 Book 3, Chapter 1 of Robert Falconer by George MacDonald. A life laid behind Robert Falconer and a life laid before him, he stood on a show between. The life behind him was in its grave, he had covered it over and turned away. But he knew it would rise at night. The life before him was not yet born, and what should issue from that dull, ghastly, unrevealing fog on the horizon he did not care. Thither the tide, setting eastward, would carry him, and his future must be born. All he cared about was to leave the empty garments of his dead behind him, the sky in the fields, the houses and the gardens, which those dead had made alive with their presence. Travel motion, ever on, ever away, was the sole impulse in his heart, nor had the thought of finding his father any share in his restlessness. He told his grandmother that he was going back to Aberdeen. She looked in his face with surprise, but, seeing trouble there, asked no questions. As if walking in a dream he found himself at Dr. Anderson's door. Why, Robert, said the good man, what has brought you back? Ah, I see, poor Erickson, I am very sorry, my boy, what can I do for you? I can't go on with my studies now, sir, answered Robert, I have taken a great longing for travel, will you give me a little money and let me go? To be sure I will, where do you want to go? I don't know, perhaps as I go I shall find myself wanting to go somewhere. You're not afraid to trust me, are you, sir? Not in the least, Robert, I trust you perfectly. You shall do just as you please. Have you any idea how much money you will want? No, give me what you are willing I should spend, I will go by that. Come along to the bank then, I will give you enough to start with. Ride it 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 long smile at the idea of enjoying himself. His friends saw it, but let it pass. There was no good in persuading a man whose grief was all he had left, that he must air long part with that, too. That would have been, in lowest, deeps of sorrow, to open a yet lower deep of war. 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. Take me with you, Robert, he cried. Your gentleman knew, I'll be your man, I'll put on a livery coat and go with you, all the way to Dr. Anderson. He shared a lot and go. No, Shargar, said Robert, I can't have you with me. I've come into trouble, Shargar, and I must fight it out alone. Aye, aye, I know. Poor Mr. Erickson. There's nothing to matter with Mr. Erickson. Don't ask me any questions. I've said more to you now than I've said to anybody besides. That is good of you, Robert. But am I never to see ye again? I don't know, perhaps we may meet someday. Perhaps his name muckled to say, Robert, protested, Shargar. It's more than can be said about everything, Shargar, returned Robert sadly. We'll amount just take it as it comes, said Shargar, with the despairing philosophy derived from the days when his mother thrashed him. But, eh, Robert, if it had only pleased the Almighty to send me into the world in some respectable kind of a fashion. With a chance of gone, brought the country like the carrot-bill and your brother, I suppose, retorted Robert, rousing himself for a moment. Na-na responded, Shargar, I'll stick to my own mother. She never learned me such tricks. Do ye that. You cannot complain of God. It's all right as far as you're concerned. If ye do not make something of ye yet, it'll be your fault, no his, I'm thinking. They walked to Dr. Andersen'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 climb, would a few words cause the clouds that enveloped this period of his history to this part 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 and wrapping the rest. But the precise nature of his misery was I shall not even attempt to conjecture. That would be to intrude within the holy place of the 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 Shardar, 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 incidents 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 that the wind up there on the heights of human aspiration always made him long in prayer. 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 stare, with the door to it out of the church, and 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 such an ascent themselves only by hearsay. The knowledge of God is good, but the church is better. Could it be, I venture to suggest, that in order to ascend they must put off the priests' garments? Good, my boy, he answered. All our 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 taste, 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 roost of Antwerp, on the black roost of Cologne, on the gray roost of Skalsburg, or on the brown roost of Basil, uplifted for the time above them, not in disassociation 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 Muslim 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 multi-formed chimneys, the thrones and procreate cradles of the storks, marvelous in history, habit, and dignity, all below him. He was taken ill at valance and lay there for 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 near still and near, growing in sweet fullness as it came, till it linked the slow torrent of tinklings what passed 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 odor, each sound tenderly truncated in dull. A great multitude of sheep was shifting its quarters in the night, quenching wither in the 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 sound started 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 near 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 the 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, but the peace wherewith his own soul was quiet, and 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 strove forward, thinking. He had learned what the sentence meant, what that was of which it spoke he had not yet learned. The peace he had once sought, the peace that lay in the smiles and tenderness of a woman, had overcome him like a summer cloud, and had passed away. There was surely a deeper, a wider, a grander peace for him than that, if indeed it was the same peace wherewith the king of men regarded his approaching end, that he had left as a heritage to his brothers. Suddenly he was aware that the earth had begun to live again. The hum of insects arose from the heath around him. The odor of its flowers entered his dull sense, the wind kissed him on the forehead, the sky domed up over his head, and the clouds veiled the distant mountaintops like the smoke of incense ascending from the altars of the worshipping earth. All nature began to minister to one who had begun to lift his head from the baptism of fire. He had taught that nature could never more be anything to him, and she was waiting on him like a mother. The next moment he was offended with himself for receiving ministrations, the reaction of whose loveliness might no longer gather around the form of Mary St. John. Every wavelet of scent, every toss of a flower's head in the breeze, came with a sting in its pleasure, for there was no woman to whom they belonged. Yet he could not shut them out for God, and not woman, is the heart of the universe. Would the day ever come when the loveliness of Mary St. John felt and acknowledged as never before would be even to him a joy and a thanksgiving? If ever, then because God is the heart of all. I do not think this mood wherein all forms of beauty spread to his soul as to their own needful center could have lasted over many miles of his journey, but such delicate inward revelations are nonetheless precious that they are evanescent. Many feelings are simply too good to last, using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, expressing the conviction that God is a hard father, fond of disappointing his children, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot yet coexist in the human economy. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience it may be believed in, and in the absence which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, work even more good than in its presence. At length he came inside of the Alpine region, far off the heads of the great mountain rose into the upper countries of cloud, where the snow settled under stony heads, and the torrents ran out from beneath the frozen mass to gladden the earth below with the faith of the lonely hills. The mighty creatures lay like grotesque animals of a far off titanic time, whose dead bodies had been first withered into stone, then worn away by the storms and covered with shrouds and piles of snow, till the outlines of their forms were gone, and only rough shapes remained like those just blocked out in the sculptor's marble, vaguely suggesting what the creatures had been, as the corpse under the sheet of death is like a man. He came amongst the valleys at their feet, with their blue-green waters herring seawards, from stony heights of air into the mass of the restless wavy plain, with their sides of rock rising in gigantic terrace after terrace, up to the heavens, with their scaling pines erect and slight, cone head aspiring above cone head ambitious to clothe the bare mass with green, till failing at length in their upward efforts the savage rock shot away, and beyond and above them the white and blue glaciers clinging cold and cruel to their ragged sides and the dead blank of whiteness covering their final despair. He drew near to the lower glaciers to find their awful abysses, tremulous with liquid blue, a blue tender and profound as it fed from the reservoir of some hidden sky, intenser than ours. He rejoiced over the velvety fields dotted with the toylike houses of the mountaineers. He sat for hours listening by the side of their streams. He grew weary, felt oppressed, longed for a wilder outlook and began to climb towards a mountain village, of which he had heard from a traveler to find solitude and freedom in an air as lofty as if he climbed twelve of his beloved cathedral spires, piled up in continuous ascent. After ascending for hours in zigzags through pine woods, where the only sound was of the little streams trotting down to the valley below, where the distant hustle some thin waterfall, he reached a level and came out of the woods. The path now led along the edge of a precipice descending sheared to the upper-nosed terrace of the valleys he had left. The valley was but a cleft in the mass of the mountain, a little way over sank its other wall steep as a plumb line could have mated a solid rock on his right leg green fields of clover and strange grasses. Evering and on from the cleft steamed up great blinding clouds of mist, which now wandered about over the nation of rocks on the mountain side beyond the gulf, now wrapped himself in their bewildering folds. In one moment the whole creation had vanished and there seemed scarce existence enough left for more than the following footsteps. The next mighty mountain stood in front, crowned with blinding snow, an awful fact, the lovely heavens were over his head and the green sod under his feet. The grasshoppers chirped about him and the gorgeous butterflies flew. From regions far beyond came the bells of the kind and the goats. He reached the little land and there took up his quarters. I am able to be a little minute in my description because I have since visited the place myself. Great heights rise around it on all sides. It stands as between heaven and hell, suspended between peaks and gulfs. The wind must roar awfully there in the winter, but the mountains stand away with their avalanches and all the sun along keep the cold off the grass he feels. The same evening he was already weary. The next morning it rained, it rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the morrow. In the evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The sun was setting, the snow peaks were faintly tinged with rows, and the ragged masses of vapor that hung lazy and leaden colored about the sides of the abyss were partially dyed, a sulky orange red. Then all faded into gray, but as the sunlight vanished a veil sank from the face of the moon. Already halfway to the zenith and she gathered courage and shone till the mountain looked lovely as a ghost in the gleam of its snow and the glimmer of its glaciers. Ah, thought Falconer, such a piece at last is all a man can look for. The repose of a spectral elicium, a world where passion is dyed away, and only the dim ghost of its memory returns to disturb with a shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming years. The religion that can do but this much is not a very great or very divine thing. The human heart cannot invent a better. It may be, but it can imagine grander results. He did not yet know what the religion was of which he spoke. As well might a man born stone deaf estimate the power of sweet sounds, or he who knows not a square from a circle pronounced upon the study of mathematics. The next morning rose brilliant an ideal summer day. He would not go yet. He would spend one day more in the place. He opened his release to get some lighter garments. His eyes fell on the New Testament. Dr. Anderson had put it there. He had never opened it yet, and now he let it lie. Its time had not yet come. He went out. Walking up the edge of the valley he came upon a little stream whose talk he had heard for some hundred yards. It flowed through a grassy hollow with steeply sloping sides. Water is the same all the world over, but there was more than water here to bring his childhood back to Falconer. For at the spot where the path led him down to the burn, a little crag stood out from the bank, a gray stone like many he knew on the stream that watered the valley Rothedon. On the top of the stone grew a little heather, and beside it, bending towards the water was the silver birch. He sat down on the foot of the rock, shut in by the high grassy banks from the gaze of the awful mountains. The sole unrest was the run of the water beside him, and it sounded so homely that he began to jabber scotch to it. He forgot that this stream was born in the clouds far up where that peak rose into the air behind him. He did not know that a couple of hundred yards from where he sat, it tumbled headlong into the valley below. With his country's birch tree beside him, and the rock crowned with its turf of heather over his head, the quiet as of a saddeth afternoon fell upon him. That quiet which is the one altogether lovely thing in the scotch saddeth, and once more the words arose in his mind, my peace, I give unto you. Now he felt thinking what this peace could be, and it came into his mind as he thought that Jesus had spoken in another place about giving rest to those that came to him, while here he spoke about my peace. Could this mind mean a certain kind of peace that the Lord himself possessed? Perhaps it wasn't virtue of that peace whatever it was, that he was the Prince of Peace. Whatever peace he had must be the highest and the best peace. Therefore the one peace for a man to seek, if indeed, as the words of the Lord seemed to imply, a man was capable of possessing it. He remembered the New Testament in his box, and resolved me to try whether he could not make something more out of it, went back to the end quieter in heart than since he had left his home. In the evening he returned to the brook and fell to search in the story, seeking after the peace of Jesus. He found that the whole passage stood thus. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. He did not leave the place for six weeks. Every day he went to the barn, as he called it, with his New Testament. Every day tried yet again to make out something more of what the Savior meant. By the end of the month it had dawned upon him, he hardly knew how, that the peace of Jesus, although of course he could not know what it was like till he had it, must have been a peace that came from the doing of the will of his Father. From the account he gave of the discoveries he then made, I've ventured to represent them in the driest and most exact form that I can find they will admit of. When I use the word discoveries, I need hardly say that I use it with reference to Falconer and his previous knowledge. They were these, that Jesus taught, first, that a man's business is to do the will of God, second, that God takes upon himself the care of the man, third, therefore that a man must never be afraid of anything, and so, fourth, be left free to love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself. For one day his thoughts having cleared themselves a little upon these points, a new set of questions arose with sudden inundation, comprised in these two. How can I tell for certain that there ever was such a man? How am I to be sure that such as he says is the mind of the maker of these glaciers and butterflies? All this time he was in the wilderness as much as Moses at the back of Horib or Saint Paul when he vanishes in Arabia, and he did nothing but read the four gospels and ponder over them. Therefore it is not surprising that he should have already become so familiar with the gospel story that the moment these questions appeared the following words should dart to the forefront of his consciousness to meet them. If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself. Here is a word of Jesus himself announcing the one means of arriving at a conviction of the truth or falsehood of all that he said, namely the doing of the will of God by the man who would arrive at such conviction. The next question naturally was what is this will of God of which Jesus speaks? Here he found himself in difficulty. The theology of his grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with demands as to feeling an inward action from which his soul turned with sickness and fainting, that they were repulsive to him, that they appeared unreal and contradictory to the nature around him was no proof that they were not of God. But on the other hand that they demanded what seemed to him unjust, that these demands were founded on what seemed to him untruth attributed to God on ways of thinking and feeling which are certainly degrading in a man. These were reasons of the very highest nature for refusing to act upon them so long as from whatever defects it might be in himself they bore to him this aspect. He saw that while they appeared to be such, even though it might turn out that he mistook them, to acknowledge them would be to wrong God. But this conclusion left him in no better position for practice than before. When at length he did see what the will of God was, he wondered, so simple did it appear, that he had failed to discover it at once. Yet not less than a fortnight had he been brooding and pondering over the question as he wandered up and down that burnside or sat at the foot of the heather-crown stone and the silver-barked birch. When the light began to dawn upon him, it was thus. In trying to understand the words of Jesus by searching back, as it were, for such thoughts and feelings in him as would account for the words he spoke, the perception awoke that at least he could not have meant by the will of God any such theological utterances as those which troubled him. Next they grew plain that what he came to do was just to lead his life, that he should do the work, such as recorded, and much besides, that the Father gave him to do. This was the will of God concerning him. With this perception arose the conviction that under every man whom God had sent into the world, he had given a work to do in that world. He had to lead the life God meant him to lead. The will of God was to be found and done in the world, in seeking a true relation to the world would he find his relation to God. The time for action was come. He rose up from the stone of his meditation, took his staff in his hand, and went down the mountain not knowing whether he went, and these were some of his thoughts as he went. If it was the will of God who made me and her, my will shall not be set against his. I cannot be happy, but I will bow my head, and let his waves and his billows go over me. If there is such a God, he knows what a pain I bear. His will be done. Jesus thought it well that his will should be done to the death. Even if there be no God, it will be grand to be a disciple of such a man, to do as he says, think as he thought, perhaps come to feel as he felt. My reader may wonder that one so young should have been able to think so practically, to the one point of action. But he was an earnest, and what lay at the root of his character, at the root of all that he did, felt, and became, was childlike simplicity and purity of nature. If the sins of his father were mercifully visited upon him, so likewise were the grace and loveliness of his mother, and between the two falconer had fared well. As he descended the mountain, the one question was, his calling, with the faintest track to follow, with the clue of a spider's thread to guide him, he would have known that his business was to set out at once to find and save his father. But never since the day when the hand of that father smote him, and Mary St. John found him bleeding on the floor, had he heard word or conjecture concerning him. If he were to set out to find him now, it would be to search the earth for one who might have vanished from it years ago. He might as well search the streets of a great city for a lost jewel. When the time came for him to find his father, if such an hour was written in the decrees of, I dare not say fate, for falconer hated the word. If such was the will of God, some sign would be given him, that is, some hint which he could follow with action. As he thought and thought it became gradually plainer that he must begin his obedience by getting ready for anything that God might require of him. Therefore he must go on learning till the call came. But he shared at the thought of returning to Aberdeen. Might he not continue his studies in Germany? Would that not be as good, possibly, from the variety of the experience better? But how was it to be decided, by submitting the matter to the friend who made either possible? Dr. Anderson had been to him as a father. He would be guided by his pleasure. He wrote therefore to Dr. Anderson saying that he would return at once if he wished it, but that he should greatly prefer going to a German university for two years. The doctor replied that of course he would rather have him at home, but that he was confident Robert knew best what was best for himself. Therefore he had only to settle where he thought proper, and the next summer he would come and see him, for he was not tied to Aberdeen any more than Robert. And chapter one. Book three, chapter two of Robert Faulkner by George McDonald. Four years passed before Faulkner returned to his native country, during which period Dr. Anderson had visited him twice, and shown himself well satisfied with his condition and pursuits. The doctor had likewise visited Rothedin, and had comforted the heart of the grandmother with regard to her Robert. From what he learned upon the visit, he had arrived at a true conjecture, I believe, as to the case of the great change which had suddenly taken place in the youth. But he never asked Robert a question leading in the direction of the grief which he saw the healthy and earnest nature of the youth gradually assimilating into his life. He had too much respect for sorrow to approach it with curiosity. He had learned to put off his shoes when he drew not the burning bush of human pain. Robert had not settled at any of the universities, but had moved from one to the other as he saw fit, report guiding him to the men who spoke with authority. The time of doubt and anxious questioning was far from over, but the time was long gone by, if in his case it had ever been, when he could be like a wave of the sea, driven of the wind and tossed. He had ever won anchor of the soul, and he found that it held, the faith of Jesus. I say the faith of Jesus, not his own faith in Jesus. The truth of Jesus, the life of Jesus. However his intellect might be tossed on the waves of speculation and criticism, he found that the word the Lord had spoken remained steadfast. For in doing righteously, in loving mercy, in walking humbly, the conviction increased that Jesus knew the very secret of human life. Now and then some great vision gleamed across his soul of the working of all things towards a far off goal of simple obedience to a law of life, which God knew, and which his Son had justified through sorrow and pain. Again and again the words of the Master gave him a peep into a region where all was explicable, where all that was crooked might be made straight, where every mountain of wrong might be made low and every valley of suffering exalted. Ever and again, some one of the dark perplexities of humanity began to glimmer with light in its inmost depth. Nor was he without those moments of communion when the creature is lifted into the secret place of the Creator. Looking back to the time when it seemed that he cried and was not heard, he saw that God had been hearing, had been answering all the time, had been making him capable of receiving the gift for which he prayed. He saw that intellectual difficulty encompassing the highest operations of harmonizing truth can no more affect their reality than the dullness of chaos disproved the motions of the wind of God over the face of its waters. He saw that any true revelation must come out of the unknown in God through the unknown in man. He saw that its truths must rise in the man as powers of life and that only as that life grows and unfolds can the ever-lagging intellect gain glimpses of partial outlines fading away into the infinite. That indeed only in material things and the laws that belong to them are outlines possible. Even there only in the picture of them which the mind that analyzes them makes for itself, not in the things themselves. At the close of these four years, with his spirit calm and hopeful, truth his passion and music which again he had resumed and diligently cultivated his pleasure, Falconer returned to Aberdeen. He was received by Dr. Anderson as if he had in truth been his own son. In the room stood a tall figure with its back towards them, pocketing its anchorchief. The next moment the figure turned and could it be? Yes, it was Shargar. Doubt lingered only until he opened his mouth and said, Ah, Robert, with which exclamation he threw himself upon him, and after a very undignified fashion began crying heartily. Tall as he was, Robert's great black head towered above him and his shoulders were like a rock against which Shargar's slight figure leaned. He looked down like a compassionate mastiff upon a distressed Italian greyhound. His eyes shimmered with feeling, but Robert's tears, if he ever shed any, were kept for very solemn occasions. He was more likely to weep for awful joy than for any suffering either in himself or others. Shargar, pronounced in a tone full of a thousand memories, was all the greeting he returned, but his great, manly hand pressed Shargar's delicate, long-fingered one with a grasp which must have satisfied his friend that everything was as it had been between them, and that their friendship from henceforth would take a new start. For with all that Robert had seen, thought, and learned, now that the bitterness of loss had gone by, the old times and the old friends were dearer. If there was any truth in the religion of God's will in which he was a disciple, every moment of life's history which had brought soul in contact with soul must be sacred as a voice from behind the veil. Therefore he could not now rest until he had gone to see his grandmother. Will you come to Rothedin with me, Shargar? I beg your pardon. I ought to keep up an old nickname, said Robert, as they sat that evening with the doctor over a tumbler of toddy. If you call me anything else, I'll cut my throat, Robert, as I told you before. If anyone else does, he added, laughing. I'll cut his throat. Can he go with me, doctor? said Robert, turning to their host. Certainly. He has not been to Rothedin since he took his degree. He's in AM now, and has distinguished himself besides. You'll see him in his uniform soon, I hope. Let's drink his health, Robert. Fill your glass. The doctor filled his glass slowly and solemnly. He seldom drank even wine, but this was a rare occasion. He then rose and with equal slowness and a tremor in his voice, which rendered it impossible to imagine the presence of anything but seriousness, said, Robert, my son, let's drink the health of George Moray. Gentlemen, stand up. Robert rose, and in his confusion Shargar rose, too, and sat down again blushing till his red hair looked yellow beside his cheeks. The men repeated the words, George Moray, gentlemen, empty their glasses and resume their seats. Shargar rose trembling and tried in vain to speak. The reason, in part, was that he sought to utter himself in English. Hoots. Hang English, he broke out at last. If I be a gentleman, Dr. Anderson and Robert Falconer, it's you twa at's made me or not, and God bless ye, and I'm your humble servant to all eternity. So saying, Shargar resumed his seat, filled his glass with trembling hand, emptied it to hide his feelings, but without success rose once more and retreated to the hall for a space. The next morning Robert and Shargar got on the couch and went to Rotherdon. Robert turned his head as they came near the bridge in the old house of Bogbani, but ashamed of his weakness he turned again and looked at the house. There it stood all the same, a thing for the night winds to howl in, and follow each other in mad gambles through its long passages and rooms, so empty from the first that not even a ghost had any reason for going there. A place almost without a history, dreary emblem of so many empty souls that leave hidden their talent in a napkin and have nothing to return for it when the master calls them. Having looked this one in the face, he felt stronger to meet those other places before which his heart coiled yet more. He knew that Miss St. John had left soon after Erickson's death. Whether he was sorry or glad that he should not see her, he could not tell. He thought Rotherdon would look like Pompey, a city buried in disinterred, but when the coach drove into the long, straggling street, he found the old love revive, and although the blood rushed back to his heart when Captain Forsythe House came in view, he did not turn away, but made his eyes and threw them his heart familiar with its desolation. He got down at the corner and leaving Chargard to go on to the boar's head and look after the luggage, walked into his grandmother's house and straight into her little parlor. She rose with her old statelyness when she saw stranger enter the room and stood waiting his address. Wheel Granny, said Robert, and took her in his arms. To Lorde's name be praised, faltered she, he's our good to the likes of me. And she lifted up her voice and wept. She had been informed of his coming, but she had not expected him till the evening. He was much altered and old age is slow. He had hardly placed her in her chair when Betty came in, if she had shown him respect before it was reverence now. Sir, she said, I did not know it was you. I would not have come into the room without knocking at the door, all the way back to my kitchen. So saying she turned to leave the room. Oh, it's Betty, cried Robert. Do not be a gout. Give us a grip of your hand. Betty stood staring and he resolute, overcome at the sight of the manly bolt before her. If you do not behave yourself, Betty, I'll just the way over to muckled them and have a drive through the session book. Betty laughed for the first time at the awful threat, and the ice once broken, things returned to somewhat of their own feeling. I must not linger on these days. The next morning Robert paid a visit to Body Fault and found that time had their flowed so greatly that it had left but few wrinkles and fewer gray hairs. The fields too had little change to show. And the hill was all the same, saved that its pines had grown. His chief mission was to John Houston and his wife. When he left for the continent, he was not so utterly absorbed in his own griefs as to forget Jesse. He told a story to Dr. Anderson and the good man had gone to see her the same day. In the evening, when he knew he should find them both at home, he walked into the cottage. They were seated by the fire with the same pot hanging on the same crook for this upper. They rose and asked him to sit down but did not know him. When he told them who he was, they greeted him warmly, and John Houston smiled, something of the old smile, but only like it, for it had no rays proportionately delivered from his mouth over his face. After a little indifferent chat, Robert said, I came through Aberdeen yesterday, John. At the very mention of Aberdeen, John's head sunk. He gave no answer but sat looking in the fire. His wife rose and went to the other end of the room, busying herself quietly about the supper. Robert thought it best to plunge into the matter at once. I saw Jesse last night, he said. Still there was no reply. John's face had grown hard as a stone face, but Robert thought rather from the determination to govern his feelings than from resentment. She's been doing wheel ever since sign, he added. Still no word from either, and Robert fearing some outburst of indignation air he had said his say, now made haste. She's been a servant with Dr. Anderson for four years new, and he's so pleased with her. She's a fine woman, but her Barney's dead and that was a sore blow to her. He heard a sob from the mother, but still John made no sign. It was a bonny Barney's ever ye saw, and look it in her face, she says, as if it knew all booted and had only come to help her through the worst of it. For at guard home, most as soon as ever, she was right able to thank God for sending her such an angel to lead her to repentance. John, said his wife, coming behind his chair and laying her hand on his shoulder, what for did not you spake? You hear what Master Faulkner says. You do not think a thing's clean useless, because there may be a spot upon it, she added, wiping her eyes upon her apron. A spot upon it, cried John, starting to his feet. What call you a spot, willman? Do not drive me mad to hear you lower the glory of virginity. That's all very well, John, interposed Robert quietly. But there was one thought as muckl of it, as you do, and would have been ashamed to hear you speak that way about your own daughter. I did not understand ye, returned Houston, looking raised like at him. Do not ye know, man, that among them at know the Lord best, when he came from heaven to look after his own, to seek and to save, you know? Among them at Cameroona bought him, to harken till him was lasses that had gone the wrong way altogether. Not like your Jesse, at Felba once. Man, you're just like Simon, the Pharisee, at was, say, scunnered at our Lord, because he looted the woman at was a sinner, take her will of his feet, the feet as they were gone to take their will of after another fashion, after long. He would have shown her the door, Simon would, like you, John, but the Lord took her part. And let me tell you, John, and I will not beg your pardon for saying it, for it's God's trust. Let me tell you, and if you go on, on that gate, you'll be siding with the Pharisee, and knew with our Lord. You may leap into your wi-fi, and to Jesse yourself, that knows better nor either of ye know to make little of virginity. Faith, they think more of it than you do, I'm thinking. After all, only it's no a thing to say muckalaboot, and it's no to stand for a thing after all. Silence followed. John sat down again, and buried his face in his hands. At length he murmured from between them. The lassies will. I answered Robert, and silence followed again. What would ye have me do? asked John, lifting his head a little. I would have ye send a kind word to her. The lassies' hearts just long and after ye. That's all, and that's no or muckal. Ye know, assented the mother. John said nothing, but when his visitor rose, he bade him a warm good night. When Robert returned to Aberdeen, he was the bearer of such a message as made poor Jesse glad at heart. This was his first experience of the sort. When he left the cottage, he did not return to the house, but threaded the little forest of pines, climbing the hill till he came out. On its bare crown, where nothing grew but heather and blackberries. There he threw himself down, and gazed into the heavens. The sun was below the horizon, all the dazzle was gone out of the gold, and the roses were fast fading. The downy blue of the sky was trembling into stars over his head. The brown dusk was gathering in the air, and a wind full of gentleness and peace came to him from the west. He let his thoughts go where they would, and they went up into the abyss over his head. Lord come to me, he cried in his heart, for I cannot go to thee. If I were to go up and up through that awful space for ages and ages, I should never find thee. Yet there thou art. The tenderness of thy infinitude looks upon me from those heavens. Thou art in them and in me, because thou thinkest I think. I am mine, all mine. I have banded myself to thee. Fill me with thyself. When I am full of thee, my griefs themselves will grow golden in thy sunlight. Thou holdest them in their cause, and wilt find some nobler atonement between them, than vile forgetfulness and the death of love. Lord, let me help those that are wretched, because they do not know thee. Let me tell them that thou, the life, must need suffer for and with them, that they may be partakers of thy ineffable peace. My life is hidden thine. Take me in thy hand as Gideon bore the pitcher to the battle. Let me be broken, if need be, that thy light may shine upon the lies which men tell them in thy name, and which eat away their hearts. Having persuaded Shagar to remain with Mrs. Falconer for a few days, and thus remove the feeling of offence, she still cherished because of his moon-legged flittering, he returned to Dr. Anderson, who now unfolded his plans for him. These were that he should attend the medical classes, common to the two universities, and at the same time accompany him in his visits to the poor. He did not at all mean, he said, to determine Robert's life as that of a medical man, but from what he had learned of his feelings he was confident that a knowledge of medicine would be invaluable to him. I think the good doctor must have foreseen the kind of life which Falconer would at length choose to lead, and with true and admirable wisdom sought to prepare him for it. However this may be Robert entertained the proposal gladly, went into the scheme with his whole heart, and began to widen that knowledge of and sympathy with the poor, which were the foundation of all his influence over them. For a time therefore he gave diligent and careful attendance upon lectures, read sufficiently, took his rounds with Dr. Anderson, and performed such duties as he delegated to his greater strength. Had the healing art been far less of an enjoyment to him than it was, he could yet hardly have failed of great progress therein, but seeing that it accorded with his best feelings profoundest theories and loftiest hopes, and that he received it as a work given him to do, it is not surprising that a certain faculty of cure, almost partaking of the instinctive, should have been rapidly developed in him to the wonder and delight of his friend and master. In this labor he again spent about four years, during which time he gathered much knowledge of human nature, learning especially to judge it from no standpoint of his own, but in every individual case to take a new position once the nature and history of the man should appear in true relation to the yet uncompleted result. He who cannot feel the humanity of his neighbor because he is different from himself in education, habits, opinions, morals, circumstances, objects is unfit, if not unworthy to aid him. Within this period Shargar had gone out to India where he had distinguished himself particularly on a certain harassing march. Towards the close of the four years he had leave of absence and was on his way home. About the same time Robert in consequence of a fever, brought on by over fatigue, was in much need of a holiday and Dr. Anderson proposed that he should meet More at Southampton. Shargar had no expectation of seeing him and his delight, not greater on that account, broke out more wildly. No thinnest film had grown over his heart, though in all else he was considerably changed. The army had done everything that was wanted for his outward show of man. The drawing walk had vanished in a firm step and soldierly stride had taken its place. His bearing was free, yet dignified. His high descent came out in the ease of his carriage and manners. There could be no doubt that at last Shargar was a gentleman. His hair had changed to a kind of red chestnut. His complexion was much darkened with the Indian sun. His eyes too were darker and no longer rolled slowly from one object to another, but indicated by their quick lances of mind ready to observe and as ready to resolve. His whole appearance was more than prepossessing. It was even striking. Robert was greatly delighted with the improvement in him, and far more when he found that his mind's growth had at least kept pace with his body's change. It would be more correct to say that it had proceeded and occasioned it, for however much the army may be able to do in that way, it had certainly in Moray's case only seconded the law of inward growth working outward show. The young men went up to London together, and great was the pleasure they had in each other's society after so long a separation in which their hearts had remained unchanged, while their natures had grown both worthy and capable of more honor and affection. They had both much to tell, for Robert was naturally open, save in regard to his grief, and Chardar was proud of being able to communicate with Robert from a nearer level, in virtue of now knowing many things that Robert could not know. They went together to a hotel in St. Paul's churchyard. Chapter 2 Book 3 Chapter 3 Of Robert Falconer by George Macdonald This Libra Vox recording is in public domain. Robert Falconer by George Macdonald Chapter 3 A Mirror Glimpse At the close of a fortnight, Falconer thought at time to return to his duties in Aberdeen. The day before the steamer sailed, they found themselves about six o'clock in Grace Church Street. It was a fine summer evening. The street was less crowded than earlier in the afternoon, although there was a continuous stream of wagons, omnibuses, and cabs, both ways, as they stood on the curb stone a little way north of Lombard waiting to cross. You see, Chardar said Robert, nature will have her way. Not all the hurry and confusion and war can keep the shadows out. Look, wherever a space is for a moment vacant, there falls a shadow, as grotesque as strange, as full of unutterable things as any shadow on a field of grass and daisies. I remember feeling the same kind of thing in India, returned Chardar, where nothing looked as if it belonged to the world I was born in, but my own shadow. In such a street as this, however, all the shadows look as if they belong to another world and had no business here. I quite feel that, returned Falconer. They come like angels from the lovely west and the pure air to show that London cannot hurt them, for it too is within the kingdom of God. To teach the lovers of nature like the old Orthodox Jews, Saint Peter, that they must not call anything common or unclean. Chardar made no reply, and Robert Glantz surrounded him. He was staring with wide eyes into, not at, the crowd of vehicles that filled the street. His face was pale and strangely like the Chardar of old days. What's the matter with you? Robert asked in some bewilderment. Receiving no answer, he followed Chardar's gaze and saw a strange sight for London City. In the middle of the crowd of vehicles, with an omnibus before them and a brood's drae behind them, came a line of three donkey carts heaped high with bundles and articles of gypsy gear. The foremost was conducted by a middle-aged woman of tall commanding aspect and expression, both cunning and fierce. She walked by the donkey's head, carrying a short stick, with which she struck him now and then, but which he often erwaved over his head like the truncheon of an excited marshal on the battlefield, accompanying the movements now with loud cries to the animal, now with a loud response to the chaff of the omnibus conductor, the driver, and the tradesmen and carts about her. She was followed by a very handsome, olive-complexioned, wild-looking young woman, with her black-haired nun up in a red handkerchief, who conducted her donkey more quietly. Both seemed as much at home in the roar of Grace Church Street as if they had men crossing a wild common. A loudest-looking young man brought up the rear with the third donkey. From the bundles on the foremost cart peeped a lovely, fair-haired, English-looking child. Robert took all this in a moment. The same moment Chargar's spell was broken. Lord, it is my mother, he cried, and darted under a horse's neck into the middle of the rock. He kneeled his way through till he reached the woman. She was swearing at a cabman whose wheel had caught the point of her donkey's shaft, and it was hauling him round. Heatless of everything, Chargar threw his arms about her, crying, Mother, Mother! None of your blasted humbugs, she exclaimed, as with a vigorous throw and a wriggle she freed herself from his embrace and pushed him away. The moment she had him at arm's length, however, her hand closed upon his arm, and her other hand went up to her brow. From underneath it her eyes shot up and down him from head to foot, and he could feel her hand closing and relaxing and closing again as if she were trying to force her long nails into his flesh. He stood motionless, waiting the result of her scrutiny, utterly unconscious, that he had caused a congestion in the veins of London, for every vehicle within sight of the pair had stopped. Falconer said a strange silence fell upon the street, as if all the things in it had been turned into shadows. A rough voice which sounded as if all London must have heard it broke the silence. It was the voice of the cabman who had been in altercation with the woman. Bursting into an insulting laugh, he used words with regard to her, which it is better to leave unrecorded. The same instant Shargar freed himself from her grasp and stood by the four-wheel of the cab. Get down, he said in a voice that was not the less impressive that it was low and hoarse. The fellow saw what he meant and whipped his horse. Shargar sprang on the box and dragged him down, all but headlong. Now, he said, beg my mother's pardon. Be hanged if I do, etc., etc., said the cabman. Then defend yourself, said Shargar. Robert, Falconer was watching all and was by his side in a moment. Come on you, etc., etc., cried the cabman, plucking up heart and putting himself in fighting shape. He looked one of those insolent fellows who none see discomfitted more gladly than the honest men of his own class, the same moment he lay between his horse's feet. Shargar turned to Robert and, saying only there, Robert, turned again towards the woman. The cabman rose, bleeding and desiring no more of the same, climbed on his box and went off, belaboring his horse and pursued by a roar from the street for the spectators were delighted at his punishment. Now, mother, said Shargar, painting with excitement. What called the ye, she asked, still doubtful, but as proud of being defended as if the course words of her assailant had had no truth in them. You cannot be my long-legged geordie, but for no, you're a gentleman faith, and what for no again, returned Shargar, beginning to smile. Wheel, its wheel spared, your father was one only way. If so be at ye are, as ye say. More put his head close to hers, and whispered some words that nobody heard but herself. It's our long sign to men upon that, she said in reply, with the look of cunning consciousness, ill-settled upon her fine features. But ye can be nobody but my geordie. Heth, man, she went on regarding him once more from head to foot, but your credit to me on moon allow, will give me a sovereign, and eyes never come near ye. Poor Shargar, in his despair, turned half mechanically towards Robert. He felt that it was time to interfere. You forget, mother, said Shargar, turning again to her, and speaking English now. It was I that claimed you, and not you that claimed me. She seemed to have no idea what he meant. Come up the road here, to our public, and take a glass, woman, said Falconer, to not hold the folk look any ye. The temptation of a glass was something strong in the hope of getting money out of them caused an instant acquiescence. She said a few words to the young woman, who proceeded at once to tie her donkey's head to the tail of the other cart. Shall the way, then, said the elder, turning again to Falconer. Shargar and he led the way to St. Paul's churchyard, and the woman followed faithfully. The waiters stared when they entered. Bring a glass of whiskey, said Falconer, as he passed on to their private room. When the whiskey arrived, she tossed it off and looked as if she would like another glass. Your father will have taken ye up, I'm thinking. Laddie, she said, turned into her son. No, answered Shargar gloomily. There's the man that took me up. And what may ye be, she asked, turned into Falconer. Mr. Falconer, said Shargar. No son of Andrew Falconer, she asked again with evident interest. The same, answered Robert. Will Geordie, she said, turned in once more to her son. It's like mother like father to the Twovey. Did you know my father, asked Robert eagerly? Instead of answering him, she made another remark to her son. He need not be ashamed of your company, on the way. Queer kind of mother, at I am. He never was ashamed of my company, said Shargar, still gloomily. I knew your father wheeling off, she said, now answering Robert. More by token, at I saw him last night. He was looking near that ill. Robert sprung from his seat and caught her by the arm. Al, you need not go into such a flurry. He'll no come near ye as I warrant. Tell me where he is, said Robert. Where did you see him? I'll give you all that I have if you take me to him. Hoolie, hoolie. What's to go looking for a thromb in a hay sow? Returned she coolly. I only said I saw him. But are ye sure it was him, answered Falconer? I, sure enough, she answered. What makes ye so sure? Cause I never was wrong yet. Said a man once between my two eyes, and that'll be T'wah at knows him when his own mother's forgotten him. Did you speak to him? Maybe I, maybe new. I did not come here to be heckled before a jury. Tell me what he's like, said Robert, agitated with eager hope. Given ye do not know what he's like, what force should ye take the trouble to spare? But deed ye'll know what he's like when ye fall in with him, she added with a vindictive laugh. Vindictive because he'd given her only one glass of strong drink. With the laugh she rose and made for the door, they rose at the same moment to detain her. Like one who knew at once to fight and flee, she turned and stunned them as with a blow. She's a fine young thing, yawned sister of yours, Geordie. She'll be worth silver by the time she's had a while at the school. The men looked at each other, aghast. When they turned their eyes, she had vanished. They rushed to the door, and parting searched in both directions. But they were soon satisfied that it was of no use. Probably she had found a back way into Paternoster Row whence the outlets are numerous. And Chapter 3. Book 3, Chapter 4 of Robert Falconer by George McDonald. This Libra Vox recording is in the public domain. Robert Falconer by George McDonald. Chapter 4, The Doctor's Death But now that Falconer had a ground, even thus shadowy for hoping, I cannot say believing, that his father might be in London, he could not return to Aberdeen. Moree, who had no heart to hunt for his mother, left the next day by the steamer. Falconer took to wandering about the labyrinthine city, and in a couple of months knew more about the metropolis, the West End accepted, than most people who had lived their lives in it. The West End is no doubt a considerable exception to make, but Falconer sought only his father, and the West End was the place where he was least likely to find him. Day and night he wandered into all sorts of places. The worse they looked, the more attractive he found them. It became almost a craze with him. He could not pass a dirty court or low-browed archway. He might be there, or he might have been there, or it was such a place as he would choose for shelter. He knew to what such a life as his must have tended. At first he was attracted only by tall elderly men. Such a man he would sometimes follow till his following made him turn and demand his object. If there was no suspicion of scotch in his tone, Falconer easily apologized. If there was, he made such replies as might lead to some betrayal. He could not defend the course he was adopting. It had not the shadow of probability upon its side. Still, the greatest successes the world has ever beheld have been at one time the greatest improbabilities. He could not choose but go on, for as yet he could think of no other way. Neither could a man like Falconer long confine his interest to his immediate object, especially after he had, in following it, found opportunity of being useful. While he still made it his main object to find his father, that object became a center from which radiated a thousand influences upon those who were as sheep that had no shepherd. He fell back into his old ways at Aberdeen, only with a boundless fear to work in, and with the hope of finding his father to harden him. He hunted the streets at night, went into all places of entertainment, often to the disgust of senses and soul, and made his way into the lowest forms of life without introduction or protection. There was a certain stately air of the hills about him, which was often mistaken for country and experience, and men thought in consequence to make gain or gain of him. But such found their mistake, and if not soon, then the more completely. Far from provoking or even meeting hostility, he soon satisfied those that persisted that it was dangerous. In two years he became well known to the poor of a large district, especially on both sides of Shoreditch, for whose sake he made the exercise of his profession, though not an object, yet a ready accident. He lived in lodgings in John Street, the same in which I found him when I came to know him. He made few acquaintances, and they were chiefly the house surgeons of hospitals, to which he paid frequent visits. He always carried a book in his pocket, but did not read much. On Sundays he generally went to some one of the many lonely heasts or commons of Surrey with his New Testament. When weary in London he would go to the reading room of the British Museum for an hour or two. He kept up a regular correspondence with Dr. Anderson. At length he received a letter from him, which occasioned his immediate departure for Aberdeen. Until now his friend, who was entirely satisfied with his mode of life, had supplied him freely with money, had not even expressed a wish to recall him, though he had often spoken of visiting him in London. It now appeared that, unwilling to cause him any needless anxiety, he had abstained from mentioning the fact that his health had been declining. He had got suddenly worse and Falconer Hasten duobé the summons he had sent him in consequence. With a heavy heart he walked up to the hospitable door, recalling as he ascended the steps how he had stood there a helpless youth in want of a few pounds to save his hopes. When this friend received him and bid him God's speed on the path he desired to follow, in a moment more he was shown into the study and was passing through it to go to the cottage room where Johnston laid his hand on his arm. The master's no up yet, sir, he said, with the very solemn look. He's been desperate, after seeing he, and I'm out gone and let him know at year here, at last, for fear it should be our muckl for him, seeing ye all at once. But as, sir, he added, the tears gathering in his eyes. You'll hardly know him, he's that changed. Johnston left the study by the door to the cottage. Falconer had never known the doctor's sleep there, and returning, a moment after, invited him to enter. In the bed, in the recess, the room unchanged, with its deal table and its sanded floor, lay the form of his friend. Falconer hastened to the bedside, kneeled down, and took his hand, speechless. The doctor was silent, too, but a smile over-spread his countenance and revealed his inward satisfaction. Robert's heart was full, and he could only gaze on the worn face. At length he was able to speak. What for did not you send for me, he said? You never tell me you was ailing. Because you were doing good, Robert, my boy, and I, who had done so little, had no right to interrupt what you were doing, I wonder if God will give me another chance. I would fame do better. I don't think I could sit singing psalms to all eternity, he added with a smile. Whatever good I may do before my turn comes, I have you to thank for it, doctor, if it had not been for you. Robert's feelings overcame him, he resumed brokenly. He gave me a man to believe in when my own father had forsaken me, and my friend was a way to God. You have made me doctor, with meat and drink, and learning and silver, and anything else you have made me. Robert said the dying man half rising on his elbow, to think what God makes us all to one another. My father did ten times for me what I had done for you. As I lie here thinking I may see him a four weeks or I'm just a barn again. As he spoke, the polish of his speech was gone, and the social refinement of his countenance with it, the face of his ancestors, the noble, sensitive, heartful, but ragged, eucolic, and weather-beaten through centuries of windy plowing, hailstorm sheep keeping, long-paced seed sowing, and multi-form labor, surely not less honorable in the sight of the working God than the fighting of the noble, came back in the face of the dying physician. From that hour to his death he spoke the rugged dialect of his fathers. A day or two after this, Robert again sitting by his bedside, I did not know, he said, whether it's right, but I have no fear of death, and yet I cannot say I'm sure of anything. I've seen many a one D that could have no faith in the Savior, but I never saw that fear that some good folk would have, you believe, mount come at the last. I would not like to take to Arnie Papestry, but I never could make up from the Bible. And I read more of it in the jungle than maybe you would think, that it's all over with the body at their death. I never heard them bring forth on a text, but on, the most ridiculous hush that you ever heard, to justify it. I can't the text, do you mean? As the tree falleth so it shall lie, or something like that, at they say King Solomon wrote, though better scholars say his tree had fallen many a long year before that text saw the light. I did not believe such a thought was in the man's head when he wrote it. It is, as you say, or contemptible to call an argument. I'll read it to you once more. Robert got his Bible and read the following portion from that wonderful book, so little understood, because it is so full of wisdom, the book of Ecclesiastes. Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven and also to eight, for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth, and if the tree fall toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth there it shall be. He that observeseth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the cloud shall not reap. As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all. In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand, for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. Aye, aye, that's it, said Dr. Anderson. Will I not say again that they're ill off for an argument that takes that for one upon such a momentous subject? I prefer to say with the same old man that I know not the works of God who maketh all, but I wish I could say I believed on a thing for certain sure. But when I think about it, would ye believe it, the faith of my Father more to me, nor on a faith of my own? That's so strange, but it's this, I'm positive that that godly great old man knew more about all the things I could see in the face of him, nor any other man had ever I knew, and it's new by comparison only. I'm sure he did know. There was something between God and him, and I think he was not likely to be wrong, and so I take courage to believe as makal as I can, though maybe no say makal as I feign would. Robert, who from experience of himself and the observations he had made by the bedsides of not a few dying men and women, knew well that nothing but the truth itself can carry its own conviction, that the words of our Lord are a body as it were in which the spirit of our Lord dwells, or rather the key to open the heart for the entrance of that spirit, turned now from all argumentation to the words of Jesus. He himself had said of them, they are spirit, and they are life, and what folly to buttress life and spirit with other powers than their own. From that day to the last, as often as long as the dying man was able to listen to him, he read from the glad news just the words of the Lord. As he read thus, one fading afternoon, the doctor broke out with. Eh, Robert, the patience of him! He did not quench the smoke and flax. There's little fire but me, but surely I know in my own heart some of the rise and smoke of the sacrifice. Eh, such words as they are. And he was going beyond to the grave himself, no half my age, as peaceful though the road was, say, rough, as if he had been going home to his father. So he was, returned Robert. Ah, but here am I lying upon my bed, slipping easy away. And there was he, the old man ceased. The sacred story was too sacred for speech. Robert sat with the New Testament open before him on the bed. The mare in the words of Jesus come into me, the doctor began again. The sure I am will see in my old braum and friend, Robert. It's true I thought his religion not only begun but ended inside him. It was a booing, doing a foar, and aspiring up into the bosom of the infinite God. I did not mean to say that he was not honorable to them about him, and I never saw in him muckle of that pride to the rest that belongs to the Brahmin. It was rather a stately kindness than that condescension which is the vice of Christians. But he had nothing to do with them. The first commandment was all he knew. He loved God, near God like Jesus Christ, but the God he knew, and that was all he could. The second commandment, that glorious recognition of the divine in humanity, making it fit and needful to be loved, that claim of God upon and for his own barons, that love of the neighbor as yourself, he did not know. Still there was religion in him, and he who died for the sins of the whole world has surely been revealed to him long air new, and through the knowledge of him he knew dwells in that God after whom he aspired. Here was the outcome of many talks which Robert and the doctor had had together, as they labored amongst the poor. Did you never try, Robert, asked, to let him know about the coming of God to his world in Jesus Christ? I could not do muckle that way, honestly. My own faith was, say, poor and small, but I tell him what Christians believed. I tell him about the character and history of Christ, but it did not seem to take muckle hold of him. It was not interesting to him. Just once when I told him some things he had said about his relation to God, such as, I and my Father are one, and about the relation of all his disciples to God and himself. I am them, and thou and me, that they may be made perfect in one. He said with a smile, the man was a good brahmin. It's little, said Robert, the one great commandment can do without the other. It's little we can know what God to love or who to love him, without thy neighbor as thyself. Any one of them without the other stands like the factors of a multiplication or a wing upon a lark. Towards the close of the week he grew much feebler. Falconer scarcely left his room. He woke one midnight and murmured as follows, with many pauses for breath and strength. Robert, my tarnished near, I'm thinking, for waking and sleeping, I'm a baron again. I can hardly believe walls at my Father has not a grip of my hand. A minute ago I was traveling through a terrible drifting of snow, and who it whistled and sang. And the cold of it was stinging, but my Father had a grip of me, I just despised it, and was stamping it doing with my wee bit feet. For I was like seven-year-old or their boots. And sign I thought I heard my mother singing, and knew by that that the other was a dream. I'm thinking a handle it'll look dreamy of four long. Eh, I wonder what the final walkin' they'll be like? After a pause he resumed. Robert, my dear boy, you're in the right way. Hold on and let nethin turn ye aside. Man, it's a great comfort to me to think that you're my own flesh and blood, and nay that far off. My Father and your great grandfather upon the grandmother's side were own brothers. I wonder who far doin' it would gone. You're the only one upon my Father's side, you and your Father, if he'd be alive, that I have said to me. My will in the bottom drawer upon the left hand in the righten table in the library. I have left you ilk a plaque that I possess. Only there's one thing that I want you to do. First of all, you might want to go on as you're doin' in London for 10 year more. If deen men have any of that foresight that's been attributed to them in the ages, it's borin' in upon me that ye will see your Father again. At all events, ye'll be helpin' some ill-fired souls to a clean face and a bonny. But if ye did not fall in with your Father within 10 year, ye mount behold a wee and just pack up your box and go away or the sea to Calcutta, and do what I have tell you to do in that will. I bind ye by nay promise, Robert, and I will not have none. Things might happen to put ye in a terrible difficulty with the promise. I'm only tellin' ye what I would like, especially if ye have fallen your Father, ye mount go by your own judgment aborted. For there'll be a handle to do with him after ye have gotten a grip of him. And though I mount lie still and may be sleep again, for I have spoken or muckled. Hoping that ye would sleep and wake yet again, Robert sat still. After an hour he looked and saw that, although hitherto much oppressed, he was now breathing like a child. There was no sign save of past suffering. His countenance was peaceful as if he had already entered into his rest. Robert withdrew and again seated himself, and the great universe became to him as a bird brooding over the breaking shell of the dying man. On either hand we behold a birth, of which, as of the moon, we see but half. We are outside the one, waiting for a life from the unknown. We are inside the other, watching the departure of a spirit from the womb of the world into the unknown. To the region where there he goes, the man enters newly born. We forget that it is a birth, and call it a death. The body he leaves behind is but the placenta by which he drew his nourishment from his mother earth. And as the child bed is watched on earth with anxious expectancy, so the couch of the dying, as we call them, may be surrounded by the birth watches of the other world, waiting like anxious servants to open the door to which the world is but the windblown porch. Extremes meet. As a man draws nigh to his second birth, his heart looks back to his childhood. When Dr. Anderson knew that he was dying, he retired into the simulacrum of his father's been-end. As Falconer sat thinking, the doctor spoke, they were low faint murmurous sounds, for the lips were nearly at rest. Wanted no more for utterance, they were going back to the holy dust, which is God's yet. Father, Father, he cried quickly, in the tone and speech of a scotch laddie, I'm gain doin', hold the grip of my hand. When Robert hurried to the bedside, he found that the last breath had gone in the words. The thin right hand lay partly closed, as if it had been grasping a larger hand. On the face, like confidence, just ruffled with apprehension, the latter melted away, and nothing remained but that awful and beautiful peace, which is the farewell of the soul to its servant. Robert knelt, and thank God for the nobleman, and Chapter 4. Book 3, Chapter 5 of Robert Falconer, by George Macdonald. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Robert Falconer, by George Macdonald. Chapter 5, A Talk With Granny Dr. Anderson's body was, according to the fine custom of many of the people of Aberdeen, born to the grave by twelve stalwart men in black, with broad-round bonnets on their heads, the one half relieving the other, a privilege of the company of shore-porters. Their execuies are thus freed from the artificial grotesque and pagan horror given by obscene mutes, frightful hearse, horses, and feathers. As soon as, in the beautiful phrase of the Old Testament, John Anderson was thus gathered to his fathers, Robert went to pay a visit to his grandmother. Dressed to a point in the same costume in which he had known her from childhood, he found her little altered in appearance. She was one of those who, instead of stooping with age, settled downwards. She was still as erect as ever, the shorter. Her step was feebler, and when she prayed, her voice craved more. On her face set the same settled, almost hard repose as ever, then her behavior was still more gentle than when he had seen her last. Notwithstanding, however, that time had brought so little change in her appearance, Robert felt that somehow the mist of a separation between her world and his was gathering, that she was, as it were, fading from his sight and presence, like the moon towards her interlunar cave. Her face was gradually turning from him towards the land of light. I have buried my best friend but yourself, Granny, he said, as he took a chair post to her side, where he used to sit when he read the Bible and bossed into her. I trust he's happy. He was a quiet and wheeled-behaved man, and he have risen to respect his memory. Did he die the death of the righteous, think ye, laddie? I do think that, Granny. He loved God and his Savior. The Lord be praised, said Mrs. Falconer. I had good hopes of him in his latter days, and folks say he's made a rich man of ye, Robert. He left me Elk a thing except something till his servants, who has well deserved it. Eh, Robert, but it's a terrible snare. Silla is an awful thing. My poor Andrew never be good to go the ill gate till he begin to have or muckle Silla, but it bed not land with him. But it's no an ill thing itself, Granny, for God made Silla as well as other things. He thinks not muckle of it, though, or he would give more of it to some folk. But as ye say, it's his, and if ye have grace to use it, all right. It may be made a great blessing to yourself and other folk. But eh, laddie, take good tent, and ye ride upon the tap of it, and no let it rise like a muckle billow o'er your head. For it's an awful thing to be drawn to enriches. Them at praise know to be led into temptation have a chance. Have not they, Granny? That have they, Robert. And to be plain with ye, I have not that muckle fear of ye, for I've heard the kind of life at ye have been leading. God's harken to my prayers for you, and if ye go on as ye have begun, my prayers like them of David, the son of Jesse, are ended. Go on, my dear lad, go on to pluck brands from the burning. Hold out a helping hand to Ilka's son and daughter of Adam, and we'll take a grip of it. Be a burning and a shining light that men may praise. Know you for your butt clay in the hand of the potter, but your father in heaven. Take the drunkard from his whiskey, the debauched from his debauch, the swear from his else, the leer from his lees, and give not any of them or muckle of your silver at once, for fear that they grow fat and kick in defy God and you. That's my advice to ye, Robert, and I hope I'll be able to hold gay and near to lit, Granny, for it's of the best. But what telleth ye that I was a bullet in London? Himself. Dr. Anderson, I just himself. I have had letter upon letter from him a bullet ye, and at ye was a bullet. He keepeth me acquainted with it all. This first proof of his friend's affections touched Robert deeply. He had himself written often do his grandmother, but he had never entered into any detail of his doings, although the thought of her was ever at hand beside the thought of his father. Do ye know, Granny, what's at the heart of my hopes? The memory and degradation that I see from morning to night, and afternir yet from night to morning, in the back classes of winds of the great city. I trust it's the glory of God, laddie. I hope that's not altogether wantin', Granny, for I love God with all my heart. But I do it it's often of the savin' of my earthly father know the glory of my heavenly one that I'm a thinkin' of. Mrs. Falconer heave the deep sigh. God grant ye success, Robert, she said, but that cannot be right. What cannot be right? Know to put the glory of God first and foremost. We are, Granny, but a body cannot rise to the height of grace all at once, know yet in ten or twenty year. Maybe if I be right, I may be able to come to that or all be done. And after all, I'm sure I love God more than my father, but I cannot help thinkin' in this, that if God heard not a song of glory from this ill-doin' earth of his, he would not be none the war, but hope know ye that, interrupted his grandmother, because he would be as good and great and grand as ever. Oh, I. But what would come of my father wantin' his salvation? He can war want that, remainin' the slave of iniquity, then God can want his glory. For by, you know, there's ne' glory to God like the repentin' of a sinner, just a feein' God insane to him. Father, you're right, and I was the wrong. Hope greater glory can God have nor that. It's all true, at ye say, but still, if God cares for that same glory, ye ought to think of that first before even the salvation of your father. Maybe you're right, granny, and if it be as ye say, he's promised three to send to a troth, and he'll lead me into that troth, but I'm thinkin' it's more for our sakes than his own, that he cares about his glory. I did not believe it he thinks about his glory, except for the sake of the truth, and men's hearts bein' for want of it. This is falconer thought for a moment. It may be at your right, laddie, but ye have a way of saying things at some fearsome. God's ne' like a prude mind to take offense, granny. There's nothing pleases him like the troth, and there's nothing displeases him like lean, particularly when it's by way of upholding him. He wants ne' such upholding, nor ye say things about him while at sounds to me fearsome. What kind of things are they, laddie? asked the old lady, with the fence gloomin' in the background. Such like as when ye spake about him as if he was a poor, prude, barely like body, full of his own importance, and ready to be doing upon anybody, it did not call him by the name of his office. I think thinkin' about his own glory in place of the quiet, mighty grand self-forgettin' all creatin' all upholdin' eternal bein' what took the form of man in Christ Jesus, just that he might have it in his poor to bear and be humble it for all sakes. Eh, granny, think o' the face of that man of sorrow's that never set a hard word to that sinful woman, or a despised publican. Was he thinkin' about his own glory, you think ye? We have no right to say we know God, savin' the face of Christ Jesus. Whatever is no like Christ is no like God. But laddie, he came to satisfy God's justice by sufferin' the punishment due to our sins, to turn aside the wrath and curse, to reconcile him to us. So he could not be altogether like God. He did methan of the con, granny. It's all a lie that he came to satisfy God's justice by givin' him back his barrens, by garin' them see that God was just, by sendin' them greetin' home, to fall at his feet and grip his knees and say, Father, you're in the right. He came to lift the wheat of the sins that God had cursed off of the shoethers of them that did them, by makin' them turn again them, and be for God, and no for sin. And there is not a word of reconcealin' God till is in all the testament, for there was no need of that. It was us that needed to be reconciled to him, and say he bore our sins, and carried our sorrows, for those sins culminate in the multitude's eye, and in his own disciples' wheel, caused him no end of grief, of mind, and pain of body, as anybody knows. It was not his own sins, for he had none, but oars that caused him suffering, and he took them away, their rent, mission, even new from the earth. Though it does not look like it in rag, fur, or petticoat lane, and fur, or sorrows, they just guard him great. His righteousness just annihilates our guilt, for it's a great wealth that swells up and destroys it. And say he gave his life a ransom for us, and he is the life of the world. He took our sins upon him, for he came into the middle of them, and took them up by no sleight of hand, by no quibbling of the lords, a boot in Putin, his righteousness to us, and sits like, which is not to be found in the Bible at all, though I did not say that there is no possible meaning in the phrase, but he took them, and took them away, and here, my granny, grew unto my sins and consequence, and there, ye granny, grew unto yours and consequence, and havin' near hand done with them altogether at this time. I wish that may be true, laddie, but I care not who you put it, returned his grandmother bewildered, no doubt with this outburst. Say be that ye put him first and last, and in the midst of all things, and say with all your heart his will be done. With all my heart his will be done, granny, responded Robert. Amen, amen, and no laddie, doth ye think there is any likelihood that your father is still in the body? I dream about him while I say, life-like, that I cannot believe him dead, but that's superstitions. We are, granny, I have not the least assurance, but I have the more hope. Would ye know him, given ye saw him? Know him, she cried. I would know him if he had been known to say four, but forty days in the self-occur. My own Andrew, who could ye express such a question, laddie? He might be so changed, granny, he might be turning old by this time. All such likes ye yourself, laddie. Hoots, hoots, ye right, I am forgetting, but nonetheless would I know him. I wish I knew what he was like. I saw him once, hardly twice, but all that I mined upon would stand me in ill stead among the streets of London. I'd do that, returned Mrs. Falconer, a form of expression, rather oddly indicating sympathetic and somewhat regretful agreement with what has been said. But, she went on, I can let ye see a picture of him, though I do it, it will not show some muckle to you as to me. He had it painted to give to your mother upon their wedding day, ah hawn. She did the light for him, but what came of that one I did not know. Mrs. Falconer went into the little closet to the old bureau, and bringing out the miniature gave it to Robert. It was the portrait of a young man in antiquated blue coat and white waistcoat, looking innocent, and it must be confessed dull and uninteresting. It had been painted by a traveling artist, and probably his skill did not reach to expression. It brought to Robert's mind no faintest shadow of recollection. It did not correspond in the smallest degree to what seemed his vague memory, perhaps half imagination of the tall, warm man whom he had seen that Sunday. He could not have a hope that this would give him the slightest aid in finding him of whom it had once been a shadowy resemblance at least. Is it like him, Granny, he asked, as if to satisfy herself once more as she replied, she took the miniature and gazed at it for some time. Then, with a deep hopeless sigh, she answered, I it's like him, but it's no himself. Eth, the bonny brew, and the smiling iron of him, smiling about a body, and upon her most of all, till he took to the drink, and worse, and worse can be. It was all silver and company, company it could not be merry on drunken. Barely there laughter was like the crackling of thorns beneath the pot. Hot water and whisky was either cry, ere their dinner, and after their supper, till my poor Andrew took till the bare whisky in the morning to fill the ab of the toddy. He would never have done as he did, but for the whisky. It just drove it all good and looted in all ill. Will you let me take this with me, Granny, said Robert. For though the portrait was useless for identification, it might serve a further purpose. Oh, I take it, I did not want it. I can see him will want that, but I have no hope left that you'll ever fall in with him. God's eye doing unlikely things, Granny, said Robert solemnly. He's doing all that he can for him, I do it already. Do you think that God could not save a man if he liked it then, Granny? God can do a thing, there's no do it but, by the gift of his spirit, he could sell on anybody. And you think he's no merciful enough to do it? It will not do to meddle with folks' free will, to God folk be good would be near goodness. But if God could actually create the free will, do not you think he could help it to go on right, with you at the only garden? Will no sailor to Le Boute, Granny? Who does his spirit help anybody? Does he guard them at except the offer of salvation? Nay, I cannot think that, but he shows them the trough in such a way that they just cannot buy themselves, but man turn to him for where peace at rest. Well, that's something as I think. And until I'm sure that a man has had the trough shown to him in such a ways that, I cannot allure myself to think that whoever he may have sinned, he has finally rejected the trough. If I knew that a man had seen the trough as I have seen it, while, and had deliberately turned his back upon it and said, I'll none of it, then I do what I would be most compelled to allow that there was none more salvation for him, but a certain fearful looking for judgment and fiery indignation, but I do not believe that every man did so, but even then I did not know. I did a for him, that I knew who to do, Cygnus' falconer reflectingly. Night and morning, and after midday praying for and with him. Maybe you scunnered him at it, Granny. She gave a stifled cry of despair. Do not say that, laddie, or you'll draw more to my mind. God forgive me if that be true. I deserve hell more nor my Andrew. But you see, Granny, supposing it were so, that would not be laid to your account, seeing you did the best you knew, nor would it be forgotten to him. It would make a hentel difference to his sin. It would be a great excuse for him, and just think. If it be fair for a human being to influence another at all, they can, and that's ne'er to fear with the free will, it's impossible to measure what God could do with his spirit, winning at them from all sides, and able to put such thoughts and such pictures into them as we cannot think. It would all be true that he telleth them, and troth can never be a meddling with the free will. Mrs. Falconer made no reply, but evidently went on thinking. She was, though not a great reader, yet a good reader. Any book that was devout and thoughtful, she read gladly. Through some one or other of this sort, she must have been instructed concerning free will. For I do not think such notions could have formed any portion of the religious teaching she had heard. Men in that part of Scotland then believed that the free will of man was only exercised in rejecting, never in accepting the truth, and that man was saved by the gift of the spirit, given to some and not to others, according to the free will of God. In the exercise of which no reason appreciable by men, or having anything to do with their notions of love or justice had any share. In the recognition of will and choice in the acceptance of the mercy of God, Mrs. Falconer was then in advance of her time, and it is no wonder for notions did not all hang logically together. At any rate, Granny resumed her grandson, I have not done all for him at I can yet, and I am not going to believe anything that would make me remiss in my endeavor. Hope for myself, for my Father, for anybody, is what has saved me and garned me work. And if you tell me that I am not working with God, that is, God knows the best and the greatest work or boon, and you take the very heart unto my breast, and I do not believe in God any more, and my hands drop by my sides, and my legs will not go. No, said Robert Ryzen, God will give me my Father sometime, Granny, for what man can do wanting a Father. Human being cannot win at the heart of things, cannot know all the roots and ends and the sides of love, except he has a Father among the love to love, and I have had none, Granny, and that God knows. She made him no answer. She dare not say that he expected too much from God. Is it likely that Jesus will say so of any man or woman when he looks for faith in the earth? Robert went out to see some of his old friends, and when he returned it was time for supper and worship. These were the same of old, a plate of porridge, and a wooden bowl of milk for the former, a chapter and a hymn both read, and a prayer from Granny and then from Robert for the latter, and so they went to bed. But Robert could not sleep. He rose and dressed himself, went up to the empty garret, looked at the stars through the skylight, knelt and prayed for his Father, and for all men to the Father wall, then softly descended the stairs, and went out into the street. End Chapter 5