"And, for turning me back, Hugh,
it was beyond your power. I had taken my resolution, and you did but show
me the way to execute it."
"You have not inquired after those you left behind," observed Hugh
Crombie.
"No--no; nor will I have aught of them," exclaimed the traveller, starting
from his seat, and pacing rapidly across the room. "My father, I know, is
dead, and I have forgiven him. My mother--what could I hear of her but
misery? I will hear nothing."
"You must have passed the cottage as you rode hitherward," said Hugh. "How
could you forbear to enter?"
"I did not see it," he replied. "I closed my eyes, and turned away my
head."
"Oh, if I had had a mother, a loving mother! if there had been one being
in the world that loved me, or cared for me, I should not have become an
utter castaway," exclaimed Hugh Crombie.
The landlord's pathos, like all pathos that flows from the winecup, was
sufficiently ridiculous; and his companion, who had already overcome his
own brief feelings of sorrow and remorse, now laughed aloud.
"Come, come, mine host of the Hand and Bottle," he cried in his usual
hard, sarcastic tone; "be a man as much as in you lies. You had always a
foolish trick of repentance; but, as I remember, it was commonly of a
morning, before you had swallowed your first dram.
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