Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (297 page)

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 dared — ?”

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. . . .

EDITORIAL 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 Droid
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 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.  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 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; while 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 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 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 seem to imply that he intended other persons, before Archie, to have fallen first under suspicion of the murder; 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.  But they do not show how he meant to get over the main difficulty, which at the same time he fully recognises.  Can it have been that Lord Hermiston’s part was to have been limited to presiding at the
first
trial, where the evidence incriminating Archie was unexpectedly brought forward, and to directing that the law should take its course?