No voice came in reply, and the place was yet more silent than the night or the hall. He must be asleep. I was afraid to call louder. I crept nearer to the bed. I stretched out my hands to feel for him. He must be at the farther side. I climbed up on the bed. I felt all across it. Utter desertion seized my soul—my father was not there! Was it a horrible dream? Should I ever awake? My heart sank totally within me. I could bear no more. I fell down on the bed weeping bitterly, and wept myself asleep.
Years after, when I was a young man, I read Jean Paul’s terrible dream that there was no God, and the desolation of this night was my key to that dream.
Once more I awoke to a sense of misery, and stretched out my arms, crying, “Papa! papa!” The same moment I found my father’s arms around me; he folded me close to him, and said—
“Hush, Ranald, my boy! Here I am! You are quite safe.”
I nestled as close to him as I could go, and wept for blessedness.
“Oh, papa!” I sobbed, “I thought I had lost you.”
“And I thought I had lost you, my boy. Tell me all about it.”
Between my narrative and my replies to his questionings he had soon gathered the whole story, and I in my turn learned the dismay of the household when I did not appear. Kirsty told what she knew. They searched everywhere, but could not find me; and great as my misery had been, my father’s had been greater than mine. While I stood forsaken and desolate in the field, they had been searching along the banks of the river. But the herd had had an idea, and although they had already searched the barn and every place they could think of, he left them and ran back for a further search about the farm. Guided by the scattered straw, he soon came upon my deserted lair, and sped back to the riverside with the news, when my father returned, and after failing to find me in my own bed, to his infinite relief found me fast asleep on his; so fast, that he undressed me and laid me in the bed without my once opening my eyes—the more strange, as I had already slept so long. But sorrow is very sleepy.
Having thus felt the awfulness and majesty of the heavens at night, it was a very long time before I again dreamed my childish dream.