But while he thus ministered, a new question arose in his mind--to meet with its own new, God-given answer.What if this should not be the man after all?--if this love had been spent in mistake, and did not belong to him at all? The answer was, that he was a man.The love Robert had given he could not, would not withdraw.The man who had been for a moment as his father he could not cease to regard with devotion.At least he was a man with a divine soul.He might at least be somebody's father.Where love had found a moment's rest for the sole of its foot, there it must build its nest.
When he had got him safe in bed, he sat down beside him to think what he would do next.This sleep gave him very needful leisure to think.He could determine nothing--not even how to find out if he was indeed his father.If he approached the subject without guile, the man might be fearful and cunning--might have reasons for being so, and for striving to conceal the truth.But this was the first thing to make sure of, because, if it was he, all the hold he had upon him lay in his knowing it for certain.He could not think.He had had little sleep the night before.He must not sleep this night.He dragged his bath into his sitting-room, and refreshed his faculties with plenty of cold water, then lighted his pipe and went on thinking--not without prayer to that Power whose candle is the understanding of man.All at once he saw how to begin.He went again into the chamber, and looked at the man, and handled him, and knew by his art that a waking of some sort was nigh.Then he went to a corner of his sitting-room, and from beneath the table drew out a long box, and from the box lifted Dooble Sandy's auld wife, tuned the somewhat neglected strings, and laid the instrument on the table.
When, keeping constant watch over the sleeping man, he judged at length that his soul had come near enough to the surface of the ocean of sleep to communicate with the outer world through that bubble his body, which had floated upon its waves all the night unconscious, he put his chair just outside the chamber door, which opened from his sitting-room, and began to play gently, softly, far away.For a while he extemporized only, thinking of Rothieden, and the grandmother, and the bleach-green, and the hills, and the waste old factory, and his mother's portrait and letters.As he dreamed on, his dream got louder, and, he hoped, was waking a more and more vivid dream in the mind of the sleeper.'For who can tell,' thought Falconer, 'what mysterious sympathies of blood and childhood's experience there may be between me and that man?--such, it may be, that my utterance on the violin will wake in his soul the very visions of which my soul is full while I play, each with its own nebulous atmosphere of dream-light around it.' For music wakes its own feeling, and feeling wakes thought, or rather, when perfected, blossoms into thought, thought radiant of music as those lilies that shine phosphorescent in the July nights.He played more and more forcefully, growing in hope.But he had been led astray in some measure by the fulness of his expectation.Strange to tell, doctor as he was, he had forgotten one important factor in his calculation:
how the man would awake from his artificial sleep.He had not reckoned of how the limbeck of his brain would be left discoloured with vile deposit, when the fumes of the narcotic should have settled and given up its central spaces to the faintness of desertion.
Robert was very keen of hearing.Indeed he possessed all his senses keener than any other man I have known.He heard him toss on his bed.Then he broke into a growl, and damned the miauling, which, he said, the strings could never have learned anywhere but in a cat's belly.But Robert was used to bad language; and there are some bad things which, seeing that there they are, it is of the greatest consequence to get used to.It gave him, no doubt, a pang of disappointment to hear such an echo to his music from the soul which he had hoped especially fitted to respond in harmonious unison with the wail of his violin.But not for even this moment did he lose his presence of mind.He instantly moderated the tone of the instrument, and gradually drew the sound away once more into the distance of hearing.But he did not therefore let it die.Through various changes it floated in the thin ?ther of the soul, changes delicate as when the wind leaves the harp of the reeds by a river's brink, and falls a-ringing at the heather bells, or playing with the dry silvery pods of honesty that hang in the poor man's garden, till at length it drew nearer once more, bearing on its wings the wail of red Flodden, the Flowers of the Forest.Listening through the melody for sounds of a far different kind, Robert was aware that those sounds had ceased; the growling was still; he heard no more turnings to and fro.How it was operating he could not tell, further than that there must be some measure of soothing in its influence.He ceased quite, and listened again.For a few moments there was no sound.Then he heard the half-articulate murmuring of one whose organs have been all but overcome by the beneficent paralysis of sleep, but whose feeble will would compel them to utterance.He was nearly asleep again.Was it a fact, or a fancy of Robert's eager heart? Did the man really say,'Play that again, father.It's bonnie, that! I aye likit the Flooers o' the Forest.Play awa'.I hae had a frichtsome dream.Ithocht I was i' the ill place.I doobt I'm no weel.But yer fiddle aye did me gude.Play awa', father!'