“Not I,” replied the Laird; “I have no turn for that service, I should only have wasted bombazine on my shoulders, and flour upon my three-tailed wig—should but have lounged away my mornings in the Outer-House, and my evenings at the play-house, and acquired no more law than what would have made me a wise justice at a Small-debt Court.”
“If you gained little, you would have lost as little,” said Meiklewham; “and albeit ye were nae great gun at the bar, ye might aye have gotten a Sheriffdom, or a Commissaryship, amang the lave, to keep the banes green; and sae ye might have saved your estate from deteriorating, if ye didna mend it muckle.”
“Yes, but I could not have had the chance of doubling it, as I might have done,” answered Mowbray, “had that inconstant jade, Fortune, but stood a moment faithful to me. I tell you, Mick, that I have been, within this twelvemonth, worth a hundred thousand—worth fifty thousand—worth nothing, but the remnant of this wretched estate, which is too little to do one good while it is mine, though, were it sold, I could start again, and mend my hand a little.”
“Ay, ay, just fling the helve after the hatchet,” said his legal adviser—“that's a' you think of. What signifies winning a hundred thousand pounds, if you win them to lose them a' again?”
“What signifies it?” replied Mowbray. “Why, it signifies as much to a man of spirit, as having won a battle signifies to a general—no matter that he is beaten afterwards in his turn, he knows there is luck for him as well as others, and so he has spirit to try it again. Here is the young Earl of Etherington will be amongst us in a day or two—they say he is up to every thing—if I had but five hundred to begin with, I should be soon up to him.”
“Mr. Mowbray,” said Meiklewham, “I am sorry for ye. I have been your house's man-of-business—I may say, in some measure, your house's servant—and now I am to see an end of it all, and just by the lad that I thought maist likely to set it up again better than ever; for, to do ye justice, you have aye had an ee to your ain interest, sae far as your lights gaed. It brings tears into my auld een.”
“Never weep for the matter, Mick,” answered Mowbray; “some of it will stick, my old boy, in your pockets, if not in mine—your service will not be altogether gratuitous, my old friend—the labourer is worthy of his hire.”
“Weel I wot is he,” said the writer; “but double fees would hardly carry folk through some wark. But if ye will have siller, ye maun have siller—but, I warrant, it goes just where the rest gaed.”
“No, by twenty devils!” exclaimed Mowbray, “to fail this time is impossible—Jack Wolverine was too strong for Etherington at any thing he could name; and I can beat Wolverine from the Land's-End to Johnnie Groat's—but there must be something to go upon—the blunt must be had, Mick.”
“Very likely—nae doubt—that is always provided it can be had,” answered the legal adviser.