“I suppose,” said Angus, in the same sort of sulky murmur, “that is your way of telling me, Mr Keith, that I am a miserable sinner.”
“Are you not?”
“Miserable enough, Heaven knows! But, Duncan, I don’t see why you, and Flora, and Mrs Kezia, and all the good folks, or the folks who think themselves extra good, which comes to the same thing—”
“Does it? I was not aware of that,” said Mr Keith.
“I can’t see,” Angus went on, “why you must all turn up the whites of your eyes like a duck in thunder, and hold up your hands in pious horror at me, because I have done just once what every gentleman in the land does every week, and thinks nothing of it. If you had not been brought up in a hen-coop, and ruled like a copy-book, you would not be so con—so hideously strict and particular! Just ask Ambrose Catterall whether there is any weight on his conscience; or ask that jolly parson, who tackled you and Flora at breakfast, what he has to say to it. I’ll be bound he will read prayers next Sabbath with as much grace and unction as if he had never been drunk in his life. And because I get let in just once, why—”
Angus paused as if to consider how to finish his sentence, and Mr Keith answered one point of his long speech, letting all the rest, go.
“Is it just this once, Angus?”
“I suppose you mean that night at York, when I got let in with those fellows of Greensmith’s,” growled Angus, more grumpily than ever. “Now, Duncan, that’s not generous of you. I did the humble and penitent for that, and you should not cast it up to me. Just that time and this!”
“And no more, Angus?”
Angus muttered something which did not reach me.