“His lordship’s come, bag and baggage,” returned Roland. “I say, Jenkins, what a thousand shames it is that he’s not rich! He is the best-natured fellow alive, and would do anything in the world for us, if he only had the tin.”
“Is he not rich, sir?”
“Why, of course he’s not,” confidentially returned Roland. “Every one knows the embarrassments of Lord Carrick. When he came into the estates, they had been mortgaged three deep by the last peer, my grandfather—an old guy in a velvet skull-cap, I remember, who took snuff incessantly—and my uncle, on his part, had mortgaged them three deep again, which made six. How Carrick manages to live nobody knows. Sometimes he’s in Ireland, in the tumble-down old homestead, with just a couple of servants to wait upon him; and sometimes he’s on the Continent, en garçon—if you know what that means. Now and then he gets a windfall when any of his tenants can be brought to pay up; but he is the easiest-going coach in life, and won’t press them. Wouldn’t I!”
“Some of those Irish tenants are very poor, sir, I have heard.”
“Poor be hanged! What is a man’s own, ought to be his own. Carrick says there are some years that he does not draw two thousand pounds, all told.”
“Indeed, sir! That is not much for a peer.”
“It’s not much for a commoner, let alone a peer,” said Roland, growing fierce. “If I were no better off than Carrick, I’d drop the title; that’s what I’d do. Why, if he could live as a peer ought, do you suppose we should be in the position we are? One a soldier; one (and that’s me) lowered to be a common old proctor; one a parson; and all the rest of it! If Carrick could be as other earls are, and have interest with the Government, and that, we should stand a chance of getting properly provided for. Of course he can make interest with nobody while his estates bring him in next door to nothing.”
“Are there no means of improving his estates, Mr. Roland?” asked Jenkins.
“If there were, he’s not the one to do it. And I don’t know that it would do him any material good, after all,” acknowledged Roland. “If he gets one thousand a year, he spends two; and if he had twenty thousand, he’d spend forty. It might come to the same in the long run, so far as he goes: we might be the better for it, and should be. It’s a shame, though, that we should need to be the better for other folk’s money; if this were not the most unjust world going, everybody would have fortunes of their own.”
After this friendly little bit of confidence touching his uncle’s affairs, Roland prepared to depart. “I’ll be sure to come in good time nn the morning, Jenkins, and set to it like a brick,” was his parting salutation.