Widow and Mother

The news which that famous Gazette brought to the Osbornes gave a
dreadful shock to the family and its chief. The girls indulged
unrestrained in their grief. The gloom-stricken old father was still
more borne down by his fate and sorrow. He strove to think that a
judgment was on the boy for his disobedience. He dared not own that
the severity of the sentence frightened him, and that its fulfilment
had come too soon upon his curses. Sometimes a shuddering terror
struck him, as if he had been the author of the doom which he had
called down on his son. There was a chance before of reconciliation.
The boy's wife might have died; or he might have come back and said,
Father I have sinned. But there was no hope now. He stood on the
other side of the gulf impassable, haunting his parent with sad eyes.
He remembered them once before so in a fever, when every one thought
the lad was dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a
dreadful gloom. Good God! how the father clung to the doctor then, and
with what a sickening anxiety he followed him: what a weight of grief
was off his mind when, after the crisis of the fever, the lad
recovered, and looked at his father once more with eyes that recognised
him. But now there was no help or cure, or chance of reconcilement:
above all, there were no humble words to soothe vanity outraged and
furious, or bring to its natural flow the poisoned, angry blood. And
it is hard to say which pang it was that tore the proud father's heart
most keenly--that his son should have gone out of the reach of his
forgiveness, or that the apology which his own pride expected should
have escaped him.