ROBERT KNOCKS--AND THE DOOR IS NOT OPENED.
The remainder of that winter was dreary indeed.Every time Robert went up the stair to his garret, he passed the door of a tomb.With that gray mortar Mary St.John was walled up, like the nun he had read of in the Marmion she had lent him.He might have rung the bell at the street door, and been admitted into the temple of his goddess, but a certain vague terror of his grannie, combined with equally vague qualms of conscience for having deceived her, and the approach in the far distance of a ghastly suspicion that violins, pianos, moonlight, and lovely women were distasteful to the over-ruling Fate, and obnoxious to the vengeance stored in the gray cloud of his providence, drove him from the awful entrance of the temple of his Isis.
Nor did Miss St.John dare to make any advances to the dreadful old lady.She would wait.For Mrs.Forsyth, she cared nothing about the whole affair.It only gave her fresh opportunity for smiling condescensions about 'poor Mrs.Falconer.' So Paradise was over and gone.
But though the loss of Miss St.John and the piano was the last blow, his sorrow did not rest there, but returned to brood over his bonny lady.She was scattered to the winds.Would any of her ashes ever rise in the corn, and moan in the ripening wind of autumn?
Might not some atoms of the bonny leddy creep into the pines on the hill, whose 'soft and soul-like sounds' had taught him to play the Flowers of the Forest on those strings which, like the nerves of an amputated limb, yet thrilled through his being? Or might not some particle find its way by winds and waters to sycamore forest of Italy, there creep up through the channels of its life to some finely-rounded curve of noble tree, on the side that ever looks sunwards, and be chosen once again by the violin-hunter, to be wrought into a new and fame-gathering instrument?
Could it be that his bonny lady had learned her wondrous music in those forests, from the shine of the sun, and the sighing of the winds through the sycamores and pines? For Robert knew that the broad-leaved sycamore, and the sharp, needle-leaved pine, had each its share in the violin.Only as the wild innocence of human nature, uncorrupted by wrong, untaught by suffering, is to that nature struggling out of darkness into light, such and so different is the living wood, with its sweetest tones of obedient impulse, answering only to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, to that wood, chosen, separated, individualized, tortured into strange, almost vital shape, after a law to us nearly unknown, strung with strings from animal organizations, and put into the hands of man to utter the feelings of a soul that has passed through a like history.
This Robert could not yet think, and had to grow able to think it by being himself made an instrument of God's music.
What he could think was that the glorious mystery of his bonny leddy was gone for ever--and alas! she had no soul.Here was an eternal sorrow.He could never meet her again.His affections, which must live for ever, were set upon that which had passed away.But the child that weeps because his mutilated doll will not rise from the dead, shall yet find relief from his sorrow, a true relief, both human and divine.He shall know that that which in the doll made him love the doll, has not passed away.And Robert must yet be comforted for the loss of his bonny leddy.If she had had a soul, nothing but her own self could ever satisfy him.As she had no soul, another body might take her place, nor occasion reproach of inconstancy.
But, in the meantime, the shears of Fate having cut the string of the sky-soaring kite of his imagination, had left him with the stick in his hand.And thus the rest of that winter was dreary enough.
The glow was out of his heart; the glow was out of the world.The bleak, kindless wind was hissing through those pines that clothed the hill above Bodyfauld, and over the dead garden, where in the summer time the rose had looked down so lovingly on the heartsease.
If he had stood once more at gloaming in that barley-stubble, not even the wail of Flodden-field would have found him there, but a keen sense of personal misery and hopeless cold.Was the summer a lie?
Not so.The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful time to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.
Now in the winter of his discontent, and in Nature finding no help, Robert was driven inwards--into his garret, into his soul.There, the door of his paradise being walled up, he began, vaguely, blindly, to knock against other doors--sometimes against stone-walls and rocks, taking them for doors--as travel-worn, and hence brain-sick men have done in a desert of mountains.A door, out or in, he must find, or perish.
It fell, too, that Miss St.John went to visit some friends who lived in a coast town twenty miles off; and a season of heavy snow followed by frost setting in, she was absent for six weeks, during which time, without a single care to trouble him from without, Robert was in the very desert of desolation.His spirits sank fearfully.He would pass his old music-master in the street with scarce a recognition, as if the bond of their relation had been utterly broken, had vanished in the smoke of the martyred violin, and all their affection had gone into the dust-heap of the past.
Dooble Sanny's character did not improve.He took more and more whisky, his bouts of drinking alternating as before with fits of hopeless repentance.His work was more neglected than ever, and his wife having no money to spend even upon necessaries, applied in desperation to her husband's bottle for comfort.This comfort, to do him justice, he never grudged her; and sometimes before midday they would both be drunk--a condition expedited by the lack of food.
