Robert Falconer | Page 4

First he had opened the street door, and stood in it. There
was nothing alive to be seen, except a sparrow picking up crumbs, and
he would not stop till he was tired of him. The Royal Oak, down the
street to the right, had not even a horseless gig or cart standing before it;
and King Charles, grinning awfully in its branches on the signboard,
was invisible from the distance at which he stood. In at the other end of
the empty street, looked the distant uplands, whose waving corn and
grass were likewise invisible, and beyond them rose one blue truncated
peak in the distance, all of them wearily at rest this weary Sabbath day.
However, there was one thing than which this was better, and that was
being at church, which, to this boy at least, was the very fifth essence of
dreariness.
He closed the door and went into the kitchen. That was nearly as bad.
The kettle was on the fire, to be sure, in anticipation of tea; but the
coals under it were black on the top, and it made only faint efforts, after
immeasurable intervals of silence, to break into a song, giving a hum
like that of a bee a mile off, and then relapsing into hopeless inactivity.
Having just had his dinner, he was not hungry enough to find any
resource in the drawer where the oatcakes lay, and, unfortunately, the
old wooden clock in the corner was going, else there would have been
some amusement in trying to torment it into demonstrations of life, as
he had often done in less desperate circumstances than the present. At
last he went up-stairs to the very room in which he now was, and sat
down upon the floor, just as he was sitting now. He had not even
brought his Pilgrim's Progress with him from his grandmother's room.
But, searching about in all holes and corners, he at length found
Klopstock's Messiah translated into English, and took refuge there till
Betty came home. Nor did he go down till she called him to tea, when,

expecting to join his grandmother and the stranger, he found, on the
contrary, that he was to have his tea with Betty in the kitchen, after
which he again took refuge with Klopstock in the garret, and remained
there till it grew dark, when Betty came in search of him, and put him
to bed in the gable-room, and not in his usual chamber. In the morning,
every trace of the visitor had vanished, even to the thorn stick which he
had set down behind the door as he entered.
All this Robert Falconer saw slowly revive on the palimpsest of his
memory, as he washed it with the vivifying waters of recollection.
CHAPTER II.
A VISITOR.
It was a very bare little room in which the boy sat, but it was his
favourite retreat. Behind the door, in a recess, stood an empty bedstead,
without even a mattress upon it. This was the only piece of furniture in
the room, unless some shelves crowded with papers tied up in bundles,
and a cupboard in the wall, likewise filled with papers, could be called
furniture. There was no carpet on the floor, no windows in the walls.
The only light came from the door, and from a small skylight in the
sloping roof, which showed that it was a garret-room. Nor did much
light come from the open door, for there was no window on the walled
stair to which it opened; only opposite the door a few steps led up into
another garret, larger, but with a lower roof, unceiled, and perforated
with two or three holes, the panes of glass filling which were no larger
than the small blue slates which covered the roof: from these panes a
little dim brown light tumbled into the room where the boy sat on the
floor, with his head almost between his knees, thinking.
But there was less light than usual in the room now, though it was only
half-past two o'clock, and the sun would not set for more than
half-an-hour yet; for if Robert had lifted his head and looked up, it
would have been at, not through, the skylight. No sky was to be seen. A
thick covering of snow lay over the glass. A partial thaw, followed by
frost, had fixed it there--a mass of imperfect cells and confused crystals.

It was a cold place to sit in, but the boy had some faculty for enduring
cold when it was the price to be paid for solitude. And besides, when he
fell into one of his thinking moods, he forgot, for a season, cold and
everything else but what he was thinking about--a faculty for which