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 concentred there, and Kirstie pointed out by that
finger 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 dare----?"
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....
SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S 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
Drood" 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, at least to my mind, 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. But their vengeance is
forestalled by his arrest 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; and in the
spring of 1894 the author rehearsed in conversation with a visitor (Mr.
Sidney Lysaght) a scene where the girl was to confess to her lover in
prison that she was with child by the man he had killed. 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 Lord Advocate 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 imply
clearly that he intended other persons before Archie to have fallen
under suspicion of the murder (what other persons?); 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.
Can it have been that Lord Hermiston's part was to have been limited to
presiding at the _first_ trial, where the persons wrongly suspected were
to have been judged, and to directing that the law should take its
course when evidence incriminating his own son was unexpectedly brought
forward?
Whether the final escape and union of Archie and Christina would have
proved equally essential to the plot may perhaps to most 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 drafted 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
probably 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," "The Misadventures of John Nicholson," and "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 horrible and true tale of the burning in Edinburgh of Major Weir,
the warlock, and his sister. 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 gravestones; 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. I know of no original for that new
and admirable incarnation of the eternal feminine in the elder Kirstie.
The little that Stevenson says about her himself is in a letter written
a few days before his death to Mr. Gosse. The allusions are to the
various views 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 quality of the 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 gaol.
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,
overtaxed so long, in fact betrayed him in mid effort.
With reference to the speech and manners of the Hanging Judge himself:
that they 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 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 quarter or even half a century earlier.
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) told me that she thought 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 on the whole
it is this which best answers the geographical indications of the story.
Some of the place-names 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. Crossmichael as the name of a town
is borrowed from Galloway; but it may be taken to all intents and
purposes as standing for Peebles, where I am told by Sir George Douglas
there existed in the early years of the century a well-known club of the
same character as that described in the story. Lastly, the name
Hermiston itself is taken from a farm on the Water of Ale, between
Ettrick and Teviotdale, and close to the proper country of the Elliotts.
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, 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, cock-laird, _small landed proprietor, yeoman_.
bool, _ball, technically marble, here = sugar-plum_.
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_.
cuddy, _donkey_.
cuist, _cast_.
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_.
dule-tree, _the tree of lamentation, the hanging tree_.
dunting, _knocking_.
dwaibly, _infirm, rickety_.
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 inside 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_.
guid, _good_.
gumption, _common-sense, judgment_.
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_.
howf, _haunt_.
hunkered, _crouched_.
hypothec, _lii. 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, _officers 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_.
riffraff, _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_.
skreigh-o'-day, _daybreak_.
snash, _abuse_.
sneisty, _supercilious_.
sooth, _to hum_.
sough, _sound, murmur_.
Spec., _The Speculative Society, a debating Society connected with
Edinburgh University_.
speir, to _ask_.
speldering, _sprawling_.
splairge, _to splash_.
spunk, _spirit, fire_.
steik, _to shut_.
stirk, _a young bullock_.
stockfish, _hard, savourless_.
sugar-bool, _sugar-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, _farm, town_.
two-names, _local sobriquets in addition to patronymic_.
tyke, _dog_.
unchancy, _unlucky_.
unco, _strange, extraordinary, very_.
upsitten, _impertinent_.
vennel, _alley, lane_. The Vennel, _a narrow lane in Edinburgh running
out of the Grassmarket_.
vivers, _victuals_.
wac, _sad, unhappy_.
waling, _choosing_.
warrandise, _warranty_.
waur, _worse_.
weird, _destiny_.
whammle, _to upset_.
whaup, _curlew_.
whiles, _sometimes_.
windlestrae, _crested dog's-tail grass_.
wund, _wind_.
yin, _one_.
END OF VOL. XIX
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