‘Scots,’ interrupted Fairford. ‘You forget you told me all this before.’
‘Scots or English, it was too much for me to lose,’ said the provost; so you see I am not a person to pack or peel with Jacobites, and such unfreemen as poor Redgauntlet.’
‘Granted, granted, Mr. Crosbie; and what then?’ said Alan Fairford.
‘Why, then, it follows, that if I am to help you at this pinch, if cannot be by and through my ain personal knowledge, but through some fitting agent or third person.’
‘Granted again,’ said Fairford. ‘And pray who may this third person be?’
‘Wha but Pate Maxwell of Summertrees—him they call Pate-in-Peril.’
‘An old Forty-five man, of course?’ said Fairford.
‘Ye may swear that,’ replied the provost—‘as black a Jacobite as the auld leaven can make him; but a sonsy, merry companion, that none of us think it worth while to break wi’ for all his brags and his clavers. You would have thought, if he had had but his own way at Derby, he would have marched Charlie Stuart through between Wade and the Duke, as a thread goes through the needle’s ee, and seated him in Saint James’s before you could have said haud your hand. But though he is a windy body when he gets on his auld-warld stories, he has mair gumption in him than most people—knows business, Mr. Alan, being bred to the law; but never took the gown, because of the oaths, which kept more folk out then than they do now—the more’s the pity.’
‘What! are you sorry, provost, that Jacobitism is upon the decline?’ said Fairford.
‘No, no,’ answered the provost—‘I am only sorry for folks losing the tenderness of conscience which they used to have. I have a son breeding to the bar, Mr. Fairford; and, no doubt, considering my services and sufferings, I might have looked for some bit postie to him; but if the muckle tykes come in—I mean a’ these Maxwells, and Johnstones, and great lairds, that the oaths used to keep out lang syne—the bits o’ messan doggies, like my son, and maybe like your father’s son, Mr. Alan, will be sair put to the wall.’