Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (283 page)

“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.