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MARY ST. JOHN.
After this, day followed day in calm, dull progress. Robert did not
care for the games through which his school-fellows forgot the
little they had to forget, and had therefore few in any sense his
companions. So he passed his time out of school in the society of
his grandmother and Shargar, except that spent in the garret, and
the few hours a week occupied by the lessons of the shoemaker. For
he went on, though half-heartedly, with those lessons, given now
upon Sandy's redeemed violin which he called his old wife, and made
a little progress even, as we sometimes do when we least think it.
He took more and more to brooding in the garret; and as more
questions presented themselves for solution, he became more anxious
to arrive at the solution, and more uneasy as he failed in
satisfying himself that he had arrived at it; so that his brain,
which needed quiet for the true formation of its substance, as a
cooling liquefaction or an evaporating solution for the just
formation of its crystals, became in danger of settling into an
abnormal arrangement of the cellular deposits.
I believe that even the new-born infant is, in some of his moods,
already grappling with the deepest metaphysical problems, in forms
infinitely too rudimental for the understanding of the grown
philosopher--as far, in fact, removed from his ken on the one side,
that of intelligential beginning, the germinal subjective, as his
abstrusest speculations are from the final solutions of absolute
entity on the other. If this be the case, it is no wonder that at
Robert's age the deepest questions of his coming manhood should be
in active operation, although so surrounded with the yoke of common
belief and the shell of accredited authority, that the embryo faith,
which in minds like his always takes the form of doubt, could not be
defined any more than its existence could be disproved. I have
given a hint at the tendency of his mind already, in the fact that
one of the most definite inquiries to which he had yet turned his
thoughts was, whether God would have mercy upon a repentant devil.
An ordinary puzzle had been--if his father were to marry again, and
it should turn out after all that his mother was not dead, what was
his father to do? But this was over now. A third was, why, when he
came out of church, sunshine always made him miserable, and he felt
better able to be good when it rained or snowed hard. I might
mention the inquiry whether it was not possible somehow to elude the
omniscience of God; but that is a common question with thoughtful
children, and indicates little that is characteristic of the
individual. That he puzzled himself about the perpetual motion may
pass for little likewise; but one thing which is worth mentioning,
for indeed it caused him considerable distress, was, that in reading
the Paradise Lost he could not help sympathizing with Satan, and
feeling--I do not say thinking--that the Almighty was pompous,
scarcely reasonable, and somewhat revengeful.
He was recognized amongst his school-fellows as remarkable for his
love of fair-play; so much so, that he was their constant referee.
Add to this that, notwithstanding his sympathy with Satan, he
almost invariably sided with his master, in regard of any angry
reflection or seditious movement, and even when unjustly punished
himself, the occasional result of a certain backwardness in
self-defence, never showed any resentment--a most improbable
statement, I admit, but nevertheless true--and I think the rest of
his character may be left to the gradual dawn of its historical
manifestation.
He had long ere this discovered who the angel was that had appeared
to him at the top of the stair upon that memorable night; but he
could hardly yet say that he had seen her; for, except one dim
glimpse he had had of her at the window as he passed in the street,
she had not appeared to him save in the vision of that night.
During the whole winter she scarcely left the house, partly from
the state of her health, affected by the sudden change to a northern
climate, partly from the attention required by her aunt, to aid in
nursing whom she had left the warmer south. Indeed, it was only to
return the visits of a few of Mrs. Forsyth's chosen, that she had
crossed the threshold at all; and those visits were paid at a time
when all such half-grown inhabitants as Robert were gathered under
the leathery wing of Mr. Innes.
But long before the winter was over, Rothieden had discovered that
the stranger, the English lady, Mary St. John, outlandish, almost
heathenish as her lovely name sounded in its ears, had a power as
altogether strange and new as her name. For she was not only an
admirable performer on the pianoforte, but such a simple enthusiast
in music, that the man must have had no music or little heart in him
in whom her playing did not move all that there was of the deepest.
Occasionally there would be quite a small crowd gathered at night by
the window of Mrs. Forsyth's drawing-room, which was on the
ground-floor, listening to music such as had never before been heard
in Rothieden. More than once, when Robert had not found Sandy
Elshender at home on the lesson-night, and had gone to seek him, he
had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet
sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned
against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the
window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched,
and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard--his whole ursine
face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his
chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it
moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and formless
world.
'Haud yer tongue!' he would say in a hoarse whisper, when Robert
sought to attract his attention; 'haud yer tongue, man, and hearken.
Gin yon bonny leddy 'at yer grannie keeps lockit up i' the aumry
war to tak to the piano, that's jist hoo she wad play. Lord, man!
pit yer sowl i' yer lugs, an' hearken.'
The soutar was all wrong in this; for if old Mr. Falconer's violin
had taken woman-shape, it would have been that of a slight, worn,
swarthy creature, with wild black eyes, great and restless, a voice
like a bird's, and thin fingers that clawed the music out of the
wires like the quills of the old harpsichord; not that of Mary St.
John, who was tall, and could not help being stately, was large and
well-fashioned, as full of repose as Handel's music, with a
contralto voice to make you weep, and eyes that would have seemed
but for their maidenliness to be always ready to fold you in their
lucid gray depths.
Robert stared at the soutar, doubting at first whether he had not
been drinking. But the intoxication of music produces such a
different expression from that of drink, that Robert saw at once
that if he had indeed been drinking, at least the music had got
above the drink. As long as the playing went on, Elshender was not
to be moved from the window.
But to many of the people of Rothieden the music did not recommend
the musician; for every sort of music, except the most unmusical of
psalm-singing, was in their minds of a piece with 'dancin' an'
play-actin', an' ither warldly vainities an' abominations.' And
Robert, being as yet more capable of melody than harmony, grudged to
lose a lesson on Sandy's 'auld wife o' a fiddle' for any amount of
Miss St. John's playing.
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