He has contrived, in less than three months, to condense and concentrate wickedness enough for a lifetime; this is technically called "going fast." Egad, I should say it's a pace far too quick to last with any man, much less with the son of a broken-down Irish gentleman! You would not believe that the boy could know the very names of the things that he appears to have reckoned as mere necessaries of daily life; and how he contrived to raise money and contract loans--a thing that has been a difficulty to myself all my life long--is clean beyond me to explain. I 'll get a copy of the "claims" and send it over to you, and I feel that your astonishment will equal my own. It would appear that the young vagabond talked as if the Barings were his next of kin, and actually took delight in squandering money! Only think! all the time I believed he was hard at work at his French lessons, it was rattling a dice-box he was, and his education for the Board of Trade was going on in the side-scenes of the opera! Vickars has been the cause of all this. If he 'd have kept his promise, the boy wonld n't have been rained with rascally companions and spendthrift associates.
Where's the money to come from, Tom? Have you any device in your head to get us out of this scrape? I suppose some, at least, of the demands will admit of abatement, and Lazarus, they say, always takes a fourth of his claim. You can estimate the pleasant game of cross-purposes I was playing all yesterday with the Court of Cassation, and what a chaotic mass of rubbish the field of Waterloo and the duel must have appeared in an action for debt! But why did n't they apprise me of what I was there for? Why did they go on with their ridiculous demand, "Racontez l'affaire"? Recount what? What should I know of the nefarious dealings of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? They torment me for six weeks by a daily examination, till it would be nothing singular if I became monomaniac, and could discuss no other theme than a duel and a gunshot wound, and then, without the slightest suggestion of a change, they launch me into a thing like a Court of Bankruptcy!
It appears that I have been committed for three days for my "contempt," and before that time elapses, there is no 'resource in Belgian law to compel them to bring up the body of Kenny Dodd; so that here I must stay, "chewing," as the poet says, "the cud of sweet and bitter fancy." Not that I have not a great deal of business to transact in this interval. Jellicot's papers would fill a cart; besides which, I have in contemplation a letter for Mrs. D. that will, I suspect, astonish her. I mean briefly, but clearly, to place before her the state we are in, and her own share in bringing us to it. I'll let her feel that her own extravagance has given the key-note to the family, and that she alone is to blame for this calamity. Among the many fine things promised me for coming abroad, she forgot to say that I was to be like Silvio Pellico; but _I_ 'll not forget it, Tom!