Chapter XVIII
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2020
Summary
MR STRAHAN, repelled in the ruffian insults with which he had ventured to harass Mrs Campbell, quitted Uigness, it may be supposed, on his return to the Low Country, in no very enviable state of feeling. He was riding rapidly, like a man capable of anything but repose,—(for the shame of detection was to him in the place of the shame of guilt, and scorn of what he conceived to be an injury done to himself, was blended with many uneasy anticipations of what he might have to suffer from the merited anger and scorn of the employer, whose trust he had so foully betrayed,)—when his notice was attracted by a boat moving, as it seemed, towards the tower he had just abandoned: And when he recognized the form of Mr Blair, it was with a fiendish, and, at the same time, a cowardly joy that he did so; for it immediately flashed upon him that the clergyman had followed Mrs Campbell thither by her invitation, and under the intoxicating influence of a guilty passion; and secure in the sense of having at least ascertained, (for so he thought he had now done,) the justice of his own and Campbell's original suspicions, he, from that moment, discarded the troublesome meditations which more directly regarded himself, and continued his journey in a mood almost as triumphant as malignant.
His surprise was great, when, on reaching the inn at which he generally staid when in Glasgow, he heard himself suddenly called to from a window looking out upon the courtyard, in a voice which could belong to no one but Campbell of Uigness himself. It was not without a considerable struggle, though brief in duration, that he contrived to smooth his brow sufficiently for entering the room in which the Captain was waiting for him; but he was relieved once more from his trepidations, when Campbell, receiving him with all his usual cordiality, said simply, “Strahan, I was astonished at not hearing from you; and besides, I thought this was a piece of business I had done wrong in devolving upon you or any man, when I was in a condition to execute it myself. So, I e’en put my foot in a vessel that was a-sailing for Leith, and here I am, so far on my way in quest of this unhappy woman.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020