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'H. FALCONER.'
Then followed the date. It was within a week of her death. The
letter was feebly written, every stroke seeming more feeble by the
contrasted strength of the words. When Falconer read it afterwards,
in the midst of the emotions it aroused--the strange lovely feelings
of such a bond between him and a beautiful ghost, far away somewhere
in God's universe, who had carried him in her lost body, and nursed
him at her breasts--in the midst of it all, he could not help
wondering, he told me, to find the forms and words so like what he
would have written himself. It seemed so long ago when that faded,
discoloured paper, with the gilt edges, and the pale brown ink, and
folded in the large sheet, and sealed with the curious wax, must
have been written; and here were its words so fresh, so new! not
withered like the rose-leaves that scented the paper from the
work-box where he had found it, but as fresh as if just shaken from
the rose-trees of the heart's garden. It was no wonder that Andrew
Falconer should be sitting with his head in his hands when Robert
looked in on him, for he had read this letter.
When Robert saw how he sat, he withdrew, and took his violin again,
and played all the tunes of the old country he could think of,
recalling Dooble Sandy's workshop, that he might recall the music he
had learnt there.
No one who understands the bit and bridle of the association of
ideas, as it is called in the skeleton language of mental
philosophy, wherewith the Father-God holds fast the souls of his
children--to the very last that we see of them, at least, and
doubtless to endless ages beyond--will sneer at Falconer's notion of
making God's violin a ministering spirit in the process of
conversion. There is a well-authenticated story of a convict's
having been greatly reformed for a time, by going, in one of the
colonies, into a church, where the matting along the aisle was of
the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone when a
boy--with his mother, I suppose. It was not the matting that so far
converted him: it was not to the music of his violin that Falconer
looked for aid, but to the memories of childhood, the mysteries of
the kingdom of innocence which that could recall--those memories
which
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.
For an hour he did not venture to go near him. When he entered the
room he found him sitting in the same place, no longer weeping, but
gazing into the fire with a sad countenance, the expression of which
showed Falconer at once that the soul had come out of its cave of
obscuration, and drawn nearer to the surface of life. He had not
seen him look so much like one 'clothed, and in his right mind,'
before. He knew well that nothing could be built upon this; that
this very emotion did but expose him the more to the besetting sin;
that in this mood he would drink, even if he knew that he would in
consequence be in danger of murdering the wife whose letter had made
him weep. But it was progress, notwithstanding. He looked up at
Robert as he entered, and then dropped his eyes again. He regarded
him perhaps as a presence doubtful whether of angel or devil, even
as the demoniacs regarded the Lord of Life who had come to set them
free. Bewildered he must have been to find himself, towards the
close of a long life of debauchery, wickedness, and the growing
pains of hell, caught in a net of old times, old feelings, old
truths.
Now Robert had carefully avoided every indication that might
disclose him to be a Scotchman even, nor was there the least sign of
suspicion in Andrew's manner. The only solution of the mystery that
could have presented itself to him was, that his friends were at the
root of it--probably his son, of whom he knew absolutely nothing.
His mother could not be alive still. Of his wife's relatives there
had never been one who would have taken any trouble about him after
her death, hardly even before it. John Lammie was the only person,
except Dr. Anderson, whose friendship he could suppose capable of
this development. The latter was the more likely person. But he
would be too much for him yet; he was not going to be treated like a
child, he said to himself, as often as the devil got uppermost.
My reader must understand that Andrew had never been a man of
resolution. He had been wilful and headstrong; and these qualities,
in children especially, are often mistaken for resolution, and
generally go under the name of strength of will. There never was a
greater mistake. The mistake, indeed, is only excusable from the
fact that extremes meet, and that this disposition is so opposite to
the other, that it looks to the careless eye most like it. He never
resisted his own impulses, or the enticements of evil companions.
Kept within certain bounds at home, after he had begun to go wrong,
by the weight of opinion, he rushed into all excesses when abroad
upon business, till at length the vessel of his fortune went to
pieces, and he was a waif on the waters of the world. But in
feeling he had never been vulgar, however much so in action. There
was a feeble good in him that had in part been protected by its very
feebleness. He could not sin so much against it as if it had been
strong. For many years he had fits of shame, and of grief without
repentance; for repentance is the active, the divine part--the
turning again; but taking more steadily both to strong drink and
opium, he was at the time when De Fleuri found him only the dull
ghost of Andrew Falconer walking in a dream of its lost carcass.
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