When Hamish MacTavish entered his mother's hut, it was only to
throw himself on the bed he had left, and exclaiming, "Undone,
undone!" to give vent, in cries of grief and anger, to his deep
sense of the deceit which had been practised on him, and of the
cruel predicament to which he was reduced.
Elspat was prepared for the first explosion of her son's passion,
and said to herself, "It is but the mountain torrent, swelled by
the thunder shower. Let us sit and rest us by the bank; for all
its present tumult, the time will soon come when we may pass it
dryshod." She suffered his complaints and his reproaches, which
were, even in the midst of his agony, respectful and
affectionate, to die away without returning any answer; and when,
at length, having exhausted all the exclamations of sorrow which
his language, copious in expressing the feelings of the heart,
affords to the sufferer, he sunk into a gloomy silence, she
suffered the interval to continue near an hour ere she approached
her son's couch.
"And now," she said at length, with a voice in which the
authority of the mother was qualified by her tenderness, "have
you exhausted your idle sorrows, and are you able to place what
you have gained against what you have lost? Is the false son of
Dermid your brother, or the father of your tribe, that you weep
because you cannot bind yourself to his belt, and become one of
those who must do his bidding? Could you find in yonder distant
country the lakes and the mountains that you leave behind you
here? Can you hunt the deer of Breadalbane in the forests of
America, or will the ocean afford you the silver-scaled salmon of
the Awe? Consider, then, what is your loss, and, like a wise
man, set it against what you have won.
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