George MacDonald - Robert Falconer

All the time she was tenderly washing and bathing the weary feet. When she had dressed them and tied them up, she took the tub of water and carried it away, but turned at the door.

‘Ye’ll jist mak up yer min’ to bide a twa three days,’ she said; ‘for thae feet cudna bide to be carried, no to say to carry a weicht like you. There’s naebody to luik for ye, ye ken. An’ ye’re no to come doon the nicht. I’ll sen’ up yer supper. And Robert there ‘ll bide and keep ye company.’

She vanished; and a moment after, Peggy appeared with a salamander—that is a huge poker, ending not in a point, but a red-hot ace of spades—which she thrust between the bars of the grate, into the heart of a nest of brushwood. Presently a cheerful fire illuminated the room.

Ericson was seated on one chair, with his feet on another, his head sunk on his bosom, and his eyes thinking. There was something about him almost as powerfully attractive to Robert as it had been to Miss Letty. So he sat gazing at him, and longing for a chance of doing something for him. He had reverence already, and some love, but he had never felt at all as he felt towards this man. Nor was it as the Chinese puzzlers called Scotch metaphysicians, might have represented it—a combination of love and reverence. It was the recognition of the eternal brotherhood between him and one nobler than himself—hence a lovely eager worship.

Seeing Ericson look about him as if he wanted something, Robert started to his feet.

‘Is there onything ye want, Mr. Ericson?’ he said, with service standing in his eyes.

‘A small bundle I think I brought up with me,’ replied the youth.

It was not there. Robert rushed down-stairs, and returned with it—a nightshirt and a hairbrush or so, tied up in a blue cotton handkerchief. This was all that Robert was able to do for Ericson that evening.

He went home and dreamed about him. He called at The Boar’s Head the next morning before going to school, but Ericson was not yet up. When he called again as soon as morning school was over, he found that they had persuaded him to keep his bed, but Miss Letty took him up to his room. He looked better, was pleased to see Robert, and spoke to him kindly. Twice yet Robert called to inquire after him that day, and once more he saw him, for he took his tea up to him.

The next day Ericson was much better, received Robert with a smile, and went out with him for a stroll, for all his companions were gone, and of some students who had arrived since he did not know any. Robert took him to his grandmother, who received him with stately kindness. Then they went out again, and passed the windows of Captain Forsyth’s house. Mary St. John was playing. They stood for a moment, almost involuntarily, to listen. She ceased.

‘That’s the music of the spheres,’ said Ericson, in a low voice, as they moved on.

‘Will you tell me what that means?’ asked Robert. ‘I’ve come upon ‘t ower an’ ower in Milton.’

Thereupon Ericson explained to him what Pythagoras had taught about the stars moving in their great orbits with sounds of awful harmony, too grandly loud for the human organ to vibrate in response to their music—hence unheard of men. And Ericson spoke as if he believed it. But after he had spoken, his face grew sadder than ever; and, as if to change the subject, he said, abruptly,

‘What a fine old lady your grandmother is, Robert!’

‘Is she?’ returned Robert.

‘I don’t mean to say she’s like Miss Letty,’ said Ericson. ‘She’s an angel!’

A long pause followed. Robert’s thoughts went roaming in their usual haunts.

‘Do you think, Mr. Ericson,’ he said, at length, taking up the old question still floating unanswered in his mind, ‘do you think if a devil was to repent God would forgive him?’

Ericson turned and looked at him. Their eyes met. The youth wondered at the boy. He had recognized in him a younger brother, one who had begun to ask questions, calling them out into the deaf and dumb abyss of the universe.

‘If God was as good as I would like him to be, the devils themselves would repent,’ he said, turning away.

Then he turned again, and looking down upon Robert like a sorrowful eagle from a crag over its harried nest, said,

‘If I only knew that God was as good as—that woman, I should die content.’

Robert heard words of blasphemy from the mouth of an angel, but his respect for Ericson compelled a reply.

‘What woman, Mr. Ericson?’ he asked.

‘I mean Miss Letty, of course.’

‘But surely ye dinna think God’s nae as guid as she is? Surely he’s as good as he can be. He is good, ye ken.’

‘Oh, yes. They say so. And then they tell you something about him that isn’t good, and go on calling him good all the same. But calling anybody good doesn’t make him good, you know.’

‘Then ye dinna believe ‘at God is good, Mr. Ericson?’ said Robert, choking with a strange mingling of horror and hope.

‘I didn’t say that, my boy. But to know that God was good, and fair, and kind—heartily, I mean, not half-ways, and with ifs and buts—my boy, there would be nothing left to be miserable about.’

In a momentary flash of thought, Robert wondered whether this might not be his old friend, the repentant angel, sent to earth as a man, that he might have a share in the redemption, and work out his own salvation. And from this very moment the thoughts about God that had hitherto been moving in formless solution in his mind began slowly to crystallize.

The next day, Eric Ericson, not without a piece in ae pouch and money in another, took his way home, if home it could be called where neither father, mother, brother, nor sister awaited his return. For a season Robert saw him no more.

As often as his name was mentioned, Miss Letty’s eyes would grow hazy, and as often she would make some comical remark.

‘Puir fallow!’ she would say, ‘he was ower lang-leggit for this warld.’

Or again:

‘Ay, he was a braw chield. But he canna live. His feet’s ower sma’.’

Or yet again:

‘Saw ye ever sic a gowk, to mak sic a wark aboot sittin’ doon an’ haein’ his feet washed, as gin that cost a body onything!’

One of the first warm mornings in the beginning of summer, the boy woke early, and lay awake, as was his custom, thinking. The sun, in all the indescribable purity of its morning light, had kindled a spot of brilliance just about where his grannie’s head must be lying asleep in its sad thoughts, on the opposite side of the partition.

He lay looking at the light. There came a gentle tapping at his window. A long streamer of honeysuckle, not yet in blossom, but alive with the life of the summer, was blown by the air of the morning against his window-pane, as if calling him to get up and look out. He did get up and look out.

But he started back in such haste that he fell against the side of his bed. Within a few yards of his window, bending over a bush, was the loveliest face he had ever seen—the only face, in fact, he had ever yet felt to be beautiful. For the window looked directly into the garden of the next house: its honeysuckle tapped at his window, its sweet-peas grew against his window-sill. It was the face of the angel of that night; but how different when illuminated by the morning sun from then, when lighted up by a chamber-candle! The first thought that came to him was the half-ludicrous, all-fantastic idea of the shoemaker about his grandfather’s violin being a woman. A vaguest dream-vision of her having escaped from his grandmother’s aumrie (store-closet), and wandering free amidst the wind and among the flowers, crossed his mind before he had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to prevent Fancy from cutting any more of those too ridiculous capers in which she indulged at will in sleep, and as often besides as she can get away from the spectacles of old Grannie Judgment.