FATHER AND SON
My Lord Justice-Clerk was known to
many; the man Adam Weir perhaps to none. He had
nothing to explain or to conceal; he sufficed wholly
and silently to himself; and that part of our nature
which goes out (too often with false coin) to acquire
glory or love seemed in him to be omitted. He
did not try to be loved he did not care to be; it
is probable the very thought of it was a stranger
to his mind. He was an admired lawyer a highly
unpopular judge; and he looked down upon those who
were his inferiors in either distinction who were
lawyers of less grasp or judges not so much detested.
In all the rest of his days and doings not one trace
of vanity appeared; and he went on through life with
a mechanical movement as of the unconscious that
was almost august.
He saw little of his son. In
the childish maladies with which the boy was troubled,
he would make daily inquiries and daily pay him a visit,
entering the sick-room with a facetious and appalling
countenance, letting off a few perfunctory jests,
and going again swiftly, to the patient’s relief.
Once, a Court holiday falling opportunely, my lord
had his carriage, and drove the child himself to Hermiston,
the customary place of convalescence. It is conceivable
he had been more than usually anxious, for that journey
always remained in Archie’s memory as a thing
apart, his father having related to him from beginning
to end, and with much detail, three authentic murder
cases. Archie went the usual round of other Edinburgh
boys, the High School and the College; and Hermiston
looked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an affectation
of interest in his progress. Daily, indeed, upon
a signal after dinner, he was brought in, given nuts
and a glass of port, regarded sardonically, sarcastically
questioned. “Well, sir, and what have you
donn with your book to-day?” my lord might begin,
and set him posers in law Latin. To a child just
stumbling into Corderius, Papinian and Paul proved
quite invincible. But papa had memory of no other.
He was not harsh to the little scholar, having a vast
fund of patience learned upon the Bench, and was at
no pains whether to conceal or to express his disappointment.
“Well, ye have a long jaunt before ye yet!”
he might observe, yawning, and fall back on his own
thoughts (as like as not) until the time came for
separation, and my lord would take the decanter and
the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking
on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till
the hours were small. There was no “fuller
man” on the Bench; his memory was marvellous,
though wholly legal; if he had to “advise”
extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who
more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in
the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence
of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite
pleasures. To be wholly devoted to some intellectual
exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps
only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion
be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction,
and find continual rewards without excitement.
This atmosphere of his father’s sterling industry
was the best of Archie’s education. Assuredly
it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted
and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved
like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless
stimulant in the boy’s life.
But Hermiston was not all of one piece.
He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine
until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table
to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head.
Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in
a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul
mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable,
and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had
inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy,
unequally mated with potential violence. In the
playing-fields, and amongst his own companions, he
repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father’s
table (when the time came for him to join these revels)
he turned pale and sickened in silence. Of all
the guests whom he there encountered, he had toleration
for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond.
Lord Glenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long
features and long delicate hands. He was often
compared with the statue of Forbes of Culloden in
the Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than
sixty, preserved some of the fire of youth. His
exquisite disparity with any of his fellow-guests,
his appearance as of an artist and an aristocrat stranded
in rude company, riveted the boy’s attention;
and as curiosity and interest are the things in the
world that are the most immediately and certainly
rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted by the boy.
“And so this is your son, Hermiston?”
he asked, laying his hand on Archie’s shoulder.
“He’s getting a big lad.”
“Hout!” said the gracious
father, “just his mother over again daurna
say boo to a goose!”
But the stranger retained the boy,
talked to him, drew him out, found in him a taste
for letters, and a fine, ardent, modest, youthful soul;
and encouraged him to be a visitor on Sunday evenings
in his bare, cold, lonely dining-room, where he sat
and read in the isolation of a bachelor grown old
in refinement. The beautiful gentleness and grace
of the old judge, and the delicacy of his person,
thoughts, and language, spoke to Archie’s heart
in its own tongue. He conceived the ambition to
be such another; and, when the day came for him to
choose a profession, it was in emulation of Lord Glenalmond,
not of Lord Hermiston, that he chose the Bar.
Hermiston looked on at this friendship with some secret
pride, but openly with the intolerance of scorn.
He scarce lost an opportunity to put them down with
a rough jape; and, to say truth, it was not difficult,
for they were neither of them quick. He had a
word of contempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters,
fiddlers, and their admirers, the bastard race of
amateurs, which was continually on his lips.
“Signor Feedle-eerie!” he would say.
“O, for Goad’s sake, no more of the Signor!”
“You and my father are great
friends, are you not?” asked Archie once.
“There is no man that I more
respect, Archie,” replied Lord Glenalmond.
“He is two things of price: he is a great
lawyer, and he is upright as the day.”
“You and he are so different,”
said the boy, his eyes dwelling on those of his old
friend, like a lover’s on his mistress’s.
“Indeed so,” replied the
judge; “very different. And so I fear are
you and he. Yet I would like it very ill if my
young friend were to misjudge his father. He
has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were
such; I think a son’s heart might well be proud
of such an ancestry of one.”
“And I would sooner he were
a plaided herd,” cried Archie, with sudden bitterness.
“And that is neither very wise,
nor I believe entirely true,” returned Glenalmond.
“Before you are done you will find some of these
expressions rise on you like a remorse. They
are merely literary and decorative; they do not aptly
express your thought, nor is your thought clearly
apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here)
would say, ‘Signor Feedle-eerie!’”
With the infinitely delicate sense
of youth, Archie avoided the subject from that hour.
It was perhaps a pity. Had he but talked talked
freely let himself gush out in words (the
way youth loves to do, and should), there might have
been no tale to write upon the Weirs of Hermiston.
But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in
the slight tartness of these words he read a prohibition;
and it is likely that Glenalmond meant it so.
Besides the veteran, the boy was without
confidant or friend. Serious and eager, he came
through school and college, and moved among a crowd
of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness.
He grew up handsome, with an open, speaking countenance,
with graceful, youthful ways; he was clever, he took
prizes, he shone in the Speculative Society.
It should seem he must become the centre of a crowd
of friends; but something that was in part the delicacy
of his mother, in part the austerity of his father,
held him aloof from all. It is a fact, and a
strange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston’s
son was thought to be a chip of the old block.
“You’re a friend of Archie Weir’s?”
said one to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his
usual flippancy and more than his usual insight:
“I know Weir, but I never met Archie.”
No one had met Archie, a malady most incident to only
sons. He flew his private signal, and none heeded
it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from which
the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he looked
round about him on the concourse of his fellow-students,
and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances
that were to come, without hope or interest.
As time went on, the tough and rough
old sinner felt himself drawn to the son of his loins
and sole continuator of his new family, with softnesses
of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly
impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner
trained through forty years to terrify and repel,
Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will scarce be engaging.
It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, but
a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt
was so unconspicuously made, the failure so stoically
supported. Sympathy is not due to these steadfast
iron natures. If he failed to gain his son’s
friendship, or even his son’s toleration, on
he went up the great, bare staircase of his duty,
uncheered and undepressed. There might have been
more pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much
he may have recognised at moments; but pleasure was
a by-product of the singular chemistry of life, which
only fools expected.
An idea of Archie’s attitude,
since we are all grown up and have forgotten the days
of our youth, it is more difficult to convey.
He made no attempt whatsoever to understand the man
with whom he dined and breakfasted. Parsimony
of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the two alternating
ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious.
The wind blew cold out of a certain quarter he
turned his back upon it; stayed as little as was possible
in his father’s presence; and when there, averted
his eyes as much as was decent from his father’s
face. The lamp shone for many hundred days upon
these two at table my lord ruddy, gloomy,
and unreverend; Archie with a potential brightness
that was always dimmed and veiled in that society;
and there were not, perhaps, in Christendom two men
more radically strangers. The father, with a
grand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself,
or maintained an unaffected silence. The son
turned in his head for some topic that should be quite
safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of
my lord’s inherent grossness or of the innocence
of his inhumanity; treading gingerly the ways of intercourse,
like a lady gathering up her skirts in a by-path.
If he made a mistake, and my lord began to abound
in matter of offence, Archie drew himself up, his brow
grew dark, his share of the talk expired; but my lord
would faithfully and cheerfully continue to pour out
the worst of himself before his silent and offended
son.
“Well, it’s a poor hert
that never rejoices!” he would say, at the conclusion
of such a nightmare interview. “But I must
get to my plew-stilts.” And he would seclude
himself as usual in the back room, and Archie go forth
into the night and the city quivering with animosity
and scorn.