“You are an admirable lawyer, Sedley. I am told London has not your equal as a special pleader, but let me tell you you are not either a projector or a politician. I am both, and I declare to you that this country which you deride and distrust is the California of Great Britain. Write to me at your earliest; finish this business if you can, out of hand, and if you make good terms for me I 'll send you some shares in an enterprise—an Irish enterprise—which will pay you a better dividend than some of your East county railroads.”
“Have you changed the name of your place? Your son, Mr. John Bramleigh, writes 'Bishop's Folly' at the top of his letter.”
“It is called Castello, sir. I am not responsible for the silly caprices of a sailor.”
CHAPTER XVI.. SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS.
Lord Culduff and Colonel Bramleigh spoke little to each other as they journeyed back to Ireland. Each fell back upon the theme personally interesting to him, and cared not to impart it to his neighbor. They were not like men who had so long travelled the same road in life that by a dropping word a whole train of associations can be conjured up, and familiar scenes and people be passed in review before the mind.
A few curt sentences uttered by Bramleigh told how matters stood in the City—money was “tight” being the text of all he said; but of that financial sensitiveness that shrinks timidly from all enterprise after a period of crash and bankruptcy, Culduff could make nothing. In his own craft nobody dreaded the fire because his neighbor's child was burned, and he could not see why capitalists should not learn something from diplomacy.
Nor was Colonel Bramleigh, on his side, much better able to follow the subjects which had interest for his companion. The rise and fall of kingdoms, the varying fortunes of states, impressed themselves upon the City man by the condition of financial credit they implied, and a mere glance at the price of a foreign loan conveyed to his appreciation a more correct notion of a people than all the blue-books and all the correspondence with plenipotentiaries.
These were not Culduffs views. His code—it is the code of all his calling—was: No country of any pretensions, no more than any gentleman of blood and family, ever became bankrupt. Pressed, hard-pushed, he would say, Yes! we all of us have had our difficulties, and to surmount them occasionally we are driven to make unprofitable bargains, but we “rub through,” and so will Greece and Spain and those other countries where they are borrowing at twelve or twenty per cent, and raise a loan each year to discharge the dividends.
Not only, then, were these two little gifted with qualities to render them companionable to each other, but from the totally different way every event and every circumstance presented itself to their minds, each grew to conceive for the other a sort of depreciatory estimate as of one who only could see a very small part of any subject, and even that colored and tinted by the hues of his own daily calling.