Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance

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 fi

lightened 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

have to talk to you seriously. Sit ye down, pl

d 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

looked up quickly and her eyes contracted. "There's no good ever comes of these secret meetings. They're not fran

have been talking to

than one of them,

o ye ca' that, that's ready to gang round like a whirligi

h a quick breath. "That is what I fe

he point of los

istina on the matter; and she strenuously repeated

nd 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 r

at Archie had said last. But the dull irritation still persisted in her bosom; with

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 the

yet," she said, "

for one," s

ied. "And what do I care

for her niece," replied

first I've heard of i

, what they have noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmas

the country before I was born, and will be doing it still, I daur say, when I'm

wo sermons, last night, both most kind and considerate. Had you been there, I promise you

ther one?" Kir

out a line of conduct for the pair of them in a few cold, convincing sentences; he had now been there some tim

ied. "What nex', I

ost kindly

ike did

othing to do with that," cried Archie,

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

oved some steps away from him before he

cried. "O, K

l, a clang of mere astonishment that s

me for?" she retorted. "What have ye to do wi

epeat the appea

et 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 ha

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

ORIA

'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

n 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 ed

; 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 m

t 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 t

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 sprin

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 interest

le, 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 mu

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. So

n 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 h

anston]. "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

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 pinne

o 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

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 ri

ateful 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

.

OS

,

ds that under the gospel dispensati

rnie, t

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brogues,

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rising

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end of a

cow-

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careful

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d, c

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mfry,

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hangie,

to co

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also used pla

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law

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infirm,

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nd, e

cap,

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feeble,

trong a

n by fate, or as persons are observed to be

, f

to d

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obloquy, d

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tive of Grizel, her

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ommon sense

d,

stormy

beside

have,

it,

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hurdie, hee

ey,

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ed, cr

e produce and stock of a farm hypothecated by law to the landlord as se

t, idl

cots law originally syn

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a slice of br

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weeth

ted, made the vi

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to

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gh,

anded pr

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lonely

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chief of the Court of

upreme court. [Cf. Guy M

n,

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k,

eception, di

mould

much, gr

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black

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accused person in a crimi

tified wa

ts, ploug

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ock,

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t, to roa

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aggard o

t breeding; opprobri

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hes, sa

possession of feudal property, or, colloquiall

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impropriety

f Session, the supre

, shufflin

o chase

er,

e, sin

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p, s

ng, sc

o'day, d

h, a

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h, t

sound,

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spiri

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, hard, s

ool, su

since,

ish slut, also used

, a good th

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cross-

n,

oubriquets in addi

e,

cy, un

ge, extraor

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, a narrow lane in Edingburgh,

s, vi

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ise, wa

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crested dog'

d,

, o