"Auld Dame Bruntisfield is but a life-rentrix; thou knowest, man, that Captain Napier, of Buchan's regiment of Scots'-Dutch, is the next and last heir of entail."
"Tush! I will have him under the nippers of the Lord Advocate ere long; when his head is on yonder battlements of the Nether Bow, the barony of Bruntisfield goes to Lilian Napier, and dost think, Mersington, that chitti-faced girl will stand in my way? I trow not. Maclutchy and some of our best-trained beagles are on the captain's track, and they will run him down somewhere in the west country, depend upon it. But 'tis neither hall nor holm, wood or water, that will satisfy me——"
"Odsfish, man! he, he! what mair would ye hae, Randal? There is the auld dame denounced a rebel, and in default of compearance, put to the horn; her moveable gudes and gear escheat to the King, conform to the acts thereanent, and sae are the heritable, but the Council will soon snap them up. What mair would ye hae?"
"The person of little Lilian," said Clermistonlee, with a sinister smile, as he winked over the top of his great silver tankard.
"Hee, hee!" chuckled Mersington.
"I would give a thousand broad pieces——"
"If ye had them!"
"Crush me! yes.——to discover where the young damsel is in hiding at this moment. Accustomed to subdue women from very habit, her piquant coldness and hauteur have inflamed, surprised, and offended me, and by all the devils, I will have her, though I should be tumbled down the precipice of hell for it!" he continued, in the cavalier phraseology. "And this fellow, Fenton, this silken slave, who crossed me on the very night I had hoped to have her arrested (he ground his teeth), and that braggart, Douglas of Finland, who was so ready with his rapier to-night, let them look to it; my path shall not be crossed with impunity by man or devil."
"Nor is that of any Lord of Council, while a warrant of arrest and ward may be had from Mackenzie for the asking, like the lettre-de-cachet o' our French friends."
"True, my Lord—our laws are severe; they are written in blood, like those of Draco, the Athenian. If this fellow, Finland, has the young lady concealed about Edinburgh, and if I thought he had a deeper aim in view, than merely crossing me, I vow to Heaven, I would make him a terrible example to all such rascally intermeddlers with the purposes of their betters."