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?'