“And would have his Majesty's signature to the promise as 'twere a deed of sale!” laughed the priest convulsively. “La! la! la! Paul, here's our Celtic Solon with tact--the tact of the foot-pad. Stand and deliver! My pardon, sire, or your life! _Mon Dieu!_ there runs much of the old original cateran in thy methods of diplomacy, good Master MacKellar. Too much for royal courts, I reckon.” MacKellar pshawed impatiently. “I'm asking you what is the Secretary's name, Mr. Greig?” said he. “Fox or Pitt it is all the same--the one is sly and the other is deep, and it is the natures of their names. I'll warrant Mr. Pitt has forgotten already the name of the man who gave him the secret, and the wisest thing Paul Greig could do now would be to go into hiding as fast as he can.”
But I expressed my determination to wait in the Queen's Head a week longer, as I had promised, and thereafter (if nothing happened to prevent it) to submit myself at Edinburgh. Though I tried to make as little of that as possible to myself, and indeed would make myself believe I was going to act with a rare bravery, I must confess now that my determination was strengthened greatly by the reflection that my service to the country would perhaps annul or greatly modify my sentence.
It was a gay place, London, in the days I write of, however it may be now, though Father Hamilton was prone occasionally to compare it unfavourably with the Paris of his fancy, the which he held a sample-piece of paradise. The fogs and rains depressed him; he had an eye altogether unfriendly for the signs of striving commerce in the streets and the greedy haste of clerks and merchants into whose days of unremitting industry so few joys (as he fancied) seemed to enter.
MacKellar soon found company in it among silken bucks that held noisy sederunts in the evenings at a place called White's and another called (if my memory does not fail me) the Cocoa Nut Tree. 'Twas marvellous the number of old friends and fellow countrymen that, by his own account, he found there. And what open hands they had! But for him that was privileged, for old acquaintance sake, to borrow from them, we had found our week or two in London singularly hungry because (to tell the truth of it) our money was come very nearly to an end. But MacKellar, who had foraged so well in Silesia, was equally good at it in the city of London. From these night escapades he seldom failed to return richer than he went, and it was he who paid the piper with so much of an air of thinking it a privilege, that we had not the heart, even if we had the inclination, to protest.