s it was. I had a little money; it went
the way of my little wit. Here in my pocket I have the scant dregs
of it. I should tell you I was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that
description would flatter me; it would assume there's something left of
me. But the ghost of a donkey--what's that? I think," he went on with
a charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, "I should
have been all right in a world arranged on different lines. Before
heaven, sir--whoever you are--I'm in practice so absurdly tender-hearted
that I can afford to say it: I entered upon life a perfect gentleman.
I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them
nowhere--found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without shade,
without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery
of colour. To furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own
soul. I went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very
pretty chiaroscuro you'll find in my track! Sitting here in this old
park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of
what might have been! I should have been born here and not there; here
my makeshift distinctions would have found things they'd have been true
of. How it was I never got free is more than I can say. It might have
cut the knot, but the knot was too tight. I was always out of health or
in debt or somehow desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the
great black sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of
an old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes of
my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess it's a
bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour
I've got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other
time, if you consent, we'll have a go at it, such as it is, together.
Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and tried to commit the
'points' of our case to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by
heart as a boy. I dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake
up some fine morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of
an English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England on
business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful mess (not
that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal practitioner in our courts,
a very rough diamond, but with a great deal of FLAIR, as they say in New
York. It was with