Their places had been secured, and the guard knew where he had to take them up. Long before the coach appeared, the notes of his horn, as like the colour of his red coat as the blindest of men could imagine, came echoing from the side of the heathery, stony hill under which they stood, so that Robert turned wondering, as if the chariot of his desires had been coming over the top of Drumsnaig, to carry him into a heaven where all labour was delight. But round the corner in front came the four-in-hand red mail instead. She pulled up gallantly; the wheelers lay on their hind quarters, and the leaders parted theirs from the pole; the boxes were hoisted up; Mr. Lammie climbed, and Robert scrambled to his seat; the horn blew; the coachman spake oracularly; the horses obeyed; and away went the gorgeous symbol of sovereignty careering through the submissive region. Nor did Robert's delight abate during the journey—certainly not when he saw the blue line of the sea in the distance, a marvel and yet a fact.
Mrs. Falconer had consulted the Misses Napier, who had many acquaintances in Aberdeen, as to a place proper for Robert, and suitable to her means. Upon this point Miss Letty, not without a certain touch of design, as may appear in the course of my story, had been able to satisfy her. In a small house of two floors and a garret, in the old town, Mr. Lammie took leave of Robert.
It was from a garret window still, but a storm-window now that Robert looked—eastward across fields and sand-hills, to the blue expanse of waters—not blue like southern seas, but slaty blue, like the eyes of northmen. It was rather dreary; the sun was shining from overhead now, casting short shadows and much heat; the dew was gone up, and the lark had come down; he was alone; the end of his journey was come, and was not anything very remarkable. His landlady interrupted his gaze to know what he would have for dinner, but he declined to use any discretion in the matter. When she left the room he did not return to the window, but sat down upon his box. His eye fell upon the other, a big wooden cube. Of its contents he knew nothing. He would amuse himself by making inquisition. It was nailed up. He borrowed a screwdriver and opened it. At the top lay a linen bag full of oatmeal; underneath that was a thick layer of oat-cake; underneath that two cheeses, a pound of butter, and six pots of jam, which ought to have tasted of roses, for it came from the old garden where the roses lived in such sweet companionship with the currant bushes; underneath that, &c.; and underneath, &c., a box which strangely recalled Shargar's garret, and one of the closets therein. With beating heart he opened it, and lo, to his marvel, and the restoration of all the fair day, there was the violin which Dooble Sanny had left him when he forsook her for—some one or other of the queer instruments of Fra Angelico's angels?
In a flutter of delight he sat down on his trunk again and played the most mournful of tunes. Two white pigeons, which had been talking to each other in the heat on the roof, came one on each side of the window and peeped into the room; and out between them, as he played, Robert saw the sea, and the blue sky above it. Is it any wonder that, instead of turning to the lying pages and contorted sentences of the Livy which he had already unpacked from his box, he forgot all about school, and college, and bursary, and went on playing till his landlady brought up his dinner, which he swallowed hastily that he might return to the spells of his enchantress!
CHAPTER V. THE COMPETITION.
I could linger with gladness even over this part of my hero's history. If the school work was dry it was thorough. If that academy had no sweetly shadowing trees; if it did stand within a parallelogram of low stone walls, containing a roughly-gravelled court; if all the region about suggested hot stones and sand—beyond still was the sea and the sky; and that court, morning and afternoon, was filled with the shouts of eager boys, kicking the football with mad rushings to and fro, and sometimes with wounds and faintings—fit symbol of the equally resultless ambition with which many of them would follow the game of life in the years to come. Shock-headed Highland colts, and rough Lowland steers as many of them were, out of that group, out of the roughest of them, would emerge in time a few gentlemen—not of the type of your trim, self-contained, clerical exquisite—but large-hearted, courteous gentlemen, for whom a man may thank God. And if the master was stern and hard, he was true; if the pupils feared him, they yet cared to please him; if there might be found not a few more widely-read scholars than he, it would be hard to find a better teacher.
Robert leaned to the collar and laboured, not greatly moved by ambition, but much by the hope of the bursary and the college life in the near distance. Not unfrequently he would rush into the thick of the football game, fight like a maniac for one short burst, and then retire and look on. He oftener regarded than mingled. He seldom joined his fellows after school hours, for his work lay both upon his conscience and his hopes; but if he formed no very deep friendships amongst them, at least he made no enemies, for he was not selfish, and in virtue of the Celtic blood in him was invariably courteous. His habits were in some things altogether irregular. He never went out for a walk; but sometimes, looking up from his Virgil or his Latin version, and seeing the blue expanse in the distance breaking into white under the viewless wing of the summer wind, he would fling down his dictionary or his pen, rush from his garret, and fly in a straight line, like a sea-gull weary of lake and river, down to the waste shore of the great deep. This was all that stood for the Arabian Nights of moon-blossomed marvel; all the rest was Aberdeen days of Latin and labour.
Slowly the hours went, and yet the dreaded, hoped-for day came quickly. The quadrangle of the stone-crowned college grew more awful in its silence and emptiness every time Robert passed it; and the professors' houses looked like the sentry-boxes of the angels of learning, soon to come forth and judge the feeble mortals who dared present a claim to their recognition. October faded softly by, with its keen fresh mornings, and cold memorial green-horizoned evenings, whose stars fell like the stray blossoms of a more heavenly world, from some ghostly wind of space that had caught them up on its awful shoreless sweep. November came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but as if to mock the poor competitors, rose, after three days of Scotch mist, in a lovely 'halcyon day' of 'St. Martin's summer,' through whose long shadows anxious young faces gathered in the quadrangle, or under the arcade, each with his Ainsworth's Dictionary, the sole book allowed, under his arm. But when the sacrist appeared and unlocked the public school, and the black-gowned professors walked into the room, and the door was left open for the candidates to follow, then indeed a great awe fell upon the assembly, and the lads crept into their seats as if to a trial for life before a bench of the incorruptible. They took their places; a portion of Robertson's History of Scotland was given them to turn into Latin; and soon there was nothing to be heard in the assembly but the turning of the leaves of dictionaries, and the scratching of pens constructing the first rough copy of the Latinized theme.
It was done. Four weary hours, nearly five, one or two of which passed like minutes, the others as if each minute had been an hour, went by, and Robert, in a kind of desperation, after a final reading of the Latin, gave in his paper, and left the room. When he got home, he asked his landlady to get him some tea. Till it was ready he would take his violin. But even the violin had grown dull, and would not speak freely. He returned to the torture—took out his first copy, and went over it once more. Horror of horrors! a maxie!—that is a maximus error. Mary Queen of Scots had been left so far behind in the beginning of the paper, that she forgot the rights of her sex in the middle of it, and in the accusative of a future participle passive—I do not know if more modern grammarians have a different name for the growth—had submitted to be dum, and her rightful dam was henceforth and for ever debarred.