Coke Clifton to Guy Fairfax

London, Dover-Street

Why ay! He who opens the flood-gates of mischief is necessarily in most danger of being swept away by the torrent!—I have drunken deeply of ruin, and soon shall have my fill!

You warned me to beware of this raven: you told me he scented carrion!—I laughed at your prophecy!—It is fulfilled!—I am a gull!—The fleeced, cheated, despicable gull of the infernal villain Mac Fane!

It was right that I should be loaded with every species of contempt for myself. I have been the fool, the gudgeon, the ineffable ass to lose a sum of money to him, which to pay would be destruction!—I begin to hate myself with most strange inveteracy! Could I meet such another fellow, I would spit in his face—Fairfax, it is true—By hell I hold myself in most rooted and ample antipathy!

I find I have strangely mistaken my own character and talents—I once thought to have driven the world before me, and to have whipped opposition into immediate compliance: but it seems I am myself one of the very sorry wretches at whom I was so all alive and ready to give, and spurn! These are odd and unaccountable things! And it appears that I am a very poor creature! A most indubitable driveller! The twin-brother of imbecility! Ay, the counterpart and compeer of Edward St. Ives, and the tool of the most barefaced of cheats, as well as his familiar!—Well! I have lived long enough to make the discovery; and it is now high time to depart!

I wrote to you but yesterday: but events hastily tread on each other's heels, and if I do not relate them now I never shall. I told you I expected the gambler to supper, by my own invitation—Ay, ay!—I am a very Solomon!

I dined at home. I knew not indeed to what extremes the St. Ives hunters might proceed: or whether they would make accusation upon oath, sufficient to authorise a magistrate in granting a warrant, to bring me before him; but the attempt must have been impotent and abortive, I therefore determined to brave them: however I heard no more of them or their suspicions.

As I sat ruminating on past events, on my sister and her epistle, and particularly on the zeal with which Anna St. Ives appealed to the letter written by her, which I had received from Laura, my curiosity was so far excited that at last I determined to read them both. I own, Fairfax, they both moved me—This sister of mine, enraged as I am against her, has somehow found the art of making herself respected. Her zeal has character and efficacy in it: I mean persuasion. I could not resist some of the sensations she intended to inspire. She cited passages from the letters of her friend that were daggers to me! At the very time I was seeking to quarrel with Anna, she angel-like was incessant in my praise!—And such praises, Fairfax—! There was no resisting it!—She thought generously, nobly, ay sublimely of me: while my irascible jealousy, false pride, and vindictive spirit were eager only to find cause of offence!

And yet I know not!—I cannot keep my mind to a point! Surely I had cause of offence: real cause?—Surely the retribution I sought had justice in it?—She could not be wholly blameless?—No!—That would indeed be distraction!

I then ventured to read the letter of Anna—On paper or in speech she is the same: energetic, awful, and affecting!

While I was reading this last Mac Fane entered, and soon put an end to my meditations. Did I tell you I had been fool enough to invite him to supper?—He had not been with me half an hour before I was most intolerably weary of his company!

After having vapoured of the feats of himself and the scowling rascal his colleague, to remind me of my high obligations to them, and talking as usual with most bitter malevolence against Henley, he soon began to descant on the old subject; gaming—To ask a madman why he is mad were vain! I was importuned by his jargon—'He had been pigeoned only last night of no less than seven hundred pounds!' Repetitions, imprecations, and lies, all of the same kind, succeeded as fast as he could utter them!

I know all this ought to have put me upon my guard; and I know too that it did not. I believe I had some lurking vanity in my mind; a persuasion that I could beat him at picquet. I was weary both of myself and him; was primed for mischief, and cared not of what kind. If you ask me for any better reason, why, knowing him as I did, I suffered myself to be the tool of this fellow, I can only say I have none to give!

I ordered my own servant to fetch half a dozen packs of cards, and imagined this precaution was some security. What will not men imagine, when their passions are afloat and reason is flown?

To give you the history of how I was led on, from one act of idiotism to another, or how after having lost one thousand I could be lunatic enough to lose a second, and after a second a third, and so on to a tenth, is more than my present temper of mind will permit. It is quite sufficient to tell you that I have ruined myself; and that there is not, upon the face of the earth, a fellow I so thoroughly despise as Coke Clifton; no not even Mac Fane himself! Below the lowest am I fallen; for I am his dupe, nay his companion, and what is worse his debtor! It is time I were out of the world—So miserable a being does not crawl upon its surface.

It is the very heyday of mischief, and I must abroad among it. The exact manner of the catastrophe I cannot foresee, but it must be tragical. I have something brooding in my mind, the outlines of a conclusion, which rather pleases me. I have sworn to avenge myself of Anna, disinherit my sister, and never to pay Mac Fane. These oaths must be kept. Anna must fall! If she will but deign to live afterward, she shall be my heir. And for myself, I know how to find a ready quietus!

My mind since this last affair is better reconciled to its destiny, and even less disturbed than before: for previous to this, there seemed to be some bare possibility of a generous release, on my part, and a more generous forgetfulness of injuries on theirs. But now, all is over! I have but to punish my opponents a little, and myself much, and having punished expire.

C. CLIFTON

P.S. I have not paid the scoundrel his thousand pounds. He proposed a bond for the whole, on which he said he could raise money. This I was determined not to give, and told him he must wait a few days, till I had consulted my lawyer and looked into my affairs, and I would then give him a determinate answer. He was beginning to assume the contemptible airs of a bully; but I was in no temper to bear the least insult. The real rage of my look silenced the mechanical ferocity of his. I bade him remember I could hit a china plate, and that I should think proper to take my own mode of payment. He then changed his tone, and began to commend his soul to Satan, in a thousand different forms, if he had ever won a hundred pounds at a sitting in his whole life before. I sneered in his face, shewed him the door, and bade him good night; and he walked quietly away.