Robert Falconer | Page 5

he
was to be envied.
If he had gone down the stair, which described half the turn of a screw
in its descent, and had crossed the landing to which it brought him, he
could have entered another bedroom, called the gable or rather ga'le
room, equally at his service for retirement; but, though carpeted and
comfortably furnished, and having two windows at right angles,
commanding two streets, for it was a corner house, the boy preferred
the garret-room--he could not tell why. Possibly, windows to the streets
were not congenial to the meditations in which, even now, as I have
said, the boy indulged.
These meditations, however, though sometimes as abstruse, if not so
continuous, as those of a metaphysician--for boys are not unfrequently
more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps,
willing to believe--were not by any means confined to such subjects:
castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely hours;
and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, what he knew, or rather
what he did not know, of his own history gave him scope enough, nor
was his brain slow in supplying him with material corresponding in
quantity to the space afforded. His mother had been dead for so many
years that he had only the vaguest recollections of her tenderness, and
none of her person. All he was told of his father was that he had gone
abroad. His grandmother would never talk about him, although he was
her own son. When the boy ventured to ask a question about where he
was, or when he would return, she always replied--'Bairns suld haud
their tongues.' Nor would she vouchsafe another answer to any question
that seemed to her from the farthest distance to bear down upon that
subject. 'Bairns maun learn to haud their tongues,' was the sole
variation of which the response admitted. And the boy did learn to hold
his tongue. Perhaps he would have thought less about his father if he
had had brothers or sisters, or even if the nature of his grandmother had
been such as to admit of their relationship being drawn closer--into

personal confidence, or some measure of familiarity. How they stood
with regard to each other will soon appear.
Whether the visions vanished from his brain because of the thickening
of his blood with cold, or he merely acted from one of those undefined
and inexplicable impulses which occasion not a few of our actions, I
cannot tell, but all at once Robert started to his feet and hurried from
the room. At the foot of the garret stair, between it and the door of the
gable-room already mentioned, stood another door at right angles to
both, of the existence of which the boy was scarcely aware, simply
because he had seen it all his life and had never seen it open. Turning
his back on this last door, which he took for a blind one, he went down
a short broad stair, at the foot of which was a window. He then turned
to the left into a long flagged passage or transe, passed the kitchen door
on the one hand, and the double-leaved street door on the other; but,
instead of going into the parlour, the door of which closed the transe,
he stopped at the passage-window on the right, and there stood looking
out.
What might be seen from this window certainly could not be called a
very pleasant prospect. A broad street with low houses of cold gray
stone is perhaps as uninteresting a form of street as any to be found in
the world, and such was the street Robert looked out upon. Not a single
member of the animal creation was to be seen in it, not a pair of eyes to
be discovered looking out at any of the windows opposite. The sole
motion was the occasional drift of a vapour-like film of white powder,
which the wind would lift like dust from the snowy carpet that covered
the street, and wafting it along for a few yards, drop again to its repose,
till another stronger gust, prelusive of the wind about to rise at
sun-down,--a wind cold and bitter as death--would rush over the street,
and raise a denser cloud of the white water-dust to sting the face of any
improbable person who might meet it in its passage. It was a keen,
knife-edged frost, even in the house, and what Robert saw to make him
stand at the desolate window, I do not know, and I believe he could not
himself have told. There he did stand, however, for the space of five
minutes or so, with nothing better filling his outer eyes at least than a
bald spot on the crown of