Weir of Hermiston | Page 3

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Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1913 Chatto and
Windus edition. Scanned and proofed by David Price, email
[email protected]

Weir of Hermiston

TO MY WIFE

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn On Lammermuir. Hearkening
I heard again In my precipitous city beaten bells Winnow the keen sea
wind. And here afar, Intent on my own race and place, I wrote. Take
thou the writing: thine it is. For who Burnished the sword, blew on the
drowsy coal, Held still the target higher, chary of praise And prodigal
of counsel - who but thou? So now, in the end, if this the least be good,
If any deed be done, if any fire Burn in the imperfect page, the praise
be thine.

INTRODUCTORY

IN the wild end of a moorland parish, far out of the sight of any house,
there stands a cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it, in the
going down of the brae-side, a monument with some verses half
defaced. It was here that Claverhouse shot with his own hand the
Praying Weaver of Balweary, and the chisel of Old Mortality has
clinked on that lonely gravestone. Public and domestic history have
thus marked with a bloody finger this hollow among the hills; and since
the Cameronian gave his life there, two hundred years ago, in a

glorious folly, and without comprehension or regret, the silence of the
moss has been broken once again by the report of firearms and the cry
of the dying.
The Deil's Hags was the old name. But the place is now called Francie's
Cairn. For a while it was told that Francie walked. Aggic Hogg met
him in the gloaming by the cairnside, and he spoke to her, with
chattering teeth, so that his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if
any one could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with
pitiful entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious
decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like the
bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and
imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of
winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet
in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and
the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk
and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge;
of the two Kirsties and the Four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap;
and of Frank Innes, "the young fool advocate," that came into these
moorland parts to find his destiny.

CHAPTER I
- 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