Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘There, Mr Whish. That will do,’ cried Attwater. ‘From that distance, and keeping your hands up, like a good boy, you can very well put me in possession of the skipper’s views.’

  The interval betwixt them was perhaps forty feet; and Huish measured it with his eye, and breathed a curse. He was already distressed with labouring in the loose sand, and his arms ached bitterly from their unnatural position. In the palm of his right hand, the jar was ready; and his heart thrilled, and his voice choked as he began to speak.

  ‘Mr Hattwater,’ said he, ‘I don’t know if ever you ‘ad a mother...’

  ‘I can set your mind at rest: I had,’ returned Attwater; ‘and henceforth, if I might venture to suggest it, her name need not recur in our communications. I should perhaps tell you that I am not amenable to the pathetic.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir, if I ‘ave seemed to tresparse on your private feelin’s,’ said the clerk, cringing and stealing a step. ‘At least, sir, you will never pe’suade me that you are not a perfec’ gentleman; I know a gentleman when I see him; and as such, I ‘ave no ‘esitation in throwin’ myself on your merciful consideration. It IS ‘ard lines, no doubt; it’s ‘ard lines to have to hown yourself beat; it’s ‘ard lines to ‘ave to come and beg to you for charity.’

  ‘When, if things had only gone right, the whole place was as good as your own?’ suggested Attwater. ‘I can understand the feeling.’

  ‘You are judging me, Mr Attwater,’ said the clerk, ‘and God knows how unjustly! THOU GAWD SEEST ME, was the tex’ I ‘ad in my Bible, w’ich my father wrote it in with ‘is own ‘and upon the fly leaft.’

  ‘I am sorry I have to beg your pardon once more,’ said Attwater; ‘but, do you know, you seem to me to be a trifle nearer, which is entirely outside of our bargain. And I would venture to suggest that you take one — two — three — steps back; and stay there.’

  The devil, at this staggering disappointment, looked out of Huish’s face, and Attwater was swift to suspect. He frowned, he stared on the little man, and considered. Why should he be creeping nearer? The next moment, his gun was at his shoulder.

  ‘Kindly oblige me by opening your hands. Open your hands wide — let me see the fingers spread, you dog — throw down that thing you’re holding!’ he roared, his rage and certitude increasing together.

  And then, at almost the same moment, the indomitable Huish decided to throw, and Attwater pulled the trigger. There was scarce the difference of a second between the two resolves, but it was in favour of the man with the rifle; and the jar had not yet left the clerk’s hand, before the ball shattered both. For the twinkling of an eye the wretch was in hell’s agonies, bathed in liquid flames, a screaming bedlamite; and then a second and more merciful bullet stretched him dead.

  The whole thing was come and gone in a breath. Before Herrick could turn about, before Davis could complete his cry of horror, the clerk lay in the sand, sprawling and convulsed.

  Attwater ran to the body; he stooped and viewed it; he put his finger in the vitriol, and his face whitened and hardened with anger.

  Davis had not yet moved; he stood astonished, with his back to the figure-head, his hands clutching it behind him, his body inclined forward from the waist.

  Attwater turned deliberately and covered him with his rifle.

  ‘Davis,’ he cried, in a voice like a trumpet, ‘I give you sixty seconds to make your peace with God!’

  Davis looked, and his mind awoke. He did not dream of self-defence, he did not reach for his pistol. He drew himself up instead to face death, with a quivering nostril.

  ‘I guess I’ll not trouble the Old Man,’ he said; ‘considering the job I was on, I guess it’s better business to just shut my face.’

  Attwater fired; there came a spasmodic movement of the victim, and immediately above the middle of his forehead, a black hole marred the whiteness of the figure-head. A dreadful pause; then again the report, and the solid sound and jar of the bullet in the wood; and this time the captain had felt the wind of it along his cheek. A third shot, and he was bleeding from one ear; and along the levelled rifle Attwater smiled like a Red Indian.

  The cruel game of which he was the puppet was now clear to Davis; three times he had drunk of death, and he must look to drink of it seven times more before he was despatched. He held up his hand.

  ‘Steady!’ he cried; ‘I’ll take your sixty seconds.’

  ‘Good!’ said Attwater.

  The captain shut his eyes tight like a child: he held his hands up at last with a tragic and ridiculous gesture.

  ‘My God, for Christ’s sake, look after my two kids,’ he said; and then, after a pause and a falter, ‘for Christ’s sake, Amen.’

  And he opened his eyes and looked down the rifle with a quivering mouth.

  ‘But don’t keep fooling me long!’ he pleaded.

  ‘That’s all your prayer?’ asked Attwater, with a singular ring in his voice.

  ‘Guess so,’ said Davis.

  So?’ said Attwater, resting the butt of his rifle on the ground, ‘is that done? Is your peace made with Heaven? Because it is with me. Go, and sin no more, sinful father. And remember that whatever you do to others, God shall visit it again a thousand-fold upon your innocents.’

  The wretched Davis came staggering forward from his place against the figure-head, fell upon his knees, and waved his hands, and fainted.

  When he came to himself again, his head was on Attwater’s arm, and close by stood one of the men in divers’ helmets, holding a bucket of water, from which his late executioner now laved his face. The memory of that dreadful passage returned upon him in a clap; again he saw Huish lying dead, again he seemed to himself to totter on the brink of an unplumbed eternity. With trembling hands he seized hold of the man whom he had come to slay; and his voice broke from him like that of a child among the nightmares of fever: ‘O! isn’t there no mercy? O! what must I do to be saved?’

  ‘Ah!’ thought Attwater, ‘here’s the true penitent.’

  CHAPTER 12. TAIL-PIECE

  On a very bright, hot, lusty, strongly blowing noon, a fortnight after the events recorded, and a month since the curtain rose upon this episode, a man might have been spied, praying on the sand by the lagoon beach. A point of palm trees isolated him from the settlement; and from the place where he knelt, the only work of man’s hand that interrupted the expanse, was the schooner Farallone, her berth quite changed, and rocking at anchor some two miles to windward in the midst of the lagoon. The noise of the Trade ran very boisterous in all parts of the island; the nearer palm trees crashed and whistled in the gusts, those farther off contributed a humming bass like the roar of cities; and yet, to any man less absorbed, there must have risen at times over this turmoil of the winds, the sharper note of the human voice from the settlement. There all was activity. Attwater, stripped to his trousers and lending a strong hand of help, was directing and encouraging five Kanakas; from his lively voice, and their more lively efforts, it was to be gathered that some sudden and joyful emergency had set them in this bustle; and the Union Jack floated once more on its staff. But the suppliant on the beach, unconscious of their voices, prayed on with instancy and fervour, and the sound of his voice rose and fell again, and his countenance brightened and was deformed with changing moods of piety and terror.

  Before his closed eyes, the skiff had been for some time tacking towards the distant and deserted Farallone; and presently the figure of Herrick might have been observed to board her, to pass for a while into the house, thence forward to the forecastle, and at last to plunge into the main hatch. In all these quarters, his visit was followed by a coil of smoke; and he had scarce entered his boat again and shoved off, before flames broke forth upon the schooner. They burned gaily; kerosene had not been spared, and the bellows of the Trade incited the conflagration. About half way on the return voyage, when Herrick looked back, he beheld the Farallone wrapped to the topmasts in leaping arms of fire, and the voluminous smoke pursuing him al
ong the face of the lagoon. In one hour’s time, he computed, the waters would have closed over the stolen ship.

  It so chanced that, as his boat flew before the wind with much vivacity, and his eyes were continually busy in the wake, measuring the progress of the flames, he found himself embayed to the northward of the point of palms, and here became aware at the same time of the figure of Davis immersed in his devotion. An exclamation, part of annoyance, part of amusement, broke from him: and he touched the helm and ran the prow upon the beach not twenty feet from the unconscious devotee. Taking the painter in his hand, he landed, and drew near, and stood over him. And still the voluble and incoherent stream of prayer continued unabated. It was not possible for him to overhear the suppliant’s petitions, which he listened to some while in a very mingled mood of humour and pity: and it was only when his own name began to occur and to be conjoined with epithets, that he at last laid his hand on the captain’s shoulder.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt the exercise,’ said he; ‘but I want you to look at the Farallone.’

  The captain scrambled to his feet, and stood gasping and staring. ‘Mr Herrick, don’t startle a man like that!’ he said. ‘I don’t seem someways rightly myself since...’ he broke off. ‘What did you say anyway? O, the Farallone,’ and he looked languidly out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Herrick. ‘There she burns! and you may guess from that what the news is.’

  ‘The Trinity Hall, I guess,’ said the captain.

  ‘The same,’ said Herrick; ‘sighted half an hour ago, and coming up hand over fist.’

  ‘Well, it don’t amount to a hill of beans,’ said the captain with a sigh.

  ‘O, come, that’s rank ingratitude!’ cried Herrick.

  ‘Well,’ replied the captain, meditatively, ‘you mayn’t just see the way that I view it in, but I’d ‘most rather stay here upon this island. I found peace here, peace in believing. Yes, I guess this island is about good enough for John Davis.’

  ‘I never heard such nonsense!’ cried Herrick. ‘What! with all turning out in your favour the way it does, the Farallone wiped out, the crew disposed of, a sure thing for your wife and family, and you, yourself, Attwater’s spoiled darling and pet penitent!’

  ‘Now, Mr Herrick, don’t say that,’ said the captain gently; ‘when you know he don’t make no difference between us. But, O! why not be one of us? why not come to Jesus right away, and let’s meet in yon beautiful land? That’s just the one thing wanted; just say, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief! And He’ll fold you in His arms. You see, I know! I’ve been a sinner myself!’

  WEIR OF HERMISTON

  AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE

  Stevenson’s final, unfinished novel was published posthumously in 1896. He was immensely pleased with the way the novel was progressing and was working on it almost up to the very hour of his death. Although only a substantial fragment (about a third) of the finished novel was completed, the work continues to be very highly regarded, with many commentators citing it as Stevenson’s masterpiece.

  At the heart of the story is the relationship between Adam Weir and his estranged son Archie. Adam Weir is a notoriously implacable ‘hanging Judge’ in a criminal court, while his son is a radical completely opposed to capital punishment. Their relationship is characterised (on both sides) by irreconcilable differences and a consequent inability to express the deep affection each man holds for the other. Racked by guilt at the conflicted relationship between himself and his father, Archie agrees to leave Edinburgh and become the laird of Hermiston – a family property in the rural outskirts of Scotland’s capital. Whilst there, he falls in love with his young housekeeper, Kirstie. At this point, the novel breaks off.

  For most of his life Stevenson was frequently bedridden with an unidentified lung complaint, and had recourse to employ his step-daughter Belle as an amanuensis. Fortunately for modern readers, this means that he had given Belle a full description of how he intended the rest of the novel to progress – this continuation was outlined by Sidney Colvin in his notes to the published edition of the novel.

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  TO MY WIFE

  INTRODUCTORY

  CHAPTER I — LIFE AND DEATH OF MRS. WEIR

  CHAPTER II — FATHER AND SON

  CHAPTER III — IN THE MATTER OF THE HANGING OF DUNCAN JOPP

  CHAPTER IV — OPINIONS OF THE BENCH

  CHAPTER V — WINTER ON THE MOORS

  I. At Hermiston

  2. Kirstie

  3. A Border Family

  CHAPTER VI — A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA’S PSALM-BOOK

  CHAPTER VII — ENTER MEPHISTOPHELES

  CHAPTER VIII — A NOCTURNAL VISIT

  CHAPTER IX — AT THE WEAVER’S STONE

  EDITORIAL NOTE

  GLOSSARY

  Portrait of Isobel ‘Belle’ Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepdaughter, to whom he dictated many of his later works. The portrait is by Belle’s husband, Joseph Strong.

  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 fat
her) 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 somehow 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?