'Na, na,' responded Shargar. 'I'll stick to my ain mither. She
never learned me sic tricks.'
'Do ye that. Ye canna compleen o' God. It's a' richt as far 's
ye're concerned. Gin he dinna something o' ye yet, it'll be your
wyte, no his, I'm thinkin'.'
They walked to Dr. Anderson's together, and spent the night there.
In the morning Robert got on the coach for Edinburgh.
I cannot, if I would, follow him on his travels. Only at times,
when the conversation rose in the dead of night, by some Jacob's
ladder of blessed ascent, into regions where the heart of such a man
could open as in its own natural clime, would a few words cause the
clouds that enveloped this period of his history to dispart, and
grant me a peep into the phantasm of his past. I suspect, however,
that much of it left upon his mind no recallable impressions. I
suspect that much of it looked to himself in the retrospect like a
painful dream, with only certain objects and occurrences standing
prominent enough to clear the moonlight mist enwrapping the rest.
What the precise nature of his misery was I shall not even attempt
to conjecture. That would be to intrude within the holy place of a
human heart. One thing alone I will venture to affirm--that
bitterness against either of his friends, whose spirits rushed
together and left his outside, had no place in that noble nature.
His fate lay behind him, like the birth of Shargar, like the death
of Ericson, a decree.
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