FATHER AND SON.
Once more Falconer retired, but not to take his violin.He could play no more.Hope and love were swelling within him.He could not rest.Was it a sign from heaven that the hour for speech had arrived? He paced up and down the room.He kneeled and prayed for guidance and help.Something within urged him to try the rusted lock of his father's heart.Without any formed resolution, without any conscious volition, he found himself again in his room.There the old man still sat, with his back to the door, and his gaze fixed on the fire, which had sunk low in the grate.Robert went round in front of him, kneeled on the rug before him, and said the one word,'Father!'
Andrew started violently, raised his hand, which trembled as with a palsy, to his head, and stared wildly at Robert.But he did not speak.Robert repeated the one great word.Then Andrew spoke, and said in a trembling, hardly audible voice,'Are you my son?--my boy Robert, sir?'
'I am.I am.Oh, father, I have longed for you by day, and dreamed about you by night, ever since I saw that other boys had fathers, and I had none.Years and years of my life--I hardly know how many--have been spent in searching for you.And now I have found you!'
The great tall man, in the prime of life and strength, laid his big head down on the old man's knee, as if he had been a little child.
His father said nothing, but laid his hand on the head.For some moments the two remained thus, motionless and silent.Andrew was the first to speak.And his words were the voice of the spirit that striveth with man.
'What am I to do, Robert?'
No other words, not even those of passionate sorrow, or overflowing affection, could have been half so precious in the ears of Robert.
When a man once asks what he is to do, there is hope for him.
Robert answered instantly,'You must come home to your mother.'
'My mother!' Andrew exclaimed.'You don't mean to say she's alive?'
'I heard from her yesterday--in her own hand, too,' said Robert.
'I daren't.I daren't,' murmured Andrew.
'You must, father,' returned Robert.'It is a long way, but I will make the journey easy for you.She knows I have found you.She is waiting and longing for you.She has hardly thought of anything but you ever since she lost you.She is only waiting to see you, and then she will go home, she says.I wrote to her and said, "Grannie, I have found your Andrew." And she wrote back to me and said, "God be praised.I shall die in peace."'
A silence followed.
'Will she forgive me?' said Andrew.
'She loves you more than her own soul,' answered Robert.'She loves you as much as I do.She loves you as God loves you.'
'God can't love me,' said Andrews, feebly.'He would never have left me if he had loved me.'
'He has never left you from the very first.You would not take his way, father, and he just let you try your own.But long before that he had begun to get me ready to go after you.He put such love to you in my heart, and gave me such teaching and such training, that Ihave found you at last.And now I have found you, I will hold you.
You cannot escape--you will not want to escape any more, father?'
Andrew made no reply to this appeal.It sounded like imprisonment for life, I suppose.But thought was moving in him.After a long pause, during which the son's heart was hungering for a word whereon to hang a further hope, the old man spoke again, muttering as if he were only speaking his thoughts unconsciously.
'Where's the use? There's no forgiveness for me.My mother is going to heaven.I must go to hell.No.It's no good.Better leave it as it is.I daren't see her.It would kill me to see her.'
'It will kill her not to see you; and that will be one sin more on your conscience, father.'