Only three of them, mind you. If the
other one had been in my hand, I'd have done him. As narrow a squeak
as that. But I lost. And you may be certain I lost gamely, as a
gentleman should. No laughing matter, but I laughed with them--except
the funny, sad one. He was worried and made no secret of it. They were
good enough to say I took my loss like a dead sport."
More of it followed, but always the same. Ever he came back to the
sickening, concise point that I was to go out to the American
wilderness with these grotesque folk who had but the most elementary
notions of what one does and what one does not do. Always he concluded
with his boast that he had taken his loss like a dead sport. He became
vexed at last by my painful efforts to understand how, precisely, the
dreadful thing had come about. But neither could I endure more. I fled
to my room. He had tried again to impress upon me that three eights
are but slightly inferior to the flush of clubs.
I faced my glass. My ordinary smooth, full face seemed to have
shrivelled. The marks of my anguish were upon me. Vainly had I locked
myself in. The gipsy's warning had borne its evil fruit. Sold, I'd
been; even as once the poor blackamoors were sold into American
bondage. I recalled one of their pathetic folk-songs in which the
wretches were wont to make light of their lamentable estate; a thing I
had often heard sung by a black with a banjo on the pier at Brighton;
not a genuine black, only dyed for the moment he was, but I had never
lost the plaintive quality of the verses:
"Away down South in Michigan,
Where I was so happy and so gay,
'Twas there I mowed the cotton and the cane----"
How poignantly the simple words came back to me! A slave, day after
day mowing his owner's cotton and cane, plucking the maize from the
savannahs, yet happy and gay! Should I be equal to this spirit? The
Honourable George had lost; so I, his pawn, must also submit like a
dead sport.
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