A GRAVE OPENED.
One thing that troubled Robert on this his return home, was the discovery that the surroundings of his childhood had deserted him.
There they were, as of yore, but they seemed to have nothing to say to him--no remembrance of him.It was not that everything looked small and narrow; it was not that the streets he saw from his new quarters, the gable-room, were awfully still after the roar of Aberdeen, and a passing cart seemed to shudder at the loneliness of the noise itself made; it was that everything seemed to be conscious only of the past and care nothing for him now.The very chairs with their inlaid backs had an embalmed look, and stood as in a dream.
He could pass even the walled-up door without emotion, for all the feeling that had been gathered about the knob that admitted him to Mary St.John, had transferred itself to the brass bell-pull at her street-door.
But one day, after standing for a while at the window, looking down on the street where he had first seen the beloved form of Ericson, a certain old mood began to revive in him.He had been working at quadratic equations all the morning; he had been foiled in the attempt to find the true algebraic statement of a very tough question involving various ratios; and, vexed with himself, he had risen to look out, as the only available zeitvertreib.It was one of those rainy days of spring which it needs a hopeful mood to distinguish from autumnal ones--dull, depressing, persistent: there might be sunshine in Mercury or Venus--but on the earth could be none, from his right hand round by India and America to his left;and certainly there was none between--a mood to which all sensitive people are liable who have not yet learned by faith in the everlasting to rule their own spirits.Naturally enough his thoughts turned to the place where he had suffered most--his old room in the garret.Hitherto he had shrunk from visiting it; but now he turned away from the window, went up the steep stairs, with their one sharp corkscrew curve, pushed the door, which clung unwillingly to the floor, and entered.It was a nothing of a place--with a window that looked only to heaven.There was the empty bedstead against the wall, where he had so often kneeled, sending forth vain prayers to a deaf heaven! Had they indeed been vain prayers, and to a deaf heaven? or had they been prayers which a hearing God must answer not according to the haste of the praying child, but according to the calm course of his own infinite law of love?
Here, somehow or other, the things about him did not seem so much absorbed in the past, notwithstanding those untroubled rows of papers bundled in red tape.True, they looked almost awful in their lack of interest and their non-humanity, for there is scarcely anything that absolutely loses interest save the records of money;but his mother's workbox lay behind them.And, strange to say, the side of that bed drew him to kneel down: he did not yet believe that prayer was in vain.If God had not answered him before, that gave no certainty that he would not answer him now.It was, he found, still as rational as it had ever been to hope that God would answer the man that cried to him.This came, I think, from the fact that God had been answering him all the time, although he had not recognized his gifts as answers.Had he not given him Ericson, his intercourse with whom and his familiarity with whose doubts had done anything but quench his thirst after the higher life? For Ericson's, like his own, were true and good and reverent doubts, not merely consistent with but in a great measure springing from devoutness and aspiration.Surely such doubts are far more precious in the sight of God than many beliefs?