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 whüre 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.