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 a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine and the glory of a cloister.Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen her - her colour raised, her hands clasped or quivering - glow with gentle ardour.There is a corner of the policy of Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the summit of Black Fell, sometimes like the mere grass top of a hill, sometimes (and this is her own expression) like a precious jewel in the heavens.On such days, upon the sudden view of it, her hand would tighten on the child's fingers, her voice rise like a song."I TO THEHILLS!" she would repeat."And O, Erchie, are nae these like the hills of Naphtali?" and her tears would flow.
Upon an impressionable child the effect of this continual and pretty accompaniment to life was deep.The woman's quietism and piety passed on to his different nature undiminished; but whereas in her it was a native sentiment, in him it was only an implanted dogma.Nature and the child's pugnacity at times revolted.A cad from the Potterrow once struck him in the mouth; he struck back, the pair fought it out in the back stable lane towards the Meadows, and Archie returned with a considerable decline in the number of his front teeth, and unregenerately boasting of the losses of the foe.It was a sore day for Mrs.Weir; she wept and prayed over the infant backslider until my lord was due from Court, and she must resume that air of tremulous composure with which she always greeted him.The judge was that day in an observant mood, and remarked upon the absent teeth.
"I am afraid Erchie will have been fechting with some of they blagyard lads," said Mrs.Weir.