That night, as he lay thinking, Cosmo resolved to set out on the morrow for the city, on foot, and begging his way if necessary. There he would acquaint Mr. Burns with the straits they were in, and require of him his best advice how to make a living for himself and his father and Grizzie. As for James and Agnes, they might stay at the castle, where he would do his best to help them. As soon as his father had had his breakfast, he would let him know his resolve, and with his assent, would depart at once. His spirits rose as he brooded. What a happy thing it was that Lord Lick-my-loof had not accepted their offer! all the time they saw themselves in a poor lodging in a noisy street, they would know they had their own strong silent castle waiting to receive them, as soon as they should be able to return to it! Then the words came to him: “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”
The special discipline for some people would seem to be that they shall never settle down, or feel as if they were at home, until they are at home in very fact.
“Anyhow,” said Cosmo to himself, “such a castle we have!”
To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds to place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no things in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read!
How blessed Cosmo would live, with his father and Grizzie and his books, in the great city—in some such place as he had occupied when at the university! The one sad thing was that he could not be with his father all day; but so much the happier would be the home-coming at night! Thus imagining, he fell fast asleep.
He dreamed that he had a barrow of oranges, with which he had been going about the streets all day, trying in vain to sell them. He was now returning home, the barrow piled, as when he set out in the morning, with the golden fruit. He consoled himself however with the thought, that his father was fond of oranges, and now might have as many as he pleased. But as he wheeled the barrow along, it seemed to grow heavier and heavier, and he feared his strength was failing him, and he would never get back to his father. Heavier and heavier it grew, until at last, although he had it on the pavement—for it was now the dead of the night—he could but just push it along. At last he reached the door, and having laboriously wheeled it into a shed, proceeded to pick from it a few of the best oranges to take up to his father. But when he came to lift one from the heap, lo, it was a lump of gold! He tried another and another: every one of them was a lump of solid gold. It was a dream-version of the golden horse. Then all at once he said to himself, nor knew why, “My father is dead!” and woke in misery. It was many moments before he quite persuaded himself that he had but dreamed. He rose, went to his father’s bed-side, found him sleeping peacefully, and lay down comforted, nor that night dreamed any more.
“What,” he said to himself, “would money be to me without my father!”
Some of us shrink from making plans because experience has shown us how seldom they are realized. Not the less are the plans we do make just as subject to overthrow as the plans of the most prolific and minute of projectors. It was long since Cosmo had made any, and the resolve with which he now fell asleep was as modest as wise man could well cherish; the morning nevertheless went differently from his intent and expectation.
CHAPTER LII.
AN OLD STORY.
He was roused before sunrise by his father’s cough. After a bad fit, he was very weary and restless. Now, in such a condition, Cosmo could almost always put him to sleep by reading to him, and he therefore got a short story, and began to read. At first it had the desired effect, but in a little while he woke, and asked him to go on. The story was of a king’s ship so disguising herself that a pirate took her for a merchant-man; and Cosmo, to whom it naturally recalled the Old Captain, made some remark about him.