Weir of Hermiston
62
“They ken the road,” replied she, implying, it might be supposed, a
negative answer. “And yet ye seem fond of the family, Kirstie, and you’re
fond of Dand at least,” he went on. “I think you would like to see more of
them?”
“Me! Likin’s neither here nor there,” said Kirstie. “I’m ower auld to be
seekin’ pleesure, though I’ll never deny but what it’s pleesurin’ I am when I
see the bairns, and Dandie, he’s a kind of a bairn too – I wad never deny
that. But it’s the way God made me. I’m like a dog – I ken them that
belangs to me. It’s there, and I canna help it, and I dinna seek to. But
it’s neither you nor me that has to mend it, if it’s wrang, and I daurna say:
it’s mair in His hands, Mr. Erchie.”
And so again Archie was brought face to face with the problem that
had so long and often interested him; to see the woman torn in two
between her acceptance of a practical necessity and an unchanged
aspiration; and that with such depth of feeling, with such a sense of
sacrifice and loss, and yet in a region so foreign to his own experience,
that he could only look on from outside in a kind of sad amazement.
Many other traits he could discern by the way, and pieces of the
jangled puzzle they helped him to fit together: that the brothers had grown
slowly further apart, and their visits become rare in the course of time;
that Kirstie’s favour extended very largely to Dand and very partially to
Gilbert, whom she suspected of holding something back from her; that
while she staunchly pardoned Hob for some past event, she thought him
capable of repetitions; that in the whole list of their failings not the least
was the habit of family concealment – from which it followed directly that
the India shawl manoeuvres had passed without an open explosion: a
conclusion welcome to Archie, who was of the opinion that the fewer
family jars, in the present state of affairs at Hermiston, the better perhaps
for all parties.

[And here the text breaks off abruptly, with the problem of Kirstie’s life
unsolved, the brother’s quarrel but guessed at, and the shadow of coming
events only suggested.]