Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (288 page)

There was a Tuesday club at the “Cross-keys” in Crossmichael, where the young bloods of the country-side congregated and drank deep on a percentage of the expense, so that he was left gainer who should have drunk the most.  Archie had no great mind to this diversion, but he took it like a duty laid upon him, went with a decent regularity, did his manfullest with the liquor, held up his head in the local jests, and got home again and was able to put up his horse, to the admiration of Kirstie and the lass that helped her.  He dined at Driffel, supped at Windielaws.  He went to the new year’s ball at Huntsfield and was made welcome, and thereafter rode to hounds with my Lord Muirfell, upon whose name, as that of a legitimate Lord of Parliament, in a work so full of Lords of Session, my pen should pause reverently.  Yet the same fate attended him here as in Edinburgh.  The habit of solitude tends to perpetuate itself, and an austerity of which he was quite unconscious, and a pride which seemed arrogance, and perhaps was chiefly shyness, discouraged and offended his new companions.  Hay did not return more than twice, Pringle never at all, and there came a time when Archie even desisted from the Tuesday Club, and became in all things — what he had had the name of almost from the first — the Recluse of Hermiston.  High-nosed Miss Pringle of Drumanno and high-stepping Miss Marshall of the Mains were understood to have had a difference of opinion about him the day after the ball — he was none the wiser, he could not suppose himself to be remarked by these entrancing ladies.  At the ball itself my Lord Muirfell’s daughter, the Lady Flora, spoke to him twice, and the second time with a touch of appeal, so that her colour rose and her voice trembled a little in his ear, like a passing grace in music.  He stepped back with a heart on fire, coldly and not ungracefully excused himself, and a little after watched her dancing with young Drumanno of the empty laugh, and was harrowed at the sight, and raged to himself that this was a world in which it was given to Drumanno to please, and to himself only to stand aside and envy.  He seemed excluded, as of right, from the favour of such society — seemed to extinguish mirth wherever he came, and was quick to feel the wound, and desist, and retire into solitude.  If he had but understood the figure he presented, and the impression he made on these bright eyes and tender hearts; if he had but guessed that the Recluse of Hermiston, young, graceful, well spoken, but always cold, stirred the maidens of the county with the charm of Byronism when Byronism was new, it may be questioned whether his destiny might not even yet have been modified.  It may be questioned, and I think it should be doubted.  It was in his horoscope to be parsimonious of pain to himself, or of the chance of pain, even to the avoidance of any opportunity of pleasure; to have a Roman sense of duty, an instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste; to be the son of Adam Weir and Jean Rutherford.

2. Kirstie

Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor.  Long of limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed and embellished her.  By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother of their children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman.  The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference.  She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart.  If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper.  Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality.  The grieve’s wife had been “sneisty”; the sister of the gardener who kept house for him had shown herself “upsitten”; and she wrote to Lord Hermiston about once a year demanding the discharge of the offenders, and justifying the demand by much wealth of detail.  For it must not be supposed that the quarrel rested with the wife and did not take in the husband also — or with the gardener’s sister, and did not speedily include the gardener himself.  As the upshot of all this petty quarrelling and intemperate speech, she was practically excluded (like a lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts of human association; except with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a lassie and entirely at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of “the mistress’s” moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour.  To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie’s presence.  She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance.  He was “Young Hermiston,” “the laird himsel’”: he had an air of distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes, that abashed the woman’s tantrums in the beginning, and therefore the possibility of any quarrel was excluded.  He was new, and therefore immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.  And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the everlasting fountains of interest.

Her feeling partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of a maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a god.  No matter what he had asked of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would have done it and joyed to do it.  Her passion, for it was nothing less, entirely filled her.  It was a rich physical pleasure to make his bed or light his lamp for him when he was absent, to pull off his wet boots or wait on him at dinner when he returned.  A young man who should have so doted on the idea, moral and physical, of any woman, might be properly described as being in love, head and heels, and would have behaved himself accordingly.  But Kirstie — though her heart leaped at his coming footsteps — though, when he patted her shoulder, her face brightened for the day — had not a hope or thought beyond the present moment and its perpetuation to the end of time.  Till the end of time she would have had nothing altered, but still continue delightedly to serve her idol, and be repaid (say twice in the month) with a clap on the shoulder.

I have said her heart leaped — it is the accepted phrase.  But rather, when she was alone in any chamber of the house, and heard his foot passing on the corridors, something in her bosom rose slowly until her breath was suspended, and as slowly fell again with a deep sigh, when the steps had passed and she was disappointed of her eyes’ desire.  This perpetual hunger and thirst of his presence kept her all day on the alert.  When he went forth at morning, she would stand and follow him with admiring looks.  As it grew late and drew to the time of his return, she would steal forth to a corner of the policy wall and be seen standing there sometimes by the hour together, gazing with shaded eyes, waiting the exquisite and barren pleasure of his view a mile off on the mountains.  When at night she had trimmed and gathered the fire, turned down his bed, and laid out his night-gear — when there was no more to be done for the king’s pleasure, but to remember him fervently in her usually very tepid prayers, and go to bed brooding upon his perfections, his future career, and what she should give him the next day for dinner — there still remained before her one more opportunity; she was still to take in the tray and say good-night.  Sometimes Archie would glance up from his book with a preoccupied nod and a perfunctory salutation which was in truth a dismissal; sometimes — and by degrees more often — the volume would be laid aside, he would meet her coming with a look of relief; and the conversation would be engaged, last out the supper, and be prolonged till the small hours by the waning fire.  It was no wonder that Archie was fond of company after his solitary days; and Kirstie, upon her side, exerted all the arts of her vigorous nature to ensnare his attention.  She would keep back some piece of news during dinner to be fired off with the entrance of the supper tray, and form as it were the
lever de rideau
of the evening’s entertainment.  Once he had heard her tongue wag, she made sure of the result.  From one subject to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing the least silence, fearing almost to give him time for an answer lest it should slip into a hint of separation.  Like so many people of her class, she was a brave narrator; her place was on the hearth-rug and she made it a rostrum, mimeing her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out with endless “quo’ he’s” and “quo’ she’s,” her voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she would suddenly spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to the clock, “Mercy, Mr. Archie!” she would say, “whatten a time o’ night is this of it!  God forgive me for a daft wife!”  So it befell, by good management, that she was not only the first to begin these nocturnal conversations, but invariably the first to break them off; so she managed to retire and not to be dismissed.

3. A Border Family

Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the same service, a helpmeet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master’s, and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship with some illustrious dead.  For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.  No more characteristic instance could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott.  They were all, and Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that tree there dangled a halter.  The Elliotts themselves have had a chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of the most unfortunate of the border clans — the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers.  One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a moment out of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business, speeding home, perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame horses and lean kine, or squealing and dealing death in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats.  One after another closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet or the Baron’s dule-tree.  For the rusty blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers.  The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their descendants alone, and the shame to be forgotten.  Pride glowed in their bosoms to publish their relationship to “Andrew Ellwald of the Laverockstanes, called ‘Unchancy Dand,’ who was justifeed wi’ seeven mair of the same name at Jeddart in the days of King James the Sax.”  In all this tissue of crime and misfortune, the Elliotts of Cauldstaneslap had one boast which must appear legitimate: the males were gallows-birds, born outlaws, petty thieves, and deadly brawlers; but, according to the same tradition, the females were all chaste and faithful.  The power of ancestry on the character is not limited to the inheritance of cells.  If I buy ancestors by the gross from the benevolence of Lyon King of Arms, my grandson (if he is Scottish) will feel a quickening emulation of their deeds.  The men of the Elliotts were proud, lawless, violent as of right, cherishing and prolonging a tradition.  In like manner with the women.  And the woman, essentially passionate and reckless, who crouched on the rug, in the shine of the peat fire, telling these tales, had cherished through life a wild integrity of virtue.

Her father Gilbert had been deeply pious, a savage disciplinarian in the antique style, and withal a notorious smuggler.  “I mind when I was a bairn getting mony a skelp and being shoo’d to bed like pou’try,” she would say.  “That would be when the lads and their bit kegs were on the road.  We’ve had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen, mony’s the time, betwix’ the twelve and the three; and their lanterns would be standing in the forecourt, ay, a score o’ them at once.  But there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap.  My faither was a consistent man in walk and conversation; just let slip an aith, and there was the door to ye!  He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair wonder to hear him pray, but the family has aye had a gift that way.” This father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald stock, by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and, secondly, to the mother of Kirstie.  “He was an auld man when he married her, a fell auld man wi’ a muckle voice — you could hear him rowting from the top o’ the Kye-skairs,” she said; “but for her, it appears she was a perfit wonder.  It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it was your ain.  The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair.  Mines is no to be mentioned wi’ it, and there’s few weemen has mair hair than what I have, or yet a bonnier colour.  Often would I tell my dear Miss Jeannie — that was your mother, dear, she was cruel ta’en up about her hair, it was unco’ tender, ye see — ’Houts, Miss Jeannie,’ I would say, ‘just fling your washes and your French dentifrishes in the back o’ the fire, for that’s the place for them; and awa’ down to a burn side, and wash yersel’ in cauld hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the caller wind o’ the muirs, the way that my mother aye washed hers, and that I have aye made it a practice to have wishen mines — just you do what I tell ye, my dear, and ye’ll give me news of it!  Ye’ll have hair, and routh of hair, a pigtail as thick’s my arm,’ I said, ‘and the bonniest colour like the clear gowden guineas, so as the lads in kirk’ll no can keep their eyes off it!’  Weel, it lasted out her time, puir thing!  I cuttit a lock of it upon her corp that was lying there sae cauld.  I’ll show it ye some of thir days if ye’re good.  But, as I was sayin’, my mither — ”