Weir of Hermiston

by Robert Louis Stevenson
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 maturitydepressed, 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" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">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 reluctantwitness, 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