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.