'Do you know,' he began, calling me by my name, 'I fancy you have been criticising me—yes, I know you have. You think I made an ass of myself about that affair in the wood. Well, I have no doubt I did. Now that it has turned out pleasantly, I can see and admit that there was nothing to make a fuss about.'
I smiled.
'Very well. Now, you're a writer. You like to get at the souls of men.
Suppose I show you a bit of mine.'
He had drunk freely of the potent ale, and was now sipping a strong tumbler of hot whisky. Possibly this accounted in some measure for his communicativeness.
'Up to the age of five-and-twenty I was clerk in a drug warehouse. To this day even the faintest smell of drugs makes my heart sink. If I can help it, I never go into a chemist's shop. I was getting a pound a week, and I not only lived on it, but kept up a decent appearance. I always had a good suit of clothes for Sundays and holidays—made at a tailor's in Holborn. Since he disappeared I've never been able to find any one who fitted me so well. I paid six-and-six a week for a top bedroom in a street near Gray's Inn Road. Did you suppose I had gone through the mill?'
I made no answer, and, after looking at me for a moment, Ireton resumed:
'Those were damned days! It wasn't the want of good food and good lodgings that troubled me most,—but the feeling that I was everybody's inferior. There's no need to tell you how I was brought up; I was led to expect better things, that's enough. I never got used to being ordered about. When I was told to do this or that, I answered with a silent curse,—and I wonder it didn't come out sometimes. That's my nature. If I had been born the son of a duke, I couldn't have resented a subordinate position more fiercely than I did. And I used to rack my brain with schemes for getting out of it. Many a night I have lain awake for hours, trying to hit on some way of earning my living independently. I planned elaborate forgeries. I read criminal cases in the newspapers to get a hint that I might work upon. Well, that only means that I had exhausted all the honest attempts, and found them all no good. I was in despair, that's all.'
He finished his whisky and shouted to the landlord, who presently brought him another glass.
'What's that bird making the strange noise?'
'A night-jar, I think.'