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_ PART II. HIS YOUTH
CHAPTER IX. A HUMAN SOUL
Ericson lay for several weeks, during which time Robert and Shargar were his only nurses. They contrived, by abridging both rest and labour, to give him constant attendance. Shargar went to bed early and got up early, so as to let Robert have a few hours' sleep before his classes began. Robert again slept in the evening, after Shargar came home, and made up for the time by reading while he sat by his friend. Mrs. Fyvie's attendance was in requisition only for the hours when he had to be at lectures. By the greatest economy of means, consisting of what Shargar brought in by jobbing about the quay and the coach-offices, and what Robert had from Dr. Anderson for copying his manuscript, they contrived to procure for Ericson all that he wanted. The shopping of the two boys, in their utter ignorance of such delicacies as the doctor told them to get for him, the blunders they made as to the shops at which they were to be bought, and the consultations they held, especially about the preparing of the prescribed nutriment, afforded them many an amusing retrospect in after years. For the house was so full of lodgers, that Robert begged Mrs. Fyvie to give herself no trouble in the matter. Her conscience, however, was uneasy, and she spoke to Dr. Anderson; but he assured her that she might trust the boys. What cooking they could not manage, she undertook cheerfully, and refused to add anything to the rent on Shargar's account.
Dr. Anderson watched everything, the two boys as much as his patient. He allowed them to work on, sending only the wine that was necessary from his own cellar. The moment the supplies should begin to fail, or the boys to look troubled, he was ready to do more. About Robert's perseverance he had no doubt: Shargar's faithfulness he wanted to prove.
Robert wrote to his grandmother to tell her that Shargar was with him, working hard. Her reply was somewhat cold and offended, but was inclosed in a parcel containing all Shargar's garments, and ended with the assurance that as long as he did well she was ready to do what she could.
Few English readers will like Mrs. Falconer; but her grandchild considered her one of the noblest women ever God made; and I, from his account, am of the same mind. Her care was fixed
To fill her odorous lamp with deeds of light,
And hope that reaps not shame.
And if one must choose between the how and the what, let me have the what, come of the how what may. I know of a man so sensitive, that he shuts his ears to his sister's griefs, because it spoils his digestion to think of them.
One evening Robert was sitting by the table in Ericson's room. Dr. Anderson had not called that day, and he did not expect to see him now, for he had never come so late. He was quite at his ease, therefore, and busy with two things at once, when the doctor opened the door and walked in. I think it is possible that he came up quietly with some design of surprising him. He found him with a stocking on one hand, a darning needle in the other, and a Greek book open before him. Taking no apparent notice of him, he walked up to the bedside, and Robert put away his work. After his interview with his patient was over, the doctor signed to him to follow him to the next room. There Shargar lay on the rug already snoring. It was a cold night in December, but he lay in his under-clothing, with a single blanket round him.
'Good training for a soldier,' said the doctor; 'and so was your work a minute ago, Robert.'
'Ay,' answered Robert, colouring a little; 'I was readin' a bit o' the Anabasis.'
The doctor smiled a far-off sly smile.
'I think it was rather the Katabasis, if one might venture to judge from the direction of your labours.'
'Weel,' answered Robert, 'what wad ye hae me do? Wad ye hae me lat Mr. Ericson gang wi' holes i' the heels o' 's hose, whan I can mak them a' snod, an' learn my Greek at the same time? Hoots, doctor! dinna lauch at me. I was doin' nae ill. A body may please themsel's--whiles surely, ohn sinned.'
'But it's such waste of time! Why don't you buy him new ones?'
''Deed that's easier said than dune. I hae eneuch ado wi' my siller as 'tis; an' gin it warna for you, doctor, I do not ken what wad come o' 's; for ye see I hae no richt to come upo' my grannie for ither fowk. There wad be nae en' to that.'
'But I could lend you the money to buy him some stockings.'
'An' whan wad I be able to pay ye, do ye think, doctor? In anither warl' maybe, whaur the currency micht be sae different there wad be no possibility o' reckonin' the rate o' exchange. Na, na.'
'But I will give you the money if you like.'
'Na, na. You hae dune eneuch already, an' mony thanks. Siller's no sae easy come by to be wastit, as lang's a darn 'll do. Forbye, gin ye began wi' his claes, ye wadna ken whaur to haud; for it wad jist be the new claith upo' the auld garment: ye micht as weel new cleed him at ance.'
'And why not if I choose, Mr. Falconer?'
'Speir ye that at him, an' see what ye'll get--a luik 'at wad fess a corbie (carrion crow) frae the lift (sky). I wadna hae ye try that. Some fowk's poverty maun be han'let jist like a sair place, doctor. He canna weel compleen o' a bit darnin'.--He canna tak that ill,' repeated Robert, in a tone that showed he yet felt some anxiety on the subject; 'but new anes! I wadna like to be by whan he fand that oot. Maybe he micht tak them frae a wuman; but frae a man body!--na, na; I maun jist darn awa'. But I'll mak them dacent eneuch afore I hae dune wi' them. A fiddler has fingers.'
The doctor smiled a pleased smile; but when he got into his carriage, again he laughed heartily.
The evening deepened into night. Robert thought Ericson was asleep. But he spoke.
'Who is that at the street door?' he said.
They were at the top of the house, and there was no window to the street. But Ericson's senses were preternaturally acute, as is often the case in such illnesses.
'I dinna hear onybody,' answered Robert.
'There was somebody,' returned Ericson.
From that moment he began to be restless, and was more feverish than usual throughout the night.
Up to this time he had spoken little, was depressed with a suffering to which he could give no name--not pain, he said--but such that he could rouse no mental effort to meet it: his endurance was passive altogether. This night his brain was more affected. He did not rave, but often wandered; never spoke nonsense, but many words that would have seemed nonsense to ordinary people: to Robert they seemed inspired. His imagination, which was greater than any other of his fine faculties, was so roused that he talked in verse--probably verse composed before and now recalled. He would even pray sometimes in measured lines, and go on murmuring petitions, till the words of the murmur became undistinguishable, and he fell asleep. But even in his sleep he would speak; and Robert would listen in awe; for such words, falling from such a man, were to him as dim breaks of coloured light from the rainbow walls of the heavenly city.
'If God were thinking me,' said Ericson, 'ah! But if he be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.'
Ericson's outside was like his own northern clime--dark, gentle, and clear, with gray-blue seas, and a sun that seems to shine out of the past, and know nothing of the future. But within glowed a volcanic angel of aspiration, fluttering his half-grown wings, and ever reaching towards the heights whence all things are visible, and where all passions are safe because true, that is divine. Iceland herself has her Hecla.
Robert listened with keenest ear. A mist of great meaning hung about the words his friend had spoken. He might speak more. For some minutes he listened in vain, and was turning at last towards his book in hopelessness, when he did speak yet again: Robert's ear soon detected the rhythmic motion of his speech.
'Come in the glory of thine excellence;
Rive the dense gloom with wedges of clear light;
And let the shimmer of thy chariot wheels
Burn through the cracks of night.--So slowly, Lord,
To lift myself to thee with hands of toil,
Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer!
Lift up a hand among my idle days--
One beckoning finger. I will cast aside
The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run
Up the broad highways where the countless worlds
Sit ripening in the summer of thy love.'
Breathless for fear of losing a word, Robert yet remembered that he had seen something like these words in the papers Ericson had given him to read on the night when his illness began. When he had fallen asleep and silent, he searched and found the poem from which I give the following extracts. He had not looked at the papers since that night.
A PRAYER.
O Lord, my God, how long
Shall my poor heart pant for a boundless joy?
How long, O mighty Spirit, shall I hear
The murmur of Truth's crystal waters slide
From the deep caverns of their endless being,
But my lips taste not, and the grosser air
Choke each pure inspiration of thy will?
I would be a wind,
Whose smallest atom is a viewless wing,
All busy with the pulsing life that throbs
To do thy bidding; yea, or the meanest thing
That has relation to a changeless truth
Could I but be instinct with thee--each thought
The lightning of a pure intelligence,
And every act as the loud thunder-clap
Of currents warring for a vacuum.
Lord, clothe me with thy truth as with a robe.
Purge me with sorrow. I will bend my head,
And let the nations of thy waves pass over,
Bathing me in thy consecrated strength.
And let the many-voiced and silver winds
Pass through my frame with their clear influence.
O save me--I am blind; lo! thwarting shapes
Wall up the void before, and thrusting out
Lean arms of unshaped expectation, beckon
Down to the night of all unholy thoughts.
I have seen
Unholy shapes lop off my shining thoughts,
Which I had thought nursed in thine emerald light;
And they have lent me leathern wings of fear,
Of baffled pride and harrowing distrust;
And Godhead with its crown of many stars,
Its pinnacles of flaming holiness,
And voice of leaves in the green summer-time,
Has seemed the shadowed image of a self.
Then my soul blackened; and I rose to find
And grasp my doom, and cleave the arching deeps
Of desolation.
O Lord, my soul is a forgotten well;
Clad round with its own rank luxuriance;
A fountain a kind sunbeam searches for,
Sinking the lustre of its arrowy finger
Through the long grass its own strange virtue [5]
Hath blinded up its crystal eye withal:
Make me a broad strong river coming down
With shouts from its high hills, whose rocky hearts
Throb forth the joy of their stability
In watery pulses from their inmost deeps,
And I shall be a vein upon thy world,
Circling perpetual from the parent deep.
O First and Last, O glorious all in all,
In vain my faltering human tongue would seek
To shape the vesture of the boundless thought,
Summing all causes in one burning word;
Give me the spirit's living tongue of fire,
Whose only voice is in an attitude
Of keenest tension, bent back on itself
With a strong upward force; even as thy bow
Of bended colour stands against the north,
And, in an attitude to spring to heaven,
Lays hold of the kindled hills.
Most mighty One,
Confirm and multiply my thoughts of good;
Help me to wall each sacred treasure round
With the firm battlements of special action.
Alas my holy, happy thoughts of thee
Make not perpetual nest within my soul,
But like strange birds of dazzling colours stoop
The trailing glories of their sunward speed,
For one glad moment filling my blasted boughs
With the sunshine of their wings.
Make me a forest
Of gladdest life, wherein perpetual spring
Lifts up her leafy tresses in the wind.
Lo! now I see
Thy trembling starlight sit among my pines,
And thy young moon slide down my arching boughs
With a soft sound of restless eloquence.
And I can feel a joy as when thy hosts
Of trampling winds, gathering in maddened bands,
Roar upward through the blue and flashing day
Round my still depths of uncleft solitude.
Hear me, O Lord,
When the black night draws down upon my soul,
And voices of temptation darken down
The misty wind, slamming thy starry doors,
With bitter jests. 'Thou fool!' they seem to say
'Thou hast no seed of goodness in thee; all
Thy nature hath been stung right through and through.
Thy sin hath blasted thee, and made thee old.
Thou hadst a will, but thou hast killed it--dead--
And with the fulsome garniture of life
Built out the loathsome corpse. Thou art a child
Of night and death, even lower than a worm.
Gather the skirts up of thy shadowy self,
And with what resolution thou hast left,
Fall on the damned spikes of doom.'
O take me like a child,
If thou hast made me for thyself, my God,
And lead me up thy hills. I shall not fear
So thou wilt make me pure, and beat back sin
With the terrors of thine eye.
Lord hast thou sent
Thy moons to mock us with perpetual hope?
Lighted within our breasts the love of love,
To make us ripen for despair, my God?
Oh, dost thou hold each individual soul
Strung clear upon thy flaming rods of purpose?
Or does thine inextinguishable will
Stand on the steeps of night with lifted hand,
Filling the yawning wells of monstrous space
With mixing thought--drinking up single life
As in a cup? and from the rending folds
Of glimmering purpose, the gloom do all thy navied stars
Slide through the gloom with mystic melody,
Like wishes on a brow? Oh, is my soul,
Hung like a dew-drop in thy grassy ways,
Drawn up again into the rack of change,
Even through the lustre which created it?
O mighty one, thou wilt not smite me through
With scorching wrath, because my spirit stands
Bewildered in thy circling mysteries.
[Footnote 5:
This line is one of many instances in which
my reader will see both the carelessness of
Ericson and my religion towards his remains.]
Here came the passage Robert had heard him repeat, and then the following paragraph:
Lord, thy strange mysteries come thickening down
Upon my head like snow-flakes, shutting out
The happy upper fields with chilly vapour.
Shall I content my soul with a weak sense
Of safety? or feed my ravenous hunger with
Sore-purged hopes, that are not hopes, but fears
Clad in white raiment?
I know not but some thin and vaporous fog,
Fed with the rank excesses of the soul,
Mocks the devouring hunger of my life
With satisfaction: lo! the noxious gas
Feeds the lank ribs of gaunt and ghastly death
With double emptiness, like a balloon,
Borne by its lightness o'er the shining lands,
A wonder and a laughter.
The creeds lie in the hollow of men's hearts
Like festering pools glassing their own corruption:
The slimy eyes stare up with dull approval,
And answer not when thy bright starry feet
Move on the watery floors.
O wilt thou hear me when I cry to thee?
I am a child lost in a mighty forest;
The air is thick with voices, and strange hands
Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts.
There is a voice which sounds like words from home,
But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems
To leap from rock to rock. Oh! if it is
Willing obliquity of sense, descend,
Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand,
And lead me homeward through the shadows.
Let me not by my wilful acts of pride
Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow
A wasted, withered thing, that stumbles on
Down to the grave with folded hands of sloth
And leaden confidence.
There was more of it, as my type indicates. Full of faults, I have given so much to my reader, just as it stood upon Ericson's blotted papers, the utterance of a true soul 'crying for the light.' But I give also another of his poems, which Robert read at the same time, revealing another of his moods when some one of the clouds of holy doubt and questioning love which so often darkened his sky, did at length
Turn forth her silver lining on the night:
SONG.
They are blind and they are dead:
We will wake them as we go;
There are words have not been said;
There are sounds they do not know.
We will pipe and we will sing--
With the music and the spring,
Set their hearts a wondering.
They are tired of what is old:
We will give it voices new;
For the half hath not been told
Of the Beautiful and True.
Drowsy eyelids shut and sleeping!
Heavy eyes oppressed with weeping!
Flashes through the lashes leaping!
Ye that have a pleasant voice,
Hither come without delay;
Ye will never have a choice
Like to that ye have to-day:
Round the wide world we will go,
Singing through the frost and snow,
Till the daisies are in blow.
Ye that cannot pipe or sing,
Ye must also come with speed;
Ye must come and with you bring
Weighty words and weightier deed:
Helping hands and loving eyes,
These will make them truly wise--
Then will be our Paradise.
As Robert read, the sweetness of the rhythm seized upon him, and, almost unconsciously, he read the last stanza aloud. Looking up from the paper with a sigh of wonder and delight--there was the pale face of Ericson gazing at him from the bed! He had risen on one arm, looking like a dead man called to life against his will, who found the world he had left already stranger to him than the one into which he had but peeped.
'Yes,' he murmured; 'I could say that once. It's all gone now. Our world is but our moods.'
He fell back on his pillow. After a little, he murmured again:
'I might fool myself with faith again. So it is better not. I would not be fooled. To believe the false and be happy is the very belly of misery. To believe the true and be miserable, is to be true--and miserable. If there is no God, let me know it. I will not be fooled. I will not believe in a God that does not exist. Better be miserable because I am, and cannot help it.--O God!'
Yet in his misery, he cried upon God.
These words came upon Robert with such a shock of sympathy, that they destroyed his consciousness for the moment, and when he thought about them, he almost doubted if he had heard them. He rose and approached the bed. Ericson lay with his eyes closed, and his face contorted as by inward pain. Robert put a spoonful of wine to his lips. He swallowed it, opened his eyes, gazed at the boy as if he did not know him, closed them again, and lay still.
Some people take comfort from the true eyes of a dog--and a precious thing to the loving heart is the love of even a dumb animal. [6] What comfort then must not such a boy as Robert have been to such a man as Ericson! Often and often when he was lying asleep as Robert thought, he was watching the face of his watcher. When the human soul is not yet able to receive the vision of the God-man, God sometimes--might I not say always?--reveals himself, or at least gives himself, in some human being whose face, whose hands are the ministering angels of his unacknowledged presence, to keep alive the fire of love on the altar of the heart, until God hath provided the sacrifice--that is, until the soul is strong enough to draw it from the concealing thicket. Here were two, each thinking that God had forsaken him, or was not to be found by him, and each the very love of God, commissioned to tend the other's heart. In each was he present to the other. The one thought himself the happiest of mortals in waiting upon his big brother, whose least smile was joy enough for one day; the other wondered at the unconscious goodness of the boy, and while he gazed at his ruddy-brown face, believed in God.
[Footnote 6:
Why should Sir Walter Scott, who felt the death
of Camp, his bullterrier, so much that he declined
a dinner engagement in consequence, say on the
death of his next favourite, a grayhound bitch--
'Rest her body, since I dare not say soul!'? Where
did he get that dare not? Is it well that the
daring of genius should be circumscribed by an
unbelief so common-place as to be capable only of
subscription?]
For some time after Ericson was taken ill, he was too depressed and miserable to ask how he was cared for. But by slow degrees it dawned upon him that a heart deep and gracious, like that of a woman, watched over him. True, Robert was uncouth, but his uncouthness was that of a half-fledged angel. The heart of the man and the heart of the boy were drawn close together. Long before Ericson was well he loved Robert enough to be willing to be indebted to him, and would lie pondering--not how to repay him, but how to return his kindness.
How much Robert's ambition to stand well in the eyes of Miss St. John contributed to his progress I can only imagine; but certainly his ministrations to Ericson did not interfere with his Latin and Greek. I venture to think that they advanced them, for difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of the powder sends the bullet the further. I have heard, indeed, that when a carrier wants to help his horse up hill, he sets a boy on his back.
Ericson made little direct acknowledgment to Robert: his tones, his gestures, his looks, all thanked him; but he shrunk from words, with the maidenly shamefacedness that belongs to true feeling. He would even assume the authoritative, and send him away to his studies, but Robert knew how to hold his own. The relation of elder brother and younger was already established between them. Shargar likewise took his share in the love and the fellowship, worshipping in that he believed. _
Read next: Part 2. His Youth: Chapter 10. A Father And A Daughter
Read previous: Part 2. His Youth: Chapter 8. A Human Providence
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