



Produced by John Bechard





ROBERT FALCONER

By George Macdonald




Note from electronic text creator: I have compiled a glossary with
definitions of most of the Scottish words found in this work and placed
it at the end of this electronic text. This glossary does not belong to
the original work, but is designed to help with the conversations and
references in Broad Scots found in this work. A further explanation of
this list can be found towards the end of this document, preceding the
glossary.

Any notes that I have made in the text (e.g. relating to Greek words in
the text) have been enclosed in {} brackets.



     TO

     THE MEMORY

     OF THE MAN WHO

     STANDS HIGHEST IN THE ORATORY

     OF MY MEMORY,

     ALEXANDER JOHN SCOTT,

     I, DARING, PRESUME TO DEDICATE THIS BOOK.





PART I.--HIS BOYHOOD.



CHAPTER I. A RECOLLECTION.

Robert Falconer, school-boy, aged fourteen, thought he had never seen
his father; that is, thought he had no recollection of having ever seen
him. But the moment when my story begins, he had begun to doubt whether
his belief in the matter was correct. And, as he went on thinking, he
became more and more assured that he had seen his father somewhere about
six years before, as near as a thoughtful boy of his age could judge
of the lapse of a period that would form half of that portion of his
existence which was bound into one by the reticulations of memory.

For there dawned upon his mind the vision of one Sunday afternoon. Betty
had gone to church, and he was alone with his grandmother, reading
The Pilgrim's Progress to her, when, just as Christian knocked at the
wicket-gate, a tap came to the street door, and he went to open it.
There he saw a tall, somewhat haggard-looking man, in a shabby
black coat (the vision gradually dawned upon him till it reached the
minuteness of all these particulars), his hat pulled down on to his
projecting eyebrows, and his shoes very dusty, as with a long journey
on foot--it was a hot Sunday, he remembered that--who looked at him very
strangely, and without a word pushed him aside, and went straight into
his grandmother's parlour, shutting the door behind him. He followed,
not doubting that the man must have a right to go there, but questioning
very much his right to shut him out. When he reached the door, however,
he found it bolted; and outside he had to stay all alone, in the
desolate remainder of the house, till Betty came home from church.

He could even recall, as he thought about it, how drearily the afternoon
had passed. First he had opened the street door, and stood in it. There
was nothing alive to be seen, except a sparrow picking up crumbs, and he
would not stop till he was tired of him. The Royal Oak, down the street
to the right, had not even a horseless gig or cart standing before it;
and King Charles, grinning awfully in its branches on the signboard, was
invisible from the distance at which he stood. In at the other end of
the empty street, looked the distant uplands, whose waving corn and
grass were likewise invisible, and beyond them rose one blue truncated
peak in the distance, all of them wearily at rest this weary Sabbath
day. However, there was one thing than which this was better, and that
was being at church, which, to this boy at least, was the very fifth
essence of dreariness.

He closed the door and went into the kitchen. That was nearly as bad.
The kettle was on the fire, to be sure, in anticipation of tea; but the
coals under it were black on the top, and it made only faint efforts,
after immeasurable intervals of silence, to break into a song, giving
a hum like that of a bee a mile off, and then relapsing into hopeless
inactivity. Having just had his dinner, he was not hungry enough to find
any resource in the drawer where the oatcakes lay, and, unfortunately,
the old wooden clock in the corner was going, else there would have been
some amusement in trying to torment it into demonstrations of life, as
he had often done in less desperate circumstances than the present. At
last he went up-stairs to the very room in which he now was, and sat
down upon the floor, just as he was sitting now. He had not even brought
his Pilgrim's Progress with him from his grandmother's room. But,
searching about in all holes and corners, he at length found Klopstock's
Messiah translated into English, and took refuge there till Betty came
home. Nor did he go down till she called him to tea, when, expecting to
join his grandmother and the stranger, he found, on the contrary, that
he was to have his tea with Betty in the kitchen, after which he again
took refuge with Klopstock in the garret, and remained there till it
grew dark, when Betty came in search of him, and put him to bed in the
gable-room, and not in his usual chamber. In the morning, every trace of
the visitor had vanished, even to the thorn stick which he had set down
behind the door as he entered.

All this Robert Falconer saw slowly revive on the palimpsest of his
memory, as he washed it with the vivifying waters of recollection.




CHAPTER II. A VISITOR.

It was a very bare little room in which the boy sat, but it was
his favourite retreat. Behind the door, in a recess, stood an empty
bedstead, without even a mattress upon it. This was the only piece of
furniture in the room, unless some shelves crowded with papers tied up
in bundles, and a cupboard in the wall, likewise filled with papers,
could be called furniture. There was no carpet on the floor, no windows
in the walls. The only light came from the door, and from a small
skylight in the sloping roof, which showed that it was a garret-room.
Nor did much light come from the open door, for there was no window on
the walled stair to which it opened; only opposite the door a few steps
led up into another garret, larger, but with a lower roof, unceiled,
and perforated with two or three holes, the panes of glass filling which
were no larger than the small blue slates which covered the roof: from
these panes a little dim brown light tumbled into the room where the boy
sat on the floor, with his head almost between his knees, thinking.

But there was less light than usual in the room now, though it was
only half-past two o'clock, and the sun would not set for more than
half-an-hour yet; for if Robert had lifted his head and looked up, it
would have been at, not through, the skylight. No sky was to be seen. A
thick covering of snow lay over the glass. A partial thaw, followed
by frost, had fixed it there--a mass of imperfect cells and confused
crystals. It was a cold place to sit in, but the boy had some faculty
for enduring cold when it was the price to be paid for solitude. And
besides, when he fell into one of his thinking moods, he forgot, for
a season, cold and everything else but what he was thinking about--a
faculty for which he was to be envied.

If he had gone down the stair, which described half the turn of a screw
in its descent, and had crossed the landing to which it brought him,
he could have entered another bedroom, called the gable or rather ga'le
room, equally at his service for retirement; but, though carpeted
and comfortably furnished, and having two windows at right angles,
commanding two streets, for it was a corner house, the boy preferred
the garret-room--he could not tell why. Possibly, windows to the streets
were not congenial to the meditations in which, even now, as I have
said, the boy indulged.

These meditations, however, though sometimes as abstruse, if not so
continuous, as those of a metaphysician--for boys are not unfrequently
more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps,
willing to believe--were not by any means confined to such subjects:
castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely
hours; and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, what he
knew, or rather what he did not know, of his own history gave him
scope enough, nor was his brain slow in supplying him with material
corresponding in quantity to the space afforded. His mother had been
dead for so many years that he had only the vaguest recollections of her
tenderness, and none of her person. All he was told of his father was
that he had gone abroad. His grandmother would never talk about him,
although he was her own son. When the boy ventured to ask a question
about where he was, or when he would return, she always replied--'Bairns
suld haud their tongues.' Nor would she vouchsafe another answer to any
question that seemed to her from the farthest distance to bear down upon
that subject. 'Bairns maun learn to haud their tongues,' was the sole
variation of which the response admitted. And the boy did learn to hold
his tongue. Perhaps he would have thought less about his father if he
had had brothers or sisters, or even if the nature of his grandmother
had been such as to admit of their relationship being drawn closer--into
personal confidence, or some measure of familiarity. How they stood with
regard to each other will soon appear.

Whether the visions vanished from his brain because of the thickening of
his blood with cold, or he merely acted from one of those undefined and
inexplicable impulses which occasion not a few of our actions, I cannot
tell, but all at once Robert started to his feet and hurried from the
room. At the foot of the garret stair, between it and the door of the
gable-room already mentioned, stood another door at right angles to
both, of the existence of which the boy was scarcely aware, simply
because he had seen it all his life and had never seen it open. Turning
his back on this last door, which he took for a blind one, he went down
a short broad stair, at the foot of which was a window. He then turned
to the left into a long flagged passage or transe, passed the kitchen
door on the one hand, and the double-leaved street door on the other;
but, instead of going into the parlour, the door of which closed the
transe, he stopped at the passage-window on the right, and there stood
looking out.

What might be seen from this window certainly could not be called a very
pleasant prospect. A broad street with low houses of cold gray stone
is perhaps as uninteresting a form of street as any to be found in the
world, and such was the street Robert looked out upon. Not a single
member of the animal creation was to be seen in it, not a pair of eyes
to be discovered looking out at any of the windows opposite. The sole
motion was the occasional drift of a vapour-like film of white powder,
which the wind would lift like dust from the snowy carpet that covered
the street, and wafting it along for a few yards, drop again to its
repose, till another stronger gust, prelusive of the wind about to
rise at sun-down,--a wind cold and bitter as death--would rush over the
street, and raise a denser cloud of the white water-dust to sting the
face of any improbable person who might meet it in its passage. It was a
keen, knife-edged frost, even in the house, and what Robert saw to make
him stand at the desolate window, I do not know, and I believe he could
not himself have told. There he did stand, however, for the space of
five minutes or so, with nothing better filling his outer eyes at least
than a bald spot on the crown of the street, whence the wind had swept
away the snow, leaving it brown and bare, a spot of March in the middle
of January.

He heard the town drummer in the distance, and let the sound invade his
passive ears, till it crossed the opening of the street, and vanished
'down the town.'

'There's Dooble Sanny,' he said to himself--'wi' siccan cauld han's,
'at he's playin' upo' the drum-heid as gin he was loupin' in a bowie
(leaping in a cask).'

Then he stood silent once more, with a look as if anything would be
welcome to break the monotony.

While he stood a gentle timorous tap came to the door, so gentle indeed
that Betty in the kitchen did not hear it, or she, tall and Roman-nosed
as she was, would have answered it before the long-legged dreamer could
have reached the door, though he was not above three yards from it.
In lack of anything better to do, Robert stalked to the summons. As he
opened the door, these words greeted him:

'Is Robert at--eh! it's Bob himsel'! Bob, I'm byous (exceedingly)
cauld.'

'What for dinna ye gang hame, than?'

'What for wasna ye at the schuil the day?'

'I spier ae queston at you, and ye answer me wi' anither.'

'Weel, I hae nae hame to gang till.'

'Weel, and I had a sair heid (a headache). But whaur's yer hame gane
till than?'

'The hoose is there a' richt, but whaur my mither is I dinna ken. The
door's lockit, an' Jeames Jaup, they tell me's tane awa' the key. I
doobt my mither's