第84章

THE ABERDEEN GARRET.

Miss St.John had long since returned from her visit, but having heard how much Robert was taken up with his dying friend, she judged it better to leave her intended proposal of renewing her lessons alone for the present.Meeting him, however, soon after Alexander's death, she introduced the subject, and Robert was enraptured at the prospect of the re-opening of the gates of his paradise.If he did not inform his grandmother of the fact, neither did he attempt to conceal it; but she took no notice, thinking probably that the whole affair would be effectually disposed of by his departure.Till that period arrived, he had a lesson almost every evening, and Miss St.

John was surprised to find how the boy had grown since the door was built up.Robert's gratitude grew into a kind of worship.

The evening before his departure for Bodyfauld--whence his grandmother had arranged that he should start for Aberdeen, in order that he might have the company of Mr.Lammie, whom business drew thither about the same time--as he was having his last lesson, Mrs.

Forsyth left the room.Thereupon Robert, who had been dejected all day at the thought of the separation from Miss St.John, found his heart beating so violently that he could hardly breathe.Probably she saw his emotion, for she put her hand on the keys, as if to cover it by showing him how some movement was to be better effected.

He seized her hand and lifted it to his lips.But when he found that instead of snatching it away, she yielded it, nay gently pressed it to his face, he burst into tears, and dropped on his knees, as if before a goddess.

'Hush, Robert! Don't be foolish,' she said, quietly and tenderly.

'Here is my aunt coming.'

The same moment he was at the piano again, playing My Bonny Lady Ann, so as to astonish Miss St.John, and himself as well.Then he rose, bade her a hasty good-night, and hurried away.

A strange conflict arose in his mind at the prospect of leaving the old place, on every house of whose streets, on every swell of whose surrounding hills he left the clinging shadows of thought and feeling.A faintly purpled mist arose, and enwrapped all the past, changing even his grayest troubles into tales of fairyland, and his deepest griefs into songs of a sad music.Then he thought of Shargar, and what was to become of him after he was gone.The lad was paler and his eyes were redder than ever, for he had been weeping in secret.He went to his grandmother and begged that Shargar might accompany him to Bodyfauld.

'He maun bide at hame an' min' his beuks,' she answered; 'for he winna hae them that muckle langer.He maun be doin' something for himsel'.'

So the next morning the boys parted--Shargar to school, and Robert to Bodyfauld--Shargar left behind with his desolation, his sun gone down in a west that was not even stormy, only gray and hopeless, and Robert moving towards an east which reflected, like a faint prophecy, the west behind him tinged with love, death, and music, but mingled the colours with its own saffron of coming dawn.

When he reached Bodyfauld he marvelled to find that all its glory had returned.He found Miss Lammie busy among the rich yellow pools in her dairy, and went out into the garden, now in the height of its summer.Great cabbage roses hung heavy-headed splendours towards purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty;tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters.It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God.His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth.The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into higher glory in his soul.The bloom and the richness and the use were all there; but instead of each flower was a delicate ethereal sense or feeling about that flower.Of these how gladly would he have gathered a posy to offer Miss St.John! but, alas! he was no poet; or rather he had but the half of the poet's inheritance--he could see: he could not say.But even if he had been full of poetic speech, he would yet have found that the half of his posy remained ungathered, for although we have speech enough now to be 'cousin to the deed,' as Chaucer says it must always be, we have not yet enough speech to cousin the tenth part of our feelings.Let him who doubts recall one of his own vain attempts to convey that which made the oddest of dreams entrancing in loveliness--to convey that aroma of thought, the conscious absence of which made him a fool in his own eyes when he spoke such silly words as alone presented themselves for the service.I can no more describe the emotion aroused in my mind by a gray cloud parting over a gray stone, by the smell of a sweetpea, by the sight of one of those long upright pennons of striped grass with the homely name, than I can tell what the glory of God is who made these things.The man whose poetry is like nature in this, that it produces individual, incommunicable moods and conditions of mind--a sense of elevated, tender, marvellous, and evanescent existence, must be a poet indeed.Every dawn of such a feeling is a light-brushed bubble rendering visible for a moment the dark unknown sea of our being which lies beyond the lights of our consciousness, and is the stuff and region of our eternal growth.

But think what language must become before it will tell dreams!--before it will convey the delicate shades of fancy that come and go in the brain of a child!--before it will let a man know wherein one face differeth from another face in glory! I suspect, however, that for such purposes it is rather music than articulation that is needful--that, with a hope of these finer results, the language must rather be turned into music than logically extended.