“I’m nearer voamiting, though, than you would fancy,” said my lord. The blood rose to Archie’s brow.
“I beg your pardon, I should have said that you had accepted my affront. . . . I admit it was an affront; I did not think to apologise, but I do, I ask your pardon; it will not be so again, I pass you my word of honour. . . . I should have said that I admired your magnanimity with—this—offender,” Archie concluded with a gulp.
“I have no other son, ye see,” said Hermiston. “A bonny one I have gotten! But I must just do the best I can wi’ him, and what am I to do? If ye had been younger, I would have wheepit ye for this rideeculous exhibeetion. The way it is, I have just to grin and bear. But one thing is to be clearly understood. As a faither, I must grin and bear it; but if I had been the Lord Advocate instead of the Lord Justice-Clerk, son or no son, Mr. Erchibald Weir would have been in a jyle the night.”
Archie was now dominated. Lord Hermiston was coarse and cruel; and yet the son was aware of a bloomless nobility, an ungracious abnegation of the man’s self in the man’s office. At every word, this sense of the greatness of Lord Hermiston’s spirit struck more home; and along with it that of his own impotence, who had struck—and perhaps basely struck—at his own father, and not reached so far as to have even nettled him.
“I place myself in your hands without reserve,” he said.
“That’s the first sensible word I’ve had of ye the night,” said Hermiston. “I can tell ye, that would have been the end of it, the one way or the other; but it’s better ye should come there yourself, than what I would have had to hirstle ye. Weel, by my way of it—and my way is the best—there’s just the one thing it’s possible that ye might be with decency, and that’s a laird. Ye’ll be out of hairm’s way at the least of it. If ye have to rowt, ye can rowt amang the kye; and the maist feck of the caapital punishment ye’re like to come across’ll be guddling trouts. Now, I’m for no idle lairdies; every man has to work, if it’s only at peddling ballants; to work, or to be wheeped, or to be haangit. If I set ye down at Hermiston I’ll have to see you work that place the way it has never been workit yet; ye must ken about the sheep like a herd; ye must be my grieve there, and I’ll see that I gain by ye. Is that understood?”
“I will do my best,” said Archie.
“Well, then, I’ll send Kirstie word the morn, and ye can go yourself the day after,” said Hermiston. “And just try to be less of an eediot!” he concluded with a freezing smile, and turned immediately to the papers on his desk.
CHAPTER IV—OPINIONS OF THE BENCH
Late the same night, after a disordered walk, Archie was admitted into Lord Glenalmond’s dining-room, where he sat with a book upon his knee, beside three frugal coals of fire. In his robes upon the bench, Glenalmond had a certain air of burliness: plucked of these, it was a may-pole of a man that rose unsteadily from his chair to give his visitor welcome. Archie had suffered much in the last days, he had suffered again that evening; his face was white and drawn, his eyes wild and dark. But Lord Glenalmond greeted him without the least mark of surprise or curiosity.