ROBERT FALCONER, page 6
‘Noo, Shargar, cut for the life o’ ye.’
And down came the poor fellow, with long gliding steps, ragged and reluctant, and, without a word or a look, launched himself out into the cold, and sped away he knew not whither. As he left the door, the only suspicion of light was the dull and doubtful shimmer of the snow that covered the street, keen particles of which were blown in his face by the wind, which, having been up all night, had grown very cold, and seemed delighted to find one unprotected human being whom it might badger at its own bitter will. Outcast Shargar! Where he spent the interval between Mrs. Falconer’s door and that of the school, I do not know. There was a report amongst his school-fellows that he had been found by Scroggie, the fish-cadger, lying at full length upon the back of his old horse, which, either from compassion or indifference, had not cared to rise up under the burden. They said likewise that, when accused by Scroggie of housebreaking, though nothing had to be broken to get in, only a string with a peculiar knot, on the invention of which the cadger prided himself, to be undone, all that Shargar had to say in his self-defence was, that he had a terrible sair wame, and that the horse was warmer nor the stanes i’ the yard; and he had dune him nae ill, nae even drawn a hair frae his tail — which would have been a difficult feat, seeing the horse’s tail was as bare as his hoof.
CHAPTER VII. ROBERT TO THE RESCUE!
That Shargar was a parish scholar — which means that the parish paid his fees, although, indeed, they were hardly worth paying — made very little difference to his position amongst his school-fellows. Nor did the fact of his being ragged and dirty affect his social reception to his discomfort. But the accumulated facts of the oddity of his personal appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the bad character borne by his mother, placed him in a very unenviable relation to the tyrannical and vulgar-minded amongst them. Concerning his person, he was long, and, as his name implied, lean, with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, and very pale face — in fact, he was half-way to an Albino. His arms and legs seemed of equal length, both exceedingly long. The handsomeness of his mother appeared only in his nose and mouth, which were regular and good, though expressionless; and the birth of his father only in his small delicate hands and feet, of which any girl who cared only for smallness, and heeded neither character nor strength, might have been proud. His feet, however, were supposed to be enormous, from the difficulty with which he dragged after him the huge shoes in which in winter they were generally encased.
The imbecility, like the large feet, was only imputed. He certainly was not brilliant, but neither did he make a fool of himself in any of the few branches of learning of which the parish-scholar came in for a share. That which gained him the imputation was the fact that his nature was without a particle of the aggressive, and all its defensive of as purely negative a character as was possible. Had he been a dog, he would never have thought of doing anything for his own protection beyond turning up his four legs in silent appeal to the mercy of the heavens. He was an absolute sepulchre in the swallowing of oppression and ill-usage. It vanished in him. There was no echo of complaint, no murmur of resentment from the hollows of that soul. The blows that fell upon him resounded not, and no one but God remembered them.
His mother made her living as she herself best knew, with occasional well-begrudged assistance from the parish. Her chief resource was no doubt begging from house to house for the handful of oatmeal which was the recognized, and, in the court of custom-taught conscience, the legalized dole upon which every beggar had a claim; and if she picked up at the same time a chicken, or a boy’s rabbit, or any other stray luxury, she was only following the general rule of society, that your first duty is to take care of yourself. She was generally regarded as a gipsy, but I doubt if she had any gipsy blood in her veins. She was simply a tramper, with occasional fits of localization. Her worst fault was the way she treated her son, whom she starved apparently that she might continue able to beat him.
The particular occasion which led to the recognition of the growing relation between Robert and Shargar was the following. Upon a certain Saturday — some sidereal power inimical to boys must have been in the ascendant — a Saturday of brilliant but intermittent sunshine, the white clouds seen from the school windows indicating by their rapid transit across those fields of vision that fresh breezes friendly to kites, or draigons, as they were called at Rothieden, were frolicking in the upper regions — nearly a dozen boys were kept in for not being able to pay down from memory the usual instalment of Shorter Catechism always due at the close of the week. Amongst these boys were Robert and Shargar. Sky-revealing windows and locked door were too painful; and in proportion as the feeling of having nothing to do increased, the more uneasy did the active element in the boys become, and the more ready to break out into some abnormal manifestation. Everything — sun, wind, clouds — was busy out of doors, and calling to them to come and join the fun; and activity at the same moment excited and restrained naturally turns to mischief. Most of them had already learned the obnoxious task — one quarter of an hour was enough for that — and now what should they do next? The eyes of three or four of the eldest of them fell simultaneously upon Shargar.
Robert was sitting plunged in one of his day-dreams, for he, too, had learned his catechism, when he was roused from his reverie by a question from a pale-faced little boy, who looked up to him as a great authority.
‘What for ‘s ‘t ca’d the Shorter Carritchis, Bob?’
‘‘Cause it’s no fully sae lang’s the Bible,’ answered Robert, without giving the question the consideration due to it, and was proceeding to turn the matter over in his mind, when the mental process was arrested by a shout of laughter. The other boys had tied Shargar’s feet to the desk at which he sat — likewise his hands, at full stretch; then, having attached about a dozen strings to as many elf-locks of his pale-red hair, which was never cut or trimmed, had tied them to various pegs in the wall behind him, so that the poor fellow could not stir. They were now crushing up pieces of waste-paper, not a few leaves of stray school-books being regarded in that light, into bullets, dipping them in ink and aiming them at Shargar’s face.
For some time Shargar did not utter a word; and Robert, although somewhat indignant at the treatment he was receiving, felt as yet no impulse to interfere, for success was doubtful. But, indeed, he was not very easily roused to action of any kind; for he was as yet mostly in the larva-condition of character, when everything is transacted inside. But the fun grew more furious, and spot after spot of ink gloomed upon Shargar’s white face. Still Robert took no notice, for they did not seem to be hurting him much. But when he saw the tears stealing down his patient cheeks, making channels through the ink which now nearly covered them, he could bear it no longer. He took out his knife, and under pretence of joining in the sport, drew near to Shargar, and with rapid hand cut the cords — all but those that bound his feet, which were less easy to reach without exposing himself defenceless.
The boys of course turned upon Robert. But ere they came to more than abusive words a diversion took place.
Mrs. Innes, the school-master’s wife — a stout, kind-hearted woman, the fine condition of whose temperament was clearly the result of her physical prosperity — appeared at the door which led to the dwelling-house above, bearing in her hands a huge tureen of potato-soup, for her motherly heart could not longer endure the thought of dinnerless boys. Her husband being engaged at a parish meeting, she had a chance of interfering with success.
But ere Nancy, the servant, could follow with the spoons and plates, Wattie Morrison had taken the tureen, and out of spite at Robert, had emptied its contents on the head of Shargar, who was still tied by the feet, with the words: ‘Shargar, I anoint thee king over us, and here is thy crown,’ giving the tureen, as he said so, a push on to his head, where it remained.
Shargar did not move, and for one moment could not speak, but the next he gave a shriek that made Robert think he was far worse scalded than turned out to be the case. He darted to him in rage, took the tureen from his head, and, his blood being fairly up now, flung it with all his force at Morrison, and felled him to the earth. At the same moment the master entered by the street door and his wife by the house door, which was directly opposite. In the middle of the room the prisoners surrounded the fallen tyrant — Robert, with the red face of wrath, and Shargar, with a complexion the mingled result of tears, ink, and soup, which latter clothed him from head to foot besides, standing on the outskirts of the group. I need not follow the story farther. Both Robert and Morrison got a lickin’; and if Mr. Innes had been like some school-masters of those times, Shargar would not have escaped his share of the evil things going.
From that day Robert assumed the acknowledged position of Shargar’s defender. And if there was pride and a sense of propriety mingled with his advocacy of Shargar’s rights, nay, even if the relation was not altogether free from some amount of show-off on Robert’s part, I cannot yet help thinking that it had its share in that development of the character of Falconer which has chiefly attracted me to the office of his biographer. There may have been in it the exercise of some patronage; probably it was not pure from the pride of beneficence; but at least it was a loving patronage and a vigorous beneficence; and, under the reaction of these, the good which in Robert’s nature was as yet only in a state of solution, began to crystallize into character.
But the effect of the new relation was far more remarkable on Shargar. As incapable of self-defence as ever, he was yet in a moment roused to fury by any attack upon the person or the dignity of Robert: so that, indeed, it became a new and favourite mode of teasing Shargar to heap abuse, real or pretended, upon his friend. From the day when Robert thus espoused his part, Shargar was Robert’s dog. That very evening, when she went to take a parting peep at the external before locking the door for the night, Betty found him sitting upon the door-step, only, however, to send him off, as she described it, ‘wi’ a flech 1 in ‘s lug (a flea in his ear).’ For the character of the mother was always associated with the boy, and avenged upon him. I must, however, allow that those delicate, dirty fingers of his could not with safety be warranted from occasional picking and stealing.
At this period of my story, Robert himself was rather a grotesque-looking animal, very tall and lanky, with especially long arms, which excess of length they retained after he was full-grown. In this respect Shargar and he were alike; but the long legs of Shargar were unmatched in Robert, for at this time his body was peculiarly long. He had large black eyes, deep sunk even then, and a Roman nose, the size of which in a boy of his years looked portentous. For the rest, he was dark-complexioned, with dark hair, destined to grow darker still, with hands and feet well modelled, but which would have made four feet and four hands such as Shargar’s.
When his mind was not oppressed with the consideration of any important metaphysical question, he learned his lessons well; when such was present, the Latin grammar, with all its attendant servilities, was driven from the presence of the lordly need. That once satisfied in spite of pandies and imprisonments, he returned with fresh zest, and, indeed, with some ephemeral ardour, to the rules of syntax or prosody, though the latter, in the mode in which it was then and there taught, was almost as useless as the task set himself by a worthy lay-preacher in the neighbourhood — of learning the first nine chapters of the first Book of the Chronicles, in atonement for having, in an evil hour of freedom of spirit, ventured to suggest that such lists of names, even although forming a portion of Holy Writ, could scarcely be reckoned of equally divine authority with St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
CHAPTER VIII. THE ANGEL UNAWARES.
Although Betty seemed to hold little communication with the outer world, she yet contrived somehow or other to bring home what gossip was going to the ears of her mistress, who had very few visitors; for, while her neighbours held Mrs. Falconer in great and evident respect, she was not the sort of person to sit down and have a news with. There was a certain sedate self-contained dignity about her which the common mind felt to be chilling and repellant; and from any gossip of a personal nature — what Betty brought her always excepted — she would turn away, generally with the words, ‘Hoots! I canna bide clashes.’
On the evening following that of Shargar’s introduction to Mrs. Falconer’s house, Betty came home from the butcher’s — for it was Saturday night, and she had gone to fetch the beef for their Sunday’s broth — with the news that the people next door, that is, round the corner in the next street, had a visitor.
The house in question had been built by Robert’s father, and was, compared with Mrs. Falconer’s one-storey house, large and handsome. Robert had been born, and had spent a few years of his life in it, but could recall nothing of the facts of those early days. Some time before the period at which my history commences it had passed into other hands, and it was now quite strange to him. It had been bought by a retired naval officer, who lived in it with his wife — the only Englishwoman in the place, until the arrival, at The Boar’s Head, of the lady so much admired by Dooble Sanny.
Robert was up-stairs when Betty emptied her news-bag, and so heard nothing of this bit of gossip. He had just assured Shargar that as soon as his grandmother was asleep he would look about for what he could find, and carry it up to him in the garret. As yet he had confined the expenditure out of Shargar’s shilling to twopence.
The household always retired early — earlier on Saturday night in preparation for the Sabbath — and by ten o’clock grannie and Betty were in bed. Robert, indeed, was in bed too; but he had lain down in his clothes, waiting for such time as might afford reasonable hope of his grandmother being asleep, when he might both ease Shargar’s hunger and get to sleep himself. Several times he got up, resolved to make his attempt; but as often his courage failed and he lay down again, sure that grannie could not be asleep yet. When the clock beside him struck eleven, he could bear it no longer, and finally rose to do his endeavour.
Opening the door of the closet slowly and softly, he crept upon his hands and knees into the middle of the parlour, feeling very much like a thief, as, indeed, in a measure he was, though from a blameless motive. But just as he had accomplished half the distance to the door, he was arrested and fixed with terror; for a deep sigh came from grannie’s bed, followed by the voice of words. He thought at first that she had heard him, but he soon found that he was mistaken. Still, the fear of discovery held him there on all fours, like a chained animal. A dull red gleam, faint and dull, from the embers of the fire, was the sole light in the room. Everything so common to his eyes in the daylight seemed now strange and eerie in the dying coals, and at what was to the boy the unearthly hour of the night.
He felt that he ought not to listen to grannie, but terror made him unable to move.
‘Och hone! och hone!’ said grannie from the bed. ‘I’ve a sair, sair hert. I’ve a sair hert i’ my breist, O Lord! thoo knowest. My ain Anerew! To think o’ my bairnie that I cairriet i’ my ain body, that sookit my breists, and leuch i’ my face — to think o’ ‘im bein’ a reprobate! O Lord! cudna he be eleckit yet? Is there nae turnin’ o’ thy decrees? Na, na; that wadna do at a’. But while there’s life there’s houp. But wha kens whether he be alive or no? Naebody can tell. Glaidly wad I luik upon ‘s deid face gin I cud believe that his sowl wasna amang the lost. But eh! the torments o’ that place! and the reik that gangs up for ever an’ ever, smorin’ (smothering) the stars! And my Anerew doon i’ the hert o’ ‘t cryin’! And me no able to win till him! O Lord! I canna say thy will be done. But dinna lay ‘t to my chairge; for gin ye was a mither yersel’ ye wadna pit him there. O Lord! I’m verra ill-fashioned. I beg yer pardon. I’m near oot o’ my min’. Forgie me, O Lord! for I hardly ken what I’m sayin’. He was my ain babe, my ain Anerew, and ye gae him to me yersel’. And noo he’s for the finger o’ scorn to pint at; an ootcast an’ a wan’erer frae his ain country, an’ daurna come within sicht o’ ‘t for them ‘at wad tak’ the law o’ ‘m. An’ it’s a’ drink — drink an’ ill company! He wad hae dune weel eneuch gin they wad only hae latten him be. What for maun men be aye drink-drinkin’ at something or ither? I never want it. Eh! gin I war as young as whan he was born, I wad be up an’ awa’ this verra nicht to luik for him. But it’s no use me tryin’ ‘t. O God! ance mair I pray thee to turn him frae the error o’ ‘s ways afore he goes hence an’ isna more. And O dinna lat Robert gang efter him, as he’s like eneuch to do. Gie me grace to haud him ticht, that he may be to the praise o’ thy glory for ever an’ ever. Amen.’
Whether it was that the weary woman here fell asleep, or that she was too exhausted for further speech, Robert heard no more, though he remained there frozen with horror for some minutes after his grandmother had ceased. This, then, was the reason why she would never speak about his father! She kept all her thoughts about him for the silence of the night, and loneliness with the God who never sleeps, but watches the wicked all through the dark. And his father was one of the wicked! And God was against him! And when he died he would go to hell! But he was not dead yet: Robert was sure of that. And when he grew a man, he would go and seek him, and beg him on his knees to repent and come back to God, who would forgive him then, and take him to heaven when he died. And there he would be good, and good people would love him.
