The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 19

  CHAPTER II

  FATHER AND SON

  My Lord Justice-Clerk was known to many; the man Adam Weir perhaps tonone. He had nothing to explain or to conceal; he sufficed wholly andsilently to himself; and that part of our nature which goes out (toooften with false coin) to acquire glory or love, seemed in him to beomitted. He did not try to be loved, he did not care to be; it isprobable the very thought of it was a stranger to his mind. He was anadmired lawyer, a highly unpopular judge; and he looked down upon thosewho were his inferiors in either distinction, who were lawyers of lessgrasp or judges not so much detested. In all the rest of his days anddoings, not one trace of vanity appeared; and he went on through lifewith a mechanical movement, as of the unconscious, that was almostaugust.

  He saw little of his son. In the childish maladies with which the boywas 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 thepatient's relief. Once, a Court holiday falling opportunely, my lord hadhis carriage, and drove the child himself to Hermiston, the customaryplace of convalescence. It is conceivable he had been more than usuallyanxious, for that journey always remained in Archie's memory as a thingapart, his father having related to him from beginning to end, and withmuch detail, three authentic murder cases. Archie went the usual roundof other Edinburgh boys, the High School and the College; and Hermistonlooked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an affectation ofinterest in his progress. Daily, indeed, upon a signal after dinner, hewas brought in, given nuts and a glass of port, regarded sardonically,sarcastically questioned. "Well, sir, and what have you donn with yourbook to-day?" my lord might begin, and set him posers in law Latin. To achild just stumbling into Corderius, Papinian and Paul proved quiteinvincible. But papa had memory of no other. He was not harsh to thelittle 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 camefor separation, and my lord would take the decanter and the glass, andbe off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled onhis cases till the hours were small. There was no "fuller man" on theBench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to"advise" extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who moreearnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table andforgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply ofrecondite pleasures. To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exerciseis to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the highermathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself withoutreaction, and find continual rewards without excitement. This atmosphereof his father's sterling industry was the best of Archie's education.Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted anddepressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of aclock, 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 thetable to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the thirdbottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent,the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became lessformidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inheritedfrom Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated withpotential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his owncompanions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father'stable (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned paleand sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he there encountered, hehad toleration for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond. LordGlenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long features and long delicatehands. He was often compared with the statue of Forbes of Culloden inthe Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than sixty, preservedsome of the fire of youth. His exquisite disparity with any of hisfellow-guests, his appearance as of an artist and an aristocrat strandedin rude company, riveted the boy's attention; and as curiosity andinterest are the things in the world that are the most immediately andcertainly rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted by the boy.

  "And so this is your son, Hermiston?" he asked, laying his hand onArchie's shoulder. "He's getting a big lad."

  "Hout!" said the gracious father, "just his mother over again--daurnasay boo to a goose!"

  But the stranger retained the boy, talked to him, drew him out, found inhim a taste for letters, and a fine, ardent, modest, youthful soul; andencouraged 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 bachelorgrown old in refinement. The beautiful gentleness and grace of the oldjudge, and the delicacy of his person, thoughts, and language, spoke toArchie's heart in its own tongue. He conceived the ambition to be suchanother; and, when the day came for him to choose a profession, it wasin emulation of Lord Glenalmond, not of Lord Hermiston, that he chosethe Bar. Hermiston looked on at this friendship with some secret pride,but openly with the intolerance of scorn. He scarce lost an opportunityto put them down with a rough jape; and, to say truth, it was notdifficult, for they were neither of them quick. He had a word ofcontempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters, fiddlers, and theiradmirers, the bastard race of amateurs, which was continually on hislips. "Signor Feedle-eerie!" he would say. "O, for Goad's sake, no moreof 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 asthe day."

  "You and he are so different," said the boy, his eyes dwelling on thoseof his old friend, like a lover's on his mistress's.

  "Indeed so," replied the judge; "very different. And so I fear are youand he. Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to misjudgehis father. He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were such; Ithink 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 suddenbitterness.

  "And that is neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true," returnedGlenalmond. "Before you are done you will find some of these expressionsrise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative;they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought clearlyapprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would say,'Signor Feedle-eerie!'"

  With the infinitely delicate sense of youth, Archie avoided the subjectfrom that hour. It was perhaps a pity. Had he but talked--talkedfreely--let himself gush out in words (the way youth loves to do, andshould), there might have been no tale to write upon the Weirs ofHermiston. But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in theslight tartness of these words he read a prohibition; and it is likelythat Glenalmond meant it so.

  Besides the veteran, the boy was without confidant or friend. Seriousand eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowdof the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness. He grew uphandsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthfulways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the SpeculativeSociety. 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 theausterity of his father, held him aloof from all. It is a fact, and astrange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston's son was thoughtto be a chip of the old block. "You're a friend of Archie Weir's?" saidone to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and morethan his usual insight: "I know Weir, but I never met Archie." No onehad met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons. He flew his privatesignal, and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world fromwhich the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he looked round abouthim on the concourse of his fellow-students, and forward to the trivialdays and acquaintances that were
to come, without hope or interest.

  As time went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn tothe son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, withsoftnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was whollyimpotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained throughforty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he willscarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, buta fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was sounconspicuously made, the failure so stoically supported. Sympathy isnot due to these steadfast iron natures. If he failed to gain his son'sfriendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went up the great, barestaircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed. There might have beenmore pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he may haverecognised at moments; but pleasure was a by-product of the singularchemistry of life, which only fools expected.

  An idea of Archie's attitude, since we are all grown up and haveforgotten the days of our youth, it is more difficult to convey. He madeno attempt whatsoever to understand the man with whom he dined andbreakfasted. Parsimony of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the twoalternating ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious. The windblew cold out of a certain quarter--he turned his back upon it; stayedas 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 lampshone for many hundred days upon these two at table--my lord ruddy,gloomy, and unreverend; Archie with a potential brightness that wasalways dimmed and veiled in that society; and there were not, perhaps,in Christendom two men more radically strangers. The father, with agrand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself, or maintainedan unaffected silence. The son turned in his head for some topic thatshould be quite safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of mylord's inherent grossness or of the innocence of his inhumanity;treading gingerly the ways of intercourse, like a lady gathering up herskirts in a by-path. If he made a mistake, and my lord began to aboundin matter of offence, Archie drew himself up, his brow grew dark, hisshare of the talk expired; but my lord would faithfully and cheerfullycontinue to pour out the worst of himself before his silent and offendedson.

  "Well, it's a poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at theconclusion of such a nightmare interview. "But I must get to myplew-stilts." And he would seclude himself as usual in the back room,and Archie go forth into the night and the city quivering with animosityand scorn.