Given a private estate, and it generally came out from Asherill's clear of meat as a picked bone. For this pleasing comparison I am, indeed, indebted to an expression used in Salisbury House.
"We have been rather slack lately," said a clerk jubilantly, "but we have got a meaty bone now."
And why should the young fellow not have been jubilant? Before Calcraft retired from that profession which he so much adorned, he was pleased doubtless to know a man had been sentenced to be hung by the neck till he was dead.
There is a pleasing adaptability about human nature which enables it to forget the possible pain the gratification of its own pleasure may involve to its fellow-creature; and there can be no question but that Mr. Swanland regarded, and perhaps reasonably, the insane struggles of victims, who felt the hooks of liquidation troublesome, as Calcraft might the mad fight of a criminal against the needful pinioning which enabled matters to go off so decently and quietly about eight o'clock on certain Monday mornings in his memory.
Nevertheless, and though he, at all events, must have had his innings out of Mortomley's estate, Mr. Swanland felt disgusted at the result of his own management of the affair.
Not because he had failed to pay the creditors even a farthing in the pound. To do Mr. Swanland strict justice, he looked upon creditors as he looked upon a debtor, namely, as natural enemies. He hated a debtor because the debtor's creditors gave him trouble, and he hated creditors because they gave him trouble; therefore he was, putting so much personal profit in the bankrupt scale, able to hold the beam straight, and declare both bankrupt and creditor to be equally obnoxious.
Mr. Swanland was a just man, and therefore conscientiously he could not declare the beam fell in favour of disliking one more than the other. He disliked them equally, when each had served his purpose, and he wished to throw both aside. The trustee's reason for feeling disgusted with Mortomley's estate was a very simple one. He had not made out of it what he expected. He had netted nothing like the amount he conceived was to be realised with good management.
Not that he feared a loss, bien entendu,—such an error had never yet been written in the books of Salisbury House; but he knew he had done that which touched his professional pride almost as keenly. He had lost profit. He had felt so certain of himself and the employèes, and the works and the customers; he had entertained so genuine a contempt for Mortomley's intellect; such a profound distrust of his capacity to transact the simplest business matter in a business manner; that he really believed when he took the management of the Homewood works upon himself that he had the ball at his feet.
Visions even of paying a dividend may have been vouchsafed to him. Certainly some extraordinary hallucination at one time held him in thrall, for after he had pocketed considerable sums of money, he actually returned much of it freely in the shape of wages to Mortomley's Estate.