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A GRAVE OPENED.
One thing that troubled Robert on this his return home, was the
discovery that the surroundings of his childhood had deserted him.
There they were, as of yore, but they seemed to have nothing to say
to him--no remembrance of him. It was not that everything looked
small and narrow; it was not that the streets he saw from his new
quarters, the gable-room, were awfully still after the roar of
Aberdeen, and a passing cart seemed to shudder at the loneliness of
the noise itself made; it was that everything seemed to be conscious
only of the past and care nothing for him now. The very chairs with
their inlaid backs had an embalmed look, and stood as in a dream.
He could pass even the walled-up door without emotion, for all the
feeling that had been gathered about the knob that admitted him to
Mary St. John, had transferred itself to the brass bell-pull at her
street-door.
But one day, after standing for a while at the window, looking down
on the street where he had first seen the beloved form of Ericson, a
certain old mood began to revive in him. He had been working at
quadratic equations all the morning; he had been foiled in the
attempt to find the true algebraic statement of a very tough
question involving various ratios; and, vexed with himself, he had
risen to look out, as the only available zeitvertreib. It was one
of those rainy days of spring which it needs a hopeful mood to
distinguish from autumnal ones--dull, depressing, persistent: there
might be sunshine in Mercury or Venus--but on the earth could be
none, from his right hand round by India and America to his left;
and certainly there was none between--a mood to which all sensitive
people are liable who have not yet learned by faith in the
everlasting to rule their own spirits. Naturally enough his
thoughts turned to the place where he had suffered most--his old
room in the garret. Hitherto he had shrunk from visiting it; but
now he turned away from the window, went up the steep stairs, with
their one sharp corkscrew curve, pushed the door, which clung
unwillingly to the floor, and entered. It was a nothing of a
place--with a window that looked only to heaven. There was the
empty bedstead against the wall, where he had so often kneeled,
sending forth vain prayers to a deaf heaven! Had they indeed been
vain prayers, and to a deaf heaven? or had they been prayers which a
hearing God must answer not according to the haste of the praying
child, but according to the calm course of his own infinite law of
love?
Here, somehow or other, the things about him did not seem so much
absorbed in the past, notwithstanding those untroubled rows of
papers bundled in red tape. True, they looked almost awful in their
lack of interest and their non-humanity, for there is scarcely
anything that absolutely loses interest save the records of money;
but his mother's workbox lay behind them. And, strange to say, the
side of that bed drew him to kneel down: he did not yet believe that
prayer was in vain. If God had not answered him before, that gave
no certainty that he would not answer him now. It was, he found,
still as rational as it had ever been to hope that God would answer
the man that cried to him. This came, I think, from the fact that
God had been answering him all the time, although he had not
recognized his gifts as answers. Had he not given him Ericson, his
intercourse with whom and his familiarity with whose doubts had done
anything but quench his thirst after the higher life? For
Ericson's, like his own, were true and good and reverent doubts, not
merely consistent with but in a great measure springing from
devoutness and aspiration. Surely such doubts are far more precious
in the sight of God than many beliefs?
He kneeled and sent forth one cry after the Father, arose, and
turned towards the shelves, removed some of the bundles of letters,
and drew out his mother's little box.
There lay the miniature, still and open-eyed as he had left it.
There too lay the bit of paper, brown and dry, with the hymn and
the few words of sorrow written thereon. He looked at the portrait,
but did not open the folded paper. Then first he thought whether
there might not be something more in the box: what he had taken for
the bottom seemed to be a tray. He lifted it by two little ears of
ribbon, and there, underneath, lay a letter addressed to his father,
in the same old-fashioned handwriting as the hymn. It was sealed
with brown wax, full of spangles, impressed with a bush of
something--he could not tell whether rushes or reeds or flags. Of
course he dared not open it. His holy mother's words to his erring
father must be sacred even from the eyes of their son. But what
other or fitter messenger than himself could bear it to its
destination? It was for this that he had been guided to it.
For years he had regarded the finding of his father as the first
duty of his manhood: it was as if his mother had now given her
sanction to the quest, with this letter to carry to the husband who,
however he might have erred, was yet dear to her. He replaced it in
the box, but the box no more on the forsaken shelf with its dreary
barricade of soulless records. He carried it with him, and laid it
in the bottom of his box, which henceforth he kept carefully locked:
there lay as it were the pledge of his father's salvation, and his
mother's redemption from an eternal grief.
He turned to his equation: it had cleared itself up; he worked it
out in five minutes. Betty came to tell him that the dinner was
ready, and he went down, peaceful and hopeful, to his grandmother.
While at home he never worked in the evenings: it was bad enough to
have to do so at college. Hence nature had a chance with him again.
Blessings on the wintry blasts that broke into the first youth of
Summer! They made him feel what summer was! Blessings on the
cheerless days of rain, and even of sleet and hail, that would shove
the reluctant year back into January. The fair face of Spring, with
her tears dropping upon her quenchless smiles, peeped in suppressed
triumph from behind the growing corn and the budding sallows on the
river-bank. Nay, even when the snow came once more in defiance of
calendars, it was but a background from which the near genesis
should 'stick fiery off.'
In general he had a lonely walk after his lesson with Miss St. John
was over: there was no one at Rothieden to whom his heart and
intellect both were sufficiently drawn to make a close friendship
possible. He had companions, however: Ericson had left his papers
with him. The influence of these led him into yet closer sympathy
with Nature and all her moods; a sympathy which, even in the stony
heart of London, he not only did not lose but never ceased to feel.
Even there a breath of wind would not only breathe upon him, it
would breathe into him; and a sunset seen from the Strand was lovely
as if it had hung over rainbow seas. On his way home he would often
go into one of the shops where the neighbours congregated in the
evenings, and hold a little talk; and although, with Miss St. John
filling his heart, his friend's poems his imagination, and geometry
and algebra his intellect, great was the contrast between his own
inner mood and the words by which he kept up human relations with
his townsfolk, yet in after years he counted it one of the greatest
blessings of a lowly birth and education that he knew hearts and
feelings which to understand one must have been young amongst them.
He would not have had a chance of knowing such as these if he had
been the son of Dr. Anderson and born in Aberdeen.
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