"Ay, my lord, and why?" Sir Winston answered, in high good humour, "because we are all trimmers to the wind, but some trim too late, and some too soon. And those are your Whigs. Never you turn Whig, my lord, whatever you do, or you will die in a Dutch garret like Tony Shiftsbury! And if anyone could have made Whiggery pay nowadays, clever Anthony would have. Here's his health, but I doubt he is in hell, these eight months."
And Sir Winston, going to the table, filled and drank off a bumper of claret. Then he filled again. "The King--God bless him--is not very well, I hear," said he, winking at the young lord. "So I will give you another toast. His Highness's health, and confusion to all who would exclude him! And now what is this business, Dyson? Who is the lad? What has he been doing?"
The constable began to explain; but before he had uttered many words, the baronet, whose last draught had more than a little fuddled him, cut him short. "Oh, come to me to-morrow!" he said. "Or stay! You are in the Commission for the county, my lord?"
"I am, but I have not acted," the young man answered.
"Rot it, man, but you shall act now! Burglary, is it? Broke and entered, eh? Then that is a hanging matter, and a young hound should be blooded. I am off! My lord will do it, Dyson. My lord will do it."
With which the Justice lurched out of the window so quickly, not to say unsteadily, that he was gone before his companion could remonstrate. The young lord, thus abandoned, looked at first at a nonplus, and seemed for a while more than half-inclined to follow. But changing his mind, and curious, I am willing to believe, to hear the case of a prisoner so much out of the common as I must have appeared to him, he turned to us, and adopting a certain stateliness, which came easily to him, young as he was, he told the constable he would hear him.
Then it was that, hanging for my life on the nods and words of intelligence that from time to time fell from him, and whereby he lifted the constable out of the slough of verbiage in which he floundered, I dared again to hope; and noting with eyes sharpened by terror the cast of his serious handsome features, and the curves of his mouth, sensitive as a woman's yet wondrously under control, saw a prospect of life. For a time indeed I had nothing more substantial on which to build than such signs, so damning seemed the tale that branded me as taken in the act and on the scene of my crimes. But when the young peer, after eyeing me gravely and pitifully, asked if they had found the money on me, and the constable answered, "No," and my lord retorted, "Then where was it?" and got no answer; and again when he enquired as to the lock on the door and the height of the window, and who had aided me to enter, and learned that a girl was suspected and no one else--then I felt the blood beat hotly in my head, and a mist come before my eyes.