She was
incapable of argument. She was inconsolable. Her husband remained
inexorable, and entreaty gave way to anger. She had adopted the idea
that Hume was buoyed up with the pride of leadership; and she told him,
with some acrimony, that his ambition of being thought the bravest man
of Selkirk would not, in the event of his death, supply the child he was
bound to work for with a bite of bread. Her love and anger carried her
beyond bounds. She used other language of a harsher character, which
forced her good-natured husband to retaliate in terms unusual to him,
unsuited to the serious subject which they had in hand, and far less to
the dangerous separation which they were about to experience. The
conversation got more acrimonious. Words of a high cast produced
expressions stronger still, and Hume left his wife in anger, to go to
the field from which he might never return.
Regret follows close upon the heels of incensed love. Alexander Hume had
not been many paces from his own house, when his wife saw, in its proper
light, the true character of her situation. Her husband had gone on a
perilous enterprise.
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