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 maturity depressed, 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 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 somewhat
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 reluctant witness, 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 business that I should
be all day in Court haanging Radicals, 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 with the cook; and then the cook would pray
with Mrs. Weir; and the next day’s meal would
never be a penny the better and the next
cook (when she came) would be worse, if anything,
but just as pious. It was often wondered that
Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a
stoical old voluptuary, contented with sound wine
and plenty of it. But there were moments when
he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the
history of his married life “Here!
tak’ it awa’, and bring me a piece of
bread and kebbuck!” he had exclaimed, with an
appalling explosion of his voice and rare gestures.
None thought to dispute or to make excuses; the service
was arrested; Mrs. Weir sat at the head of the table
whimpering without disguise; and his lordship opposite
munched his bread and cheese in ostentatious disregard.
Once only Mrs. Weir had ventured to appeal. He
was passing her chair on his way into the study.
“O, Edom!” she wailed,
in a voice tragic with tears, and reaching out to
him both hands, in one of which she held a sopping
pocket-handkerchief.
He paused and looked upon her with
a face of wrath, into which there stole, as he looked,
a twinkle of humour.
“Noansense!” he said.
“You and your noansense! What do I want
with a Christian faim’ly? I want Christian
broth! Get me a lass that can plain-boil a potato,
if she was a whüre off the streets.” And
with these words, which echoed in her tender ears
like blasphemy, he had passed on to his study and
shut the door behind him.
Such was the housewifery in George
Square. It was better at Hermiston, where Kirstie
Elliott, the sister of a neighbouring bonnet-laird,
and an eighteenth cousin of the lady’s, bore
the charge of all, and kept a trim house and a good
country table. Kirstie was a woman in a thousand,
clean, capable, notable; once a moorland Helen, and
still comely as a blood horse and healthy as the hill
wind. High in flesh and voice and colour, she
ran the house with her whole intemperate soul, in a
bustle, not without buffets. Scarce more pious
than decency in those days required, she was the cause
of many an anxious thought and many a tearful prayer
to Mrs. Weir. Housekeeper and mistress renewed
the parts of Martha and Mary; and though with a pricking
conscience, Mary reposed on Martha’s strength
as on a rock. Even Lord Hermiston held Kirstie
in a particular regard. There were few with whom
he unbent so gladly, few whom he favoured with so
many pleasantries. “Kirstie and me maun
have our joke,” he would declare, in high good-humour,
as he buttered Kirstie’s scones, and she waited
at table. A man who had no need either of love
or of popularity, a keen reader of men and of events,
there was perhaps only one truth for which he was
quite unprepared: he would have been quite unprepared
to learn that Kirstie hated him. He thought maid
and master were well matched; hard, handy, healthy,
broad Scots folk, without a hair of nonsense to the
pair of them. And the fact was that she made
a goddess and an only child of the effete and tearful
lady; and even as she waited at table her hands would
sometimes itch for my lord’s ears.
Thus, at least, when the family were
at Hermiston, not only my lord, but Mrs. Weir too,
enjoyed a holiday. Free from the dreadful looking-for
of the miscarried dinner, she would mind her seam,
read her piety books, and take her walk (which was
my lord’s orders), sometimes by herself, sometimes
with Archie, the only child of that scarce natural
union. The child was her next bond to life.
Her frosted sentiment bloomed again, she breathed
deep of life, she let loose her heart, in that society.
The miracle of her motherhood was ever new to her.
The sight of the little man at her skirt intoxicated
her with the sense of power, and froze her with the
consciousness of her responsibility. She looked
forward, and, seeing him in fancy grow up and play
his diverse part on the world’s theatre, caught
in her breath and lifted up her courage with a lively
effort. It was only with the child that she forgot
herself and was at moments natural; yet it was only
with the child that she had conceived and managed
to pursue a scheme of conduct. Archie was to be
a great man and a good; a minister if possible, a
saint for certain. She tried to engage his mind
upon her favourite books, Rutherford’s “Letters,”
Scougal’s “Grace Abounding,” and
the like. It was a common practice of hers (and
strange to remember now) that she would carry the child
to the Deil’s Hags, sit with him on the Praying
Weaver’s Stone, and talk of the Covenanters
till their tears ran down. Her view of history
was wholly artless, a design in snow and ink; upon
the one side, tender innocents with psalms upon their
lips; upon the other, the persecutors, booted, bloody-minded,
flushed with wine: a suffering Christ, a raging
Beelzebub. Persecutor was a word that knocked
upon the woman’s heart; it was her highest thought
of wickedness, and the mark of it was on her house.
Her great-great-grandfather had drawn the sword against
the Lord’s anointed on the field of Rullion
Green, and breathed his last (tradition said) in the
arms of the detestable Dalyell. Nor could she
blind herself to this, that had they lived in those
old days, Hermiston himself would have been numbered
alongside of Bloody Mackenzie and the politic Lauderdale
and Rothes, in the band of God’s immediate enemies.
The sense of this moved her to the more fervour; she
had a voice for that name of persecutor that
thrilled in the child’s marrow; and when one
day the mob hooted and hissed them all in my lord’s
travelling carriage, and cried, “Down with the
persecutor! down with Hanging Hermiston!” and
mamma covered her eyes and wept, and papa let down
the glass and looked out upon the rabble with his
droll formidable face, bitter and smiling, as they
said he sometimes looked when he gave sentence, Archie
was for the moment too much amazed to be alarmed, but
he had scarce got his mother by herself before his
shrill voice was raised demanding an explanation:
why had they called papa a persecutor?
“Keep me, my precious!”
she exclaimed. “Keep me, my dear! this is
poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical,
Erchie. Your faither is a great man, my dear,
and it’s no for me or you to be judging him.
It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves
in our several stations the way your faither does
in his high office; and let me hear no more of any
such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No
that you meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother
kens that she kens it well, dearie!”
And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind
of the child an obscure but ineradicable sense of
something wrong.
Mrs. Weir’s philosophy of life
was summed in one expression tenderness.
In her view of the universe, which was all lighted
up with a glow out of the doors of hell, good people
must walk there in a kind of ecstasy of tenderness.
The beasts and plants had no souls; they were here
but for a day, and let their day pass gently!
And as for the immortal men, on what black, downward
path were many of them wending, and to what a horror
of an immortality! “Are not two sparrows,”
“Whosoever shall smite thee,” “God
sendeth His rain,” “Judge not, that ye
be not judged” these texts made her
body of divinity; she put them on in the morning with
her clothes and lay down to sleep with them at night;
they haunted her like a favourite air, they clung
about her like a favourite perfume. Their minister
was a marrowy expounder of the law, and my lord sat
under him with relish; but Mrs. Weir respected him
from far off; heard him (like the cannon of a beleaguered
city) usefully booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts;
and meanwhile, within and out of shot, dwelt in her
private garden which she watered with grateful tears.
It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual
woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have
made the sunshine and the glory of a cloister.
Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be eloquent;
perhaps none but he had seen her her colour
raised, her hands clasped or quivering glow
with gentle ardour. There is a corner of the policy
of Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the
summit of Black Fell, sometimes like the mere grass
top of a hill, sometimes (and this is her own expression)
like a precious jewel in the heavens. On such
days, upon the sudden view of it, her hand would tighten
on the child’s fingers, her voice rise like
a song. “I to the hills!” she would
repeat. “And O, Erchie, arena these like
the hills of Naphtali?” and her tears would
flow.
Upon an impressionable child the effect
of this continual and pretty accompaniment to life
was deep. The woman’s quietism and piety
passed on to his different nature undiminished; but
whereas in her it was a native sentiment, in him it
was only an implanted dogma. Nature and the child’s
pugnacity at times revolted. A cad from the Potterrow
once struck him in the mouth; he struck back, the
pair fought it out in the back stable lane towards
the Meadows, and Archie returned with a considerable
decline in the number of his front teeth, and unregenerately
boasting of the losses of the foe. It was a sore
day for Mrs. Weir; she wept and prayed over the infant
backslider until my lord was due from Court, and she
must resume that air of tremulous composure with which
she always greeted him. The judge was that day
in an observant mood, and remarked upon the absent
teeth.
“I am afraid Erchie will have
been fechting with some of thae blagyard lads,”
said Mrs. Weir.
My lord’s voice rang out as
it did seldom in the privacy of his own house.
“I’ll have nonn of that, sir!” he
cried. “Do you hear me? nonn
of that! No son of mine shall be speldering in
the glaur with any dirty raibble.”
The anxious mother was grateful for
so much support; she had even feared the contrary.
And that night when she put the child to bed “Now,
my dear, ye see!” she said, “I told you
what your faither would think of it, if he heard ye
had fallen into this dreidful sin; and let you and
me pray to God that ye may be keepit from the like
temptation or stren’thened to resist it!”
The womanly falsity of this was thrown
away. Ice and iron cannot be welded; and the
points of view of the Justice-Clerk and Mrs. Weir were
not less unassimilable. The character and position
of his father had long been a stumbling-block to Archie,
and with every year of his age the difficulty grew
more instant. The man was mostly silent; when
he spoke at all, it was to speak of the things of
the world, always in a worldly spirit, often in language
that the child had been schooled to think coarse,
and sometimes with words that he knew to be sins in
themselves. Tenderness was the first duty, and
my lord was invariably harsh. God was love; the
name of my lord (to all who knew him) was fear.
In the world, as schematised for Archie by his mother,
the place was marked for such a creature. There
were some whom it was good to pity and well (though
very likely useless) to pray for; they were named
reprobates, goats, God’s enemies, brands for
the burning; and Archie tallied every mark of identification,
and drew the inevitable private inference that the
Lord Justice-Clerk was the chief of sinners.
The mother’s honesty was scarce
complete. There was one influence she feared
for the child and still secretly combated; that was
my lord’s; and half unconsciously, half in a
wilful blindness, she continued to undermine her husband
with his son. As long as Archie remained silent,
she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven
and the child’s salvation; but the day came
when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie was
seven, and beyond his years for curiosity and logic,
when he brought the case up openly. If judging
were sinful and forbidden, how came papa to be a judge?
to have that sin for a trade? to bear the name of it
for a distinction?
“I can’t see it,”
said the little Rabbi, and wagged his head.
Mrs. Weir abounded in commonplace replies.
“No, I canna see it,”
reiterated Archie. “And I’ll tell
you what, mamma, I don’t think you and me’s
justifeed in staying with him.”
The woman awoke to remorse; she saw
herself disloyal to her man, her sovereign and bread-winner,
in whom (with what she had of worldliness) she took
a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply
on my lord’s honour and greatness; his useful
services in this world of sorrow and wrong, and the
place in which he stood, far above where babes and
innocents could hope to see or criticise. But
she had builded too well Archie had his
answers pat: Were not babes and innocents the
type of the kingdom of heaven? Were not honour
and greatness the badges of the world? And at
any rate, how about the mob that had once seethed
about the carriage?
“It’s all very fine,”
he concluded, “but in my opinion, papa has no
right to be it. And it seems that’s not
the worst yet of it. It seems he’s called
’the Hanging Judge’ it seems
he’s crooool. I’ll tell you what
it is, mamma, there’s a tex’ borne in upon
me: It were better for that man if a milestone
were bound upon his back and him flung into the deepestmost
pairts of the sea.”
“O my lamb, ye must never say
the like of that!” she cried. “Ye’re
to honour faither and mother, dear, that your days
may be long in the land. It’s Atheists
that cry out against him French Atheists,
Erchie! Ye would never surely even yourself down
to be saying the same thing as French Atheists?
It would break my heart to think that of you.
And O, Erchie, here arena you setting up to
judge? And have ye no forgot God’s
plain command the First with Promise, dear?
Mind you upon the beam and the mote!”
Having thus carried the war into the
enemy’s camp, the terrified lady breathed again.
And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child
with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far
it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects
the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will
instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion.
For even in this simple and antique relation of the
mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied.
When the Court rose that year and
the family returned to Hermiston, it was a common
remark in all the country that the lady was sore failed.
She seemed to lose and seize again her touch with life,
now sitting inert in a sort of durable bewilderment,
anon waking to feverish and weak activity. She
dawdled about the lasses at their work, looking stupidly
on; she fell to rummaging in old cabinets and presses,
and desisted when half through; she would begin remarks
with an air of animation and drop them without a struggle.
Her common appearance was of one who has forgotten
something and is trying to remember; and when she
overhauled, one after another, the worthless and touching
mementoes of her youth, she might have been seeking
the clue to that lost thought. During this period
she gave many gifts to the neighbours and house lasses,
giving them with a manner of regret that embarrassed
the recipients.
The last night of all she was busy
on some female work, and toiled upon it with so manifest
and painful a devotion that my lord (who was not often
curious) inquired as to its nature.
She blushed to the eyes. “O,
Edom, it’s for you!” she said. “It’s
slippers. I I hae never made ye any.”
“Ye daft auld wife!” returned
his lordship. “A bonny figure I would be,
palmering about in bauchles!”
The next day, at the hour of her walk,
Kirstie interfered. Kirstie took this decay of
her mistress very hard; bore her a grudge, quarrelled
with and railed upon her, the anxiety of a genuine
love wearing the disguise of temper. This day
of all days she insisted disrespectfully, with rustic
fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But,
“No, no,” she said, “it’s
my lord’s orders,” and set forth as usual.
Archie was visible in the acre bog, engaged upon some
childish enterprise, the instrument of which was mire;
and she stood and looked at him a while like one about
to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook
her head, and proceeded on her rounds alone.
The house lasses were at the burn-side washing, and
saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait.
“She’s a terrible feckless
wife the mistress!” said the one.
“Tut,” said the other, “the wumman’s
seeck.”
“Weel, I canna see nae differ
in her,” returned the first. “A füshionless
quean, a feckless carline.”
The poor creature thus discussed rambled
a while in the grounds without a purpose. Tides
in her mind ebbed and flowed, and carried her to and
fro like seaweed. She tried a path, paused, returned,
and tried another; questing, forgetting her quest;
the spirit of choice extinct in her bosom, or devoid
of sequency. On a sudden, it appeared as though
she had remembered, or had formed a resolution, wheeled
about, returned with hurried steps, and appeared in
the dining-room, where Kirstie was at the cleaning,
like one charged with an important errand.
“Kirstie!” she began,
and paused; and then with conviction, “Mr. Weir
isna speeritually minded, but he has been a good man
to me.”
It was perhaps the first time since
her husband’s elevation that she had forgotten
the handle to his name, of which the tender, inconsistent
woman was not a little proud. And when Kirstie
looked up at the speaker’s face, she was aware
of a change.
“Godsake, what’s the maitter
wi’ ye, mem?” cried the housekeeper, starting
from the rug.
“I do not ken,” answered
her mistress, shaking her head. “But he
is not speeritually minded, my dear.”
“Here, sit down with ye!
Godsake, what ails the wife?” cried Kirstie,
and helped and forced her into my lord’s own
chair by the cheek of the hearth.
“Keep me, what’s this?”
she gasped. “Kirstie, what’s this?
I’m frich’ened.”
They were her last words.
It was the lowering nightfall when
my lord returned. He had the sunset in his back,
all clouds and glory; and before him, by the wayside,
spied Kirstie Elliott waiting. She was dissolved
in tears, and addressed him in the high, false note
of barbarous mourning, such as still lingers modified
among Scots heather.
“The Lord peety ye, Hermiston!
the Lord prepare ye!” she keened out. “Weary
upon me, that I should have to tell it!”
He reined in his horse and looked
upon her with the hanging face.
“Has the French landit?” cried he.
“Man, man,” she said,
“is that a’ ye can think of? The Lord
prepare ye: the Lord comfort and support ye!”
“Is onybody deid?” says his lordship.
“It’s no Erchie?”
“Bethankit, no!” exclaimed
the woman, startled into a more natural tone.
“Na, na, it’s no sae bad as that.
It’s the mistress, my lord; she just fair flittit
before my e’en. She just gi’ed a sab
and was by wi’ it. Eh, my bonny Miss Jeannie,
that I mind sae weel!” And forth again upon that
pouring tide of lamentation in which women of her class
excel and over-abound.
Lord Hermiston sat in the saddle beholding
her. Then he seemed to recover command upon himself.
“Weel, it’s something
of the suddenest,” said he. “But she
was a dwaibly body from the first.”
And he rode home at a precipitate
amble with Kirstie at his horse’s heels.
Dressed as she was for her last walk,
they had laid the dead lady on her bed. She was
never interesting in life; in death she was not impressive;
and as her husband stood before her, with his hands
crossed behind his powerful back, that which he looked
upon was the very image of the insignificant.
“Her and me were never cut out
for one another,” he remarked at last.
“It was a daft-like marriage.” And
then, with a most unusual gentleness of tone, “Puir
bitch,” said he, “puir bitch!” Then
suddenly: “Where’s Erchie?”
Kirstie had decoyed him to her room
and given him “a jeely-piece.”
“Ye have some kind of gumption,
too,” observed the judge, and considered his
housekeeper grimly. “When all’s said,”
he added, “I micht have done waur I
micht have been marriet upon a skirling Jezebel like
you!”
“There’s naebody thinking
of you, Hermiston!” cried the offended woman.
“We think of her that’s out of her sorrows.
And could she have done waur? Tell me
that, Hermiston tell me that before her
clay-cauld corp!”
“Weel, there’s some of
them gey an’ ill to please,” observed his
lordship.