NATURE PUTS IN A CLAIM.
Before the day of return arrived, Robert had taken care to remove the violin from his bedroom, and carry it once more to its old retreat in Shargar's garret.The very first evening, however, that grannie again spent in her own arm-chair, he hied from the house as soon as it grew dusk, and made his way with his brown-paper parcel to Sandy Elshender's.
Entering the narrow passage from which his shop door opened, and hearing him hammering away at a sole, he stood and unfolded his treasure, then drew a low sigh from her with his bow, and awaited the result.He heard the lap-stone fall thundering on the floor, and, like a spider from his cavern, Dooble Sanny appeared in the door, with the bend-leather in one hand, and the hammer in the other.
'Lordsake, man! hae ye gotten her again? Gie's a grup o' her!' he cried, dropping leather and hammer.
'Na, na,' returned Robert, retreating towards the outer door.'Ye maun sweir upo' her that, whan I want her, I sall hae her ohn demur, or I sanna lat ye lay roset upo' her.'
'I swear 't, Robert; I sweir 't upo' her,' said the soutar hurriedly, stretching out both his hands as if to receive some human being into his embrace.
Robert placed the violin in those grimy hands.A look of heavenly delight dawned over the hirsute and dirt-besmeared countenance, which drooped into tenderness as he drew the bow across the instrument, and wiled from her a thin wail as of sorrow at their long separation.He then retreated into his den, and was soon sunk in a trance, deaf to everything but the violin, from which no entreaties of Robert, who longed for a lesson, could rouse him; so that he had to go home grievously disappointed, and unrewarded for the risk he had run in venturing the stolen visit.
Next time, however, he fared better; and he contrived so well that, from the middle of June to the end of August, he had two lessons a week, mostly upon the afternoons of holidays.For these his master thought himself well paid by the use of the instrument between.And Robert made great progress.
Occasionally he saw Miss St.John in the garden, and once or twice met her in the town; but her desire to find in him a pupil had been greatly quenched by her unfortunate conjecture as to the cause of his accident.She had, however, gone so far as to mention the subject to her aunt, who assured her that old Mrs.Falconer would as soon consent to his being taught gambling as music.The idea, therefore, passed away; and beyond a kind word or two when she met him, there was no further communication between them.But Robert would often dream of waking from a swoon, and finding his head lying on her lap, and her lovely face bending over him full of kindness and concern.
By the way, Robert cared nothing for poetry.Virgil was too troublesome to be enjoyed; and in English he had met with nothing but the dried leaves and gum-flowers of the last century.Miss Letty once lent him The Lady of the Lake; but before he had read the first canto through, his grandmother laid her hands upon it, and, without saying a word, dropped it behind a loose skirting-board in the pantry, where the mice soon made it a ruin sad to behold.For Miss Letty, having heard from the woful Robert of its strange disappearance, and guessing its cause, applied to Mrs.Falconer for the volume; who forthwith, the tongs aiding, extracted it from its hole, and, without shade of embarrassment, held it up like a drowned kitten before the eyes of Miss Letty, intending thereby, no doubt, to impress her with the fate of all seducing spirits that should attempt an entrance into her kingdom: Miss Letty only burst into merry laughter over its fate.So the lode of poetry failed for the present from Robert's life.Nor did it matter much; for had he not his violin?
I have, I think, already indicated that his grandfather had been a linen manufacturer.Although that trade had ceased, his family had still retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield, devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it in private looms.To Robert and Shargar it was a wondrous pleasure when the pile of linen which the week had accumulated at the office under the ga'le-room, was on Saturday heaped high upon the base of a broad-wheeled cart, to get up on it and be carried to the said bleachfield, which lay along the bank of the river.Soft laid and high-borne, gazing into the blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph; and although, once arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them, yet the store of amusement was endless.The great wheel, which drove the whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill--a word Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and of their motion to walking--with the water plashing and squirting from the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound--each was haunted in its turn and season.The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.Here sweeping in a mass along the race; there divided into branches and hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along a spout; there flowing in a narrow canal through the green expanse of the well-mown bleaehfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over the outspread yarn--the water was an endless delight.