Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1913 Chatto and
Windus edition. Scanned and proofed by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Weir of Hermiston
TO MY WIFE
I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar,
Intent on my own race and place, I wrote.
Take thou the writing: thine it is. For who
Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,
Held still the target higher, chary of praise
And prodigal of counsel - who but thou?
So now, in the end, if this the least be good,
If any deed be done, if any fire
Burn in the imperfect page, the praise be thine.
INTRODUCTORY
IN the wild end of a moorland parish, far out of the sight of any house,
there stands a cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it, in
the going down of the brae-side, a monument with some verses half
defaced. It was here that Claverhouse shot with his own hand the
Praying Weaver of Balweary, and the chisel of Old Mortality has clinked
on that lonely gravestone. Public and domestic history have thus marked
with a bloody finger this hollow among the hills; and since the
Cameronian gave his life there, two hundred years ago, in a glorious
folly, and without comprehension or regret, the silence of the moss has
been broken once again by the report of firearms and the cry of the
dying.
The Deil's Hags was the old name. But the place is now called Francie's
Cairn. For a while it was told that Francie walked. Aggic Hogg met him
in the gloaming by the cairnside, and he spoke to her, with chattering
teeth, so that his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if any one
could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with pitiful
entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious
decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like
the bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and
imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of
winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet
in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and
the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk
and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge; of
the two Kirsties and the Four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and
of Frank Innes, "the young fool advocate," that came into these moorland
parts to find his destiny.
CHAPTER I - LIFE AND DEATH OF MRS. WEIR
THE Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but
his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before
her. The old "riding Rutherfords of Hermiston," of whom she was the
last descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill
subjects, and ill husbands to their wives though not their properties.
Tales of them were rife for twenty miles about; and their name was even
printed in the page of our Scots histories, not always to their credit.
One bit the dust at Flodden; one was hanged at his peel door by James
the Fifth; another fell dead in a carouse with Tom Dalyell; while a
fourth (and that was Jean's own father) died presiding at a Hell-Fire
Club, of which he was the founder. There were many heads shaken in
Crossmichael at that judgment; the more so as the man had a villainous
reputation among high and low, and both with the godly and the worldly.
At that very hour of his demise, he had ten going pleas before the
Session, eight of them oppressive. And the same doom extended even to
his agents; his grieve, that had been his right hand in many a left-hand
business, being cast from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag
on the Kye-skairs; and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons)
surviving him not long, and dying on a sudden in a bloody flux.
In all these generations, while a male Rutherford was in the saddle with
his lads, or brawling in a change-house, there would be always a white-
faced wife immured at home in the old peel or the later mansion-house.
It seemed this succession of martyrs bided long, but took their
vengeance in the end, and that was in the person of the last descendant,
Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of
their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm.
Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness,
gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of
beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and
(whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers)
came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no blood of
life in her, no grasp or gaiety; pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and
incompetent.
It was a wonder to many that she had married - seeming so wholly of the
stuff that makes old maids. But chance cast her in the path of Adam
Weir, then the new Lord-Advocate, a recognised, risen man, the conqueror
of many obstacles, and thus late in the day beginning to think upon a
wife. He was one who looked rather to obedience than beauty, yet it
would seem he was struck with her at the first look. "Wha's she?" he
said, turning to his host; and, when he had been told, "Ay," says he,
"she looks menseful. She minds me - "; and then, after a pause (which
some have been daring enough to set down to sentimental recollections),
"Is she releegious?" he asked, and was shortly after, at his own
request, presented. The acquaintance, which it seems profane to call a
courtship, was pursued with Mr. Weir's accustomed industry, and was long
a legend, or rather a source of legends, in the Parliament House. He
was described coming, rosy with much port, into the drawing-room,
walking direct up to the lady, and assailing her with pleasantries, to
which the embarrassed fair one responded, in what seemed a kind of
agony, "Eh, Mr. Weir!" or "O, Mr. Weir!" or "Keep me, Mr. Weir!" On the
very eve of their engagement, it was related that one had drawn near to
the tender couple, and had overheard the lady cry out, with the tones of
one who talked for the sake of talking, "Keep me, Mr. Weir, and what
became of him?" and the profound accents of the suitor reply, "Haangit,
mem, haangit." The motives upon either side were much debated. Mr.
Weir must have supposed his bride to be somehow suitable; perhaps he
belonged to that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of
women - an opinion invariably punished in this life. Her descent and
her estate were beyond question. Her wayfaring ancestors and her
litigious father had done well by Jean. There was ready money and there
were broad acres, ready to fall wholly to the husband, to lend dignity
to his descendants, and to himself a title, when he should be called
upon the Bench. On the side of Jean, there was perhaps some fascination
of curiosity as to this unknown male animal that approached her with the
roughness of a ploughman and the APLOMB of an advocate. Being so
trenchantly opposed to all she knew, loved, or understood, he may well
have seemed to her the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex. And
besides, he was an ill man to refuse. A little over forty at the period
of his marriage, he looked already older, and to the force of manhood
added the senatorial dignity of years; it was, perhaps, with an
unreverend awe, but he was awful. The Bench, the Bar, and the most
experienced and reluctant witness, bowed to his authority - and why not
Jeannie Rutherford?
The heresy about foolish women is always punished, I have said, and Lord
Hermiston began to pay the penalty at once. His house in George Square
was wretchedly ill-guided; nothing answerable to the expense of
maintenance but the cellar, which was his own private care. When things
went wrong at dinner, as they continually did, my lord would look up the
table at his wife: "I think these broth would be better to sweem in than
to sup." Or else to the butler: "Here, M'Killop, awa' wi' this Raadical
gigot - tak' it to the French, man, and bring me some puddocks! It
seems rather a sore kind of a business that I should be all day in Court
haanging Raadicals, and get nawthing to my denner." Of course this was
but a manner of speaking, and he had never hanged a man for being a
Radical in his life; the law, of which he was the faithful minister,
directing otherwise. And of course these growls were in the nature of
pleasantry, but it was of a recondite sort; and uttered as they were in
his resounding voice, and commented on by that expression which they
called in the Parliament House "Hermiston's hanging face" - they struck
mere dismay into the wife. She sat before him speechless and
fluttering; at each dish, as at a fresh ordeal, her eye hovered toward
my lord's countenance and fell again; if he but ate in silence,
unspeakable relief was her portion; if there were complaint, the world
was darkened. She would seek out the cook, who was always her SISTER IN
THE LORD. "O, my dear, this is the most dreidful thing that my lord can
never be contented in his own house!" she would begin; and weep and pray
with the cook; and then the cook would pray with Mrs. Weir; and the next
day's meal would never be a penny the better - and the next cook (when
she came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often
wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical
old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there
were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the
history of his married life - "Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece
bread and kebbuck!" he had exclaimed, with an appalling explosion of his
voice and rare gestures. None thought to dispute or to make excuses;
the service was arrested; Mrs. Weir sat at the head of the table
whimpering without disguise; and his lordship opposite munched his bread
and cheese in ostentatious disregard. Once only, Mrs. Weir had ventured
to appeal. He was passing her chair on his way into the study.
"O, Edom!" she wailed, in a voice tragic with tears, and reaching out to
him both hands, in one of which she held a sopping pocket-handkerchief.
He paused and looked upon her with a face of wrath, into which there
stole, as he looked, a twinkle of humour.
"Noansense!" he said. "You and your noansense! What do I want with a
Christian faim'ly? I want Christian broth! Get me a lass that can
plain-boil a potato, if she was a whure off the streets." And with
these words, which echoed in her tender ears like blasphemy, he had
passed on to his study and shut the door behind him.
Such was the housewifery in George Square. It was better at Hermiston,
where Kirstie Elliott, the sister of a neighbouring bonnet-laird, and an
eighteenth cousin of the lady's, bore the charge of all, and kept a trim
house and a good country table. Kirstie was a woman in a thousand,
clean, capable, notable; once a moorland Helen, and still comely as a
blood horse and healthy as the hill wind. High in flesh and voice and
colour, she ran the house with her whole intemperate soul, in a bustle,
not without buffets. Scarce more pious than decency in those days
required, she was the cause of many an anxious thought and many a
tearful prayer to Mrs. Weir. Housekeeper and mistress renewed the parts
of Martha and Mary; and though with a pricking conscience, Mary reposed
on Martha's strength as on a rock. Even Lord Hermiston held Kirstie in
a particular regard. There were few with whom he unbent so gladly, few
whom he favoured with so many pleasantries. "Kirstie and me maun have
our joke," he would declare in high good-humour, as he buttered
Kirstie's scones, and she waited at table. A man who had no need either
of love or of popularity, a keen reader of men and of events, there was
perhaps only one truth for which he was quite unprepared: he would have
been quite unprepared to learn that Kirstie hated him. He thought maid
and master were well matched; hard, bandy, healthy, broad Scots folk,
without a hair of nonsense to the pair of them. And the fact was that
she made a goddess and an only child of the effete and tearful lady; and
even as she waited at table her hands would sometimes itch for my lord's
ears.
Thus, at least, when the family were at Hermiston, not only my lord, but
Mrs. Weir too, enjoyed a holiday. Free from the dreadful looking-for of
the miscarried dinner, she would mind her seam, read her piety books,
and take her walk (which was my lord's orders), sometimes by herself,
sometimes with Archie, the only child of that scarce natural union. The
child was her next bond to life. Her frosted sentiment bloomed again,
she breathed deep of life, she let loose her heart, in that society.
The miracle of her motherhood was ever new to her. The sight of the
little man at her skirt intoxicated her with the sense of power, and
froze her with the consciousness of her responsibility. She looked
forward, and, seeing him in fancy grow up and play his diverse part on
the world's theatre, caught in her breath and lifted up her courage with
a lively effort. It was only with the child that she forgot herself and
was at moments natural; yet it was only with the child that she had
conceived and managed to pursue a scheme of conduct. Archie was to be a
great man and a good; a minister if possible, a saint for certain. She
tried to engage his mind upon her favourite books, Rutherford's LETTERS,
Scougalls GRACE ABOUNDING, and the like. It was a common practice of
hers (and strange to remember now) that she would carry the child to the
Deil's Hags, sit with him on the Praying Weaver's stone, and talk of the
Covenanters till their tears ran down. Her view of history was wholly
artless, a design in snow and ink; upon the one side, tender innocents
with psalms upon their lips; upon the other, the persecutors, booted,
bloody-minded, flushed with wine: a suffering Christ, a raging
Beelzebub. PERSECUTOR was a word that knocked upon the woman's heart;
it was her highest thought of wickedness, and the mark of it was on her
house. Her great-great-grandfather had drawn the sword against the
Lord's anointed on the field of Rullion Green, and breathed his last
(tradition said) in the arms of the detestable Dalyell. Nor could she
blind herself to this, that had they lived in those old days, Hermiston
himself would have been numbered alongside of Bloody MacKenzie and the
politic Lauderdale and Rothes, in the band of God's immediate enemies.
The sense of this moved her to the more fervour; she had a voice for
that name of PERSECUTOR that thrilled in the child's marrow; and when
one day the mob hooted and hissed them all in my lord's travelling
carriage, and cried, "Down with the persecutor! down with Hanging
Hermiston!" and mamma covered her eyes and wept, and papa let down the
glass and looked out upon the rabble with his droll formidable face,
bitter and smiling, as they said he sometimes looked when he gave
sentence, Archie was for the moment too much amazed to be alarmed, but
he had scarce got his mother by herself before his shrill voice was
raised demanding an explanation: why had they called papa a persecutor?
"Keep me, my precious!" she exclaimed. "Keep me, my dear! this is
poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical, Erchie. Your
faither is a great man, my dear, and it's no for me or you to be judging
him. It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves in our several
stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear
no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that - she kens it
well, dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of
the child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.
Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression -
tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with
a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind
of ecstasy of tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were
here but for a day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the
immortal men, on what black, downward path were many of them wending,
and to what a horror of an immortality! "Are not two sparrows,"
"Whosoever shall smite thee," "God sendeth His rain," "Judge not, that
ye be not judged" - these texts made her body of divinity; she put them
on in the morning with her clothes and lay down to sleep with them at
night; they haunted her like a favourite air, they clung about her like
a favourite perfume. Their minister was a marrowy expounder of the law,
and my lord sat under him with relish; but Mrs. Weir respected him from
far off; heard him (like the cannon of a beleaguered city) usefully
booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts; and meanwhile, within and out
of shot, dwelt in her private garden which she watered with grateful
tears. It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual
woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine
and the glory of a cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be
eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen her - her colour raised, her
hands clasped or quivering - glow with gentle ardour. There is a corner
of the policy of Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the
summit of Black Fell, sometimes like the mere grass top of a hill,
sometimes (and this is her own expression) like a precious jewel in the
heavens. On such days, upon the sudden view of it, her hand would
tighten on the child's fingers, her voice rise like a song. "I TO THE
HILLS!" she would repeat. "And O, Erchie, are nae these like the hills
of Naphtali?" and her tears would flow.
Upon an impressionable child the effect of this continual and pretty
accompaniment to life was deep. The woman's quietism and piety passed
on to his different nature undiminished; but whereas in her it was a
native sentiment, in him it was only an implanted dogma. Nature and the
child's pugnacity at times revolted. A cad from the Potterrow once
struck him in the mouth; he struck back, the pair fought it out in the
back stable lane towards the Meadows, and Archie returned with a
considerable decline in the number of his front teeth, and
unregenerately boasting of the losses of the foe. It was a sore day for
Mrs. Weir; she wept and prayed over the infant backslider until my lord
was due from Court, and she must resume that air of tremulous composure
with which she always greeted him. The judge was that day in an
observant mood, and remarked upon the absent teeth.
"I am afraid Erchie will have been fechting with some of they blagyard
lads," said Mrs. Weir.
My lord's voice rang out as it did seldom in the privacy of his own
house. "I'll have norm of that, sir!" he cried. "Do you hear me? -
nonn of that! No son of mine shall be speldering in the glaur with any
dirty raibble."
The anxious mother was grateful for so much support; she had even feared
the contrary. And that night when she put the child to bed - "Now, my
dear, ye see!" she said, "I told you what your faither would think of
it, if he heard ye had fallen into this dreidful sin; and let you and me
pray to God that ye may be keepit from the like temptation or
strengthened to resist it!"
The womanly falsity of this was thrown away. Ice and iron cannot be
welded; and the points of view of the Justice-Clerk and Mrs. Weir were
not less unassimilable. The character and position of his father had
long been a stumbling-block to Archie, and with every year of his age
the difficulty grew more instant. The man was mostly silent; when he
spoke at all, it was to speak of the things of the world, always in a
worldly spirit, often in language that the child had been schooled to
think coarse, and sometimes with words that he knew to be sins in
themselves. Tenderness was the first duty, and my lord was invariably
harsh. God was love; the name of my lord (to all who knew him) was
fear. In the world, as schematised for Archie by his mother, the place
was marked for such a creature. There were some whom it was good to
pity and well (though very likely useless) to pray for; they were named
reprobates, goats, God's enemies, brands for the burning; and Archie
tallied every mark of identification, and drew the inevitable private
inference that the Lord Justice-Clerk was the chief of sinners.
The mother's honesty was scarce complete. There was one influence she
feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's;
and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to
undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent,
she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's
salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie
was seven, and beyond his years for curiosity and logic, when he brought
the case up openly. If judging were sinful and forbidden, how came papa
to be a judge? to have that sin for a trade? to bear the name of it for
a distinction?
"I can't see it," said the little Rabbi, and wagged his head.
Mrs. Weir abounded in commonplace replies.
"No, I cannae see it," reiterated Archie. "And I'll tell you what,
mamma, I don't think you and me's justifeed in staying with him."
The woman awoke to remorse, she saw herself disloyal to her man, her
sovereign and bread-winner, in whom (with what she had of worldliness)
she took a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply on my lord's
honour and greatness; his useful services in this world of sorrow and
wrong, and the place in which he stood, far above where babes and
innocents could hope to see or criticise. But she had builded too well
- Archie had his answers pat: Were not babes and innocents the type of
the kingdom of heaven? Were not honour and greatness the badges of the
world? And at any rate, how about the mob that had once seethed about
the carriage?
"It's all very fine," he concluded, "but in my opinion papa has no right
to be it. And it seems that's not the worst yet of it. It seems he's
called "The Hanging judge" - it seems he's crooool. I'll tell you what
it is, mamma, there's a tex' borne in upon me: It were better for that
man if a milestone were bound upon his back and him flung into the
deepestmost pairts of the sea."
"O, my lamb, ye must never say the like of that!" she cried. "Ye're to
honour faither and mother, dear, that your days may be long in the land.
It's Atheists that cry out against him - French Atheists, Erchie! Ye
would never surely even yourself down to be saying the same thing as
French Atheists? It would break my heart to think that of you. And O,
Erchie, here are'na YOU setting up to JUDGE? And have ye no forgot
God's plain command - the First with Promise, dear? Mind you upon the
beam and the mote!"
Having thus carried the war into the enemy's camp, the terrified lady
breathed again. And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with
catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An
instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He
will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in
this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child,
hypocrisies are multiplied.
When the Court rose that year and the family returned to Hermiston, it
was a common remark in all the country that the lady was sore failed.
She seemed to loose and seize again her touch with life, now sitting
inert in a sort of durable bewilderment, anon waking to feverish and
weak activity. She dawdled about the lasses at their work, looking
stupidly on; she fell to rummaging in old cabinets and presses, and
desisted when half through; she would begin remarks with an air of
animation and drop them without a struggle. Her common appearance was
of one who has forgotten something and is trying to remember; and when
she overhauled, one after another, the worthless and touching mementoes
of her youth, she might have been seeking the clue to that lost thought.
During this period, she gave many gifts to the neighbours and house
lasses, giving them with a manner of regret that embarrassed the
recipients.
The last night of all she was busy on some female work, and toiled upon
it with so manifest and painful a devotion that my lord (who was not
often curious) inquired as to its nature.
She blushed to the eyes. "O, Edom, it's for you!" she said. "It's
slippers. I - I hae never made ye any."
"Ye daft auld wife!" returned his lordship. "A bonny figure I would
be, palmering about in bauchles!"
The next day, at the hour of her walk, Kirstie interfered. Kirstie took
this decay of her mistress very hard; bore her a grudge, quarrelled with
and railed upon her, the anxiety of a genuine love wearing the disguise
of temper. This day of all days she insisted disrespectfully, with
rustic fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But, "No, no," she
said, "it's my lord's orders," and set forth as usual. Archie was
visible in the acre bog, engaged upon some childish enterprise, the
instrument of which was mire; and she stood and looked at him a while
like one about to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook her
head, and proceeded on her rounds alone. The house lasses were at the
burnside washing, and saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait.
"She's a terrible feckless wife, the mistress!" said the one.
"Tut," said the other, "the wumman's seeck."
"Weel, I canna see nae differ in her," returned the first. "A
fushionless quean, a feckless carline."
The poor creature thus discussed rambled a while in the grounds without
a purpose. Tides in her mind ebbed and flowed, and carried her
to and fro like seaweed. She tried a path, paused, returned, and tried
another; questing, forgetting her quest; the spirit of choice extinct in
her bosom, or devoid of sequency. On a sudden, it appeared as though
she had remembered, or had formed a resolution, wheeled about, returned
with hurried steps, and appeared in the dining-room, where Kirstie was
at the cleaning, like one charged with an important errand.
"Kirstie!" she began, and paused; and then with conviction, "Mr. Weir
isna speeritually minded, but he has been a good man to me."
It was perhaps the first time since her husband's elevation that she had
forgotten the handle to his name, of which the tender, inconsistent
woman was not a little proud. And when Kirstie looked up at the
speaker's face, she was aware of a change.
"Godsake, what's the maitter wi' ye, mem?" cried the housekeeper,
starting from the rug.
"I do not ken," answered her mistress, shaking her head. "But he is not
speeritually minded, my dear."
"Here, sit down with ye! Godsake, what ails the wife?" cried Kirstie,
and helped and forced her into my lord's own chair by the cheek of the
hearth.
"Keep me, what's this?" she gasped. "Kirstie, what's this? I'm
frich'ened."
They were her last words.
It was the lowering nightfall when my lord returned. He had the sunset
in his back, all clouds and glory; and before him, by the wayside, spied
Kirstie Elliott waiting. She was dissolved in tears, and addressed him
in the high, false note of barbarous mourning, such as still lingers
modified among Scots heather.
"The Lord peety ye, Hermiston! the Lord prepare ye!" she keened out.
"Weary upon me, that I should have to tell it!"
He reined in his horse and looked upon her with the hanging face.
"Has the French landit?" cried he.
"Man, man," she said, "is that a' ye can think of? The Lord prepare ye:
the Lord comfort and support ye!"
"Is onybody deid?" said his lordship. "It's no Erchie?"
"Bethankit, no!" exclaimed the woman, startled into a more natural tone.
"Na, na, it's no sae bad as that. It's the mistress, my lord; she just
fair flittit before my e'en. She just gi'ed a sab and was by wi' it.
Eh, my bonny Miss Jeannie, that I mind sae weel!" And forth again upon
that pouring tide of lamentation in which women of her class excel and
over-abound.
Lord Hermiston sat in the saddle beholding her. Then he seemed to
recover command upon himself.
"Well, it's something of the suddenest," said he. "But she was a
dwaibly body from the first."
And he rode home at a precipitate amble with Kirstie at his horse's
heels.
Dressed as she was for her last walk, they had laid the dead lady on her
bed. She was never interesting in life; in death she was not
impressive; and as her husband stood before her, with his hands crossed
behind his powerful back, that which he looked upon was the very image
of the insignificant.
"Her and me were never cut out for one another," he remarked at last.
"It was a daft-like marriage." And then, with a most unusual gentleness
of tone, "Puir bitch," said he, "puir bitch!" Then suddenly: "Where's
Erchie?"
Kirstie had decoyed him to her room and given him "a jeely-piece."
"Ye have some kind of gumption, too," observed the judge, and considered
his housekeeper grimly. "When all's said," he added, "I micht have done
waur - I micht have been marriet upon a skirting Jezebel like you!"
"There's naebody thinking of you, Hermiston!" cried the offended woman.
"We think of her that's out of her sorrows. And could SHE have done
waur? Tell me that, Hermiston - tell me that before her clay-cauld
corp!"
"Weel, there's some of them gey an' ill to please," observed his
lordship.
CHAPTER II - FATHER AND SON
MY Lord Justice-Clerk was known to many; the man Adam Weir perhaps to
none. He had nothing to explain or to conceal; he sufficed wholly and
silently to himself; and that part of our nature which goes out (too
often with false coin) to acquire glory or love, seemed in him to be
omitted. He did not try to be loved, he did not care to be; it is
probable the very thought of it was a stranger to his mind. He was an
admired lawyer, a highly unpopular judge; and he looked down upon those
who were his inferiors in either distinction, who were lawyers of less
grasp or judges not so much detested. In all the rest of his days and
doings, not one trace of vanity appeared; and he went on through life
with a mechanical movement, as of the unconscious; that was almost
august.
He saw little of his son. In the childish maladies with which the boy
was troubled, he would make daily inquiries and daily pay him a visit,
entering the sick-room with a facetious and appalling countenance,
letting off a few perfunctory jests, and going again swiftly, to the
patient's relief. Once, a court holiday falling opportunely, my lord
had his carriage, and drove the child himself to Hermiston, the
customary place of convalescence. It is conceivable he had been more
than usually anxious, for that journey always remained in Archie's
memory as a thing apart, his father having related to him from beginning
to end, and with much detail, three authentic murder cases. Archie went
the usual round of other Edinburgh boys, the high school and the
college; and Hermiston looked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an
affectation of interest in his progress. Daily, indeed, upon a signal
after dinner, he was brought in, given nuts and a glass of port,
regarded sardonically, sarcastically questioned. "Well, sir, and what
have you donn with your book to-day?" my lord might begin, and set him
posers in law Latin. To a child just stumbling into Corderius, Papinian
and Paul proved quite invincible. But papa had memory of no other. He
was not harsh to the little scholar, having a vast fund of patience
learned upon the bench, and was at no pains whether to conceal or to
express his disappointment. "Well, ye have a long jaunt before ye yet!"
he might observe, yawning, and fall back on his own thoughts (as like as
not) until the time came for separation, and my lord would take the
decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the
Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small. There
was no "fuller man" on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though
wholly legal; if he had to "advise" extempore, none did it better; yet
there was none who more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the
night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but
he tasted deeply of recondite pleasures. To be wholly devoted to some
intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in
law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice
to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without
excitement. This atmosphere of his father's sterling industry was the
best of Archie's education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly
it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved
like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the
boy's life.
But Hermiston was not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty
toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from
the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the
third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross
accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less
formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited
from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with
potential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his own
companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father's
table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale
and sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he there encountered, he
had toleration for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond.
Lord Glenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long features and long
delicate hands. He was often compared with the statue of Forbes of
Culloden in the Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than sixty,
preserved some of the fire of youth. His exquisite disparity with any
of his fellow-guests, his appearance as of an artist and an aristocrat
stranded in rude company, riveted the boy's attention; and as curiosity
and interest are the things in the world that are the most immediately
and certainly rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted by the boy.
"And so this is your son, Hermiston?" he asked, laying his hand on
Archie's shoulder. "He's getting a big lad."
"Hout!" said the gracious father, "just his mother over again - daurna
say boo to a goose!"
But the stranger retained the boy, talked to him, drew him out, found in
him a taste for letters, and a fine, ardent, modest, youthful soul; and
encouraged him to be a visitor on Sunday evenings in his bare, cold,
lonely dining-room, where he sat and read in the isolation of a bachelor
grown old in refinement. The beautiful gentleness and grace of the old
judge, and the delicacy of his person, thoughts, and language, spoke to
Archie's heart in its own tongue. He conceived the ambition to be such
another; and, when the day came for him to choose a profession, it was
in emulation of Lord Glenalmond, not of Lord Hermiston, that he chose
the Bar. Hermiston looked on at this friendship with some secret pride,
but openly with the intolerance of scorn. He scarce lost an opportunity
to put them down with a rough jape; and, to say truth, it was not
difficult, for they were neither of them quick. He had a word of
contempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters, fiddlers, and their
admirers, the bastard race of amateurs, which was continually on his
lips. "Signor Feedle-eerie!" he would say. "O, for Goad's sake, no
more of the Signor!"
"You and my father are great friends, are you not?" asked Archie once.
"There is no man that I more respect, Archie," replied Lord Glenalmond.
"He is two things of price. He is a great lawyer, and he is upright as
the day."
"You and he are so different," said the boy, his eyes dwelling on those
of his old friend, like a lover's on his mistress's.
"Indeed so," replied the judge; "very different. And so I fear are you
and he. Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to
misjudge his father. He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were
such; I think a son's heart might well be proud of such an ancestry of
one."
"And I would sooner he were a plaided herd," cried Archie, with sudden
bitterness.
"And that is neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true," returned
Glenalmond. "Before you are done you will find some of these
expressions rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and
decorative; they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought
clearly apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would
say, "Signor Feedle-eerie!"
With the infinitely delicate sense of youth, Archie avoided the subject
from that hour. It was perhaps a pity. Had he but talked - talked
freely - let himself gush out in words (the way youth loves to do and
should), there might have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of
Hermiston. But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in the
slight tartness of these words he read a prohibition; and it is likely
that Glenalmond meant it so.
Besides the veteran, the boy was without confidant or friend. Serious
and eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowd
of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness. He grew up
handsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthful
ways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the Speculative
Society. It should seem he must become the centre of a crowd of
friends; but something that was in part the delicacy of his mother, in
part the austerity of his father, held him aloof from all. It is a
fact, and a strange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston's son
was thought to be a chip of the old block. "You're a friend of Archie
Weir's?" said one to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his usual
flippancy and more than his usual insight: "I know Weir. but I never met
Archie." No one had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons.
He flew his private signal, and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad
in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he
looked round about him on the concourse of his fellow-students, and
forward to the trivial days and acquaintances that were to come, without
hope or interest.
As time went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn to
the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with
softnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly
impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained through
forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will
scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie,
but a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was so
unconspicuously made, the failure so stoically supported. Sympathy is
not due to these steadfast iron natures. If he failed to gain his son's
friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went up the great, bare
staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed. There might have been
more pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he may have
recognised at moments; but pleasure was a by-product of the singular
chemistry of life, which only fools expected.
An idea of Archie's attitude, since we are all grown up and have
forgotten the days of our youth, it is more difficult to convey. He
made no attempt whatsoever to understand the man with whom he dined and
breakfasted. Parsimony of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the two
alternating ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious. The wind
blew cold out of a certain quarter - he turned his back upon it; stayed
as little as was possible in his father's presence; and when there,
averted his eyes as much as was decent from his father's face. The lamp
shone for many hundred days upon these two at table - my lord, ruddy,
gloomy, and unreverent; Archie with a potential brightness that was
always dimmed and veiled in that society; and there were not, perhaps,
in Christendom two men more radically strangers. The father, with a
grand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself, or maintained
an unaffected silence. The son turned in his head for some topic that
should be quite safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of my
lord's inherent grossness or of the innocence of his inhumanity;
treading gingerly the ways of intercourse, like a lady gathering up her
skirts in a by-path. If he made a mistake, and my lord began to abound
in matter of offence, Archie drew himself up, his brow grew dark, his
share of the talk expired; but my lord would faithfully and cheerfully
continue to pour out the worst of himself before his silent and offended
son.
"Well, it's a poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at the
conclusion of such a nightmare interview. "But I must get to my plew-
stilts." And he would seclude himself as usual in his back room, and
Archie go forth into the night and the city quivering with animosity and
scorn.
CHAPTER III - IN THE MATTER OF THE HANGING OF DUNCAN JOPP
IT chanced in the year 1813 that Archie strayed one day into the
Justiciary Court. The macer made room for the son of the presiding
judge. In the dock, the centre of men's eyes, there stood a whey-
coloured, misbegotten caitiff, Duncan Jopp, on trial for his life. His
story, as it was raked out before him in that public scene, was one of
disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime; and the
creature heard and it seemed at times as though he understood - as if at
times he forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the
shame of what had brought him there. He kept his head bowed and his
hands clutched upon the rail; his hair dropped in his eyes and at times
he flung it back; and now he glanced about the audience in a sudden
fellness of terror, and now looked in the face of his judge and gulped.
There was pinned about his throat a piece of dingy flannel; and this it
was perhaps that turned the scale in Archie's mind between disgust and
pity. The creature stood in a vanishing point; yet a little while, and
he was still a man, and had eyes and apprehension; yet a little longer,
and with a last sordid piece of pageantry, he would cease to be. And
here, in the meantime, with a trait of human nature that caught at the
beholder's breath, he was tending a sore throat.
Over against him, my Lord Hermiston occupied the bench in the red robes
of criminal jurisdiction, his face framed in the white wig. Honest all
through, he did not affect the virtue of impartiality; this was no case
for refinement; there was a man to be hanged, he would have said, and he
was hanging him. Nor was it possible to see his lordship, and acquit
him of gusto in the task. It was plain he gloried in the exercise of
his trained faculties, in the clear sight which pierced at once into the
joint of fact, in the rude, unvarnished gibes with which he demolished
every figment of defence. He took his ease and jested, unbending in
that solemn place with some of the freedom of the tavern; and the rag of
man with the flannel round his neck was hunted gallowsward with jeers.
Duncan had a mistress, scarce less forlorn and greatly older than
himself, who came up, whimpering and curtseying, to add the weight of
her betrayal. My lord gave her the oath in his most roaring voice, and
added an intolerant warning.
"Mind what ye say now, Janet," said he. "I have an e'e upon ye, I'm ill
to jest with."
Presently, after she was tremblingly embarked on her story, "And what
made ye do this, ye auld runt?" the Court interposed. "Do ye mean to
tell me ye was the panel's mistress?"
"If you please, ma loard," whined the female.
"Godsake! ye made a bonny couple," observed his lordship; and there was
something so formidable and ferocious in his scorn that not even the
galleries thought to laugh.
The summing up contained some jewels.
"These two peetiable creatures seem to have made up thegither, it's not
for us to explain why." - "The panel, who (whatever else he may be)
appears to be equally ill set-out in mind and boady." - "Neither the
panel nor yet the old wife appears to have had so much common sense as
even to tell a lie when it was necessary." And in the course of
sentencing, my lord had this OBITER DICTUM: "I have been the means,
under God, of haanging a great number, but never just such a disjaskit
rascal as yourself." The words were strong in themselves; the light and
heat and detonation of their delivery, and the savage pleasure of the
speaker in his task, made them tingle in the ears.
When all was over, Archie came forth again into a changed world. Had
there been the least redeeming greatness in the crime, any obscurity,
any dubiety, perhaps he might have understood. But the culprit stood,
with his sore throat, in the sweat of his mortal agony, without defence
or excuse: a thing to cover up with blushes: a being so much sunk
beneath the zones of sympathy that pity might seem harmless. And the
judge had pursued him with a monstrous, relishing gaiety, horrible to be
conceived, a trait for nightmares. It is one thing to spear a tiger,
another to crush a toad; there are aesthetics even of the slaughter-
house; and the loathsomeness of Duncan Jopp enveloped and infected the
image of his judge.
Archie passed by his friends in the High Street with incoherent words
and gestures. He saw Holyrood in a dream, remembrance of its romance
awoke in him and faded; he had a vision of the old radiant stories, of
Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, of the hooded stag, of the splendour and
crime, the velvet and bright iron of the past; and dismissed them with a
cry of pain. He lay and moaned in the Hunter's Bog, and the heavens
were dark above him and the grass of the field an offence. "This is my
father," he said. "I draw my life from him; the flesh upon my bones is
his, the bread I am fed with is the wages of these horrors." He
recalled his mother, and ground his forehead in the earth. He thought
of flight, and where was he to flee to? of other lives, but was there
any life worth living in this den of savage and jeering animals?
The interval before the execution was like a violent dream. He met his
father; he would not look at him, he could not speak to him. It seemed
there was no living creature but must have been swift to recognise that
imminent animosity; but the hide of the Justice-Clerk remained
impenetrable. Had my lord been talkative, the truce could never have
subsisted; but he was by fortune in one of his humours of sour silence;
and under the very guns of his broadside, Archie nursed the enthusiasm
of rebellion. It seemed to him, from the top of his nineteen years'
experience, as if he were marked at birth to be the perpetrator of some
signal action, to set back fallen Mercy, to overthrow the usurping devil
that sat, horned and hoofed, on her throne. Seductive Jacobin figments,
which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and
startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk
accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties.
On the named morning he was at the place of execution. He saw the
fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced. He looked on for a
while at a certain parody of devotion, which seemed to strip the wretch
of his last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of
extinction, and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken
jumping-jack. He had been prepared for something terrible, not for this
tragic meanness. He stood a moment silent, and then - "I denounce this
God-defying murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have
disclaimed the sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with
which it was uttered.
Frank Innes dragged him from the spot. The two handsome lads followed
the same course of study and recreation, and felt a certain mutual
attraction, founded mainly on good looks. It had never gone deep; Frank
was by nature a thin, jeering creature, not truly susceptible whether of
feeling or inspiring friendship; and the relation between the pair was
altogether on the outside, a thing of common knowledge and the
pleasantries that spring from a common acquaintance. The more credit to
Frank that he was appalled by Archie's outburst, and at least conceived
the design of keeping him in sight, and, if possible, in hand, for the
day. But Archie, who had just defied - was it God or Satan? - would not
listen to the word of a college companion.
"I will not go with you," he said. "I do not desire your company, sir;
I would be alone."
"Here, Weir, man, don't be absurd," said Innes, keeping a tight hold
upon his sleeve. "I will not let you go until I know what you mean to
do with yourself; it's no use brandishing that staff." For indeed at
that moment Archie had made a sudden - perhaps a warlike - movement.
"This has been the most insane affair; you know it has. You know very
well that I'm playing the good Samaritan. All I wish is to keep you
quiet."
"If quietness is what you wish, Mr. Innes," said Archie, "and you will
promise to leave me entirely to myself, I will tell you so much, that I
am going to walk in the country and admire the beauties of nature."
