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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Weir of Hermiston, by Robert Louis Stevenson,
+Edited by Sidney Colvin
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Weir of Hermiston
+       an unfinished romance
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Editor: Sidney Colvin
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2010  [eBook #380]
+[First posted: December 2, 1995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEIR OF HERMISTON***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 Chatto and Windus edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                            WEIR OF HERMISTON
+
+
+                          AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+                       [Picture: Decorative image]
+
+                            FINE-PAPER EDITION
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                             CHATTO & WINDUS
+                                   1913
+
+                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+                    at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+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."
+
+"Honour bright?" asked Frank.
+
+"I am not in the habit of lying, Mr. Innes," retorted Archie.  "I have
+the honour of wishing you good-day."
+
+"You won't forget the Spec.?" asked Innes.
+
+"The Spec.?" said Archie.  "O no, I won't forget the Spec."
+
+And the one young man carried his tortured spirit forth of the city and
+all the day long, by one road and another, in an endless pilgrimage of
+misery; while the other hastened smilingly to spread the news of Weir's
+access of insanity, and to drum up for that night a full attendance at
+the Speculative, where further eccentric developments might certainly be
+looked for.  I doubt if Innes had the least belief in his prediction; I
+think it flowed rather from a wish to make the story as good and the
+scandal as great as possible; not from any ill-will to Archie--from the
+mere pleasure of beholding interested faces.  But for all that his words
+were prophetic.  Archie did not forget the Spec.; he put in an appearance
+there at the due time, and, before the evening was over, had dealt a
+memorable shock to his companions.  It chanced he was the president of
+the night.  He sat in the same room where the Society still meets--only
+the portraits were not there: the men who afterwards sat for them were
+then but beginning their career.  The same lustre of many tapers shed its
+light over the meeting; the same chair, perhaps, supported him that so
+many of us have sat in since.  At times he seemed to forget the business
+of the evening, but even in these periods he sat with a great air of
+energy and determination.  At times he meddled bitterly, and launched
+with defiance those fines which are the precious and rarely used
+artillery of the president.  He little thought, as he did so, how he
+resembled his father, but his friends remarked upon it, chuckling.  So
+far, in his high place above his fellow-students, he seemed set beyond
+the possibility of any scandal; but his mind was made up--he was
+determined to fulfil the sphere of his offence.  He signed to Innes (whom
+he had just fined, and who just impeached his ruling) to succeed him in
+the chair, stepped down from the platform, and took his place by the
+chimney-piece, the shine of many wax tapers from above illuminating his
+pale face, the glow of the great red fire relieving from behind his slim
+figure.  He had to propose, as an amendment to the next subject in the
+case-book, "Whether capital punishment be consistent with God's will or
+man's policy?"
+
+A breath of embarrassment, of something like alarm, passed round the
+room, so daring did these words appear upon the lips of Hermiston's only
+son.  But the amendment was not seconded; the previous question was
+promptly moved and unanimously voted, and the momentary scandal smuggled
+by.  Innes triumphed in the fulfilment of his prophecy.  He and Archie
+were now become the heroes of the night; but whereas every one crowded
+about Innes, when the meeting broke up, but one of all his companions
+came to speak to Archie.
+
+"Weir, man!  That was an extraordinary raid of yours!" observed this
+courageous member, taking him confidentially by the arm as they went out.
+
+"I don't think it a raid," said Archie grimly.  "More like a war.  I saw
+that poor brute hanged this morning, and my gorge rises at it yet."
+
+"Hut-tut," returned his companion, and, dropping his arm like something
+hot, he sought the less tense society of others.
+
+Archie found himself alone.  The last of the faithful--or was it only the
+boldest of the curious?--had fled.  He watched the black huddle of his
+fellow-students draw off down and up the street, in whispering or
+boisterous gangs.  And the isolation of the moment weighed upon him like
+an omen and an emblem of his destiny in life.  Bred up in unbroken fear
+himself, among trembling servants, and in a house which (at the least
+ruffle in the master's voice) shuddered into silence, he saw himself on
+the brink of the red valley of war, and measured the danger and length of
+it with awe.  He made a detour in the glimmer and shadow of the streets,
+came into the back stable lane, and watched for a long while the light
+burn steady in the Judge's room.  The longer he gazed upon that
+illuminated window-blind, the more blank became the picture of the man
+who sat behind it, endlessly turning over sheets of process, pausing to
+sip a glass of port, or rising and passing heavily about his book-lined
+walls to verify some reference.  He could not combine the brutal judge
+and the industrious, dispassionate student; the connecting link escaped
+him; from such a dual nature, it was impossible he should predict
+behaviour; and he asked himself if he had done well to plunge into a
+business of which the end could not be foreseen? and presently after,
+with a sickening decline of confidence, if he had done loyally to strike
+his father?  For he had struck him--defied him twice over and before a
+cloud of witnesses--struck him a public buffet before crowds.  Who had
+called him to judge his father in these precarious and high questions?
+The office was usurped.  It might have become a stranger; in a son--there
+was no blinking it--in a son, it was disloyal.  And now, between these
+two natures so antipathetic, so hateful to each other, there was
+depending an unpardonable affront: and the providence of God alone might
+foresee the manner in which it would be resented by Lord Hermiston.
+
+These misgivings tortured him all night and arose with him in the
+winter's morning; they followed him from class to class, they made him
+shrinkingly sensitive to every shade of manner in his companions, they
+sounded in his ears through the current voice of the professor; and he
+brought them home with him at night unabated and indeed increased.  The
+cause of this increase lay in a chance encounter with the celebrated Dr.
+Gregory.  Archie stood looking vaguely in the lighted window of a book
+shop, trying to nerve himself for the approaching ordeal.  My lord and he
+had met and parted in the morning as they had now done for long, with
+scarcely the ordinary civilities of life; and it was plain to the son
+that nothing had yet reached the father's ears.  Indeed, when he recalled
+the awful countenance of my lord, a timid hope sprang up in him that
+perhaps there would be found no one bold enough to carry tales.  If this
+were so, he asked himself, would he begin again? and he found no answer.
+It was at this moment that a hand was laid upon his arm, and a voice said
+in his ear, "My dear Mr. Archie, you had better come and see me."
+
+He started, turned round, and found himself face to face with Dr.
+Gregory.  "And why should I come to see you?" he asked, with the defiance
+of the miserable.
+
+"Because you are looking exceedingly ill," said the doctor, "and you very
+evidently want looking after, my young friend.  Good folk are scarce, you
+know; and it is not every one that would be quite so much missed as
+yourself.  It is not every one that Hermiston would miss."
+
+And with a nod and a smile, the doctor passed on.
+
+A moment after, Archie was in pursuit, and had in turn, but more roughly,
+seized him by the arm.
+
+"What do you mean? what did you mean by saying that?  What makes you
+think that Hermis--my father would have missed me?"
+
+The doctor turned about and looked him all over with a clinical eye.  A
+far more stupid man than Dr. Gregory might have guessed the truth; but
+ninety-nine out of a hundred, even if they had been equally inclined to
+kindness, would have blundered by some touch of charitable exaggeration.
+The doctor was better inspired.  He knew the father well; in that white
+face of intelligence and suffering, he divined something of the son; and
+he told, without apology or adornment, the plain truth.
+
+"When you had the measles, Mr. Archibald, you had them gey and ill; and I
+thought you were going to slip between my fingers," he said.  "Well, your
+father was anxious.  How did I know it? says you.  Simply because I am a
+trained observer.  The sign that I saw him make, ten thousand would have
+missed; and perhaps--_perhaps_, I say, because he's a hard man to judge
+of--but perhaps he never made another.  A strange thing to consider!  It
+was this.  One day I came to him: 'Hermiston,' said I, 'there's a
+change.'  He never said a word, just glowered at me (if ye'll pardon the
+phrase) like a wild beast.  'A change for the better,' said I.  And I
+distinctly heard him take his breath."
+
+The doctor left no opportunity for anti-climax; nodding his cocked hat (a
+piece of antiquity to which he clung) and repeating "Distinctly" with
+raised eye-brows, he took his departure, and left Archie speechless in
+the street.
+
+The anecdote might be called infinitely little, and yet its meaning for
+Archie was immense.  "I did not know the old man had so much blood in
+him."  He had never dreamed this sire of his, this aboriginal antique,
+this adamantine Adam, had even so much of a heart as to be moved in the
+least degree for another--and that other himself, who had insulted him!
+With the generosity of youth, Archie was instantly under arms upon the
+other side: had instantly created a new image of Lord Hermiston, that of
+a man who was all iron without and all sensibility within.  The mind of
+the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly
+insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so
+long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his
+misdeeds, impatient to throw himself on the mercy of this imaginary
+character.
+
+He was not to be long without a rude awakening.  It was in the gloaming
+when he drew near the door-step of the lighted house, and was aware of
+the figure of his father approaching from the opposite side.  Little
+daylight lingered; but on the door being opened, the strong yellow shine
+of the lamp gushed out upon the landing and shone full on Archie, as he
+stood, in the old-fashioned observance of respect, to yield precedence.
+The judge came without haste, stepping stately and firm; his chin raised,
+his face (as he entered the lamplight) strongly illumined, his mouth set
+hard.  There was never a wink of change in his expression; without
+looking to the right or left, he mounted the stair, passed close to
+Archie, and entered the house.  Instinctively, the boy, upon his first
+coming, had made a movement to meet him; instinctively he recoiled
+against the railing, as the old man swept by him in a pomp of
+indignation.  Words were needless; he knew all--perhaps more than
+all--and the hour of judgment was at hand.
+
+It is possible that, in this sudden revulsion of hope, and before these
+symptoms of impending danger, Archie might have fled.  But not even that
+was left to him.  My lord, after hanging up his cloak and hat, turned
+round in the lighted entry, and made him an imperative and silent gesture
+with his thumb, and with the strange instinct of obedience, Archie
+followed him into the house.
+
+All dinner-time there reigned over the Judge's table a palpable silence,
+and as soon as the solids were despatched he rose to his feet.
+
+"M'Killup, tak' the wine into my room," said he; and then to his son:
+"Archie, you and me has to have a talk."
+
+It was at this sickening moment that Archie's courage, for the first and
+last time, entirely deserted him.  "I have an appointment," said he.
+
+"It'll have to be broken, then," said Hermiston, and led the way into his
+study.
+
+The lamp was shaded, the fire trimmed to a nicety, the table covered deep
+with orderly documents, the backs of law books made a frame upon all
+sides that was only broken by the window and the doors.
+
+For a moment Hermiston warmed his hands at the fire, presenting his back
+to Archie; then suddenly disclosed on him the terrors of the Hanging
+Face.
+
+"What's this I hear of ye?" he asked.
+
+There was no answer possible to Archie.
+
+"I'll have to tell ye, then," pursued Hermiston.  "It seems ye've been
+skirting against the father that begot ye, and one of his Maijesty's
+Judges in this land; and that in the public street, and while an order of
+the Court was being executit.  Forbye which, it would appear that ye've
+been airing your opeenions in a Coallege Debatin' Society"; he paused a
+moment: and then, with extraordinary bitterness, added: "Ye damned
+eediot."
+
+"I had meant to tell you," stammered Archie.  "I see you are well
+informed."
+
+"Muckle obleeged to ye," said his lordship, and took his usual seat.
+"And so you disapprove of Caapital Punishment?" he added.
+
+"I am sorry, sir, I do," said Archie.
+
+"I am sorry, too," said his lordship.  "And now, if you please, we shall
+approach this business with a little more parteecularity.  I hear that at
+the hanging of Duncan Jopp--and, man! ye had a fine client there--in the
+middle of all the riff-raff of the ceety, ye thought fit to cry out,
+'This is a damned murder, and my gorge rises at the man that haangit
+him.'"
+
+"No, sir, these were not my words," cried Archie.
+
+"What were yer words, then?" asked the Judge.
+
+"I believe I said, 'I denounce it as a murder!'" said the son.  "I beg
+your pardon--a God-defying murder.  I have no wish to conceal the truth,"
+he added, and looked his father for a moment in the face.
+
+"God, it would only need that of it next!" cried Hermiston.  "There was
+nothing about your gorge rising, then?"
+
+"That was afterwards, my lord, as I was leaving the Speculative.  I said
+I had been to see the miserable creature hanged, and my gorge rose at
+it."
+
+"Did ye, though?" said Hermiston.  "And I suppose ye knew who haangit
+him?"
+
+"I was present at the trial, I ought to tell you that, I ought to
+explain.  I ask your pardon beforehand for any expression that may seem
+undutiful.  The position in which I stand is wretched," said the unhappy
+hero, now fairly face to face with the business he had chosen.  "I have
+been reading some of your cases.  I was present while Jopp was tried.  It
+was a hideous business.  Father, it was a hideous thing!  Grant he was
+vile, why should you hunt him with a vileness equal to his own?  It was
+done with glee--that is the word--you did it with glee; and I looked on,
+God help me! with horror."
+
+"You're a young gentleman that doesna approve of Caapital Punishment,"
+said Hermiston.  "Weel, I'm an auld man that does.  I was glad to get
+Jopp haangit, and what for would I pretend I wasna?  You're all for
+honesty, it seems; you couldn't even steik your mouth on the public
+street.  What for should I steik mines upon the bench, the King's
+officer, bearing the sword, a dreid to evil-doers, as I was from the
+beginning, and as I will be to the end!  Mair than enough of it!
+Heedious!  I never gave twa thoughts to heediousness, I have no call to
+be bonny.  I'm a man that gets through with my day's business, and let
+that suffice."
+
+The ring of sarcasm had died out of his voice as he went on; the plain
+words became invested with some of the dignity of the Justice-seat.
+
+"It would be telling you if you could say as much," the speaker resumed.
+"But ye cannot.  Ye've been reading some of my cases, ye say.  But it was
+not for the law in them, it was to spy out your faither's nakedness, a
+fine employment in a son.  You're splairging; you're running at lairge in
+life like a wild nowt.  It's impossible you should think any longer of
+coming to the Bar.  You're not fit for it; no splairger is.  And another
+thing: son of mines or no son of mines, you have flung fylement in public
+on one of the Senators of the Coallege of Justice, and I would make it my
+business to see that ye were never admitted there yourself.  There is a
+kind of a decency to be observit.  Then comes the next of it--what am I
+to do with ye next?  Ye'll have to find some kind of a trade, for I'll
+never support ye in idleset.  What do ye fancy ye'll be fit for?  The
+pulpit?  Na, they could never get diveenity into that bloackhead.  Him
+that the law of man whammles is no likely to do muckle better by the law
+of God.  What would ye make of hell?  Wouldna your gorge rise at that?
+Na, there's no room for splairgers under the fower quarters of John
+Calvin.  What else is there?  Speak up.  Have ye got nothing of your
+own?"
+
+"Father, let me go to the Peninsula," said Archie.  "That's all I'm fit
+for--to fight."
+
+"All? quo' he!" returned the Judge.  "And it would be enough too, if I
+thought it.  But I'll never trust ye so near the French, you that's so
+Frenchi-feed."
+
+"You do me injustice there, sir," said Archie.  "I am loyal; I will not
+boast; but any interest I may have ever felt in the French--"
+
+"Have ye been so loyal to me?" interrupted his father.
+
+There came no reply.
+
+"I think not," continued Hermiston.  "And I would send no man to be a
+servant to the King, God bless him! that has proved such a shauchling son
+to his own faither.  You can splairge here on Edinburgh street, and
+where's the hairm?  It doesna play buff on me!  And if there were twenty
+thousand eediots like yourself, sorrow a Duncan Jopp would hang the
+fewer.  But there's no splairging possible in a camp; and if ye were to
+go to it, you would find out for yourself whether Lord Well'n'ton
+approves of caapital punishment or not.  You a sodger!" he cried, with a
+sudden burst of scorn.  "Ye auld wife, the sodgers would bray at ye like
+cuddies!"
+
+As at the drawing of a curtain, Archie was aware of some illogicality in
+his position, and stood abashed.  He had a strong impression, besides, of
+the essential valour of the old gentleman before him, how conveyed it
+would be hard to say.
+
+"Well, have ye no other proposeetion?" said my lord again.
+
+"You have taken this so calmly, sir, that I cannot but stand ashamed,"
+began Archie.
+
+"I'm nearer voamiting, though, than you would fancy," said my lord.  The
+blood rose to Archie's brow.
+
+"I beg your pardon, I should have said that you had accepted my affront.
+. . . I admit it was an affront; I did not think to apologise, but I do,
+I ask your pardon; it will not be so again, I pass you my word of honour.
+. . . I should have said that I admired your magnanimity
+with--this--offender," Archie concluded with a gulp.
+
+"I have no other son, ye see," said Hermiston.  "A bonny one I have
+gotten!  But I must just do the best I can wi' him, and what am I to do?
+If ye had been younger, I would have wheepit ye for this rideeculous
+exhibeetion.  The way it is, I have just to grin and bear.  But one thing
+is to be clearly understood.  As a faither, I must grin and bear it; but
+if I had been the Lord Advocate instead of the Lord Justice-Clerk, son or
+no son, Mr. Erchibald Weir would have been in a jyle the night."
+
+Archie was now dominated.  Lord Hermiston was coarse and cruel; and yet
+the son was aware of a bloomless nobility, an ungracious abnegation of
+the man's self in the man's office.  At every word, this sense of the
+greatness of Lord Hermiston's spirit struck more home; and along with it
+that of his own impotence, who had struck--and perhaps basely struck--at
+his own father, and not reached so far as to have even nettled him.
+
+"I place myself in your hands without reserve," he said.
+
+"That's the first sensible word I've had of ye the night," said
+Hermiston.  "I can tell ye, that would have been the end of it, the one
+way or the other; but it's better ye should come there yourself, than
+what I would have had to hirstle ye.  Weel, by my way of it--and my way
+is the best--there's just the one thing it's possible that ye might be
+with decency, and that's a laird.  Ye'll be out of hairm's way at the
+least of it.  If ye have to rowt, ye can rowt amang the kye; and the
+maist feck of the caapital punishment ye're like to come across'll be
+guddling trouts.  Now, I'm for no idle lairdies; every man has to work,
+if it's only at peddling ballants; to work, or to be wheeped, or to be
+haangit.  If I set ye down at Hermiston I'll have to see you work that
+place the way it has never been workit yet; ye must ken about the sheep
+like a herd; ye must be my grieve there, and I'll see that I gain by ye.
+Is that understood?"
+
+"I will do my best," said Archie.
+
+"Well, then, I'll send Kirstie word the morn, and ye can go yourself the
+day after," said Hermiston.  "And just try to be less of an eediot!" he
+concluded with a freezing smile, and turned immediately to the papers on
+his desk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--OPINIONS OF THE BENCH
+
+
+Late the same night, after a disordered walk, Archie was admitted into
+Lord Glenalmond's dining-room, where he sat with a book upon his knee,
+beside three frugal coals of fire.  In his robes upon the bench,
+Glenalmond had a certain air of burliness: plucked of these, it was a
+may-pole of a man that rose unsteadily from his chair to give his visitor
+welcome.  Archie had suffered much in the last days, he had suffered
+again that evening; his face was white and drawn, his eyes wild and dark.
+But Lord Glenalmond greeted him without the least mark of surprise or
+curiosity.
+
+"Come in, come in," said he.  "Come in and take a seat.  Carstairs" (to
+his servant), "make up the fire, and then you can bring a bit of supper,"
+and again to Archie, with a very trivial accent: "I was half expecting
+you," he added.
+
+"No supper," said Archie.  "It is impossible that I should eat."
+
+"Not impossible," said the tall old man, laying his hand upon his
+shoulder, "and, if you will believe me, necessary."
+
+"You know what brings me?" said Archie, as soon as the servant had left
+the room.
+
+"I have a guess, I have a guess," replied Glenalmond.  "We will talk of
+it presently--when Carstairs has come and gone, and you have had a piece
+of my good Cheddar cheese and a pull at the porter tankard: not before."
+
+"It is impossible I should eat" repeated Archie.
+
+"Tut, tut!" said Lord Glenalmond.  "You have eaten nothing to-day, and I
+venture to add, nothing yesterday.  There is no case that may not be made
+worse; this may be a very disagreeable business, but if you were to fall
+sick and die, it would be still more so, and for all concerned--for all
+concerned."
+
+"I see you must know all," said Archie.  "Where did you hear it?"
+
+"In the mart of scandal, in the Parliament House," said Glenalmond.  "It
+runs riot below among the bar and the public, but it sifts up to us upon
+the bench, and rumour has some of her voices even in the divisions."
+
+Carstairs returned at this moment, and rapidly laid out a little supper;
+during which Lord Glenalmond spoke at large and a little vaguely on
+indifferent subjects, so that it might be rather said of him that he made
+a cheerful noise, than that he contributed to human conversation; and
+Archie sat upon the other side, not heeding him, brooding over his wrongs
+and errors.
+
+But so soon as the servant was gone, he broke forth again at once.  "Who
+told my father?  Who dared to tell him?  Could it have been you?"
+
+"No, it was not me," said the Judge; "although--to be quite frank with
+you, and after I had seen and warned you--it might have been me--I
+believe it was Glenkindie."
+
+"That shrimp!" cried Archie.
+
+"As you say, that shrimp," returned my lord; "although really it is
+scarce a fitting mode of expression for one of the senators of the
+College of Justice.  We were hearing the parties in a long, crucial case,
+before the fifteen; Creech was moving at some length for an infeftment;
+when I saw Glenkindie lean forward to Hermiston with his hand over his
+mouth and make him a secret communication.  No one could have guessed its
+nature from your father: from Glenkindie, yes, his malice sparked out of
+him a little grossly.  But your father, no.  A man of granite.  The next
+moment he pounced upon Creech.  'Mr. Creech,' says he, 'I'll take a look
+of that sasine,' and for thirty minutes after," said Glenalmond, with a
+smile, "Messrs. Creech and Co. were fighting a pretty up-hill battle,
+which resulted, I need hardly add, in their total rout.  The case was
+dismissed.  No, I doubt if ever I heard Hermiston better inspired.  He
+was literally rejoicing _in apicibus juris_."
+
+Archie was able to endure no longer.  He thrust his plate away and
+interrupted the deliberate and insignificant stream of talk.  "Here," he
+said, "I have made a fool of myself, if I have not made something worse.
+Do you judge between us--judge between a father and a son.  I can speak
+to you; it is not like . . . I will tell you what I feel and what I mean
+to do; and you shall be the judge," he repeated.
+
+"I decline jurisdiction," said Glenalmond, with extreme seriousness.
+"But, my dear boy, if it will do you any good to talk, and if it will
+interest you at all to hear what I may choose to say when I have heard
+you, I am quite at your command.  Let an old man say it, for once, and
+not need to blush: I love you like a son."
+
+There came a sudden sharp sound in Archie's throat.  "Ay," he cried, "and
+there it is!  Love!  Like a son!  And how do you think I love my father?"
+
+"Quietly, quietly," says my lord.
+
+"I will be very quiet," replied Archie.  "And I will be baldly frank.  I
+do not love my father; I wonder sometimes if I do not hate him.  There's
+my shame; perhaps my sin; at least, and in the sight of God, not my
+fault.  How was I to love him?  He has never spoken to me, never smiled
+upon me; I do not think he ever touched me.  You know the way he talks?
+You do not talk so, yet you can sit and hear him without shuddering, and
+I cannot.  My soul is sick when he begins with it; I could smite him in
+the mouth.  And all that's nothing.  I was at the trial of this Jopp.
+You were not there, but you must have heard him often; the man's
+notorious for it, for being--look at my position! he's my father and this
+is how I have to speak of him--notorious for being a brute and cruel and
+a coward.  Lord Glenalmond, I give you my word, when I came out of that
+Court, I longed to die--the shame of it was beyond my strength: but
+I--I--" he rose from his seat and began to pace the room in a disorder.
+"Well, who am I?  A boy, who have never been tried, have never done
+anything except this twopenny impotent folly with my father.  But I tell
+you, my lord, and I know myself, I am at least that kind of a man--or
+that kind of a boy, if you prefer it--that I could die in torments rather
+than that any one should suffer as that scoundrel suffered.  Well, and
+what have I done?  I see it now.  I have made a fool of myself, as I said
+in the beginning; and I have gone back, and asked my father's pardon, and
+placed myself wholly in his hands--and he has sent me to Hermiston," with
+a wretched smile, "for life, I suppose--and what can I say? he strikes me
+as having done quite right, and let me off better than I had deserved."
+
+"My poor, dear boy!" observed Glenalmond.  "My poor dear and, if you will
+allow me to say so, very foolish boy!  You are only discovering where you
+are; to one of your temperament, or of mine, a painful discovery.  The
+world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men,
+all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there,
+we just have to sclamber and tumble.  Don't think that I am at all
+disposed to be surprised; don't suppose that I ever think of blaming you;
+indeed I rather admire!  But there fall to be offered one or two
+observations on the case which occur to me and which (if you will listen
+to them dispassionately) may be the means of inducing you to view the
+matter more calmly.  First of all, I cannot acquit you of a good deal of
+what is called intolerance.  You seem to have been very much offended
+because your father talks a little sculduddery after dinner, which it is
+perfectly licit for him to do, and which (although I am not very fond of
+it myself) appears to be entirely an affair of taste.  Your father, I
+scarcely like to remind you, since it is so trite a commonplace, is older
+than yourself.  At least, he is _major_ and _sui juris_, and may please
+himself in the matter of his conversation.  And, do you know, I wonder if
+he might not have as good an answer against you and me?  We say we
+sometimes find him _coarse_, but I suspect he might retort that he finds
+us always dull.  Perhaps a relevant exception."
+
+He beamed on Archie, but no smile could be elicited.
+
+"And now," proceeded the Judge, "for 'Archibald on Capital Punishment.'
+This is a very plausible academic opinion; of course I do not and I
+cannot hold it; but that's not to say that many able and excellent
+persons have not done so in the past.  Possibly, in the past also, I may
+have a little dipped myself in the same heresy.  My third client, or
+possibly my fourth, was the means of a return in my opinions.  I never
+saw the man I more believed in; I would have put my hand in the fire, I
+would have gone to the cross for him; and when it came to trial he was
+gradually pictured before me, by undeniable probation, in the light of so
+gross, so cold-blooded, and so black-hearted a villain, that I had a mind
+to have cast my brief upon the table.  I was then boiling against the man
+with even a more tropical temperature than I had been boiling for him.
+But I said to myself: 'No, you have taken up his case; and because you
+have changed your mind it must not be suffered to let drop.  All that
+rich tide of eloquence that you prepared last night with so much
+enthusiasm is out of place, and yet you must not desert him, you must say
+something.'  So I said something, and I got him off.  It made my
+reputation.  But an experience of that kind is formative.  A man must not
+bring his passions to the bar--or to the bench," he added.
+
+The story had slightly rekindled Archie's interest.  "I could never
+deny," he began--"I mean I can conceive that some men would be better
+dead.  But who are we to know all the springs of God's unfortunate
+creatures?  Who are we to trust ourselves where it seems that God Himself
+must think twice before He treads, and to do it with delight? Yes, with
+delight.  _Tigris ut aspera_."
+
+"Perhaps not a pleasant spectacle," said Glenalmond.  "And yet, do you
+know, I think somehow a great one."
+
+"I've had a long talk with him to-night," said Archie.
+
+"I was supposing so," said Glenalmond.
+
+"And he struck me--I cannot deny that he struck me as something very
+big," pursued the son.  "Yes, he is big.  He never spoke about himself;
+only about me.  I suppose I admired him.  The dreadful part--"
+
+"Suppose we did not talk about that," interrupted Glenalmond.  "You know
+it very well, it cannot in any way help that you should brood upon it,
+and I sometimes wonder whether you and I--who are a pair of
+sentimentalists--are quite good judges of plain men."
+
+"How do you mean?" asked Archie.
+
+"_Fair_ judges, mean," replied Glenalmond.  "Can we be just to them?  Do
+we not ask too much?  There was a word of yours just now that impressed
+me a little when you asked me who we were to know all the springs of
+God's unfortunate creatures.  You applied that, as I understood, to
+capital cases only.  But does it--I ask myself--does it not apply all
+through?  Is it any less difficult to judge of a good man or of a
+half-good man, than of the worst criminal at the bar?  And may not each
+have relevant excuses?"
+
+"Ah, but we do not talk of punishing the good," cried Archie.
+
+"No, we do not talk of it," said Glenalmond.  "But I think we do it.
+Your father, for instance."
+
+"You think I have punished him?" cried Archie.
+
+Lord Glenalmond bowed his head.
+
+"I think I have," said Archie.  "And the worst is, I think he feels it!
+How much, who can tell, with such a being?  But I think he does."
+
+"And I am sure of it," said Glenalmond.
+
+"Has he spoken to you, then?" cried Archie.
+
+"O no," replied the judge.
+
+"I tell you honestly," said Archie, "I want to make it up to him.  I will
+go, I have already pledged myself to go to Hermiston.  That was to him.
+And now I pledge myself to you, in the sight of God, that I will close my
+mouth on capital punishment and all other subjects where our views may
+clash, for--how long shall I say? when shall I have sense enough?--ten
+years.  Is that well?"
+
+"It is well," said my lord.
+
+"As far as it goes," said Archie.  "It is enough as regards myself, it is
+to lay down enough of my conceit.  But as regards him, whom I have
+publicly insulted?  What am I to do to him?  How do you pay attentions to
+a--an Alp like that?"
+
+"Only in one way," replied Glenalmond.  "Only by obedience, punctual,
+prompt, and scrupulous."
+
+"And I promise that he shall have it," answered Archie.  "I offer you my
+hand in pledge of it."
+
+"And I take your hand as a solemnity," replied the judge.  "God bless
+you, my dear, and enable you to keep your promise.  God guide you in the
+true way, and spare your days, and preserve to you your honest heart." At
+that, he kissed the young man upon the forehead in a gracious, distant,
+antiquated way; and instantly launched, with a marked change of voice,
+into another subject.  "And now, let us replenish the tankard; and I
+believe if you will try my Cheddar again, you would find you had a better
+appetite.  The Court has spoken, and the case is dismissed."
+
+"No, there is one thing I must say," cried Archie.  "I must say it in
+justice to himself.  I know--I believe faithfully, slavishly, after our
+talk--he will never ask me anything unjust.  I am proud to feel it, that
+we have that much in common, I am proud to say it to you."
+
+The Judge, with shining eyes, raised his tankard.  "And I think perhaps
+that we might permit ourselves a toast," said he.  "I should like to
+propose the health of a man very different from me and very much my
+superior--a man from whom I have often differed, who has often (in the
+trivial expression) rubbed me the wrong way, but whom I have never ceased
+to respect and, I may add, to be not a little afraid of.  Shall I give
+you his name?"
+
+"The Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Hermiston," said Archie, almost with
+gaiety; and the pair drank the toast deeply.
+
+It was not precisely easy to re-establish, after these emotional
+passages, the natural flow of conversation.  But the Judge eked out what
+was wanting with kind looks, produced his snuff-box (which was very
+rarely seen) to fill in a pause, and at last, despairing of any further
+social success, was upon the point of getting down a book to read a
+favourite passage, when there came a rather startling summons at the
+front door, and Carstairs ushered in my Lord Glenkindie, hot from a
+midnight supper.  I am not aware that Glenkindie was ever a beautiful
+object, being short, and gross-bodied, and with an expression of
+sensuality comparable to a bear's.  At that moment, coming in hissing
+from many potations, with a flushed countenance and blurred eyes, he was
+strikingly contrasted with the tall, pale, kingly figure of Glenalmond.
+A rush of confused thought came over Archie--of shame that this was one
+of his father's elect friends; of pride, that at the least of it
+Hermiston could carry his liquor; and last of all, of rage, that he
+should have here under his eyes the man that had betrayed him.  And then
+that too passed away; and he sat quiet, biding his opportunity.
+
+The tipsy senator plunged at once into an explanation with Glenalmond.
+There was a point reserved yesterday, he had been able to make neither
+head nor tail of it, and seeing lights in the house, he had just dropped
+in for a glass of porter--and at this point he became aware of the third
+person.  Archie saw the cod's mouth and the blunt lips of Glenkindie gape
+at him for a moment, and the recognition twinkle in his eyes.
+
+"Who's this?" said he.  "What? is this possibly you, Don Quickshot?  And
+how are ye?  And how's your father?  And what's all this we hear of you?
+It seems you're a most extraordinary leveller, by all tales.  No king, no
+parliaments, and your gorge rises at the macers, worthy men!  Hoot, toot!
+Dear, dear me!  Your father's son too!  Most rideeculous!"
+
+Archie was on his feet, flushing a little at the reappearance of his
+unhappy figure of speech, but perfectly self-possessed.  "My lord--and
+you, Lord Glenalmond, my dear friend," he began, "this is a happy chance
+for me, that I can make my confession and offer my apologies to two of
+you at once."
+
+"Ah, but I don't know about that.  Confession?  It'll be judeecial, my
+young friend," cried the jocular Glenkindie.  "And I'm afraid to listen
+to ye.  Think if ye were to make me a coanvert!"
+
+"If you would allow me, my lord," returned Archie, "what I have to say is
+very serious to me; and be pleased to be humorous after I am gone!"
+
+"Remember, I'll hear nothing against the macers!" put in the incorrigible
+Glenkindie.
+
+But Archie continued as though he had not spoken.  "I have played, both
+yesterday and to-day, a part for which I can only offer the excuse of
+youth.  I was so unwise as to go to an execution; it seems I made a scene
+at the gallows; not content with which, I spoke the same night in a
+college society against capital punishment.  This is the extent of what I
+have done, and in case you hear more alleged against me, I protest my
+innocence.  I have expressed my regret already to my father, who is so
+good as to pass my conduct over--in a degree, and upon the condition that
+I am to leave my law studies." . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--WINTER ON THE MOORS
+
+
+I. At Hermiston
+
+
+The road to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a
+stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and
+pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch.  Here and there,
+but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may
+be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time,
+the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation.
+Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; and, by the
+time you came that length, you would scarce be surprised at the
+inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated for
+fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score
+gravestones.  The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is
+surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of
+bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds
+harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great
+silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn, and
+the bell on Sundays.  A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the valley
+by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the place of
+Hermiston, where it comes to an end in the back-yard before the
+coach-house.  All beyond and about is the great field, of the hills; the
+plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows in
+a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle one
+behind another like a herd of cattle into the sunset.
+
+The house was sixty years old, unsightly, comfortable; a farmyard and a
+kitchen-garden on the left, with a fruit wall where little hard green
+pears came to their maturity about the end of October.
+
+The policy (as who should say the park) was of some extent, but very ill
+reclaimed; heather and moorfowl had crossed the boundary wall and spread
+and roosted within; and it would have tasked a landscape gardener to say
+where policy ended and unpolicied nature began.  My lord had been led by
+the influence of Mr. Sheriff Scott into a considerable design of
+planting; many acres were accordingly set out with fir, and the little
+feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop
+to the moors.  A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at
+all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds.  Standing so
+high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed
+by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout,
+beaten upon and buffeted by all the winds of heaven; and the prospect
+would be often black with tempest, and often white with the snows of
+winter.  But the house was wind and weather proof, the hearths were kept
+bright, and the rooms pleasant with live fires of peat; and Archie might
+sit of an evening and hear the squalls bugle on the moorland, and watch
+the fire prosper in the earthy fuel, and the smoke winding up the
+chimney, and drink deep of the pleasures of shelter.
+
+Solitary as the place was, Archie did not want neighbours.  Every night,
+if he chose, he might go down to the manse and share a "brewst" of toddy
+with the minister--a hare-brained ancient gentleman, long and light and
+still active, though his knees were loosened with age, and his voice
+broke continually in childish trebles--and his lady wife, a heavy, comely
+dame, without a word to say for herself beyond good-even and good-day.
+Harum-scarum, clodpole young lairds of the neighbourhood paid him the
+compliment of a visit.  Young Hay of Romanes rode down to call, on his
+crop-eared pony; young Pringle of Drumanno came up on his bony grey.  Hay
+remained on the hospitable field, and must be carried to bed; Pringle got
+somehow to his saddle about 3 A.M., and (as Archie stood with the lamp on
+the upper doorstep) lurched, uttered a senseless view-holloa, and
+vanished out of the small circle of illumination like a wraith.  Yet a
+minute or two longer the clatter of his break-neck flight was audible,
+then it was cut off by the intervening steepness of the hill; and again,
+a great while after, the renewed beating of phantom horse-hoofs, far in
+the valley of the Hermiston, showed that the horse at least, if not his
+rider, was still on the homeward way.
+
+There was a Tuesday club at the "Cross-keys" in Crossmichael, where the
+young bloods of the country-side congregated and drank deep on a
+percentage of the expense, so that he was left gainer who should have
+drunk the most.  Archie had no great mind to this diversion, but he took
+it like a duty laid upon him, went with a decent regularity, did his
+manfullest with the liquor, held up his head in the local jests, and got
+home again and was able to put up his horse, to the admiration of Kirstie
+and the lass that helped her.  He dined at Driffel, supped at Windielaws.
+He went to the new year's ball at Huntsfield and was made welcome, and
+thereafter rode to hounds with my Lord Muirfell, upon whose name, as that
+of a legitimate Lord of Parliament, in a work so full of Lords of
+Session, my pen should pause reverently.  Yet the same fate attended him
+here as in Edinburgh.  The habit of solitude tends to perpetuate itself,
+and an austerity of which he was quite unconscious, and a pride which
+seemed arrogance, and perhaps was chiefly shyness, discouraged and
+offended his new companions.  Hay did not return more than twice, Pringle
+never at all, and there came a time when Archie even desisted from the
+Tuesday Club, and became in all things--what he had had the name of
+almost from the first--the Recluse of Hermiston.  High-nosed Miss Pringle
+of Drumanno and high-stepping Miss Marshall of the Mains were understood
+to have had a difference of opinion about him the day after the ball--he
+was none the wiser, he could not suppose himself to be remarked by these
+entrancing ladies.  At the ball itself my Lord Muirfell's daughter, the
+Lady Flora, spoke to him twice, and the second time with a touch of
+appeal, so that her colour rose and her voice trembled a little in his
+ear, like a passing grace in music.  He stepped back with a heart on
+fire, coldly and not ungracefully excused himself, and a little after
+watched her dancing with young Drumanno of the empty laugh, and was
+harrowed at the sight, and raged to himself that this was a world in
+which it was given to Drumanno to please, and to himself only to stand
+aside and envy.  He seemed excluded, as of right, from the favour of such
+society--seemed to extinguish mirth wherever he came, and was quick to
+feel the wound, and desist, and retire into solitude.  If he had but
+understood the figure he presented, and the impression he made on these
+bright eyes and tender hearts; if he had but guessed that the Recluse of
+Hermiston, young, graceful, well spoken, but always cold, stirred the
+maidens of the county with the charm of Byronism when Byronism was new,
+it may be questioned whether his destiny might not even yet have been
+modified.  It may be questioned, and I think it should be doubted.  It
+was in his horoscope to be parsimonious of pain to himself, or of the
+chance of pain, even to the avoidance of any opportunity of pleasure; to
+have a Roman sense of duty, an instinctive aristocracy of manners and
+taste; to be the son of Adam Weir and Jean Rutherford.
+
+
+
+2. Kirstie
+
+
+Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor.  Long of
+limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden
+hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed
+and embellished her.  By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she
+seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother of their
+children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her
+youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman.
+The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and
+disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury
+of interference.  She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she
+washed floors with her empty heart.  If she could not win the love of one
+with love, she must dominate all by her temper.  Hasty, wordy, and
+wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with
+the others not much more than armed neutrality.  The grieve's wife had
+been "sneisty"; the sister of the gardener who kept house for him had
+shown herself "upsitten"; and she wrote to Lord Hermiston about once a
+year demanding the discharge of the offenders, and justifying the demand
+by much wealth of detail.  For it must not be supposed that the quarrel
+rested with the wife and did not take in the husband also--or with the
+gardener's sister, and did not speedily include the gardener himself.  As
+the upshot of all this petty quarrelling and intemperate speech, she was
+practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts
+of human association; except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a
+lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of
+"the mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets
+or caresses according to the temper of the hour.  To Kirstie, thus
+situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit
+to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie's presence.
+She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and
+yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and
+had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather
+melancholy young gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a
+new acquaintance.  He was "Young Hermiston," "the laird himsel'": he had
+an air of distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black
+eyes, that abashed the woman's tantrums in the beginning, and therefore
+the possibility of any quarrel was excluded.  He was new, and therefore
+immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.
+And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the
+everlasting fountains of interest.
+
+Her feeling partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of a
+maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a god.  No matter what he had asked
+of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would have done it and joyed to do it.
+Her passion, for it was nothing less, entirely filled her.  It was a rich
+physical pleasure to make his bed or light his lamp for him when he was
+absent, to pull off his wet boots or wait on him at dinner when he
+returned.  A young man who should have so doted on the idea, moral and
+physical, of any woman, might be properly described as being in love,
+head and heels, and would have behaved himself accordingly.  But
+Kirstie--though her heart leaped at his coming footsteps--though, when he
+patted her shoulder, her face brightened for the day--had not a hope or
+thought beyond the present moment and its perpetuation to the end of
+time.  Till the end of time she would have had nothing altered, but still
+continue delightedly to serve her idol, and be repaid (say twice in the
+month) with a clap on the shoulder.
+
+I have said her heart leaped--it is the accepted phrase.  But rather,
+when she was alone in any chamber of the house, and heard his foot
+passing on the corridors, something in her bosom rose slowly until her
+breath was suspended, and as slowly fell again with a deep sigh, when the
+steps had passed and she was disappointed of her eyes' desire.  This
+perpetual hunger and thirst of his presence kept her all day on the
+alert.  When he went forth at morning, she would stand and follow him
+with admiring looks.  As it grew late and drew to the time of his return,
+she would steal forth to a corner of the policy wall and be seen standing
+there sometimes by the hour together, gazing with shaded eyes, waiting
+the exquisite and barren pleasure of his view a mile off on the
+mountains.  When at night she had trimmed and gathered the fire, turned
+down his bed, and laid out his night-gear--when there was no more to be
+done for the king's pleasure, but to remember him fervently in her
+usually very tepid prayers, and go to bed brooding upon his perfections,
+his future career, and what she should give him the next day for
+dinner--there still remained before her one more opportunity; she was
+still to take in the tray and say good-night.  Sometimes Archie would
+glance up from his book with a preoccupied nod and a perfunctory
+salutation which was in truth a dismissal; sometimes--and by degrees more
+often--the volume would be laid aside, he would meet her coming with a
+look of relief; and the conversation would be engaged, last out the
+supper, and be prolonged till the small hours by the waning fire.  It was
+no wonder that Archie was fond of company after his solitary days; and
+Kirstie, upon her side, exerted all the arts of her vigorous nature to
+ensnare his attention.  She would keep back some piece of news during
+dinner to be fired off with the entrance of the supper tray, and form as
+it were the _lever de rideau_ of the evening's entertainment.  Once he
+had heard her tongue wag, she made sure of the result.  From one subject
+to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing the least silence,
+fearing almost to give him time for an answer lest it should slip into a
+hint of separation.  Like so many people of her class, she was a brave
+narrator; her place was on the hearth-rug and she made it a rostrum,
+mimeing her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail,
+spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her voice
+sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she
+would suddenly spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to the clock,
+"Mercy, Mr. Archie!" she would say, "whatten a time o' night is this of
+it!  God forgive me for a daft wife!"  So it befell, by good management,
+that she was not only the first to begin these nocturnal conversations,
+but invariably the first to break them off; so she managed to retire and
+not to be dismissed.
+
+
+
+3. A Border Family
+
+
+Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the
+clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the
+same service, a helpmeet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a
+pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride
+of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master's,
+and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship
+with some illustrious dead.  For that is the mark of the Scot of all
+classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to
+Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good
+or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead
+even to the twentieth generation.  No more characteristic instance could
+be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott.  They were all, and
+Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars
+of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed
+down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that
+tree there dangled a halter.  The Elliotts themselves have had a
+chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of the
+most unfortunate of the border clans--the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the
+Crozers.  One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a moment out
+of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business, speeding home,
+perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame horses and lean kine, or squealing
+and dealing death in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats.
+One after another closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to
+the arm of the royal gibbet or the Baron's dule-tree.  For the rusty
+blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but
+jurymen, became a weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and
+the Crozers.  The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the
+memories of their descendants alone, and the shame to be forgotten.
+Pride glowed in their bosoms to publish their relationship to "Andrew
+Ellwald of the Laverockstanes, called 'Unchancy Dand,' who was justifeed
+wi' seeven mair of the same name at Jeddart in the days of King James the
+Sax."  In all this tissue of crime and misfortune, the Elliotts of
+Cauldstaneslap had one boast which must appear legitimate: the males were
+gallows-birds, born outlaws, petty thieves, and deadly brawlers; but,
+according to the same tradition, the females were all chaste and
+faithful.  The power of ancestry on the character is not limited to the
+inheritance of cells.  If I buy ancestors by the gross from the
+benevolence of Lyon King of Arms, my grandson (if he is Scottish) will
+feel a quickening emulation of their deeds.  The men of the Elliotts were
+proud, lawless, violent as of right, cherishing and prolonging a
+tradition.  In like manner with the women.  And the woman, essentially
+passionate and reckless, who crouched on the rug, in the shine of the
+peat fire, telling these tales, had cherished through life a wild
+integrity of virtue.
+
+Her father Gilbert had been deeply pious, a savage disciplinarian in the
+antique style, and withal a notorious smuggler.  "I mind when I was a
+bairn getting mony a skelp and being shoo'd to bed like pou'try," she
+would say.  "That would be when the lads and their bit kegs were on the
+road.  We've had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen,
+mony's the time, betwix' the twelve and the three; and their lanterns
+would be standing in the forecourt, ay, a score o' them at once.  But
+there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap.  My faither was a
+consistent man in walk and conversation; just let slip an aith, and there
+was the door to ye!  He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair wonder
+to hear him pray, but the family has aye had a gift that way." This
+father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald stock,
+by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and, secondly, to
+the mother of Kirstie.  "He was an auld man when he married her, a fell
+auld man wi' a muckle voice--you could hear him rowting from the top o'
+the Kye-skairs," she said; "but for her, it appears she was a perfit
+wonder.  It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it was your ain.
+The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair.  Mines is no to
+be mentioned wi' it, and there's few weemen has mair hair than what I
+have, or yet a bonnier colour.  Often would I tell my dear Miss
+Jeannie--that was your mother, dear, she was cruel ta'en up about her
+hair, it was unco' tender, ye see--'Houts, Miss Jeannie,' I would say,
+'just fling your washes and your French dentifrishes in the back o' the
+fire, for that's the place for them; and awa' down to a burn side, and
+wash yersel' in cauld hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the caller
+wind o' the muirs, the way that my mother aye washed hers, and that I
+have aye made it a practice to have wishen mines--just you do what I tell
+ye, my dear, and ye'll give me news of it!  Ye'll have hair, and routh of
+hair, a pigtail as thick's my arm,' I said, 'and the bonniest colour like
+the clear gowden guineas, so as the lads in kirk'll no can keep their
+eyes off it!'  Weel, it lasted out her time, puir thing!  I cuttit a lock
+of it upon her corp that was lying there sae cauld.  I'll show it ye some
+of thir days if ye're good.  But, as I was sayin', my mither--"
+
+On the death of the father there remained golden-haired Kirstie, who took
+service with her distant kinsfolk, the Rutherfords, and black-a-vised
+Gilbert, twenty years older, who farmed the Cauldstaneslap, married, and
+begot four sons between 1773 and 1784, and a daughter, like a postscript,
+in '97, the year of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent.  It seemed it was a
+tradition in the family to wind up with a belated girl.  In 1804, at the
+age of sixty, Gilbert met an end that might be called heroic.  He was due
+home from market any time from eight at night till five in the morning,
+and in any condition from the quarrelsome to the speechless, for he
+maintained to that age the goodly customs of the Scots farmer.  It was
+known on this occasion that he had a good bit of money to bring home; the
+word had gone round loosely.  The laird had shown his guineas, and if
+anybody had but noticed it, there was an ill-looking, vagabond crew, the
+scum of Edinburgh, that drew out of the market long ere it was dusk and
+took the hill-road by Hermiston, where it was not to be believed that
+they had lawful business.  One of the country-side, one Dickieson, they
+took with them to be their guide, and dear he paid for it!  Of a sudden
+in the ford of the Broken Dykes, this vermin clan fell on the laird, six
+to one, and him three parts asleep, having drunk hard.  But it is ill to
+catch an Elliott.  For a while, in the night and the black water that was
+deep as to his saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at
+his stithy, and great was the sound of oaths and blows.  With that the
+ambuscade was burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball in him,
+three knife wounds, the loss of his front teeth, a broken rib and bridle,
+and a dying horse.  That was a race with death that the laird rode!  In
+the mirk night, with his broken bridle and his head swimming, he dug his
+spurs to the rowels in the horse's side, and the horse, that was even
+worse off than himself, the poor creature! screamed out loud like a
+person as he went, so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at
+Cauldstaneslap got to their feet about the table and looked at each other
+with white faces.  The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird won
+the length of the house and fell there on the threshold.  To the son that
+raised him he gave the bag of money.  "Hae," said he.  All the way up the
+thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination
+left him--he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade--and the thirst
+of vengeance seized on his dying mind.  Raising himself and pointing with
+an imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he
+uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted.  He had never
+been loved, but he had been feared in honour.  At that sight, at that
+word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old
+Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons.  "Wanting the hat,"
+continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told
+this tale like one inspired, "wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o'
+pouder in the house, wi' nae mair weepons than their sticks into their
+hands, the fower o' them took the road.  Only Hob, and that was the
+eldest, hunkered at the doorsill where the blood had rin, fyled his hand
+wi' it--and haddit it up to Heeven in the way o' the auld Border aith.
+'Hell shall have her ain again this nicht!' he raired, and rode forth
+upon his earrand."  It was three miles to Broken Dykes, down hill, and a
+sore road.  Kirstie has seen men from Edinburgh dismounting there in
+plain day to lead their horses.  But the four brothers rode it as if Auld
+Hornie were behind and Heaven in front.  Come to the ford, and there was
+Dickieson.  By all tales, he was not dead, but breathed and reared upon
+his elbow, and cried out to them for help.  It was at a graceless face
+that he asked mercy.  As soon as Hob saw, by the glint of the lantern,
+the eyes shining and the whiteness of the teeth in the man's face, "Damn
+you!" says he; "ye hae your teeth, hae ye?" and rode his horse to and fro
+upon that human remnant.  Beyond that, Dandie must dismount with the
+lantern to be their guide; he was the youngest son, scarce twenty at the
+time.  "A' nicht long they gaed in the wet heath and jennipers, and whaur
+they gaed they neither knew nor cared, but just followed the bluid stains
+and the footprints o' their faither's murderers.  And a' nicht Dandie had
+his nose to the grund like a tyke, and the ithers followed and spak'
+naething, neither black nor white.  There was nae noise to be heard, but
+just the sough of the swalled burns, and Hob, the dour yin, risping his
+teeth as he gaed." With the first glint of the morning they saw they were
+on the drove road, and at that the four stopped and had a dram to their
+breakfasts, for they knew that Dand must have guided them right, and the
+rogues could be but little ahead, hot foot for Edinburgh by the way of
+the Pentland Hills.  By eight o'clock they had word of them--a shepherd
+had seen four men "uncoly mishandled" go by in the last hour.  "That's
+yin a piece," says Clem, and swung his cudgel.  "Five o' them!" says Hob.
+"God's death, but the faither was a man!  And him drunk!"  And then there
+befell them what my author termed "a sair misbegowk," for they were
+overtaken by a posse of mounted neighbours come to aid in the pursuit.
+Four sour faces looked on the reinforcement.  "The Deil's broughten you!"
+said Clem, and they rode thenceforward in the rear of the party with
+hanging heads.  Before ten they had found and secured the rogues, and by
+three of the afternoon, as they rode up the Vennel with their prisoners,
+they were aware of a concourse of people bearing in their midst something
+that dripped.  "For the boady of the saxt," pursued Kirstie, "wi' his
+head smashed like a hazelnit, had been a' that nicht in the chairge o'
+Hermiston Water, and it dunting it on the stanes, and grunding it on the
+shallows, and flinging the deid thing heels-ower-hurdie at the Fa's o'
+Spango; and in the first o' the day, Tweed had got a hold o' him and
+carried him off like a wind, for it was uncoly swalled, and raced wi'
+him, bobbing under brae-sides, and was long playing with the creature in
+the drumlie lynns under the castle, and at the hinder end of all cuist
+him up on the starling of Crossmichael brig.  Sae there they were
+a'thegither at last (for Dickieson had been brought in on a cart long
+syne), and folk could see what mainner o'man my brither had been that had
+held his head again sax and saved the siller, and him drunk!"  Thus died
+of honourable injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the
+Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less glory out of the business.
+Their savage haste, the skill with which Dand had found and followed the
+trail, the barbarity to the wounded Dickieson (which was like an open
+secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they
+had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination.
+Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the
+last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit
+was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the
+degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to
+make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve
+Apostles" or the "Three Musketeers."
+
+Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew--in the proper Border diminutives,
+Hob, Gib, Clem, and Dand Elliott--these ballad heroes, had much in
+common; in particular, their high sense of the family and the family
+honour; but they went diverse ways, and prospered and failed in different
+businesses.  According to Kirstie, "they had a' bees in their bonnets but
+Hob."  Hob the laird was, indeed, essentially a decent man.  An elder of
+the Kirk, nobody had heard an oath upon his lips, save perhaps thrice or
+so at the sheep-washing, since the chase of his father's murderers.  The
+figure he had shown on that eventful night disappeared as if swallowed by
+a trap.  He who had ecstatically dipped his hand in the red blood, he who
+had ridden down Dickieson, became, from that moment on, a stiff and
+rather graceless model of the rustic proprieties; cannily profiting by
+the high war prices, and yearly stowing away a little nest-egg in the
+bank against calamity; approved of and sometimes consulted by the greater
+lairds for the massive and placid sense of what he said, when he could be
+induced to say anything; and particularly valued by the minister, Mr.
+Torrance, as a right-hand man in the parish, and a model to parents.  The
+transfiguration had been for the moment only; some Barbarossa, some old
+Adam of our ancestors, sleeps in all of us till the fit circumstance
+shall call it into action; and, for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had
+given once for all the measure of the devil that haunted him.  He was
+married, and, by reason of the effulgence of that legendary night, was
+adored by his wife.  He had a mob of little lusty, barefoot children who
+marched in a caravan the long miles to school, the stages of whose
+pilgrimage were marked by acts of spoliation and mischief, and who were
+qualified in the country-side as "fair pests."  But in the house, if
+"faither was in," they were quiet as mice.  In short, Hob moved through
+life in a great peace--the reward of any one who shall have killed his
+man, with any formidable and figurative circumstance, in the midst of a
+country gagged and swaddled with civilisation.
+
+It was a current remark that the Elliotts were "guid and bad, like
+sanguishes"; and certainly there was a curious distinction, the men of
+business coming alternately with the dreamers.  The second brother, Gib,
+was a weaver by trade, had gone out early into the world to Edinburgh,
+and come home again with his wings singed.  There was an exaltation in
+his nature which had led him to embrace with enthusiasm the principles of
+the French Revolution, and had ended by bringing him under the hawse of
+my Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon the Liberals,
+which sent Muir and Palmer into exile and dashed the party into chaff.
+It was whispered that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement, and
+prevailed upon a little by a sense of neighbourliness, had given Gib a
+hint.  Meeting him one day in the Potterrow, my lord had stopped in front
+of him: "Gib, ye eediot," he had said, "what's this I hear of you?
+Poalitics, poalitics, poalitics, weaver's poalitics, is the way of it, I
+hear.  If ye arena a'thegither dozened with cediocy, ye'll gang your ways
+back to Cauldstaneslap, and ca' your loom, and ca' your loom, man!" And
+Gilbert had taken him at the word and returned, with an expedition almost
+to be called flight, to the house of his father.  The clearest of his
+inheritance was that family gift of prayer of which Kirstie had boasted;
+and the baffled politician now turned his attention to religious
+matters--or, as others said, to heresy and schism.  Every Sunday morning
+he was in Crossmichael, where he had gathered together, one by one, a
+sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves "God's Remnant of
+the True Faithful," or, for short, "God's Remnant." To the profane, they
+were known as "Gib's Deils."  Bailie Sweedie, a noted humorist in the
+town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to the tune of "The Deil
+Fly Away with the Exciseman," and that the sacrament was dispensed in the
+form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked hits at the evangelist, who had
+been suspected of smuggling in his youth, and had been overtaken (as the
+phrase went) on the streets of Crossmichael one Fair day.  It was known
+that every Sunday they prayed for a blessing on the arms of Bonaparte.
+For this "God's Remnant," as they were "skailing" from the cottage that
+did duty for a temple, had been repeatedly stoned by the bairns, and Gib
+himself hooted by a squadron of Border volunteers in which his own
+brother, Dand, rode in a uniform and with a drawn sword.  The "Remnant"
+were believed, besides, to be "antinomian in principle," which might
+otherwise have been a serious charge, but the way public opinion then
+blew it was quite swallowed up and forgotten in the scandal about
+Bonaparte.  For the rest, Gilbert had set up his loom in an outhouse at
+Cauldstaneslap, where he laboured assiduously six days of the week.  His
+brothers, appalled by his political opinions, and willing to avoid
+dissension in the household, spoke but little to him; he less to them,
+remaining absorbed in the study of the Bible and almost constant prayer.
+The gaunt weaver was dry-nurse at Cauldstaneslap, and the bairns loved
+him dearly.  Except when he was carrying an infant in his arms, he was
+rarely seen to smile--as, indeed, there were few smilers in that family.
+When his sister-in-law rallied him, and proposed that he should get a
+wife and bairns of his own, since he was so fond of them, "I have no
+clearness of mind upon that point," he would reply.  If nobody called him
+in to dinner, he stayed out.  Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, once
+tried the experiment.  He went without food all day, but at dusk, as the
+light began to fail him, he came into the house of his own accord,
+looking puzzled.  "I've had a great gale of prayer upon my speerit," said
+he.  "I canna mind sae muckle's what I had for denner." The creed of
+God's Remnant was justified in the life of its founder.  "And yet I dinna
+ken," said Kirstie.  "He's maybe no more stockfish than his neeghbours!
+He rode wi' the rest o' them, and had a good stamach to the work, by a'
+that I hear!  God's Remnant!  The deil's clavers!  There wasna muckle
+Christianity in the way Hob guided Johnny Dickieson, at the least of it;
+but Guid kens!  Is he a Christian even?  He might be a Mahommedan or a
+Deevil or a Fire-worshipper, for what I ken."
+
+The third brother had his name on a door-plate, no less, in the city of
+Glasgow, "Mr. Clement Elliott," as long as your arm.  In his case, that
+spirit of innovation which had shown itself timidly in the case of Hob by
+the admission of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert in
+subversive politics and heretical religions, bore useful fruit in many
+ingenious mechanical improvements.  In boyhood, from his addiction to
+strange devices of sticks and string, he had been counted the most
+eccentric of the family.  But that was all by now; and he was a partner
+of his firm, and looked to die a bailie.  He too had married, and was
+rearing a plentiful family in the smoke and din of Glasgow; he was
+wealthy, and could have bought out his brother, the cock-laird, six times
+over, it was whispered; and when he slipped away to Cauldstaneslap for a
+well-earned holiday, which he did as often as he was able, he astonished
+the neighbours with his broadcloth, his beaver hat, and the ample plies
+of his neckcloth.  Though an eminently solid man at bottom, after the
+pattern of Hob, he had contracted a certain Glasgow briskness and
+_aplomb_ which set him off.  All the other Elliotts were as lean as a
+rake, but Clement was laying on fat, and he panted sorely when he must
+get into his boots.  Dand said, chuckling: "Ay, Clem has the elements of
+a corporation."  "A provost and corporation," returned Clem.  And his
+readiness was much admired.
+
+The fourth brother, Dand, was a shepherd to his trade, and by starts,
+when he could bring his mind to it, excelled in the business.  Nobody
+could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the peril of great storms
+in the winter time, could do more gallantly.  But if his dexterity were
+exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for
+bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it.  He
+loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make a
+shrewd bargain when he liked.  But he preferred a vague knowledge that he
+was well to windward to any counted coins in the pocket; he felt himself
+richer so.  Hob would expostulate: "I'm an amature herd."  Dand would
+reply, "I'll keep your sheep to you when I'm so minded, but I'll keep my
+liberty too.  Thir's no man can coandescend on what I'm worth." Clein
+would expound to him the miraculous results of compound interest, and
+recommend investments.  "Ay, man?" Dand would say; "and do you think, if
+I took Hob's siller, that I wouldna drink it or wear it on the lassies?
+And, anyway, my kingdom is no of this world.  Either I'm a poet or else
+I'm nothing."  Clem would remind him of old age.  "I'll die young, like,
+Robbie Burns," he would say stoutly.  No question but he had a certain
+accomplishment in minor verse.  His "Hermiston Burn," with its pretty
+refrain--
+
+    "I love to gang thinking whaur ye gang linking,
+             Hermiston burn, in the howe;"
+
+his "Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of
+auld," and his really fascinating piece about the Praying Weaver's Stone,
+had gained him in the neighbourhood the reputation, still possible in
+Scotland, of a local bard; and, though not printed himself, he was
+recognised by others who were and who had become famous.  Walter Scott
+owed to Dandie the text of the "Raid of Wearie" in the _Minstrelsy_; and
+made him welcome at his house, and appreciated his talents, such as they
+were, with all his usual generosity.  The Ettrick Shepherd was his sworn
+crony; they would meet, drink to excess, roar out their lyrics in each
+other's faces, and quarrel and make it up again till bedtime.  And
+besides these recognitions, almost to be called official, Dandie was made
+welcome for the sake of his gift through the farmhouses of several
+contiguous dales, and was thus exposed to manifold temptations which he
+rather sought than fled.  He had figured on the stool of repentance, for
+once fulfilling to the letter the tradition of his hero and model.  His
+humorous verses to Mr. Torrance on that occasion--"Kenspeckle here my
+lane I stand"--unfortunately too indelicate for further citation, ran
+through the country like a fiery cross--they were recited, quoted,
+paraphrased, and laughed over as far away as Dumfries on the one hand and
+Dunbar on the other.
+
+These four brothers were united by a close bond, the bond of that mutual
+admiration--or rather mutual hero-worship--which is so strong among the
+members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture.
+Even the extremes admired each other.  Hob, who had as much poetry as the
+tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, who had no more
+religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an
+open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed with
+relish the rise of Clem's fortunes.  Indulgence followed hard on the
+heels of admiration.  The laird, Clem, and Dand, who were Tories and
+patriots of the hottest quality, excused to themselves, with a certain
+bashfulness, the radical and revolutionary heresies of Gib.  By another
+division of the family, the laird, Clem, and Gib, who were men exactly
+virtuous, swallowed the dose of Dand's irregularities as a kind of clog
+or drawback in the mysterious providence of God affixed to bards, and
+distinctly probative of poetical genius.  To appreciate the simplicity of
+their mutual admiration it was necessary to hear Clem, arrived upon one
+of his visits, and dealing in a spirit of continuous irony with the
+affairs and personalities of that great city of Glasgow where he lived
+and transacted business.  The various personages, ministers of the
+church, municipal officers, mercantile big-wigs, whom he had occasion to
+introduce, were all alike denigrated, all served but as reflectors to
+cast back a flattering side-light on the house of Cauldstaneslap.  The
+Provost, for whom Clem by exception entertained a measure of respect, he
+would liken to Hob.  "He minds me o' the laird there," he would say.  "He
+has some of Hob's grand, whunstane sense, and the same way with him of
+steiking his mouth when he's no very pleased."  And Hob, all unconscious,
+would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for comparison, the
+formidable grimace referred to.  The unsatisfactory incumbent of St.
+Enoch's Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: "If he had but twa fingers o'
+Gib's, he would waken them up."  And Gib, honest man! would look down and
+secretly smile.  Clem was a spy whom they had sent out into the world of
+men.  He had come back with the good news that there was nobody to
+compare with the Four Black Brothers, no position that they would not
+adorn, no official that it would not be well they should replace, no
+interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately
+bloom under their supervision.  The excuse of their folly is in two
+words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry.  The
+measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were
+kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice.  To
+the world their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion of any
+simper of self-contentment.  Yet it was known.  "They hae a guid pride o'
+themsel's!" was the word in the country-side.
+
+Lastly, in a Border story, there should be added their "two-names."  Hob
+was The Laird.  "Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne"; he was the laird of
+Cauldstaneslap--say fifty acres--_ipsissimus_.  Clement was Mr. Elliott,
+as upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no
+longer applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the
+imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual
+wanderings, was known by the sobriquet of Randy Dand.
+
+It will be understood that not all this information was communicated by
+the aunt, who had too much of the family failing herself to appreciate it
+thoroughly in others.  But as time went on, Archie began to observe an
+omission in the family chronicle.
+
+"Is there not a girl too?" he asked.
+
+"Ay: Kirstie.  She was named for me, or my grandmother at least--it's the
+same thing," returned the aunt, and went on again about Dand, whom she
+secretly preferred by reason of his gallantries.
+
+"But what is your niece like?" said Archie at the next opportunity.
+
+"Her?  As black's your hat!  But I dinna suppose she would maybe be what
+you would ca' _ill-looked_ a'thegither.  Na, she's a kind of a handsome
+jaud--a kind o' gipsy," said the aunt, who had two sets of scales for men
+and women--or perhaps it would be more fair to say that she had three,
+and the third and the most loaded was for girls.
+
+"How comes it that I never see her in church?" said Archie.
+
+"'Deed, and I believe she's in Glesgie with Clem and his wife.  A heap
+good she's like to get of it!  I dinna say for men folk, but where weemen
+folk are born, there let them bide.  Glory to God, I was never far'er
+from here than Crossmichael."
+
+In the meanwhile it began to strike Archie as strange, that while she
+thus sang the praises of her kinsfolk, and manifestly relished their
+virtues and (I may say) their vices like a thing creditable to herself,
+there should appear not the least sign of cordiality between the house of
+Hermiston and that of Cauldstaneslap.  Going to church of a Sunday, as
+the lady housekeeper stepped with her skirts kilted, three tucks of her
+white petticoat showing below, and her best India shawl upon her back (if
+the day were fine) in a pattern of radiant dyes, she would sometimes
+overtake her relatives preceding her more leisurely in the same
+direction.  Gib of course was absent: by skreigh of day he had been gone
+to Crossmichael and his fellow-heretics; but the rest of the family would
+be seen marching in open order: Hob and Dand, stiff-necked,
+straight-backed six-footers, with severe dark faces, and their plaids
+about their shoulders; the convoy of children scattering (in a state of
+high polish) on the wayside, and every now and again collected by the
+shrill summons of the mother; and the mother herself, by a suggestive
+circumstance which might have afforded matter of thought to a more
+experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl nearly identical
+with Kirstie's, but a thought more gaudy and conspicuously newer.  At the
+sight, Kirstie grew more tall--Kirstie showed her classical profile, nose
+in air and nostril spread, the pure blood came in her cheek evenly in a
+delicate living pink.
+
+"A braw day to ye, Mistress Elliott," said she, and hostility and
+gentility were nicely mingled in her tones.  "A fine day, mem," the
+laird's wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while
+her plumage--setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the
+mere man, the pattern of her India shawl.  Behind her, the whole
+Cauldstaneslap contingent marched in closer order, and with an
+indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie
+saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in
+court, Hob marched on in awful immobility.  There appeared upon the face
+of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud.
+Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter,
+and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too
+late to be included in the present skin-deep reconciliation.
+
+"Kirstie," said Archie one day, "what is this you have against your
+family?"
+
+"I dinna complean," said Kirstie, with a flush.  "I say naething."
+
+"I see you do not--not even good-day to your own nephew," said he.
+
+"I hae naething to be ashamed of," said she.  "I can say the Lord's
+prayer with a good grace.  If Hob was ill, or in preeson or poverty, I
+would see to him blithely.  But for curtchying and complimenting and
+colloguing, thank ye kindly!"
+
+Archie had a bit of a smile: he leaned back in his chair.  "I think you
+and Mrs. Robert are not very good friends," says he slyly, "when you have
+your India shawls on?"
+
+She looked upon him in silence, with a sparkling eye but an
+indecipherable expression; and that was all that Archie was ever destined
+to learn of the battle of the India shawls.
+
+"Do none of them ever come here to see you?" he inquired.
+
+"Mr. Archie," said she, "I hope that I ken my place better.  It would be
+a queer thing, I think, if I was to clamjamfry up your faither's
+house--that I should say it!--wi' a dirty, black-a-vised clan, no ane o'
+them it was worth while to mar soap upon but just mysel'!  Na, they're
+all damnifeed wi' the black Ellwalds.  I have nae patience wi' black
+folk." Then, with a sudden consciousness of the case of Archie, "No that
+it maitters for men sae muckle," she made haste to add, "but there's
+naebody can deny that it's unwomanly.  Long hair is the ornament o' woman
+ony way; we've good warrandise for that--it's in the Bible--and wha can
+doubt that the Apostle had some gowden-haired lassie in his mind--Apostle
+and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel'?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA'S PSALM-BOOK
+
+
+Archie was sedulous at church.  Sunday after Sunday he sat down and stood
+up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance leaping like
+an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an opportunity to study
+his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens that he joined together
+in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent solemnity in the act of
+benediction.  Hermiston pew was a little square box, dwarfish in
+proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table not much bigger
+than a footstool.  There sat Archie, an apparent prince, the only
+undeniable gentleman and the only great heritor in the parish, taking his
+ease in the only pew, for no other in the kirk had doors.  Thence he
+might command an undisturbed view of that congregation of solid plaided
+men, strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children, and uneasy
+sheep-dogs.  It was strange how Archie missed the look of race; except
+the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and inimitably curling tails,
+there was no one present with the least claim to gentility.  The
+Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an exception; Dandie perhaps, as he
+amused himself making verses through the interminable burden of the
+service, stood out a little by the glow in his eye and a certain superior
+animation of face and alertness of body; but even Dandie slouched like a
+rustic.  The rest of the congregation, like so many sheep, oppressed him
+with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following day--of physical labour
+in the open air, oatmeal porridge, peas bannock the somnolent fireside in
+the evening, and the night-long nasal slumbers in a box-bed.  Yet he knew
+many of them to be shrewd and humorous, men of character, notable women,
+making a bustle in the world and radiating an influence from their
+low-browed doors.  He knew besides they were like other men; below the
+crust of custom, rapture found a way; he had heard them beat the timbrel
+before Bacchus--had heard them shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy;
+and not the most Dutch-bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even
+the solemn elders themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at the
+voice of love.  Men drawing near to an end of life's adventurous
+journey--maids thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of
+entrance--women who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could
+remember the clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the
+little feet now silent--he marvelled that among all those faces there
+should be no face of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which
+the rhythm and poetry of life had entered.  "O for a live face," he
+thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he
+would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see
+himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death
+come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the
+Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.
+
+On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
+come at last.  It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the
+warmth only the more welcome.  The shallows of the stream glittered and
+tinkled among bunches of primrose.  Vagrant scents of the earth arrested
+Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication.  The grey
+Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the
+sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an
+essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in
+particulars but breathing to him from the whole.  He surprised himself by
+a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so sometimes, loose, galloping
+octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott--and when he had taken his place on a
+boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was
+already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he
+should have nothing to write.  His heart perhaps beat in time to some
+vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.  By the time he came to a corner
+of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that
+the first psalm was finishing.  The nasal psalmody, full of turns and
+trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk
+itself upraised in thanksgiving, "Everything's alive," he said; and again
+cries it aloud, "thank God, everything's alive!"  He lingered yet a while
+in the kirk-yard.  A tuft of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an
+old black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random
+apologue.  They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of
+contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day,
+the season, and the beauty that surrounded him--the chill there was in
+the warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp
+earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents.  The voice
+of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy.  And he wondered if
+Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring
+morning; Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must
+come so soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his
+rheumatisms, while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from
+his own familiar pulpit?  The pity of it, and something of the chill of
+the grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
+
+He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with
+lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old
+gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further.  He could
+not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it.  Brightnesses of azure,
+clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing birds, rose
+like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that was not his,
+but belonged to the flesh on his bones.  His body remembered; and it
+seemed to him that his body was in no way gross, but ethereal and
+perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an exquisite
+tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful instincts and
+destined to an early death.  And he felt for old Torrance--of the many
+supplications, of the few days--a pity that was near to tears.  The
+prayer ended.  Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the only ornament
+in the roughly masoned chapel--for it was no more; the tablet
+commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but rather the existence of
+a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and Archie, under that trophy of his
+long descent and local greatness, leaned back in the pew and contemplated
+vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and sad, that became
+him strangely.  Dandie's sister, sitting by the side of Clem in her new
+Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the young laird.  Aware of
+the stir of his entrance, the little formalist had kept her eyes fastened
+and her face prettily composed during the prayer.  It was not hypocrisy,
+there was no one further from a hypocrite.  The girl had been taught to
+behave: to look up, to look down, to look unconscious, to look seriously
+impressed in church, and in every conjuncture to look her best.  That was
+the game of female life, and she played it frankly.  Archie was the one
+person in church who was of interest, who was somebody new, reputed
+eccentric, known to be young, and a laird, and still unseen by Christina.
+Small wonder that, as she stood there in her attitude of pretty decency,
+her mind should run upon him!  If he spared a glance in her direction, he
+should know she was a well-behaved young lady who had been to Glasgow.
+In reason he must admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should
+think her pretty.  At that her heart beat the least thing in the world;
+and she proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and dismiss a
+series of fancied pictures of the young man who should now, by rights, be
+looking at her.  She settled on the plainest of them,--a pink short young
+man with a dish face and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford
+to smile; but for all that, the consciousness of his gaze (which was
+really fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a
+flutter till the word Amen.  Even then, she was far too well-bred to
+gratify her curiosity with any impatience.  She resumed her seat
+languidly--this was a Glasgow touch--she composed her dress, rearranged
+her nosegay of primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the
+other side, and at last allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the
+direction of the Hermiston pew.  For a moment, they were riveted.  Next
+she had plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have
+meditated flight.  Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future
+and grew dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with
+the inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm.  "I
+wonder, will I have met my fate?" she thought, and her heart swelled.
+
+Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing a deep
+layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of his discourse,
+which was to deal with a nice point in divinity, before Archie suffered
+his eyes to wander.  They fell first of all on Clem, looking
+insupportably prosperous, and patronising Torrance with the favour of a
+modified attention, as of one who was used to better things in Glasgow.
+Though he had never before set eyes on him, Archie had no difficulty in
+identifying him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him vulgar, the worst
+of the family.  Clem was leaning lazily forward when Archie first saw
+him.  Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and that deadly instrument,
+the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile.  Though not quite in the
+front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow
+mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great
+advantage.  Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart-burning, and
+almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company.  Mrs. Hob had said
+her say at Cauldstaneslap.  "Daft-like!" she had pronounced it.  "A
+jaiket that'll no meet!  Whaur's the sense of a jaiket that'll no button
+upon you, if it should come to be weet?  What do ye ca' thir things?
+Demmy brokens, d'ye say?  They'll be brokens wi' a vengeance or ye can
+win back!  Weel, I have nae thing to do wi' it--it's no good taste."
+Clem, whose purse had thus metamorphosed his sister, and who was not
+insensible to the advertisement, had come to the rescue with a "Hoot,
+woman!  What do you ken of good taste that has never been to the ceety?"
+And Hob, looking on the girl with pleased smiles, as she timidly
+displayed her finery in the midst of the dark kitchen, had thus ended the
+dispute: "The cutty looks weel," he had said, "and it's no very like
+rain.  Wear them the day, hizzie; but it's no a thing to make a practice
+o'."  In the breasts of her rivals, coming to the kirk very conscious of
+white under-linen, and their faces splendid with much soap, the sight of
+the toilet had raised a storm of varying emotion, from the mere unenvious
+admiration that was expressed in a long-drawn "Eh!" to the angrier
+feeling that found vent in an emphatic "Set her up!"  Her frock was of
+straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the
+ankle, so as to display her _demi-broquins_ of Regency violet, crossing
+with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking.  According to the pretty
+fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our
+great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our
+great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both
+breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it.
+Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of
+primroses.  She wore on her shoulders--or rather on her back and not her
+shoulders, which it scarcely passed--a French coat of sarsenet, tied in
+front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes.
+About her face clustered a disorder of dark ringlets, a little garland of
+yellow French roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by a
+village hat of chipped straw.  Amongst all the rosy and all the weathered
+faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower--girl
+and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it
+in a fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold that played in her
+hair.
+
+Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child.  He looked at her
+again and yet again, and their looks crossed.  The lip was lifted from
+her little teeth.  He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny
+skin.  Her eye, which was great as a stag's, struck and held his gaze.
+He knew who she must be--Kirstie, she of the harsh diminutive, his
+housekeeper's niece, the sister of the rustic prophet, Gib--and he found
+in her the answer to his wishes.
+
+Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to
+rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright.  But the
+gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief.  She looked away
+abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness.
+She knew what she should have done, too late--turned slowly with her nose
+in the air.  And meantime his look was not removed, but continued to play
+upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now seemed to
+isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a
+pillory, before the congregation.  For Archie continued to drink her in
+with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and
+stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable.  In the cleft of
+her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of
+primrose fascinated him.  He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake
+with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose the girl.
+And Christina was conscious of his gaze--saw it, perhaps, with the dainty
+plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets; she was conscious of
+changing colour, conscious of her unsteady breath.  Like a creature
+tracked, run down, surrounded, she sought in a dozen ways to give herself
+a countenance.  She used her handkerchief--it was a really fine one--then
+she desisted in a panic: "He would only think I was too warm."  She took
+to reading in the metrical psalms, and then remembered it was
+sermon-time.  Last she put a "sugar-bool" in her mouth, and the next
+moment repented of the step.  It was such a homely-like thing!  Mr.
+Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable
+effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high.  At this
+signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense of his ill-behaviour.  What
+had he been doing?  He had been exquisitely rude in church to the niece
+of his housekeeper; he had stared like a lackey and a libertine at a
+beautiful and modest girl.  It was possible, it was even likely, he would
+be presented to her after service in the kirk-yard, and then how was he
+to look?  And there was no excuse.  He had marked the tokens of her
+shame, of her increasing indignation, and he was such a fool that he had
+not understood them.  Shame bowed him down, and he looked resolutely at
+Mr. Torrance; who little supposed, good, worthy man, as he continued to
+expound justification by faith, what was his true business: to play the
+part of derivative to a pair of children at the old game of falling in
+love.
+
+Christina was greatly relieved at first.  It seemed to her that she was
+clothed again.  She looked back on what had passed.  All would have been
+right if she had not blushed, a silly fool!  There was nothing to blush
+at, if she _had_ taken a sugar-bool.  Mrs. MacTaggart, the elder's wife
+in St. Enoch's, took them often.  And if he had looked at her, what was
+more natural than that a young gentleman should look at the best-dressed
+girl in church?  And at the same time, she knew far otherwise, she knew
+there was nothing casual or ordinary in the look, and valued herself on
+its memory like a decoration.  Well, it was a blessing he had found
+something else to look at!  And presently she began to have other
+thoughts.  It was necessary, she fancied, that she should put herself
+right by a repetition of the incident, better managed.  If the wish was
+father to the thought, she did not know or she would not recognise it.
+It was simply as a manoeuvre of propriety, as something called for to
+lessen the significance of what had gone before, that she should a second
+time meet his eyes, and this time without blushing.  And at the memory of
+the blush, she blushed again, and became one general blush burning from
+head to foot.  Was ever anything so indelicate, so forward, done by a
+girl before?  And here she was, making an exhibition of herself before
+the congregation about nothing!  She stole a glance upon her neighbours,
+and behold! they were steadily indifferent, and Clem had gone to sleep.
+And still the one idea was becoming more and more potent with her, that
+in common prudence she must look again before the service ended.
+Something of the same sort was going forward in the mind of Archie, as he
+struggled with the load of penitence.  So it chanced that, in the flutter
+of the moment when the last psalm was given out, and Torrance was reading
+the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in church were rustling
+under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent out like antennae
+among the pews and on the indifferent and absorbed occupants, and drew
+timidly nearer to the straight line between Archie and Christina.  They
+met, they lingered together for the least fraction of time, and that was
+enough.  A charge as of electricity passed through Christina, and behold!
+the leaf of her psalm-book was torn across.
+
+Archie was outside by the gate of the graveyard, conversing with Hob and
+the minister and shaking hands all round with the scattering
+congregation, when Clem and Christina were brought up to be presented.
+The laird took off his hat and bowed to her with grace and respect.
+Christina made her Glasgow curtsey to the laird, and went on again up the
+road for Hermiston and Cauldstaneslap, walking fast, breathing hurriedly
+with a heightened colour, and in this strange frame of mind, that when
+she was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one addressed
+her she resented it like a contradiction.  A part of the way she had the
+company of some neighbour girls and a loutish young man; never had they
+seemed so insipid, never had she made herself so disagreeable.  But these
+struck aside to their various destinations or were out-walked and left
+behind; and when she had driven off with sharp words the proffered convoy
+of some of her nephews and nieces, she was free to go on alone up
+Hermiston brae, walking on air, dwelling intoxicated among clouds of
+happiness.  Near to the summit she heard steps behind her, a man's steps,
+light and very rapid.  She knew the foot at once and walked the faster.
+"If it's me he's wanting, he can run for it," she thought, smiling.
+
+Archie overtook her like a man whose mind was made up.
+
+"Miss Kirstie," he began.
+
+"Miss Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir," she interrupted.  "I canna
+bear the contraction."
+
+"You forget it has a friendly sound for me.  Your aunt is an old friend
+of mine, and a very good one.  I hope we shall see much of you at
+Hermiston?"
+
+"My aunt and my sister-in-law doesna agree very well.  Not that I have
+much ado with it.  But still when I'm stopping in the house, if I was to
+be visiting my aunt, it would not look considerate-like."
+
+"I am sorry," said Archie.
+
+"I thank you kindly, Mr. Weir," she said.  "I whiles think myself it's a
+great peety."
+
+"Ah, I am sure your voice would always be for peace!" he cried.
+
+"I wouldna be too sure of that," she said.  "I have my days like other
+folk, I suppose."
+
+"Do you know, in our old kirk, among our good old grey dames, you made an
+effect like sunshine."
+
+"Ah, but that would be my Glasgow clothes!"
+
+"I did not think I was so much under the influence of pretty frocks."
+
+She smiled with a half look at him.  "There's more than you!" she said.
+"But you see I'm only Cinderella.  I'll have to put all these things by
+in my trunk; next Sunday I'll be as grey as the rest.  They're Glasgow
+clothes, you see, and it would never do to make a practice of it.  It
+would seem terrible conspicuous."
+
+By that they were come to the place where their ways severed.  The old
+grey moors were all about them; in the midst a few sheep wandered; and
+they could see on the one hand the straggling caravan scaling the braes
+in front of them for Cauldstaneslap, and on the other, the contingent
+from Hermiston bending off and beginning to disappear by detachments into
+the policy gate.  It was in these circumstances that they turned to say
+farewell, and deliberately exchanged a glance as they shook hands.  All
+passed as it should, genteelly; and in Christina's mind, as she mounted
+the first steep ascent for Cauldstaneslap, a gratifying sense of triumph
+prevailed over the recollection of minor lapses and mistakes.  She had
+kilted her gown, as she did usually at that rugged pass; but when she
+spied Archie still standing and gazing after her, the skirts came down
+again as if by enchantment.  Here was a piece of nicety for that upland
+parish, where the matrons marched with their coats kilted in the rain,
+and the lasses walked barefoot to kirk through the dust of summer, and
+went bravely down by the burn-side, and sat on stones to make a public
+toilet before entering!  It was perhaps an air wafted from Glasgow; or
+perhaps it marked a stage of that dizziness of gratified vanity, in which
+the instinctive act passed unperceived.  He was looking after!  She
+unloaded her bosom of a prodigious sigh that was all pleasure, and betook
+herself to run.  When she had overtaken the stragglers of her family, she
+caught up the niece whom she had so recently repulsed, and kissed and
+slapped her, and drove her away again, and ran after her with pretty
+cries and laughter.  Perhaps she thought the laird might still be
+looking!  But it chanced the little scene came under the view of eyes
+less favourable; for she overtook Mrs. Hob marching with Clem and Dand.
+
+"You're shurely fey, lass!" quoth Dandie.
+
+"Think shame to yersel', miss!" said the strident Mrs. Hob.  "Is this the
+gait to guide yersel' on the way hame frae kirk?  You're shiirely no
+sponsible the day!  And anyway I would mind my guid claes."
+
+"Hoot!" said Christina, and went on before them head in air, treading the
+rough track with the tread of a wild doe.
+
+She was in love with herself, her destiny, the air of the hills, the
+benediction of the sun.  All the way home, she continued under the
+intoxication of these sky-scraping spirits.  At table she could talk
+freely of young Hermiston; gave her opinion of him off-hand and with a
+loud voice, that he was a handsome young gentleman, real well mannered
+and sensible-like, but it was a pity he looked doleful.  Only--the moment
+after--a memory of his eyes in church embarrassed her.  But for this
+inconsiderable check, all through meal-time she had a good appetite, and
+she kept them laughing at table, until Gib (who had returned before them
+from Crossmichael and his separative worship) reproved the whole of them
+for their levity.
+
+Singing "in to herself" as she went, her mind still in the turmoil of a
+glad confusion, she rose and tripped upstairs to a little loft, lighted
+by four panes in the gable, where she slept with one of her nieces.  The
+niece, who followed her, presuming on "Auntie's" high spirits, was
+flounced out of the apartment with small ceremony, and retired, smarting
+and half tearful, to bury her woes in the byre among the hay.  Still
+humming, Christina divested herself of her finery, and put her treasures
+one by one in her great green trunk.  The last of these was the
+psalm-book; it was a fine piece, the gift of Mistress Clem, in distinct
+old-faced type, on paper that had begun to grow foxy in the
+warehouse--not by service--and she was used to wrap it in a handkerchief
+every Sunday after its period of service was over, and bury it end-wise
+at the head of her trunk.  As she now took it in hand the book fell open
+where the leaf was torn, and she stood and gazed upon that evidence of
+her bygone discomposure.  There returned again the vision of the two
+brown eyes staring at her, intent and bright, out of that dark corner of
+the kirk.  The whole appearance and attitude, the smile, the suggested
+gesture of young Hermiston came before her in a flash at the sight of the
+torn page.  "I was surely fey!" she said, echoing the words of Dandie,
+and at the suggested doom her high spirits deserted her.  She flung
+herself prone upon the bed, and lay there, holding the psalm-book in her
+hands for hours, for the more part in a mere stupor of unconsenting
+pleasure and unreasoning fear.  The fear was superstitious; there came up
+again and again in her memory Dandie's ill-omened words, and a hundred
+grisly and black tales out of the immediate neighbourhood read her a
+commentary on their force.  The pleasure was never realised.  You might
+say the joints of her body thought and remembered, and were gladdened,
+but her essential self, in the immediate theatre of consciousness, talked
+feverishly of something else, like a nervous person at a fire.  The image
+that she most complacently dwelt on was that of Miss Christina in her
+character of the Fair Lass of Cauldstaneslap, carrying all before her in
+the straw-coloured frock, the violet mantle, and the yellow cobweb
+stockings.  Archie's image, on the other hand, when it presented itself
+was never welcomed--far less welcomed with any ardour, and it was exposed
+at times to merciless criticism.  In the long vague dialogues she held in
+her mind, often with imaginary, often with unrealised interlocutors,
+Archie, if he were referred to at all came in for savage handling.  He
+was described as "looking like a stork," "staring like a caulf," "a face
+like a ghaist's."  "Do you call that manners?" she said; or, "I soon put
+him in his place."  "'_Miss Christina_, _if you please_, _Mr. Weir_!'
+says I, and just flyped up my skirt tails."  With gabble like this she
+would entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would
+perhaps fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would appear again
+from the darkness of the wall, and the voluble words deserted her, and
+she would lie still and stupid, and think upon nothing with devotion, and
+be sometimes raised by a quiet sigh.  Had a doctor of medicine come into
+that loft, he would have diagnosed a healthy, well-developed, eminently
+vivacious lass lying on her face in a fit of the sulks; not one who had
+just contracted, or was just contracting, a mortal sickness of the mind
+which should yet carry her towards death and despair.  Had it been a
+doctor of psychology, he might have been pardoned for divining in the
+girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love _in excelsis_, and no more.
+It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing the
+inarticulate.  Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost every
+word used too strong.  Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of
+rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers,
+the names of definite and famous cities far distant, and now perhaps
+basking in sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as it were,
+at the foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and
+blinding wreaths of haze.
+
+The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when she sat
+suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by that psalm-book
+which had already played a part so decisive in the first chapter of her
+love-story.  In the absence of the mesmerist's eye, we are told nowadays
+that the head of a bright nail may fill his place, if it be steadfastly
+regarded.  So that torn page had riveted her attention on what might else
+have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous words
+of Dandie--heard, not heeded, and still remembered--had lent to her
+thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea of
+Fate--a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure,
+lawless, and august--moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian
+men.  Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare
+and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, may
+be decomposed into a sequence of accidents happily concurring.
+
+She put on a grey frock and a pink kerchief, looked at herself a moment
+with approval in the small square of glass that served her for a toilet
+mirror, and went softly downstairs through the sleeping house that
+resounded with the sound of afternoon snoring.  Just outside the door,
+Dandie was sitting with a book in his hand, not reading, only honouring
+the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind.  She came near him and stood
+still.
+
+"I'm for off up the muirs, Dandie," she said.
+
+There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him look up.
+She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace remained of the levity
+of the morning.
+
+"Ay, lass?  Ye'll have yer ups and downs like me, I'm thinkin'," he
+observed.
+
+"What for do ye say that?" she asked.
+
+"O, for naething," says Dand.  "Only I think ye're mair like me than the
+lave of them.  Ye've mair of the poetic temper, tho' Guid kens little
+enough of the poetic taalent.  It's an ill gift at the best.  Look at
+yoursel'.  At denner you were all sunshine and flowers and laughter, and
+now you're like the star of evening on a lake."
+
+She drank in this hackneyed compliment like wine, and it glowed in her
+veins.
+
+"But I'm saying, Dand"--she came nearer him--"I'm for the muirs.  I must
+have a braith of air.  If Clem was to be speiring for me, try and quaiet
+him, will ye no?"
+
+"What way?" said Dandie.  "I ken but the ae way, and that's leein'.  I'll
+say ye had a sair heid, if ye like."
+
+"But I havena," she objected.
+
+"I daursay no," he returned.  "I said I would say ye had; and if ye like
+to nay-say me when ye come back, it'll no mateerially maitter, for my
+chara'ter's clean gane a'ready past reca'."
+
+"O, Dand, are ye a lecar?" she asked, lingering.
+
+"Folks say sae," replied the bard.
+
+"Wha says sae?" she pursued.
+
+"Them that should ken the best," he responded.  "The lassies, for ane."
+
+"But, Dand, you would never lee to me?" she asked.
+
+"I'll leave that for your pairt of it, ye girzie," said he.  "Ye'll lee
+to me fast eneuch, when ye hae gotten a jo.  I'm tellin' ye and it's
+true; when you have a jo, Miss Kirstie, it'll be for guid and ill.  I
+ken: I was made that way mysel', but the deil was in my luck!  Here, gang
+awa wi' ye to your muirs, and let me be; I'm in an hour of inspiraution,
+ye upsetting tawpie!"
+
+But she clung to her brother's neighbourhood, she knew not why.
+
+"Will ye no gie's a kiss, Dand?" she said.  "I aye likit ye fine."
+
+He kissed her and considered her a moment; he found something strange in
+her.  But he was a libertine through and through, nourished equal
+contempt and suspicion of all womankind, and paid his way among them
+habitually with idle compliments.
+
+"Gae wa' wi' ye!" said he.  "Ye're a dentie baby, and be content wi'
+that!"
+
+That was Dandie's way; a kiss and a comfit to Jenny--a bawbee and my
+blessing to Jill--and goodnight to the whole clan of ye, my dears! When
+anything approached the serious, it became a matter for men, he both
+thought and said.  Women, when they did not absorb, were only children to
+be shoo'd away.  Merely in his character of connoisseur, however, Dandie
+glanced carelessly after his sister as she crossed the meadow.  "The
+brat's no that bad!" he thought with surprise, for though he had just
+been paying her compliments, he had not really looked at her.  "Hey!
+what's yon?"  For the grey dress was cut with short sleeves and skirts,
+and displayed her trim strong legs clad in pink stockings of the same
+shade as the kerchief she wore round her shoulders, and that shimmered as
+she went.  This was not her way in undress; he knew her ways and the ways
+of the whole sex in the country-side, no one better; when they did not go
+barefoot, they wore stout "rig and furrow" woollen hose of an invisible
+blue mostly, when they were not black outright; and Dandie, at sight of
+this daintiness, put two and two together.  It was a silk handkerchief,
+then they would be silken hose; they matched--then the whole outfit was a
+present of Clem's, a costly present, and not something to be worn through
+bog and briar, or on a late afternoon of Sunday.  He whistled.  "My denty
+May, either your heid's fair turned, or there's some ongoings!" he
+observed, and dismissed the subject.
+
+She went slowly at first, but ever straighter and faster for the
+Cauldstaneslap, a pass among the hills to which the farm owed its name.
+The Slap opened like a doorway between two rounded hillocks; and through
+this ran the short cut to Hermiston.  Immediately on the other side it
+went down through the Deil's Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of the
+hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools where the
+black peat-water slumbered.  There was no view from here.  A man might
+have sat upon the Praying Weaver's stone a half century, and seen none
+but the Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their
+way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the irruption
+of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about the springs, drinking
+and shrilly piping.  So, when she had once passed the Slap, Kirstie was
+received into seclusion.  She looked back a last time at the farm.  It
+still lay deserted except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to
+be scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having come to
+him at last.  Thence she passed rapidly through the morass, and came to
+the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn discharges, and the path for
+Hermiston accompanies it on the beginning of its downward path.  From
+this corner a wide view was opened to her of the whole stretch of braes
+upon the other side, still sallow and in places rusty with the winter,
+with the path marked boldly, here and there by the burn-side a tuft of
+birches, and--two miles off as the crow flies--from its enclosures and
+young plantations, the windows of Hermiston glittering in the western
+sun.
+
+Here she sat down and waited, and looked for a long time at these
+far-away bright panes of glass.  It amused her to have so extended a
+view, she thought.  It amused her to see the house of Hermiston--to see
+"folk"; and there was an indistinguishable human unit, perhaps the
+gardener, visibly sauntering on the gravel paths.
+
+By the time the sun was down and all the easterly braes lay plunged in
+clear shadow, she was aware of another figure coming up the path at a
+most unequal rate of approach, now half running, now pausing and seeming
+to hesitate.  She watched him at first with a total suspension of
+thought.  She held her thought as a person holds his breathing.  Then she
+consented to recognise him.  "He'll no be coming here, he canna be; it's
+no possible."  And there began to grow upon her a subdued choking
+suspense.  He _was_ coming; his hesitations had quite ceased, his step
+grew firm and swift; no doubt remained; and the question loomed up before
+her instant: what was she to do?  It was all very well to say that her
+brother was a laird himself: it was all very well to speak of casual
+intermarriages and to count cousinship, like Auntie Kirstie.  The
+difference in their social station was trenchant; propriety, prudence,
+all that she had ever learned, all that she knew, bade her flee.  But on
+the other hand the cup of life now offered to her was too enchanting.
+For one moment, she saw the question clearly, and definitely made her
+choice.  She stood up and showed herself an instant in the gap relieved
+upon the sky line; and the next, fled trembling and sat down glowing with
+excitement on the Weaver's stone.  She shut her eyes, seeking, praying
+for composure.  Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full of
+incongruous and futile speeches.  What was there to make a work about?
+She could take care of herself, she supposed!  There was no harm in
+seeing the laird.  It was the best thing that could happen.  She would
+mark a proper distance to him once and for all.  Gradually the wheels of
+her nature ceased to go round so madly, and she sat in passive
+expectation, a quiet, solitary figure in the midst of the grey moss.  I
+have said she was no hypocrite, but here I am at fault.  She never
+admitted to herself that she had come up the hill to look for Archie.
+And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls.
+For the steps of love in the young, and especially in girls, are
+instinctive and unconscious.
+
+In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was
+consciously seeking her neighbourhood.  The afternoon had turned to ashes
+in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and drawn
+him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began to come
+on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by
+the moor path to Cauldstaneslap.  He had no hope to find her; he took the
+off chance without expectation of result and to relieve his uneasiness.
+The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the slope and came into
+the hollow of the Deil's Hags, to see there, like an answer to his
+wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink kerchief
+sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in these
+desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead weaver.
+Those things that still smacked of winter were all rusty about her, and
+those things that already relished of the spring had put forth the tender
+and lively colours of the season.  Even in the unchanging face of the
+death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled lettering,
+the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green.  By an afterthought
+that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the
+kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive
+face.  Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned
+on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim
+wrist, and shimmered in the fading light.
+
+Young Hermiston was struck with a certain chill.  He was reminded that he
+now dealt in serious matters of life and death.  This was a grown woman
+he was approaching, endowed with her mysterious potencies and
+attractions, the treasury of the continued race, and he was neither
+better nor worse than the average of his sex and age.  He had a certain
+delicacy which had preserved him hitherto unspotted, and which (had
+either of them guessed it) made him a more dangerous companion when his
+heart should be really stirred.  His throat was dry as he came near; but
+the appealing sweetness of her smile stood between them like a guardian
+angel.
+
+For she turned to him and smiled, though without rising.  There was a
+shade in this cavalier greeting that neither of them perceived; neither
+he, who simply thought it gracious and charming as herself; nor yet she,
+who did not observe (quick as she was) the difference between rising to
+meet the laird, and remaining seated to receive the expected admirer.
+
+"Are ye stepping west, Hermiston?" said she, giving him his territorial
+name after the fashion of the country-side.
+
+"I was," said he, a little hoarsely, "but I think I will be about the end
+of my stroll now.  Are you like me, Miss Christina?  The house would not
+hold me.  I came here seeking air."
+
+He took his seat at the other end of the tombstone and studied her,
+wondering what was she.  There was infinite import in the question alike
+for her and him.
+
+"Ay," she said.  "I couldna bear the roof either.  It's a habit of mine
+to come up here about the gloaming when it's quaiet and caller."
+
+"It was a habit of my mother's also," he said gravely.  The recollection
+half startled him as he expressed it.  He looked around.  "I have scarce
+been here since.  It's peaceful," he said, with a long breath.
+
+"It's no like Glasgow," she replied.  "A weary place, yon Glasgow!  But
+what a day have I had for my homecoming, and what a bonny evening!"
+
+"Indeed, it was a wonderful day," said Archie.  "I think I will remember
+it years and years until I come to die.  On days like this--I do not know
+if you feel as I do--but everything appears so brief, and fragile, and
+exquisite, that I am afraid to touch life.  We are here for so short a
+time; and all the old people before us--Rutherfords of Hermiston,
+Elliotts of the Cauldstaneslap--that were here but a while since riding
+about and keeping up a great noise in this quiet corner--making love too,
+and marrying--why, where are they now?  It's deadly commonplace, but,
+after all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths."
+
+He was sounding her, semi-consciously, to see if she could understand
+him; to learn if she were only an animal the colour of flowers, or had a
+soul in her to keep her sweet.  She, on her part, her means well in hand,
+watched, womanlike, for any opportunity to shine, to abound in his
+humour, whatever that might be.  The dramatic artist, that lies dormant
+or only half awake in most human beings, had in her sprung to his feet in
+a divine fury, and chance had served her well.  She looked upon him with
+a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the day and the train of
+thought; earnestness shone through her like stars in the purple west; and
+from the great but controlled upheaval of her whole nature there passed
+into her voice, and rang in her lightest words, a thrill of emotion.
+
+"Have you mind of Dand's song?" she answered.  "I think he'll have been
+trying to say what you have been thinking."
+
+"No, I never heard it," he said.  "Repeat it to me, can you?"
+
+"It's nothing wanting the tune," said Kirstie.
+
+"Then sing it me," said he.
+
+"On the Lord's Day?  That would never do, Mr. Weir!"
+
+"I am afraid I am not so strict a keeper of the Sabbath, and there is no
+one in this place to hear us, unless the poor old ancient under the
+stone."
+
+"No that I'm thinking that really," she said.  "By my way of thinking,
+it's just as serious as a psalm.  Will I sooth it to ye, then?"
+
+"If you please," said he, and, drawing near to her on the tombstone,
+prepared to listen.
+
+She sat up as if to sing.  "I'll only can sooth it to ye," she explained.
+"I wouldna like to sing out loud on the Sabbath.  I think the birds would
+carry news of it to Gilbert," and she smiled.  "It's about the Elliotts,"
+she continued, "and I think there's few bonnier bits in the book-poets,
+though Dand has never got printed yet."
+
+And she began, in the low, clear tones of her half voice, now sinking
+almost to a whisper, now rising to a particular note which was her best,
+and which Archie learned to wait for with growing emotion:--
+
+    "O they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
+       In the rain and the wind and the lave,
+    They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill,
+       But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave.
+    Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotte of
+    auld!"
+
+All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees
+straight, her hands upon her knee, her head cast back and up.  The
+expression was admirable throughout, for had she not learned it from the
+lips and under the criticism of the author?  When it was done, she turned
+upon Archie a face softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and shining in
+the twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with boundless pity
+and sympathy.  His question was answered.  She was a human being tuned to
+a sense of the tragedy of life; there were pathos and music and a great
+heart in the girl.
+
+He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a point, and
+scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee upon a
+victory.  They were but commonplaces that remained to be exchanged, but
+the low, moved voices in which they passed made them sacred in the
+memory.  In the falling greyness of the evening he watched her figure
+winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave a hand, and
+then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if something went
+along with her out of the deepest of his heart.  And something surely had
+come, and come to dwell there.  He had retained from childhood a picture,
+now half obliterated by the passage of time and the multitude of fresh
+impressions, of his mother telling him, with the fluttered earnestness of
+her voice, and often with dropping tears, the tale of the "Praying
+Weaver," on the very scene of his brief tragedy and long repose.  And now
+there was a companion piece; and he beheld, and he should behold for
+ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in the grey colours of the
+evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower, and she also singing--
+
+    "Of old, unhappy far off things,
+    And battles long ago,"
+
+of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their
+weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their
+descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be
+gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour.  By one of
+the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together
+in his memory.  Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes
+indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being
+something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of
+things serious as life and death and his dead mother.  So that in all
+ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor
+pair of children.  The generations were prepared, the pangs were made
+ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
+
+In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie, there opened
+before Kirstie's eyes the cup-like hollow in which the farm lay.  She
+saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself bright
+with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry.  For they were
+only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which
+rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the
+relaxation of supper.  Already she knew that Robert must be within-sides
+at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in his
+quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who
+officiated.  She made good time accordingly down the steep ascent, and
+came up to the door panting as the three younger brothers, all roused at
+last from slumber, stood together in the cool and the dark of the evening
+with a fry of nephews and nieces about them, chatting and awaiting the
+expected signal.  She stood back; she had no mind to direct attention to
+her late arrival or to her labouring breath.
+
+"Kirstie, ye have shaved it this time, my lass?" said Clem.  "Whaur were
+ye?"
+
+"O, just taking a dander by mysel'," said Kirstie.
+
+And the talk continued on the subject of the American War, without
+further reference to the truant who stood by them in the covert of the
+dusk, thrilling with happiness and the sense of guilt.
+
+The signal was given, and the brothers began to go in one after another,
+amid the jostle and throng of Hob's children.
+
+Only Dandie, waiting till the last, caught Kirstie by the arm.  "When did
+ye begin to dander in pink hosen, Mistress Elliott?" he whispered slyly.
+
+She looked down; she was one blush.  "I maun have forgotten to change
+them," said she; and went into prayers in her turn with a troubled mind,
+between anxiety as to whether Dand should have observed her yellow
+stockings at church, and should thus detect her in a palpable falsehood,
+and shame that she had already made good his prophecy.  She remembered
+the words of it, how it was to be when she had gotten a jo, and that that
+would be for good and evil.  "Will I have gotten my jo now?" she thought
+with a secret rapture.
+
+And all through prayers, where it was her principal business to conceal
+the pink stockings from the eyes of the indifferent Mrs. Hob--and all
+through supper, as she made a feint of eating and sat at the table
+radiant and constrained--and again when she had left them and come into
+her chamber, and was alone with her sleeping niece, and could at last lay
+aside the armour of society--the same words sounded within her, the same
+profound note of happiness, of a world all changed and renewed, of a day
+that had been passed in Paradise, and of a night that was to be heaven
+opened.  All night she seemed to be conveyed smoothly upon a shallow
+stream of sleep and waking, and through the bowers of Beulah; all night
+she cherished to her heart that exquisite hope; and if, towards morning,
+she forgot it a while in a more profound unconsciousness, it was to catch
+again the rainbow thought with her first moment of awaking.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--ENTER MEPHISTOPHELES
+
+
+Two days later a gig from Crossmichael deposited Frank Innes at the doors
+of Hermiston.  Once in a way, during the past winter, Archie, in some
+acute phase of boredom, had written him a letter.  It had contained
+something in the nature of an invitation or a reference to an
+invitation--precisely what, neither of them now remembered.  When Innes
+had received it, there had been nothing further from his mind than to
+bury himself in the moors with Archie; but not even the most acute
+political heads are guided through the steps of life with unerring
+directness.  That would require a gift of prophecy which has been denied
+to man.  For instance, who could have imagined that, not a month after he
+had received the letter, and turned it into mockery, and put off
+answering it, and in the end lost it, misfortunes of a gloomy cast should
+begin to thicken over Frank's career?  His case may be briefly stated.
+His father, a small Morayshire laird with a large family, became
+recalcitrant and cut off the supplies; he had fitted himself out with the
+beginnings of quite a good law library, which, upon some sudden losses on
+the turf, he had been obliged to sell before they were paid for; and his
+bookseller, hearing some rumour of the event, took out a warrant for his
+arrest.  Innes had early word of it, and was able to take precautions.
+In this immediate welter of his affairs, with an unpleasant charge
+hanging over him, he had judged it the part of prudence to be off
+instantly, had written a fervid letter to his father at Inverauld, and
+put himself in the coach for Crossmichael.  Any port in a storm!  He was
+manfully turning his back on the Parliament House and its gay babble, on
+porter and oysters, the race-course and the ring; and manfully prepared,
+until these clouds should have blown by, to share a living grave with
+Archie Weir at Hermiston.
+
+To do him justice, he was no less surprised to be going than Archie was
+to see him come; and he carried off his wonder with an infinitely better
+grace.
+
+"Well, here I am!" said he, as he alighted.  "Pylades has come to Orestes
+at last.  By the way, did you get my answer?  No?  How very provoking!
+Well, here I am to answer for myself, and that's better still."
+
+"I am very glad to see you, of course," said Archie.  "I make you
+heartily welcome, of course.  But you surely have not come to stay, with
+the Courts still sitting; is that not most unwise?"
+
+"Damn the Courts!" says Frank.  "What are the Courts to friendship and a
+little fishing?"
+
+And so it was agreed that he was to stay, with no term to the visit but
+the term which he had privily set to it himself--the day, namely, when
+his father should have come down with the dust, and he should be able to
+pacify the bookseller.  On such vague conditions there began for these
+two young men (who were not even friends) a life of great familiarity
+and, as the days drew on, less and less intimacy.  They were together at
+meal times, together o' nights when the hour had come for whisky-toddy;
+but it might have been noticed (had there been any one to pay heed) that
+they were rarely so much together by day.  Archie had Hermiston to attend
+to, multifarious activities in the hills, in which he did not require,
+and had even refused, Frank's escort.  He would be off sometimes in the
+morning and leave only a note on the breakfast table to announce the
+fact; and sometimes, with no notice at all, he would not return for
+dinner until the hour was long past.  Innes groaned under these
+desertions; it required all his philosophy to sit down to a solitary
+breakfast with composure, and all his unaffected good-nature to be able
+to greet Archie with friendliness on the more rare occasions when he came
+home late for dinner.
+
+"I wonder what on earth he finds to do, Mrs. Elliott?" said he one
+morning, after he had just read the hasty billet and sat down to table.
+
+"I suppose it will be business, sir," replied the housekeeper drily,
+measuring his distance off to him by an indicated curtsy.
+
+"But I can't imagine what business!" he reiterated.
+
+"I suppose it will be _his_ business," retorted the austere Kirstie.
+
+He turned to her with that happy brightness that made the charm of his
+disposition, and broke into a peal of healthy and natural laughter.
+
+"Well played, Mrs. Elliott!" he cried; and the housekeeper's face relaxed
+into the shadow of an iron smile.  "Well played indeed!" said he.  "But
+you must not be making a stranger of me like that.  Why, Archie and I
+were at the High School together, and we've been to college together, and
+we were going to the Bar together, when--you know!  Dear, dear me! what a
+pity that was!  A life spoiled, a fine young fellow as good as buried
+here in the wilderness with rustics; and all for what?  A frolic, silly,
+if you like, but no more.  God, how good your scones are, Mrs. Elliott!"
+
+"They're no mines, it was the lassie made them," said Kirstie; "and,
+saving your presence, there's little sense in taking the Lord's name in
+vain about idle vivers that you fill your kyte wi'."
+
+"I daresay you're perfectly right, ma'am," quoth the imperturbable Frank.
+"But as I was saying, this is a pitiable business, this about poor
+Archie; and you and I might do worse than put our heads together, like a
+couple of sensible people, and bring it to an end.  Let me tell you,
+ma'am, that Archie is really quite a promising young man, and in my
+opinion he would do well at the Bar.  As for his father, no one can deny
+his ability, and I don't fancy any one would care to deny that he has the
+deil's own temper--"
+
+"If you'll excuse me, Mr. Innes, I think the lass is crying on me," said
+Kirstie, and flounced from the room.
+
+"The damned, cross-grained, old broomstick!" ejaculated Innes.
+
+In the meantime, Kirstie had escaped into the kitchen, and before her
+vassal gave vent to her feelings.
+
+"Here, ettercap!  Ye'll have to wait on yon Innes!  I canna haud myself
+in.  'Puir Erchie!'  I'd 'puir Erchie' him, if I had my way!  And
+Hermiston with the deil's ain temper!  God, let him take Hermiston's
+scones out of his mouth first.  There's no a hair on ayther o' the Weirs
+that hasna mair spunk and dirdum to it than what he has in his hale
+dwaibly body!  Settin' up his snash to me!  Let him gang to the black
+toon where he's mebbe wantit--birling in a curricle--wi' pimatum on his
+heid--making a mess o' himsel' wi' nesty hizzies--a fair disgrace!"  It
+was impossible to hear without admiration Kirstie's graduated disgust, as
+she brought forth, one after another, these somewhat baseless charges.
+Then she remembered her immediate purpose, and turned again on her
+fascinated auditor.  "Do ye no hear me, tawpie? Do ye no hear what I'm
+tellin' ye?  Will I have to shoo ye in to him? If I come to attend to ye,
+mistress!" And the maid fled the kitchen, which had become practically
+dangerous, to attend on Innes' wants in the front parlour.
+
+_Tantaene irae_?  Has the reader perceived the reason?  Since Frank's
+coming there were no more hours of gossip over the supper tray!  All his
+blandishments were in vain; he had started handicapped on the race for
+Mrs. Elliott's favour.
+
+But it was a strange thing how misfortune dogged him in his efforts to be
+genial.  I must guard the reader against accepting Kirstie's epithets as
+evidence; she was more concerned for their vigour than for their
+accuracy.  Dwaibly, for instance; nothing could be more calumnious.
+Frank was the very picture of good looks, good humour, and manly youth.
+He had bright eyes with a sparkle and a dance to them, curly hair, a
+charming smile, brilliant teeth, an admirable carriage of the head, the
+look of a gentleman, the address of one accustomed to please at first
+sight and to improve the impression.  And with all these advantages, he
+failed with every one about Hermiston; with the silent shepherd, with the
+obsequious grieve, with the groom who was also the ploughman, with the
+gardener and the gardener's sister--a pious, down-hearted woman with a
+shawl over her ears--he failed equally and flatly.  They did not like
+him, and they showed it.  The little maid, indeed, was an exception; she
+admired him devoutly, probably dreamed of him in her private hours; but
+she was accustomed to play the part of silent auditor to Kirstie's
+tirades and silent recipient of Kirstie's buffets, and she had learned
+not only to be a very capable girl of her years, but a very secret and
+prudent one besides.  Frank was thus conscious that he had one ally and
+sympathiser in the midst of that general union of disfavour that
+surrounded, watched, and waited on him in the house of Hermiston; but he
+had little comfort or society from that alliance, and the demure little
+maid (twelve on her last birthday) preserved her own counsel, and tripped
+on his service, brisk, dumbly responsive, but inexorably
+unconversational.  For the others, they were beyond hope and beyond
+endurance.  Never had a young Apollo been cast among such rustic
+barbarians.  But perhaps the cause of his ill-success lay in one trait
+which was habitual and unconscious with him, yet diagnostic of the man.
+It was his practice to approach any one person at the expense of some one
+else.  He offered you an alliance against the some one else; he flattered
+you by slighting him; you were drawn into a small intrigue against him
+before you knew how.  Wonderful are the virtues of this process
+generally; but Frank's mistake was in the choice of the some one else.
+He was not politic in that; he listened to the voice of irritation.
+Archie had offended him at first by what he had felt to be rather a dry
+reception, had offended him since by his frequent absences.  He was
+besides the one figure continually present in Frank's eye; and it was to
+his immediate dependants that Frank could offer the snare of his
+sympathy.  Now the truth is that the Weirs, father and son, were
+surrounded by a posse of strenuous loyalists.  Of my lord they were
+vastly proud.  It was a distinction in itself to be one of the vassals of
+the "Hanging Judge," and his gross, formidable joviality was far from
+unpopular in the neighbourhood of his home.  For Archie they had, one and
+all, a sensitive affection and respect which recoiled from a word of
+belittlement.
+
+Nor was Frank more successful when he went farther afield.  To the Four
+Black Brothers, for instance, he was antipathetic in the highest degree.
+Hob thought him too light, Gib too profane.  Clem, who saw him but for a
+day or two before he went to Glasgow, wanted to know what the fule's
+business was, and whether he meant to stay here all session time! "Yon's
+a drone," he pronounced.  As for Dand, it will be enough to describe
+their first meeting, when Frank had been whipping a river and the rustic
+celebrity chanced to come along the path.
+
+"I'm told you're quite a poet," Frank had said.
+
+"Wha tell't ye that, mannie?" had been the unconciliating answer.
+
+"O, everybody!" says Frank.
+
+"God!  Here's fame!" said the sardonic poet, and he had passed on his
+way.
+
+Come to think of it, we have here perhaps a truer explanation of Frank's
+failures.  Had he met Mr. Sheriff Scott he could have turned a neater
+compliment, because Mr. Scott would have been a friend worth making.
+Dand, on the other hand, he did not value sixpence, and he showed it even
+while he tried to flatter.  Condescension is an excellent thing, but it
+is strange how one-sided the pleasure of it is!  He who goes fishing
+among the Scots peasantry with condescension for a bait will have an
+empty basket by evening.
+
+In proof of this theory Frank made a great success of it at the
+Crossmichael Club, to which Archie took him immediately on his arrival;
+his own last appearance on that scene of gaiety.  Frank was made welcome
+there at once, continued to go regularly, and had attended a meeting (as
+the members ever after loved to tell) on the evening before his death.
+Young Hay and young Pringle appeared again.  There was another supper at
+Windiclaws, another dinner at Driffel; and it resulted in Frank being
+taken to the bosom of the county people as unreservedly as he had been
+repudiated by the country folk.  He occupied Hermiston after the manner
+of an invader in a conquered capital.  He was perpetually issuing from
+it, as from a base, to toddy parties, fishing parties, and dinner
+parties, to which Archie was not invited, or to which Archie would not
+go.  It was now that the name of The Recluse became general for the young
+man.  Some say that Innes invented it; Innes, at least, spread it abroad.
+
+"How's all with your Recluse to-day?" people would ask.
+
+"O, reclusing away!" Innes would declare, with his bright air of saying
+something witty; and immediately interrupt the general laughter which he
+had provoked much more by his air than his words, "Mind you, it's all
+very well laughing, but I'm not very well pleased.  Poor Archie is a good
+fellow, an excellent fellow, a fellow I always liked.  I think it small
+of him to take his little disgrace so hard, and shut himself up.  'Grant
+that it is a ridiculous story, painfully ridiculous,' I keep telling him.
+'Be a man!  Live it down, man!'  But not he.  Of course, it's just
+solitude, and shame, and all that.  But I confess I'm beginning to fear
+the result.  It would be all the pities in the world if a really
+promising fellow like Weir was to end ill.  I'm seriously tempted to
+write to Lord Hermiston, and put it plainly to him."
+
+"I would if I were you," some of his auditors would say, shaking the
+head, sitting bewildered and confused at this new view of the matter, so
+deftly indicated by a single word.  "A capital idea!" they would add, and
+wonder at the _aplomb_ and position of this young man, who talked as a
+matter of course of writing to Hermiston and correcting him upon his
+private affairs.
+
+And Frank would proceed, sweetly confidential: "I'll give you an idea,
+now.  He's actually sore about the way that I'm received and he's left
+out in the county--actually jealous and sore.  I've rallied him and I've
+reasoned with him, told him that every one was most kindly inclined
+towards him, told him even that I was received merely because I was his
+guest.  But it's no use.  He will neither accept the invitations he gets,
+nor stop brooding about the ones where he's left out.  What I'm afraid of
+is that the wound's ulcerating.  He had always one of those dark, secret,
+angry natures--a little underhand and plenty of bile--you know the sort.
+He must have inherited it from the Weirs, whom I suspect to have been a
+worthy family of weavers somewhere; what's the cant phrase?--sedentary
+occupation.  It's precisely the kind of character to go wrong in a false
+position like what his father's made for him, or he's making for himself,
+whichever you like to call it.  And for my part, I think it a disgrace,"
+Frank would say generously.
+
+Presently the sorrow and anxiety of this disinterested friend took shape.
+He began in private, in conversations of two, to talk vaguely of bad
+habits and low habits.  "I must say I'm afraid he's going wrong
+altogether," he would say.  "I'll tell you plainly, and between
+ourselves, I scarcely like to stay there any longer; only, man, I'm
+positively afraid to leave him alone.  You'll see, I shall be blamed for
+it later on.  I'm staying at a great sacrifice.  I'm hindering my chances
+at the Bar, and I can't blind my eyes to it.  And what I'm afraid of is
+that I'm going to get kicked for it all round before all's done.  You
+see, nobody believes in friendship nowadays."
+
+"Well, Innes," his interlocutor would reply, "it's very good of you, I
+must say that.  If there's any blame going, you'll always be sure of _my_
+good word, for one thing."
+
+"Well," Frank would continue, "candidly, I don't say it's pleasant.  He
+has a very rough way with him; his father's son, you know.  I don't say
+he's rude--of course, I couldn't be expected to stand that--but he steers
+very near the wind.  No, it's not pleasant; but I tell ye, man, in
+conscience I don't think it would be fair to leave him.  Mind you, I
+don't say there's anything actually wrong.  What I say is that I don't
+like the looks of it, man!" and he would press the arm of his momentary
+confidant.
+
+In the early stages I am persuaded there was no malice.  He talked but
+for the pleasure of airing himself.  He was essentially glib, as becomes
+the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the
+mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random.  There was no
+particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to
+flatter himself and to please and interest the present friend.  And by
+thus milling air out of his mouth, he had presently built up a
+presentation of Archie which was known and talked of in all corners of
+the county.  Wherever there was a residential house and a walled garden,
+wherever there was a dwarfish castle and a park, wherever a quadruple
+cottage by the ruins of a peel-tower showed an old family going down, and
+wherever a handsome villa with a carriage approach and a shrubbery marked
+the coming up of a new one--probably on the wheels of machinery--Archie
+began to be regarded in the light of a dark, perhaps a vicious mystery,
+and the future developments of his career to be looked for with
+uneasiness and confidential whispering.  He had done something
+disgraceful, my dear.  What, was not precisely known, and that good kind
+young man, Mr. Innes, did his best to make light of it.  But there it
+was.  And Mr. Innes was very anxious about him now; he was really uneasy,
+my dear; he was positively wrecking his own prospects because he dared
+not leave him alone.  How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single
+prater, not needfully with any malign purpose!  And if a man but talks of
+himself in the right spirit, refers to his virtuous actions by the way,
+and never applies to them the name of virtue, how easily his evidence is
+accepted in the court of public opinion!
+
+All this while, however, there was a more poisonous ferment at work
+between the two lads, which came late indeed to the surface, but had
+modified and magnified their dissensions from the first.  To an idle,
+shallow, easy-going customer like Frank, the smell of a mystery was
+attractive.  It gave his mind something to play with, like a new toy to a
+child; and it took him on the weak side, for like many young men coming
+to the Bar, and before they had been tried and found wanting, he
+flattered himself he was a fellow of unusual quickness and penetration.
+They knew nothing of Sherlock Holmes in those days, but there was a good
+deal said of Talleyrand.  And if you could have caught Frank off his
+guard, he would have confessed with a smirk that, if he resembled any
+one, it was the Marquis de Talleyrand-Perigord.  It was on the occasion
+of Archie's first absence that this interest took root.  It was vastly
+deepened when Kirstie resented his curiosity at breakfast, and that same
+afternoon there occurred another scene which clinched the business.  He
+was fishing Swingleburn, Archie accompanying him, when the latter looked
+at his watch.
+
+"Well, good-bye," said he.  "I have something to do.  See you at dinner."
+
+"Don't be in such a hurry," cries Frank.  "Hold on till I get my rod up.
+I'll go with you; I'm sick of flogging this ditch."
+
+And he began to reel up his line.
+
+Archie stood speechless.  He took a long while to recover his wits under
+this direct attack; but by the time he was ready with his answer, and the
+angle was almost packed up, he had become completely Weir, and the
+hanging face gloomed on his young shoulders.  He spoke with a laboured
+composure, a laboured kindness even; but a child could see that his mind
+was made up.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Innes; I don't want to be disagreeable, but let us
+understand one another from the beginning.  When I want your company,
+I'll let you know."
+
+"O!" cries Frank, "you don't want my company, don't you?"
+
+"Apparently not just now," replied Archie.  "I even indicated to you when
+I did, if you'll remember--and that was at dinner.  If we two fellows are
+to live together pleasantly--and I see no reason why we should not--it
+can only be by respecting each other's privacy.  If we begin intruding--"
+
+"O, come!  I'll take this at no man's hands.  Is this the way you treat a
+guest and an old friend?" cried Innes.
+
+"Just go home and think over what I said by yourself," continued Archie,
+"whether it's reasonable, or whether it's really offensive or not; and
+let's meet at dinner as though nothing had happened, I'll put it this
+way, if you like--that I know my own character, that I'm looking forward
+(with great pleasure, I assure you) to a long visit from you, and that
+I'm taking precautions at the first.  I see the thing that we--that I, if
+you like--might fall out upon, and I step in and _obsto principiis_.  I
+wager you five pounds you'll end by seeing that I mean friendliness, and
+I assure you, Francie, I do," he added, relenting.
+
+Bursting with anger, but incapable of speech, Innes shouldered his rod,
+made a gesture of farewell, and strode off down the burn-side.  Archie
+watched him go without moving.  He was sorry, but quite unashamed.  He
+hated to be inhospitable, but in one thing he was his father's son.  He
+had a strong sense that his house was his own and no man else's; and to
+lie at a guest's mercy was what he refused.  He hated to seem harsh.  But
+that was Frank's lookout.  If Frank had been commonly discreet, he would
+have been decently courteous.  And there was another consideration.  The
+secret he was protecting was not his own merely; it was hers: it belonged
+to that inexpressible she who was fast taking possession of his soul, and
+whom he would soon have defended at the cost of burning cities.  By the
+time he had watched Frank as far as the Swingleburn-foot, appearing and
+disappearing in the tarnished heather, still stalking at a fierce gait
+but already dwindled in the distance into less than the smallness of
+Lilliput, he could afford to smile at the occurrence.  Either Frank would
+go, and that would be a relief--or he would continue to stay, and his
+host must continue to endure him.  And Archie was now free--by devious
+paths, behind hillocks and in the hollow of burns--to make for the
+trysting-place where Kirstie, cried about by the curlew and the plover,
+waited and burned for his coming by the Covenanter's stone.
+
+Innes went off down-hill in a passion of resentment, easy to be
+understood, but which yielded progressively to the needs of his
+situation.  He cursed Archie for a cold-hearted, unfriendly, rude, rude
+dog; and himself still more passionately for a fool in having come to
+Hermiston when he might have sought refuge in almost any other house in
+Scotland.  But the step once taken, was practically irretrievable.  He
+had no more ready money to go anywhere else; he would have to borrow from
+Archie the next club-night; and ill as he thought of his host's manners,
+he was sure of his practical generosity.  Frank's resemblance to
+Talleyrand strikes me as imaginary; but at least not Talleyrand himself
+could have more obediently taken his lesson from the facts.  He met
+Archie at dinner without resentment, almost with cordiality.  You must
+take your friends as you find them, he would have said.  Archie couldn't
+help being his father's son, or his grandfather's, the hypothetical
+weaver's, grandson.  The son of a hunks, he was still a hunks at heart,
+incapable of true generosity and consideration; but he had other
+qualities with which Frank could divert himself in the meanwhile, and to
+enjoy which it was necessary that Frank should keep his temper.
+
+So excellently was it controlled that he awoke next morning with his head
+full of a different, though a cognate subject.  What was Archie's little
+game?  Why did he shun Frank's company?  What was he keeping secret?  Was
+he keeping tryst with somebody, and was it a woman?  It would be a good
+joke and a fair revenge to discover.  To that task he set himself with a
+great deal of patience, which might have surprised his friends, for he
+had been always credited not with patience so much as brilliancy; and
+little by little, from one point to another, he at last succeeded in
+piecing out the situation.  First he remarked that, although Archie set
+out in all the directions of the compass, he always came home again from
+some point between the south and west.  From the study of a map, and in
+consideration of the great expanse of untenanted moorland running in that
+direction towards the sources of the Clyde, he laid his finger on
+Cauldstaneslap and two other neighbouring farms, Kingsmuirs and
+Polintarf.  But it was difficult to advance farther.  With his rod for a
+pretext, he vainly visited each of them in turn; nothing was to be seen
+suspicious about this trinity of moorland settlements.  He would have
+tried to follow Archie, had it been the least possible, but the nature of
+the land precluded the idea.  He did the next best, ensconced himself in
+a quiet corner, and pursued his movements with a telescope.  It was
+equally in vain, and he soon wearied of his futile vigilance, left the
+telescope at home, and had almost given the matter up in despair, when,
+on the twenty-seventh day of his visit, he was suddenly confronted with
+the person whom he sought.  The first Sunday Kirstie had managed to stay
+away from kirk on some pretext of indisposition, which was more truly
+modesty; the pleasure of beholding Archie seeming too sacred, too vivid
+for that public place.  On the two following, Frank had himself been
+absent on some of his excursions among the neighbouring families.  It was
+not until the fourth, accordingly, that Frank had occasion to set eyes on
+the enchantress.  With the first look, all hesitation was over.  She came
+with the Cauldstaneslap party; then she lived at Cauldstaneslap.  Here
+was Archie's secret, here was the woman, and more than that--though I
+have need here of every manageable attenuation of language--with the
+first look, he had already entered himself as rival.  It was a good deal
+in pique, it was a little in revenge, it was much in genuine admiration:
+the devil may decide the proportions!  I cannot, and it is very likely
+that Frank could not.
+
+"Mighty attractive milkmaid," he observed, on the way home.
+
+"Who?" said Archie.
+
+"O, the girl you're looking at--aren't you?  Forward there on the road.
+She came attended by the rustic bard; presumably, therefore, belongs to
+his exalted family.  The single objection! for the four black brothers
+are awkward customers.  If anything were to go wrong, Gib would gibber,
+and Clem would prove inclement; and Dand fly in danders, and Hob blow up
+in gobbets.  It would be a Helliott of a business!"
+
+"Very humorous, I am sure," said Archie.
+
+"Well, I am trying to be so," said Frank.  "It's none too easy in this
+place, and with your solemn society, my dear fellow.  But confess that
+the milkmaid has found favour in your eyes, or resign all claim to be a
+man of taste."
+
+"It is no matter," returned Archie.
+
+But the other continued to look at him, steadily and quizzically, and his
+colour slowly rose and deepened under the glance, until not impudence
+itself could have denied that he was blushing.  And at this Archie lost
+some of his control.  He changed his stick from one hand to the other,
+and--"O, for God's sake, don't be an ass!" he cried.
+
+"Ass?  That's the retort delicate without doubt," says Frank.  "Beware of
+the homespun brothers, dear.  If they come into the dance, you'll see
+who's an ass.  Think now, if they only applied (say) a quarter as much
+talent as I have applied to the question of what Mr. Archie does with his
+evening hours, and why he is so unaffectedly nasty when the subject's
+touched on--"
+
+"You are touching on it now," interrupted Archie with a wince.
+
+"Thank you.  That was all I wanted, an articulate confession," said
+Frank.
+
+"I beg to remind you--" began Archie.
+
+But he was interrupted in turn.  "My dear fellow, don't.  It's quite
+needless.  The subject's dead and buried."
+
+And Frank began to talk hastily on other matters, an art in which he was
+an adept, for it was his gift to be fluent on anything or nothing.  But
+although Archie had the grace or the timidity to suffer him to rattle on,
+he was by no means done with the subject.  When he came home to dinner,
+he was greeted with a sly demand, how things were looking "Cauldstaneslap
+ways."  Frank took his first glass of port out after dinner to the toast
+of Kirstie, and later in the evening he returned to the charge again.
+
+"I say, Weir, you'll excuse me for returning again to this affair.  I've
+been thinking it over, and I wish to beg you very seriously to be more
+careful.  It's not a safe business.  Not safe, my boy," said he.
+
+"What?" said Archie.
+
+"Well, it's your own fault if I must put a name on the thing; but really,
+as a friend, I cannot stand by and see you rushing head down into these
+dangers.  My dear boy," said he, holding up a warning cigar, "consider!
+What is to be the end of it?"
+
+"The end of what?"--Archie, helpless with irritation, persisted in this
+dangerous and ungracious guard.
+
+"Well, the end of the milkmaid; or, to speak more by the card, the end of
+Miss Christina Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap."
+
+"I assure you," Archie broke out, "this is all a figment of your
+imagination.  There is nothing to be said against that young lady; you
+have no right to introduce her name into the conversation."
+
+"I'll make a note of it," said Frank.  "She shall henceforth be nameless,
+nameless, nameless, Grigalach!  I make a note besides of your valuable
+testimony to her character.  I only want to look at this thing as a man
+of the world.  Admitted she's an angel--but, my good fellow, is she a
+lady?"
+
+This was torture to Archie.  "I beg your pardon," he said, struggling to
+be composed, "but because you have wormed yourself into my confidence--"
+
+"O, come!" cried Frank.  "Your confidence?  It was rosy but unconsenting.
+Your confidence, indeed?  Now, look!  This is what I must say, Weir, for
+it concerns your safety and good character, and therefore my honour as
+your friend.  You say I wormed myself into your confidence.  Wormed is
+good.  But what have I done?  I have put two and two together, just as
+the parish will be doing tomorrow, and the whole of Tweeddale in two
+weeks, and the black brothers--well, I won't put a date on that; it will
+be a dark and stormy morning!  Your secret, in other words, is poor
+Poll's.  And I want to ask of you as a friend whether you like the
+prospect?  There are two horns to your dilemma, and I must say for myself
+I should look mighty ruefully on either.  Do you see yourself explaining
+to the four Black Brothers? or do you see yourself presenting the
+milkmaid to papa as the future lady of Hermiston?  Do you?  I tell you
+plainly, I don't!"
+
+Archie rose.  "I will hear no more of this," he said, in a trembling
+voice.
+
+But Frank again held up his cigar.  "Tell me one thing first.  Tell me if
+this is not a friend's part that I am playing?"
+
+"I believe you think it so," replied Archle.  "I can go as far as that.
+I can do so much justice to your motives.  But I will hear no more of it.
+I am going to bed."
+
+"That's right, Weir," said Frank heartily.  "Go to bed and think over it;
+and I say, man, don't forget your prayers!  I don't often do the
+moral--don't go in for that sort of thing--but when I do there's one
+thing sure, that I mean it."
+
+So Archie marched off to bed, and Frank sat alone by the table for
+another hour or so, smiling to himself richly.  There was nothing
+vindictive in his nature; but, if revenge came in his way, it might as
+well be good, and the thought of Archie's pillow reflections that night
+was indescribably sweet to him.  He felt a pleasant sense of power.  He
+looked down on Archie as on a very little boy whose strings he pulled--as
+on a horse whom he had backed and bridled by sheer power of intelligence,
+and whom he might ride to glory or the grave at pleasure.  Which was it
+to be?  He lingered long, relishing the details of schemes that he was
+too idle to pursue.  Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that night the
+sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the strands of that
+intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer waned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--A NOCTURNAL VISIT
+
+
+Kirstie had many causes of distress.  More and more as we grow old--and
+yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of
+age--we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul.  Only
+thus, in the curtailment of our means, can we relieve the straitened cry
+of the passion within us; only thus, in the bitter and sensitive shyness
+of advancing years, can we maintain relations with those vivacious
+figures of the young that still show before us and tend daily to become
+no more than the moving wall-paper of life.  Talk is the last link, the
+last relation.  But with the end of the conversation, when the voice
+stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away, solitude falls
+again on the bruised heart.  Kirstie had lost her "cannie hour at e'en";
+she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you will, but a happy
+ghost, in fields Elysian.  And to her it was as if the whole world had
+fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of amusements.  And she
+raged to know it.  The effervescency of her passionate and irritable
+nature rose within her at times to bursting point.
+
+This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling.  It
+must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
+it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when she
+had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when she
+trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but
+annulled.  For, with the clairvoyance of a genuine love, she had pierced
+the mystery that had so long embarrassed Frank.  She was conscious, even
+before it was carried out, even on that Sunday night when it began, of an
+invasion of her rights; and a voice told her the invader's name.  Since
+then, by arts, by accident, by small things observed, and by the general
+drift of Archie's humour, she had passed beyond all possibility of doubt.
+With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied, she had
+that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of the younger
+Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality of her nature,
+she had recognised the coming of fate.  Not thus would she have chosen.
+She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall, powerful, and
+rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her own image, for whom she
+would have strewed the bride-bed with delight; and now she could have
+wept to see the ambition falsified.  But the gods had pronounced, and her
+doom was otherwise.
+
+She lay tossing in bed that night, besieged with feverish thoughts.
+There were dangerous matters pending, a battle was toward, over the fate
+of which she hung in jealousy, sympathy, fear, and alternate loyalty and
+disloyalty to either side.  Now she was reincarnated in her niece, and
+now in Archie.  Now she saw, through the girl's eyes, the youth on his
+knees to her, heard his persuasive instances with a deadly weakness, and
+received his overmastering caresses.  Anon, with a revulsion, her temper
+raged to see such utmost favours of fortune and love squandered on a brat
+of a girl, one of her own house, using her own name--a deadly
+ingredient--and that "didna ken her ain mind an' was as black's your
+hat."  Now she trembled lest her deity should plead in vain, loving the
+idea of success for him like a triumph of nature; anon, with returning
+loyalty to her own family and sex, she trembled for Kirstie and the
+credit of the Elliotts.  And again she had a vision of herself, the day
+over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her
+last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she
+saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die.  Had she then
+come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as a
+girl's and strong as womanhood?  It could not be, and yet it was so; and
+for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides of the grave.  And
+she looked forward over a waste of hours, and saw herself go on to rage,
+and tremble, and be softened, and rage again, until the day came and the
+labours of the day must be renewed.
+
+Suddenly she heard feet on the stairs--his feet, and soon after the sound
+of a window-sash flung open.  She sat up with her heart beating.  He had
+gone to his room alone, and he had not gone to bed.  She might again have
+one of her night cracks; and at the entrancing prospect, a change came
+over her mind; with the approach of this hope of pleasure, all the baser
+metal became immediately obliterated from her thoughts.  She rose, all
+woman, and all the best of woman, tender, pitiful, hating the wrong,
+loyal to her own sex--and all the weakest of that dear miscellany,
+nourishing, cherishing next her soft heart, voicelessly flattering, hopes
+that she would have died sooner than have acknowledged.  She tore off her
+nightcap, and her hair fell about her shoulders in profusion.  Undying
+coquetry awoke.  By the faint light of her nocturnal rush, she stood
+before the looking-glass, carried her shapely arms above her head, and
+gathered up the treasures of her tresses.  She was never backward to
+admire herself; that kind of modesty was a stranger to her nature; and
+she paused, struck with a pleased wonder at the sight.  "Ye daft auld
+wife!" she said, answering a thought that was not; and she blushed with
+the innocent consciousness of a child.  Hastily she did up the massive
+and shining coils, hastily donned a wrapper, and with the rushlight in
+her hand, stole into the hall.  Below stairs she heard the clock ticking
+the deliberate seconds, and Frank jingling with the decanters in the
+dining-room.  Aversion rose in her, bitter and momentary.  "Nesty,
+tippling puggy!" she thought; and the next moment she had knocked
+guardedly at Archie's door and was bidden enter.
+
+Archie had been looking out into the ancient blackness, pierced here and
+there with a rayless star; taking the sweet air of the moors and the
+night into his bosom deeply; seeking, perhaps finding, peace after the
+manner of the unhappy.  He turned round as she came in, and showed her a
+pale face against the window-frame.
+
+"Is that you, Kirstie?" he asked.  "Come in!"
+
+"It's unco late, my dear," said Kirstie, affecting unwillingness.
+
+"No, no," he answered, "not at all.  Come in, if you want a crack.  I am
+not sleepy, God knows!"
+
+She advanced, took a chair by the toilet table and the candle, and set
+the rushlight at her foot.  Something--it might be in the comparative
+disorder of her dress, it might be the emotion that now welled in her
+bosom--had touched her with a wand of transformation, and she seemed
+young with the youth of goddesses.
+
+"Mr. Erchie," she began, "what's this that's come to ye?"
+
+"I am not aware of anything that has come," said Archie, and blushed, and
+repented bitterly that he had let her in.
+
+"O, my dear, that'll no dae!" said Kirstie.  "It's ill to blend the eyes
+of love.  O, Mr. Erchie, tak a thocht ere it's ower late.  Ye shouldna be
+impatient o' the braws o' life, they'll a' come in their saison, like the
+sun and the rain.  Ye're young yet; ye've mony cantie years afore ye.
+See and dinna wreck yersel' at the outset like sae mony ithers! Hae
+patience--they telled me aye that was the owercome o' life--hae patience,
+there's a braw day coming yet.  Gude kens it never cam to me; and here I
+am, wi' nayther man nor bairn to ca' my ain, wearying a' folks wi' my ill
+tongue, and you just the first, Mr. Erchie!"
+
+"I have a difficulty in knowing what you mean," said Archie.
+
+"Weel, and I'll tell ye," she said.  "It's just this, that I'm feared.
+I'm feared for ye, my dear.  Remember, your faither is a hard man,
+reaping where he hasna sowed and gaithering where he hasna strawed.  It's
+easy speakin', but mind!  Ye'll have to look in the gurly face o'm, where
+it's ill to look, and vain to look for mercy.  Ye mind me o' a bonny ship
+pitten oot into the black and gowsty seas--ye're a' safe still, sittin'
+quait and crackin' wi' Kirstie in your lown chalmer; but whaur will ye be
+the morn, and in whatten horror o' the fearsome tempest, cryin' on the
+hills to cover ye?"
+
+"Why, Kirstie, you're very enigmatical to-night--and very eloquent,"
+Archie put in.
+
+"And, my dear Mr. Erchie," she continued, with a change of voice, "ye
+mauna think that I canna sympathise wi' ye.  Ye mauna think that I havena
+been young mysel'.  Lang syne, when I was a bit lassie, no twenty yet--"
+She paused and sighed.  "Clean and caller, wi' a fit like the hinney
+bee," she continned.  "I was aye big and buirdly, ye maun understand; a
+bonny figure o' a woman, though I say it that suldna--built to rear
+bairns--braw bairns they suld hae been, and grand I would hae likit it!
+But I was young, dear, wi' the bonny glint o' youth in my e'en, and
+little I dreamed I'd ever be tellin' ye this, an auld, lanely, rudas
+wife!  Weel, Mr. Erchie, there was a lad cam' courtin' me, as was but
+naetural.  Mony had come before, and I would nane o' them.  But this yin
+had a tongue to wile the birds frae the lift and the bees frae the
+foxglove bells.  Deary me, but it's lang syne!  Folk have dee'd sinsyne
+and been buried, and are forgotten, and bairns been born and got merrit
+and got bairns o' their ain.  Sinsyne woods have been plantit, and have
+grawn up and are bonny trees, and the joes sit in their shadow, and
+sinsyne auld estates have changed hands, and there have been wars and
+rumours of wars on the face of the earth.  And here I'm still--like an
+auld droopit craw--lookin' on and craikin'!  But, Mr. Erchie, do ye no
+think that I have mind o' it a' still?  I was dwalling then in my
+faither's house; and it's a curious thing that we were whiles trysted in
+the Deil's Hags.  And do ye no think that I have mind of the bonny simmer
+days, the lang miles o' the bluid-red heather, the cryin' of the whaups,
+and the lad and the lassie that was trysted?  Do ye no think that I mind
+how the hilly sweetness ran about my hairt?  Ay, Mr. Erchie, I ken the
+way o' it--fine do I ken the way--how the grace o' God takes them, like
+Paul of Tarsus, when they think it least, and drives the pair o' them
+into a land which is like a dream, and the world and the folks in't' are
+nae mair than clouds to the puir lassie, and heeven nae mair than
+windle-straes, if she can but pleesure him!  Until Tam dee'd--that was my
+story," she broke off to say, "he dee'd, and I wasna at the buryin'.  But
+while he was here, I could take care o' mysel'.  And can yon puir
+lassie?"
+
+Kirstie, her eyes shining with unshed tears, stretched out her hand
+towards him appealingly; the bright and the dull gold of her hair flashed
+and smouldered in the coils behind her comely head, like the rays of an
+eternal youth; the pure colour had risen in her face; and Archie was
+abashed alike by her beauty and her story.  He came towards her slowly
+from the window, took up her hand in his and kissed it.
+
+"Kirstie," he said hoarsely, "you have misjudged me sorely.  I have
+always thought of her, I wouldna harm her for the universe, my woman!"
+
+"Eh, lad, and that's easy sayin'," cried Kirstie, "but it's nane sae easy
+doin'!  Man, do ye no comprehend that it's God's wull we should be
+blendit and glamoured, and have nae command over our ain members at a
+time like that?  My bairn," she cried, still holding his hand, "think o'
+the puir lass! have pity upon her, Erchie! and O, be wise for twa! Think
+o' the risk she rins!  I have seen ye, and what's to prevent ithers!  I
+saw ye once in the Hags, in my ain howl, and I was wae to see ye
+there--in pairt for the omen, for I think there's a weird on the
+place--and in pairt for pure nakit envy and bitterness o' hairt.  It's
+strange ye should forgather there tae!  God! but yon puir, thrawn, auld
+Covenanter's seen a heap o' human natur since he lookit his last on the
+musket barrels, if he never saw nane afore," she added, with a kind of
+wonder in her eyes.
+
+"I swear by my honour I have done her no wrong," said Archie.  "I swear
+by my honour and the redemption of my soul that there shall none be done
+her.  I have heard of this before.  I have been foolish, Kirstie, not
+unkind, and, above all, not base."
+
+"There's my bairn!" said Kirstie, rising.  "I'll can trust ye noo, I'll
+can gang to my bed wi' an easy hairt."  And then she saw in a flash how
+barren had been her triumph.  Archie had promised to spare the girl, and
+he would keep it; but who had promised to spare Archie?  What was to be
+the end of it?  Over a maze of difficulties she glanced, and saw, at the
+end of every passage, the flinty countenance of Hermiston.  And a kind of
+horror fell upon her at what she had done.  She wore a tragic mask.
+"Erchie, the Lord peety you, dear, and peety me!  I have buildit on this
+foundation"--laying her hand heavily on his shoulder--"and buildit hie,
+and pit my hairt in the buildin' of it.  If the hale hypothec were to
+fa', I think, laddie, I would dee!  Excuse a daft wife that loves ye, and
+that kenned your mither.  And for His name's sake keep yersel' frae
+inordinate desires; haud your heart in baith your hands, carry it canny
+and laigh; dinna send it up like a hairn's kite into the collieshangic o'
+the wunds!  Mind, Maister Erchie dear, that this life's a'
+disappointment, and a mouthfu' o' mools is the appointed end."
+
+"Ay, but Kirstie, my woman, you're asking me ower much at last," said
+Archie, profoundly moved, and lapsing into the broad Scots.  "Ye're
+asking what nae man can grant ye, what only the Lord of heaven can grant
+ye if He see fit.  Ay!  And can even He!  I can promise ye what I shall
+do, and you can depend on that.  But how I shall feel--my woman, that is
+long past thinking of!"
+
+They were both standing by now opposite each other.  The face of Archie
+wore the wretched semblance of a smile; hers was convulsed for a moment.
+
+"Promise me ae thing," she cried in a sharp voice.  "Promise me ye'll
+never do naething without telling me."
+
+"No, Kirstie, I canna promise ye that," he replied.  "I have promised
+enough, God kens!"
+
+"May the blessing of God lift and rest upon ye dear!" she said.
+
+"God bless ye, my old friend," said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--AT THE WEAVER'S STONE
+
+
+It was late in the afternoon when Archie drew near by the hill path to
+the Praying Weaver's stone.  The Hags were in shadow.  But still, through
+the gate of the Slap, the sun shot a last arrow, which sped far and
+straight across the surface of the moss, here and there touching and
+shining on a tussock, and lighted at length on the gravestone and the
+small figure awaiting him there.  The emptiness and solitude of the great
+moors seemed to be concentrated there, and Kirstie pointed out by that
+figure of sunshine for the only inhabitant.  His first sight of her was
+thus excruciatingly sad, like a glimpse of a world from which all light,
+comfort, and society were on the point of vanishing.  And the next
+moment, when she had turned her face to him and the quick smile had
+enlightened it, the whole face of nature smiled upon him in her smile of
+welcome.  Archie's slow pace was quickened; his legs hasted to her though
+his heart was hanging back.  The girl, upon her side, drew herself
+together slowly and stood up, expectant; she was all languor, her face
+was gone white; her arms ached for him, her soul was on tip-toes.  But he
+deceived her, pausing a few steps away, not less white than herself, and
+holding up his hand with a gesture of denial.
+
+"No, Christina, not to-day," he said.  "To-day I have to talk to you
+seriously.  Sit ye down, please, there where you were.  Please!" he
+repeated.
+
+The revulsion of feeling in Christina's heart was violent.  To have
+longed and waited these weary hours for him, rehearsing her
+endearments--to have seen him at last come--to have been ready there,
+breathless, wholly passive, his to do what he would with--and suddenly to
+have found herself confronted with a grey-faced, harsh schoolmaster--it
+was too rude a shock.  She could have wept, but pride withheld her.  She
+sat down on the stone, from which she had arisen, part with the instinct
+of obedience, part as though she had been thrust there.  What was this?
+Why was she rejected?  Had she ceased to please?  She stood here offering
+her wares, and he would none of them!  And yet they were all his!  His to
+take and keep, not his to refuse though!  In her quick petulant nature, a
+moment ago on fire with hope, thwarted love and wounded vanity wrought.
+The schoolmaster that there is in all men, to the despair of all girls
+and most women, was now completely in possession of Archie.  He had
+passed a night of sermons, a day of reflection; he had come wound up to
+do his duty; and the set mouth, which in him only betrayed the effort of
+his will, to her seemed the expression of an averted heart.  It was the
+same with his constrained voice and embarrassed utterance; and if so--if
+it was all over--the pang of the thought took away from her the power of
+thinking.
+
+He stood before her some way off.  "Kirstie, there's been too much of
+this.  We've seen too much of each other."  She looked up quickly and her
+eyes contracted.  "There's no good ever comes of these secret meetings.
+They're not frank, not honest truly, and I ought to have seen it.  People
+have begun to talk; and it's not right of me.  Do you see?"
+
+"I see somebody will have been talking to ye," she said sullenly.
+
+"They have, more than one of them," replied Archie.
+
+"And whae were they?" she cried.  "And what kind o' love do ye ca' that,
+that's ready to gang round like a whirligig at folk talking?  Do ye think
+they havena talked to me?"
+
+"Have they indeed?" said Archie, with a quick breath.  "That is what I
+feared.  Who were they?  Who has dared--?"
+
+Archie was on the point of losing his temper.
+
+As a matter of fact, not any one had talked to Christina on the matter;
+and she strenuously repeated her own first question in a panic of
+self-defence.
+
+"Ah, well! what does it matter?" he said.  "They were good folk that
+wished well to us, and the great affair is that there are people talking.
+My dear girl, we have to be wise.  We must not wreck our lives at the
+outset.  They may be long and happy yet, and we must see to it, Kirstie,
+like God's rational creatures and not like fool children.  There is one
+thing we must see to before all.  You're worth waiting for, Kirstie!
+worth waiting for a generation; it would be enough reward."--And here he
+remembered the schoolmaster again, and very unwisely took to following
+wisdom.  "The first thing that we must see to, is that there shall be no
+scandal about for my father's sake.  That would ruin all; do ye no see
+that?"
+
+Kirstie was a little pleased, there had been some show of warmth of
+sentiment in what Archie had said last.  But the dull irritation still
+persisted in her bosom; with the aboriginal instinct, having suffered
+herself, she wished to make Archie suffer.
+
+And besides, there had come out the word she had always feared to hear
+from his lips, the name of his father.  It is not to be supposed that,
+during so many days with a love avowed between them, some reference had
+not been made to their conjoint future.  It had in fact been often
+touched upon, and from the first had been the sore point.  Kirstie had
+wilfully closed the eye of thought; she would not argue even with
+herself; gallant, desperate little heart, she had accepted the command of
+that supreme attraction like the call of fate and marched blindfold on
+her doom.  But Archie, with his masculine sense of responsibility, must
+reason; he must dwell on some future good, when the present good was all
+in all to Kirstie; he must talk--and talk lamely, as necessity drove
+him--of what was to be.  Again and again he had touched on marriage;
+again and again been driven back into indistinctness by a memory of Lord
+Hermiston.  And Kirstie had been swift to understand and quick to choke
+down and smother the understanding; swift to leap up in flame at a
+mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity and her love,
+that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also, to
+recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of
+these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded madness,
+to go on and to reck nothing of the future.  But these unfinished
+references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his memory and
+reason rose up to silence it before the words were well uttered, gave her
+unqualifiable agony.  She was raised up and dashed down again bleeding.
+The recurrence of the subject forced her, for however short a time, to
+open her eyes on what she did not wish to see; and it had invariably
+ended in another disappointment.  So now again, at the mere wind of its
+coming, at the mere mention of his father's name--who might seem indeed
+to have accompanied them in their whole moorland courtship, an awful
+figure in a wig with an ironical and bitter smile, present to guilty
+consciousness--she fled from it head down.
+
+"Ye havena told me yet," she said, "who was it spoke?"
+
+"Your aunt for one," said Archie.
+
+"Auntie Kirstie?" she cried.  "And what do I care for my Auntie Kirstie?"
+
+"She cares a great deal for her niece," replied Archie, in kind reproof.
+
+"Troth, and it's the first I've heard of it," retorted the girl.
+
+"The question here is not who it is, but what they say, what they have
+noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmaster.  "That is what we have to think
+of in self-defence."
+
+"Auntie Kirstie, indeed!  A bitter, thrawn auld maid that's fomented
+trouble in the country before I was born, and will be doing it still, I
+daur say, when I'm deid!  It's in her nature; it's as natural for her as
+it's for a sheep to eat."
+
+"Pardon me, Kirstie, she was not the only one," interposed Archie.  "I
+had two warnings, two sermons, last night, both most kind and
+considerate.  Had you been there, I promise you you would have grat, my
+dear!  And they opened my eyes.  I saw we were going a wrong way."
+
+"Who was the other one?" Kirstie demanded.
+
+By this time Archie was in the condition of a hunted beast.  He had come,
+braced and resolute; he was to trace out a line of conduct for the pair
+of them in a few cold, convincing sentences; he had now been there some
+time, and he was still staggering round the outworks and undergoing what
+he felt to be a savage cross-examination.
+
+"Mr. Frank!" she cried.  "What nex', I would like to ken?"
+
+"He spoke most kindly and truly."
+
+"What like did he say?"
+
+"I am not going to tell you; you have nothing to do with that," cried
+Archie, startled to find he had admitted so much.
+
+"O, I have naething to do with it!" she repeated, springing to her feet.
+"A'body at Hermiston's free to pass their opinions upon me, but I have
+naething to do wi' it!  Was this at prayers like?  Did ye ca' the grieve
+into the consultation?  Little wonder if a'body's talking, when ye make
+a'body yer confidants!  But as you say, Mr. Weir,--most kindly, most
+considerately, most truly, I'm sure,--I have naething to do with it.  And
+I think I'll better be going.  I'll be wishing you good evening, Mr.
+Weir."  And she made him a stately curtsey, shaking as she did so from
+head to foot, with the barren ecstasy of temper.
+
+Poor Archie stood dumbfounded.  She had moved some steps away from him
+before he recovered the gift of articulate speech.
+
+"Kirstie!" he cried.  "O, Kirstie woman!"
+
+There was in his voice a ring of appeal, a clang of mere astonishment
+that showed the schoolmaster was vanquished.
+
+She turned round on him.  "What do ye Kirstie me for?" she retorted.
+"What have ye to do wi' me!  Gang to your ain freends and deave them!"
+
+He could only repeat the appealing "Kirstie!"
+
+"Kirstie, indeed!" cried the girl, her eyes blazing in her white face.
+"My name is Miss Christina Elliott, I would have ye to ken, and I daur ye
+to ca' me out of it.  If I canna get love, I'll have respect, Mr. Weir.
+I'm come of decent people, and I'll have respect.  What have I done that
+ye should lightly me?  What have I done?  What have I done? O, what have
+I done?" and her voice rose upon the third repetition.  "I thocht--I
+thocht--I thocht I was sae happy!" and the first sob broke from her like
+the paroxysm of some mortal sickness.
+
+Archie ran to her.  He took the poor child in his arms, and she nestled
+to his breast as to a mother's, and clasped him in hands that were strong
+like vices.  He felt her whole body shaken by the throes of distress, and
+had pity upon her beyond speech.  Pity, and at the same time a bewildered
+fear of this explosive engine in his arms, whose works he did not
+understand, and yet had been tampering with.  There arose from before him
+the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the ambiguous face
+of woman as she is.  In vain he looked back over the interview; he saw
+not where he had offended.  It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of
+brute nature. . . .
+
+
+
+
+EDITORIAL NOTE
+
+
+With the words last printed, "a wilful convulsion of brute nature," the
+romance of _Weir of Hermiston_ breaks off.  They were dictated, I
+believe, on the very morning of the writer's sudden seizure and death.
+_Weir of Hermiston_ thus remains in the work of Stevenson what _Edwin
+Droid_ is in the work of Dickens or _Denis Duval_ in that of Thackeray:
+or rather it remains relatively more, for if each of those fragments
+holds an honourable place among its author's writings, among Stevenson's
+the fragment of _Weir_ holds certainly the highest.
+
+Readers may be divided in opinion on the question whether they would or
+they would not wish to hear more of the intended course of the story and
+destinies of the characters.  To some, silence may seem best, and that
+the mind should be left to its own conjectures as to the sequel, with the
+help of such indications as the text affords.  I confess that this is the
+view which has my sympathy.  But since others, and those almost certainly
+a majority, are anxious to be told all they can, and since editors and
+publishers join in the request, I can scarce do otherwise than comply.
+The intended argument, then, so far as it was known at the time of the
+writer's death to his step-daughter and devoted amanuensis, Mrs. Strong,
+was nearly as follows:--
+
+Archie persists in his good resolution of avoiding further conduct
+compromising to young Kirstie's good name.  Taking advantage of the
+situation thus created, and of the girl's unhappiness and wounded vanity,
+Frank Innes pursues his purpose of seduction; and Kirstie, though still
+caring for Archie in her heart, allows herself to become Frank's victim.
+Old Kirstie is the first to perceive something amiss with her, and
+believing Archie to be the culprit, accuses him, thus making him aware
+for the first time that mischief has happened.  He does not at once deny
+the charge, but seeks out and questions young Kirstie, who confesses the
+truth to him; and he, still loving her, promises to protect and defend
+her in her trouble.  He then has an interview with Frank Innes on the
+moor, which ends in a quarrel, and in Archie killing Frank beside the
+Weaver's Stone.  Meanwhile the Four Black Brothers, having become aware
+of their sister's betrayal, are bent on vengeance against Archie as her
+supposed seducer.  They are about to close in upon him with this purpose
+when he is arrested by the officers of the law for the murder of Frank.
+He is tried before his own father, the Lord Justice-Clerk, found guilty,
+and condemned to death.  Meanwhile the elder Kirstie, having discovered
+from the girl how matters really stand, informs her nephews of the truth;
+and they, in a great revulsion of feeling in Archie's favour, determine
+on an action after the ancient manner of their house.  They gather a
+following, and after a great fight break the prison where Archie lies
+confined, and rescue him.  He and young Kirstie thereafter escape to
+America.  But the ordeal of taking part in the trial of his own son has
+been too much for the Lord Justice-Clerk, who dies of the shock.  "I do
+not know," adds the amanuensis, "what becomes of old Kirstie, but that
+character grew and strengthened so in the writing that I am sure he had
+some dramatic destiny for her."
+
+The plan of every imaginative work is subject, of course, to change under
+the artist's hand as he carries it out; and not merely the character of
+the elder Kirstie, but other elements of the design no less, might well
+have deviated from the lines originally traced.  It seems certain,
+however, that the next stage in the relations of Archie and the younger
+Kirstie would have been as above foreshadowed; and this conception of the
+lover's unconventional chivalry and unshaken devotion to his mistress
+after her fault is very characteristic of the writer's mind.  The
+vengeance to be taken on the seducer beside the Weaver's Stone is
+prepared for in the first words of the Introduction; while the situation
+and fate of the judge, confronting like a Brutus, but unable to survive,
+the duty of sending his own son to the gallows, seem clearly to have been
+destined to furnish the climax and essential tragedy of the tale.
+
+How this last circumstance was to have been brought about, within the
+limits of legal usage and possibility, seems hard to conjecture; but it
+was a point to which the author had evidently given careful
+consideration.  Mrs. Strong says simply that the Lord Justice-Clerk, like
+an old Roman, condemns his son to death; but I am assured on the best
+legal authority of Scotland that no judge, however powerful either by
+character or office, could have insisted on presiding at the trial of a
+near kinsman of his own.  The Lord Justice-Clerk was head of the criminal
+justiciary of the country; he might have insisted on his right of being
+present on the bench when his son was tried: but he would never have been
+allowed to preside or to pass sentence.  Now in a letter of Stevenson's
+to Mr. Baxter, of October 1892, I find him asking for materials in terms
+which seem to indicate that he knew this quite well:--"I wish Pitcairn's
+'Criminal Trials,' _quam primum_.  Also an absolutely correct text of the
+Scots judiciary oath.  Also, in case Pitcairn does not come down late
+enough, I wish as full a report as possible of a Scots murder trial
+between 1790-1820.  Understand the _fullest possible_.  Is there any book
+which would guide me to the following facts?  The Justice-Clerk tries
+some people capitally on circuit.  Certain evidence cropping up, the
+charge is transferred to the Justice-Clerk's own son.  Of course in the
+next trial the Justice-Clerk is excluded, and the case is called before
+the Lord Justice-General.  Where would this trial have to be?  I fear in
+Edinburgh, which would not suit my view.  Could it be again at the
+circuit town?"  The point was referred to a quondam fellow-member with
+Stevenson of the Edinburgh Speculative Society, Mr. Graham Murray, the
+present Solicitor-General for Scotland; whose reply was to the effect
+that there would be no difficulty in making the new trial take place at
+the circuit town; that it would have to be held there in spring or
+autumn, before two Lords of Justiciary; and that the Lord Justice-General
+would have nothing to do with it, this title being at the date in
+question only a nominal one held by a layman (which is no longer the
+case).  On this Stevenson writes, "Graham Murray's note _re_ the venue
+was highly satisfactory, and did me all the good in the world."  The
+terms of his inquiry seem to imply that he intended other persons, before
+Archie, to have fallen first under suspicion of the murder; and
+also--doubtless in order to make the rescue by the Black Brothers
+possible--that he wanted Archie to be imprisoned not in Edinburgh but in
+the circuit town.  But they do not show how he meant to get over the main
+difficulty, which at the same time he fully recognises.  Can it have been
+that Lord Hermiston's part was to have been limited to presiding at the
+_first_ trial, where the evidence incriminating Archie was unexpectedly
+brought forward, and to directing that the law should take its course?
+
+Whether the final escape and union of Archie and Christina would have
+proved equally essential to the plot may perhaps to some readers seem
+questionable.  They may rather feel that a tragic destiny is foreshadowed
+from the beginning for all concerned, and is inherent in the very
+conditions of the tale.  But on this point, and other matters of general
+criticism connected with it, I find an interesting discussion by the
+author himself in his correspondence.  Writing to Mr. J. M. Barrie, under
+date November 1, 1892, and criticising that author's famous story of _The
+Little Minister_, Stevenson says:--
+
+"Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully
+unconscientious. . . .  The _Little Minister_ ought to have ended badly;
+we all know it _did_, and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace
+and good feeling with which you have lied about it.  If you had told the
+truth, I for one could never have forgiven you.  As you had conceived and
+written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably
+true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord, in art.
+If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the
+beginning.  Now, your book began to end well.  You let yourself fall in
+love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets.  Once you had done
+that, your honour was committed--at the cost of truth to life you were
+bound to save them.  It is the blot on _Richard Feverel_ for instance,
+that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill.  But in
+this case, there is worse behind, for the ill ending does not inherently
+issue from the plot--the story had, in fact, ended well after the great
+last interview between Richard and Lucy--and the blind, illogical bullet
+which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to
+do with a room into whose open window it comes buzzing.  It might have so
+happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain
+our readers.  I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind
+about my Braxfield story.  Braxfield--only his name is Hermiston--has a
+son who is condemned to death; plainly there is a fine tempting fitness
+about this--and I meant he was to hang.  But on considering my minor
+characters, I saw there were five people who would--in a sense, who
+must--break prison and attempt his rescue.  They are capable hardy folks
+too, who might very well succeed.  Why should they not then?  Why should
+not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he
+could, with his--but soft!  I will not betray my secret nor my heroine. . . ."
+
+To pass, now, from the question how the story would have ended to the
+question how it originated and grew in the writer's mind.  The character
+of the hero, Weir of Hermiston, is avowedly suggested by the historical
+personality of Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield.  This famous judge has
+been for generations the subject of a hundred Edinburgh tales and
+anecdotes.  Readers of Stevenson's essay on the Raeburn exhibition, in
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, will remember how he is fascinated by Raeburn's
+portrait of Braxfield, even as Lockhart had been fascinated by a
+different portrait of the same worthy sixty years before (see _Peter's
+Letters to his Kinsfolk_); nor did his interest in the character diminish
+in later life.  Again, the case of a judge involved by the exigencies of
+his office in a strong conflict between public duty and private interest
+or affection, was one which had always attracted and exercised
+Stevenson's imagination.  In the days when he and Mr. Henley were
+collaborating with a view to the stage, Mr. Henley once proposed a plot
+founded on the story of Mr. Justice Harbottle in Sheridan Le Fanu's _In a
+Glass Darkly_, in which the wicked judge goes headlong _per fas et nefas_
+to his object of getting the husband of his mistress hanged.  Some time
+later Stevenson and his wife together wrote a play called _The Hanging
+Judge_.  In this, the title character is tempted for the first time in
+his life to tamper with the course of justice, in order to shield his
+wife from persecution by a former husband who reappears after being
+supposed dead.  Bulwer's novel of _Paul Clifford_, with its final
+situation of the worldly-minded judge, Sir William Brandon, learning that
+the highwayman whom he is in the act of sentencing is his own son, and
+dying of the knowledge, was also well known to Stevenson, and no doubt
+counted for something in the suggestion of the present story.
+
+Once more, the difficulties often attending the relation of father and
+son in actual life had pressed heavily on Stevenson's mind and conscience
+from the days of his youth, when in obeying the law of his own nature he
+had been constrained to disappoint, distress, and for a time to be much
+misunderstood by, a father whom he justly loved and admired with all his
+heart.  Difficulties of this kind he had already handled in a lighter
+vein once or twice in fiction--as for instance in the _Story of a Lie_
+and in _The Wrecker_--before he grappled with them in the acute and
+tragic phase in which they occur in the present story.
+
+These three elements, then, the interest of the historical personality of
+Lord Braxfield, the problems and emotions arising from a violent conflict
+between duty and nature in a judge, and the difficulties due to
+incompatibility and misunderstanding between father and son, lie at the
+foundations of the present story.  To touch on minor matters, it is
+perhaps worth notice, as Mr. Henley reminds me, that the name of Weir had
+from of old a special significance for Stevenson's imagination, from the
+traditional fame in Edinburgh of Major Weir, burned as a warlock,
+together with his sister, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity.
+Another name, that of the episodical personage of Mr. Torrance the
+minister, is borrowed direct from life, as indeed are the whole figure
+and its surroundings--kirkyard, kirk, and manse--down even to the black
+thread mittens: witness the following passage from a letter of the early
+seventies:--"I've been to church and am not depressed--a great step.  It
+was at that beautiful church" [of Glencorse in the Pentlands, three miles
+from his father's country house at Swanston].  "It is a little cruciform
+place, with a steep slate roof.  The small kirkyard is full of old
+grave-stones; one of a Frenchman from Dunkerque, I suppose he died
+prisoner in the military prison hard by.  And one, the most pathetic
+memorial I ever saw: a poor school-slate, in a wooden frame, with the
+inscription cut into it evidently by the father's own hand.  In church,
+old Mr. Torrance preached, over eighty and a relic of times forgotten,
+with his black thread gloves and mild old face."  A side hint for a
+particular trait in the character of Mrs. Weir we can trace in some
+family traditions concerning the writer's own grandmother, who is
+reported to have valued piety much more than efficiency in her domestic
+servants.  The other women characters seem, so far at least as I know, to
+have been pure creation, and especially that new and admirable
+incarnation of the eternal feminine in the elder Kirstie.  The little
+that he says about her himself is in a letter written a few days before
+his death to Mr. Gosse.  The allusions are to the various moods and
+attitudes of people in regard to middle age, and are suggested by Mr.
+Gosse's volume of poems, _In Russet and Silver_.  "It seems rather
+funny," he writes, "that this matter should come up just now, as I am at
+present engaged in treating a severe case of middle age in one of my
+stories, _The Justice-Clerk_.  The case is that of a woman, and I think I
+am doing her justice.  You will be interested, I believe, to see the
+difference in our treatments.  _Secreta Vitae_ [the title of one of Mr.
+Gosse's poems] comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie."  From the
+wonderful midnight scene between her and Archie, we may judge what we
+have lost in those later scenes where she was to have taxed him with the
+fault that was not his--to have presently learned his innocence from the
+lips of his supposed victim--to have then vindicated him to her kinsmen
+and fired them to the action of his rescue.  The scene of the
+prison-breaking here planned by Stevenson would have gained interest (as
+will already have occurred to readers) from comparison with the two
+famous precedents in Scott, the Porteous mob and the breaking of
+Portanferry jail.
+
+The best account of Stevenson's methods of imaginative work is in the
+following sentences from a letter of his own to Mr. W. Craibe Angus of
+Glasgow:--"I am still 'a slow study,' and sit for a long while silent on
+my eggs.  Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your
+subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there
+your stuff is--good or bad."  The several elements above noted having
+been left to work for many years in his mind, it was in the autumn of
+1892 that he was moved to "take the lid off and look in,"--under the
+influence, it would seem, of a special and overmastering wave of that
+feeling for the romance of Scottish scenery and character which was at
+all times so strong in him, and which his exile did so much to intensify.
+I quote again from his letter to Mr. Barrie on November 1st in that
+year:--"It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas
+under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so
+continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come.
+I have finished _David Balfour_, I have another book on the stocks, _The
+Young Chevalier_, which is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and
+to deal with Prince Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done
+but begun a third, which is to be all moorland together, and is to have
+for a centre-piece a figure that I think you will appreciate--that of the
+immortal Braxfield.  Braxfield himself is my grand premier--or since you
+are so much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy lead."
+Writing to me at the same date he makes the same announcement more
+briefly, with a list of the characters and an indication of the scene and
+date of the story.  To Mr. Baxter he writes a month later, "I have a
+novel on the stocks to be called _The Justice-Clerk_.  It is pretty
+Scotch; the grand premier is taken from Braxfield (O, by the by, send me
+Cockburn's _Memorials_), and some of the story is, well, queer.  The
+heroine is seduced by one man, and finally disappears with the other man
+who shot him. . . .  Mind you, I expect _The Justice-Clerk_ to be my
+masterpiece.  My Braxfield is already a thing of beauty and a joy for
+ever, and so far as he has gone, far my best character."  From the last
+extract it appears that he had already at this date drafted some of the
+earlier chapters of the book.  He also about the same time composed the
+dedication to his wife, who found it pinned to her bed-curtains one
+morning on awaking.  It was always his habit to keep several books in
+progress at the same time, turning from one to another as the fancy took
+him, and finding relief in the change of labour; and for many months
+after the date of this letter, first illness,--then a voyage to
+Auckland,--then work on the _Ebb-Tide_, on a new tale called _St. Ives_,
+which was begun during an attack of influenza, and on his projected book
+of family history,--prevented his making any continuous progress with
+_Weir_.  In August 1893 he says he has been recasting the beginning.  A
+year later, still only the first four or five chapters had been drafted.
+Then, in the last weeks of his life, he attacked the task again, in a
+sudden heat of inspiration, and worked at it ardently and without
+interruption until the end came.  No wonder if during these weeks he was
+sometimes aware of a tension of the spirit difficult to sustain.  "How
+can I keep this pitch?" he is reported to have said after finishing one
+of the chapters; and all the world knows how that frail organism in fact
+betrayed him in mid effort.  The greatness of the loss to his country's
+letters can for the first time be fully measured from the foregoing
+pages.
+
+There remains one more point to be mentioned, as to the speech and
+manners of the Hanging Judge himself.  That these are not a whit
+exaggerated, in comparison with what is recorded of his historic
+prototype, Lord Braxfield, is certain.  The _locus classicus_ in regard
+to this personage is in Lord Cockburn's _Memorials of his Time_.  "Strong
+built and dark, with rough eyebrows, powerful eyes, threatening lips, and
+a low growling voice, he was like a formidable blacksmith.  His accent
+and dialect were exaggerated Scotch; his language, like his thoughts,
+short, strong, and conclusive.  Illiterate and without any taste for any
+refined enjoyment, strength of understanding, which gave him power
+without cultivation, only encouraged him to a more contemptuous disdain
+of all natures less coarse than his own.  It may be doubted if he was
+ever so much in his element as when tauntingly repelling the last
+despairing claim of a wretched culprit, and sending him to Botany Bay or
+the gallows with an insulting jest.  Yet this was not from cruelty, for
+which he was too strong and too jovial, but from cherished coarseness."
+Readers, nevertheless, who are at all acquainted with the social history
+of Scotland will hardly have failed to make the observation that
+Braxfield's is an extreme case of eighteenth-century manners, as he
+himself was an eighteenth-century personage (he died in 1799, in his
+seventy-eighth year); and that for the date in which the story is cast
+(1814) such manners are somewhat of an anachronism.  During the
+generation contemporary with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
+wars--or to put it another way, the generation that elapsed between the
+days when Scott roamed the country as a High School and University
+student and those when he settled in the fulness of fame and prosperity
+at Abbotsford,--or again (the allusions will appeal to readers of the
+admirable Galt) during the interval between the first and the last
+provostry of Bailie Pawkie in the borough of Gudetown, or between the
+earlier and the final ministrations of Mr. Balwhidder in the parish of
+Dalmailing,--during this period a great softening had taken place in
+Scottish manners generally, and in those of the Bar and Bench not least.
+"Since the death of Lord Justice-Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield," says
+Lockhart, writing about 1817, "the whole exterior of judicial deportment
+has been quite altered."  A similar criticism may probably hold good on
+the picture of border life contained in the chapter concerning the Four
+Black Brothers of Cauldstaneslap, namely, that it rather suggests the
+ways of an earlier generation; nor have I any clue to the reasons which
+led Stevenson to choose this particular date, in the year preceding
+Waterloo, for a story which, in regard to some of its features at least,
+might seem more naturally placed some twenty-five or thirty years before.
+
+If the reader seeks, further, to know whether the scenery of Hermiston
+can be identified with any one special place familiar to the writer's
+early experience, the answer, I think, must be in the negative.  Rather
+it is distilled from a number of different haunts and associations among
+the moorlands of southern Scotland.  In the dedication and in a letter to
+me he indicates the Lammermuirs as the scene of his tragedy.  And Mrs.
+Stevenson (his mother) tells me that she thinks he was inspired by
+recollections of a visit paid in boyhood to an uncle living at a remote
+farmhouse in that district called Overshiels, in the parish of Stow.  But
+though he may have thought of the Lammermuirs in the first instance, we
+have already found him drawing his description of the kirk and manse from
+another haunt of his youth, namely, Glencorse in the Pentlands; while
+passages in chapters v. and viii. point explicitly to a third district,
+that is, Upper Tweeddale, with the country stretching thence towards the
+wells of Clyde.  With this country also holiday rides and excursions from
+Peebles had made him familiar as a boy: and this seems certainly the most
+natural scene of the story, if only from its proximity to the proper home
+of the Elliotts, which of course is in the heart of the Border,
+especially Teviotdale and Ettrick.  Some of the geographical names
+mentioned are clearly not meant to furnish literal indications.  The
+Spango, for instance, is a water running, I believe, not into the Tweed
+but into the Nith, and Crossmichael as the name of a town is borrowed
+from Galloway.
+
+But it is with the general and essential that the artist deals, and
+questions of strict historical perspective or local definition are beside
+the mark in considering his work.  Nor will any reader expect, or be
+grateful for, comment in this place on matters which are more properly to
+the point--on the seizing and penetrating power of the author's ripened
+art as exhibited in the foregoing pages, the wide range of character and
+emotion over which he sweeps with so assured a hand, his vital poetry of
+vision and magic of presentment.  Surely no son of Scotland has died
+leaving with his last breath a worthier tribute to the land he loved.
+
+                                                                     S. C.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+Ae, one.
+
+Antinomian, one of a sect which holds that under the gospel dispensation
+the moral law is not obligatory.
+
+Auld Hornie, the Devil.
+
+Ballant, ballad.
+
+Bauchles, brogues, old shoes.
+
+Bauld, bold.
+
+Bees in their bonnet, eccentricities.
+
+Birling, whirling.
+
+Black-a-vised, dark-complexioned.
+
+Bonnet-laird, small landed proprietor, yeoman.
+
+Bool, ball.
+
+Brae, rising ground.
+
+Brig, bridge.
+
+Buff, play buff on, to make a fool of, to deceive.
+
+Burn, stream.
+
+Butt end, end of a cottage.
+
+Byre, cow-house.
+
+Ca', drive.
+
+Caller, fresh.
+
+Canna, cannot.
+
+Canny, careful, shrewd.
+
+Cantie, cheerful.
+
+Carline, old woman.
+
+Cauld, cold.
+
+Chalmer, chamber.
+
+Claes, clothes.
+
+Clamjamfry, crowd.
+
+Clavers, idle talk.
+
+Cock-laird.  See Bonnet-laird.
+
+Collieshangie, turmoil.
+
+Crack, to converse.
+
+Cuist, cast.
+
+Cuddy, donkey.
+
+Cutty, jade, also used playfully = brat.
+
+Daft, mad, frolicsome.
+
+Dander, to saunter.
+
+Danders, cinders.
+
+Daurna, dare not.
+
+Deave, to deafen.
+
+Denty, dainty.
+
+Dirdum, vigour.
+
+Disjaskit, worn out, disreputable-looking.
+
+Doer, law agent.
+
+Dour, hard.
+
+Drumlie, dark.
+
+Dunting, knocking.
+
+Dwaibly, infirm, rickety.
+
+Dule-tree, the tree of lamentation, the hanging-tree.
+
+Earrand, errand.
+
+Ettercap, vixen.
+
+Fechting, fighting.
+
+Feck, quantity, portion.
+
+Feckless, feeble, powerless.
+
+Fell, strong and fiery.
+
+Fey, unlike yourself, strange, as if urged on by fate, or as persons are
+observed to be in the hour of approaching death or disaster.
+
+Fit, foot.
+
+Flit, to depart.
+
+Flyped, turned up, turned in-side out.
+
+Forbye, in addition to.
+
+Forgather, to fall in with.
+
+Fower, four.
+
+Fushionless, pithless, weak.
+
+Fyle, to soil, to defile.
+
+Fylement, obloquy, defilement.
+
+Gaed, Went.
+
+Gang, to go.
+
+Gey an', very.
+
+Gigot, leg of mutton.
+
+Girzie, lit. diminutive of Grizel, here a playful nickname.
+
+Glaur, mud.
+
+Glint, glance, sparkle.
+
+Gloaming, twilight.
+
+Glower, to scowl.
+
+Gobbets, small lumps.
+
+Gowden, golden.
+
+Gowsty, gusty.
+
+Grat, wept.
+
+Grieve, land-steward.
+
+Guddle, to catch fish with the hands by groping under the stones or
+banks.
+
+Gumption, common sense, judgment.
+
+Guid, good.
+
+Gurley, stormy, surly.
+
+Gyte, beside itself.
+
+Hae, have, take.
+
+Haddit, held.
+
+Hale, whole.
+
+Heels-ower-hurdie, heels over head.
+
+Hinney, honey.
+
+Hirstle, to bustle.
+
+Hizzie, wench.
+
+Howe, hollow.
+
+Howl, hovel.
+
+Hunkered, crouched.
+
+Hypothec, lit. in Scots law the furnishings of a house, and formerly the
+produce and stock of a farm hypothecated by law to the landlord as
+security for rent; colloquially "the whole structure," "the whole
+concern."
+
+Idleset, idleness.
+
+Infeftment, a term in Scots law originally synonymous with investiture.
+
+Jaud, jade.
+
+Jeely-piece, a slice of bread and jelly.
+
+Jennipers, juniper.
+
+Jo, sweetheart.
+
+Justifeed, executed, made the victim of justice.
+
+Jyle, jail
+
+Kebbuck, cheese.
+
+Ken, to know.
+
+Kenspeckle, conspicuous.
+
+Kilted, tucked up.
+
+Kyte, belly.
+
+Laigh, low.
+
+Laird, landed proprietor.
+
+Lane, alone.
+
+Lave, rest, remainder.
+
+Linking, tripping.
+
+Lown, lonely, still.
+
+Lynn, cataract.
+
+Lyon King of Arms, the chief of the Court of Heraldry in Scotland.
+
+Macers, offiers of the supreme court. [Cf.  Guy Mannering, last chapter.]
+
+Maun, must.
+
+Menseful, of good manners.
+
+Mirk, dark.
+
+Misbegowk, deception, disappointment.
+
+Mools, mould, earth.
+
+Muckle, much, great, big.
+
+My lane, by myself.
+
+Nowt, black cattle.
+
+Palmering, walking infirmly.
+
+Panel, in Scots law, the accused person in a criminal action, the
+prisoner.
+
+Peel, fortified watch-tower.
+
+Plew-stilts, plough-handles.
+
+Policy, ornamental grounds of a country mansion.
+
+Puddock, frog.
+
+Quean, wench.
+
+Rair, to roar.
+
+Riff-raff, rabble.
+
+Risping, grating.
+
+Rout, rowt, to roar, to rant.
+
+Rowth, abundance.
+
+Rudas, haggard old woman.
+
+Runt, an old cow past breeding; opprobriously, an old woman.
+
+Sab, sob.
+
+Sanguishes, sandwiches.
+
+Sasine, in Scots law, the act of giving legal possession of feudal
+property, or, colloquially, the deed by which that possession is proved.
+
+Sclamber, to scramble.
+
+Sculduddery, impropriety, grossness.
+
+Session, the Court of Session, the supreme court of Scotland.
+
+Shauchling, shuffling, slipshod.
+
+Shoo, to chase gently.
+
+Siller, money.
+
+Sinsyne, since then.
+
+Skailing, dispersing.
+
+Skelp, slap.
+
+Skirling, screaming.
+
+Skriegh-o'day, daybreak.
+
+Snash, abuse.
+
+Sneisty, supercilious.
+
+Sooth, to hum.
+
+Sough, sound, murmur.
+
+Spec, The Speculative Society, a debating Society connected with
+Edingburgh University.
+
+Speir, to ask.
+
+Speldering, sprawling.
+
+Splairge, to splash.
+
+Spunk, spirit, fire.
+
+Steik, to shut.
+
+Stockfish, hard, savourless.
+
+Suger-bool, suger-plum.
+
+Syne, since, then.
+
+Tawpie, a slow foolish slut, also used playfully = monkey.
+
+Telling you, a good thing for you.
+
+Thir, these.
+
+Thrawn, cross-grained.
+
+Toon, town.
+
+Two-names, local soubriquets in addition to patronymic.
+
+Tyke, dog.
+
+Unchancy, unlucky.
+
+Unco, strange, extraordinary, very.
+
+Upsitten, impertinent.
+
+Vennel, alley, lane.  The Vennel, a narrow lane in Edingburgh, running
+out of the Grassmarket.
+
+Vivers, victuals.
+
+Wae, sad, unhappy.
+
+Waling, choosing.
+
+Warrandise, warranty.
+
+Waur, worse.
+
+Weird, destiny.
+
+Whammle, to upset.
+
+Whaup, curlew.
+
+Whiles, sometimes.
+
+Windlestae, crested dog's-tail, grass.
+
+Wund, wind.
+
+Yin, one.
+
+
+
+
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