Weir of Hermiston(赫米斯顿的魏尔)

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Weir of Hermiston

Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

Weir of Hermiston

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.

Weir of Hermiston

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

Weir of Hermiston

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

Weir of Hermiston

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

Weir of Hermiston

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

Weir of Hermiston

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-

Weir of Hermiston

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

Weir of Hermiston

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

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WeirofHermiston1WeirofHermistonRobertLouisStevensonWeirofHermiston2TOMYWIFEIsawrainfallingandtherainbowdrawnOnLammermuir.HearkeningIheardagainInmyprecipitouscitybeatenbellsWinnowthekeenseawind.Andhereafar,Intentonmyownraceandplace,Iwrote.Takethouthewriting:thineitis.ForwhoBurnishedthesword,blewonthe...

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