The youth laid his hand upon the boy's head, then
withdrew it hastily, and the smile vanished like the sun behind a
cloud. Robert saw it, and as if he had been David before Saul, rose
instinctively and said,
'I'll gang for my fiddle.--Hoots! I hae broken ane o' the strings.
We maun bide till the morn. But I want nae fiddle mysel' whan I
hear the great water oot there.'
'You're young yet, my boy, or you might hear voices in that water--!
I've lived in the sound of it all my days. When I can't rest at
night, I hear a moaning and crying in the dark, and I lie and listen
till I can't tell whether I'm a man or some God-forsaken sea in the
sunless north.'
'Sometimes I believe in naething but my fiddle,' answered Robert.
'Yes, yes. But when it comes into you, my boy! You won't hear much
music in the cry of the sea after that. As long as you've got it at
arm's length, it's all very well. It's interesting then, and you
can talk to your fiddle about it, and make poetry about it,' said
Ericson, with a smile of self-contempt. 'But as soon as the real
earnest comes that is all over. The sea-moan is the cry of a
tortured world then. Its hollow bed is the cup of the world's pain,
ever rolling from side to side and dashing over its lip. Of all
that might be, ought to be, nothing to be had!--I could get music
out of it once. Look here. I could trifle like that once.'
He half rose, then dropped on his chair.
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