第73章

'I doobt no, mem,' answered Robert, with what most people would think an excess of honesty.

But Miss St.John made a better conjecture as to his apparent closeness.

'At all events,' she said, 'don't mind what your grannie may think, so long as you have no wish to make her think it.Good-night.'

Had she been indeed an angel from heaven, Robert could not have worshipped her more.And why should he? Was she less God's messenger that she had beautiful arms instead of less beautiful wings?

He practised his scales till his unaccustomed fingers were stiff, then shut the piano with reverence, and departed, carefully peeping into the disenchanted region without the gates to see that no enemy lay in wait for him as he passed beyond them.He closed the door gently; and in one moment the rich lovely room and the beautiful lady were behind him, and before him the bare stair between two white-washed walls, and the long flagged transe that led to his silent grandmother seated in her arm-chair, gazing into the red coals--for somehow grannie's fire always glowed, and never blazed--with her round-toed shoes pointed at them from the top of her little wooden stool.He traversed the stair and the transe, entered the parlour, and sat down to his open book as though nothing had happened.But his grandmother saw the light in his face, and did think he had just come from his prayers.And she blessed God that he had put it into her heart to burn the fiddle.

The next night Robert took with him the miniature of his mother, and showed it to Miss St.John, who saw at once that, whatever might be his present surroundings, his mother must have been a lady.Acertain fancied resemblance in it to her own mother likewise drew her heart to the boy.Then Robert took from his pocket the gold thimble, and said,'This thimmel was my mamma's.Will ye tak it, mem, for ye ken it's o' nae use to me.'

Miss St.John hesitated for a moment.

'I will keep it for you, if you like,' she said, for she could not bear to refuse it.

'Na, mem; I want ye to keep it to yersel'; for I'm sure my mamma wad hae likit you to hae 't better nor ony ither body.'

'Well, I will use it sometimes for your sake.But mind, I will not take it from you; I will only keep it for you.'

'Weel, weel, mem; gin ye'll keep it till I speir for 't, that'll du weel eneuch,' answered Robert, with a smile.

He laboured diligently; and his progress corresponded to his labour.

It was more than intellect that guided him: Falconer had genius for whatever he cared for.

Meantime the love he bore his teacher, and the influence of her beauty, began to mould him, in his kind and degree, after her likeness, so that he grew nice in his person and dress, and smoothed the roughness and moderated the broadness of his speech with the amenities of the English which she made so sweet upon her tongue.

He became still more obedient to his grandmother, and more diligent at school; gathered to himself golden opinions without knowing it, and was gradually developing into a rustic gentleman.

Nor did the piano absorb all his faculties.Every divine influence tends to the rounded perfection of the whole.His love of Nature grew more rapidly.Hitherto it was only in summer that he had felt the presence of a power in her and yet above her: in winter, now, the sky was true and deep, though the world was waste and sad; and the tones of the wind that roared at night about the goddess-haunted house, and moaned in the chimneys of the lowly dwelling that nestled against it, woke harmonies within him which already he tried to spell out falteringly.Miss St.John began to find that he put expressions of his own into the simple things she gave him to play, and even dreamed a little at his own will when alone with the passive instrument.Little did Mrs.Falconer think into what a seventh heaven of accursed music she had driven her boy.

But not yet did he tell his friend, much as he loved and much as he trusted her, the little he knew of his mother's sorrows and his father's sins, or whose the hand that had struck him when she found him lying in the waste factory.

For a time almost all his trouble about God went from him.Nor do Ithink that this was only because he rarely thought of him at all:

God gave him of himself in Miss St.John.But words dropped now and then from off the shelves where his old difficulties lay, and they fell like seeds upon the heart of Miss St.John, took root, and rose in thoughts: in the heart of a true woman the talk of a child even will take life.

One evening Robert rose from the table, not unwatched of his grandmother, and sped swiftly and silently through the dark, as was his custom, to enter the chamber of enchantment.Never before had his hand failed to alight, sure as a lark on its nest, upon the brass handle of the door that admitted him to his paradise.It missed it now, and fell on something damp, and rough, and repellent instead.Horrible, but true suspicion! While he was at school that day, his grandmother, moved by what doubt or by what certainty she never revealed, had had the doorway walled up.He felt the place all over.It was to his hands the living tomb of his mother's vicar on earth.

He returned to his book, pale as death, but said never a word.The next day the stones were plastered over.

Thus the door of bliss vanished from the earth.And neither the boy nor his grandmother ever said that it had been.