Weir of Hermiston | Page 6

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, Scougalls 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