With this barb, touched with wararra poison, or ten times distilled kakodyle, and a layer of honey over all, Dewhurst hurried away, to make no call. He was hard to subdue, and a puppy, whose passion it was to strut, in the perfection of a refined toilette, among fashionable street-walkers. While he was abroad, his cares rankling within were overborne by the consciousness of being "in position." The dog's nose is cold even when his tongue is reeking; and as he walked slowly along, his exterior showed the proper thermo-metric nonchalance—it was not the time for a pyrometric measurement within the heart. On his way, he talked to a Leith merchant, who hailed him; yet he exhibited the required retenu, so expressive of confidence and ease within, and withal so fashionable. You might have said that he had the heart to wing a partridge,—to "wing it," a pretty phrase in the mouth of a polite sportsman, who, if a poacher were to break the bones of his leg, would, in his own case, think it a little different. Yes, Dewhurst might have been supposed to be able to "wing a partridge,"—not to "flay a gull."
It was while thus "in position"—not its master, but its slave—that curvation of the spine of society, which produces so much paralysis and death—that, when he came to Princes Street, he felt himself constrained and able to walk up South St. Andrew Street, direct to the door of the Royal Bank. He even entered; he even drew a draft; he even made that draft £110, all the money he had there in keeping for so many coming wants and exigencies; he even presented it to the teller, who knew his circumstances and his dangers—ay, and his father's anxieties while he sent the yearly remittance.
"All, Mr. Dewhurst?" said the teller, looking blank at the draft.
"All, sir; I require it all," answered the student, with such a mouthful of the vowel, that we might write the word requoire, and not be far from the pronunciation.
The teller gave his head a significant shake. If he had had a tail to shake, and had shaken that tail, it would have been much the same.
Having got the money, he was more than ever under the law of that proclivity, on the broad line to ruin, on which so many young men take stations; and still retaining his, he went at the hour of the hot joints, to dine at the Rainbow, where he met many others, in that refreshment house, of the same class, who, like himself, considered—that is, while the money was there—that guineas in the purse supersede the necessity of having ideas in the head. He took to such liquid accompaniments of the dinner, as would confirm the resolution he had formed, of paying at once his debt of honour. And why not? Was not he of that world whose code of laws draws the legitimate line of distinction between debts contracted to industrious tradesmen for the necessaries of life, and those which are the result of whim, pride, or vindictiveness? All recollections of the flaying of the bird, and of the lady's adjuration to heaven, had given way to the enthusiasm of the noble feeling to obey the dictates of that eternal and immutable code of honour. And by seven o'clock he was at Stewart's, where he found Hamilton and Cameron waiting for their respective "pounds of flesh."
"Here is the £5," cried Hamilton, as he entered; and, throwing the note upon the table, "it is for the gull trick."
"And here," responded the West Indian, "is your £100 for the woman trick."
And he cast from him the bundle of notes, with a grandeur of both honour and defiance. "But I have a reservation to make. Campbell has not reported to me the issue of his commission; and if it shall turn out that the woman retracts, I will reclaim the money."
"And get it too," said the other, laughing sneeringly, as he counted the notes. "But here comes Campbell."