He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his clothes, for grannie must not see it. She would take that away as she had taken his fiddle. He had a nameless something now for which he had been longing for years.
Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper, discoloured with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not so old as himself. Unfolding it he found written upon it a well-known hymn, and at the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord! my heart is very sore.'—The treasure upon Robert's bosom was no longer the symbol of a mother's love, but of a woman's sadness, which he could not reach to comfort. In that hour, the boy made a great stride towards manhood. Doubtless his mother's grief had been the same as grannie's—the fear that she would lose her husband for ever. The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more. He looked no farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper, put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty bundles. Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate than ever.
He found her seated in her usual place. Her New Testament, a large-print octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers? That it was the will of God might well comfort any suffering of her own, but would it comfort Andrew? and if there was no comfort for Andrew, how was Andrew's mother to be comforted?
Yet God had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he be pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted? True, some awful unknown force of a necessity with which God could not cope came in to explain it; but this did not make God more kind, for he knew it all every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for God would have his very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember him and be happy.
'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.
Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for the world.'
'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna pray for him, what for suld I?'
Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to harden her heart. The strife which results from believing that the higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most fearful of all discords, the absolute love slaying love—the house divided against itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him, the next the human tenderness rushing back in a flood. Mrs. Falconer burst into a very agony of weeping. From that day, for many years, the name of her lost Andrew never passed her lips in the hearing of her grandson, and certainly in that of no one else.
But in a few weeks she was more cheerful. It is one of the mysteries of humanity that mothers in her circumstances, and holding her creed, do regain not merely the faculty of going on with the business of life, but, in most cases, even cheerfulness. The infinite Truth, the Love of the universe, supports them beyond their consciousness, coming to them like sleep from the roots of their being, and having nothing to do with their opinions or beliefs. And hence spring those comforting subterfuges of hope to which they all fly. Not being able to trust the Father entirely, they yet say: 'Who can tell what took place at the last moment? Who can tell whether God did not please to grant them saving faith at the eleventh hour?'—that so they might pass from the very gates of hell, the only place for which their life had fitted them, into the bosom of love and purity! This God could do for all: this for the son beloved of his mother perhaps he might do!
O rebellious mother heart! dearer to God than that which beats laboriously solemn under Genevan gown or Lutheran surplice! if thou wouldst read by thine own large light, instead of the glimmer from the phosphorescent brains of theologians, thou mightst even be able to understand such a simple word as that of the Saviour, when, wishing his disciples to know that he had a nearer regard for them as his brethren in holier danger, than those who had not yet partaken of his light, and therefore praying for them not merely as human beings, but as the human beings they were, he said to his Father in their hearing: 'I pray not for the world, but for them,'—not for the world now, but for them—a meaningless utterance, if he never prayed for the world; a word of small meaning, if it was not his very wont and custom to pray for the world—for men as men. Lord Christ! not alone from the pains of hell, or of conscience—not alone from the outer darkness of self and all that is mean and poor and low, do we fly to thee; but from the anger that arises within us at the wretched words spoken in thy name, at the degradation of thee and of thy Father in the mouths of those that claim especially to have found thee, do we seek thy feet. Pray thou for them also, for they know not what they do.