False Evidence

Fortune is the strangest mistress a man ever wooed. Who courts her she shuns, who deserves her she passes over, and on him who defies her and takes no pains to secure her she lavishes her favours. I am one of those to whom she has shown herself most kind. Many years ago I vowed my life away to one purpose, and that partly an immoral one. It was a purpose which held my life. I swore to seek no end apart from it, and I put away from my thoughts all joys that were not included in its accomplishment. And yet, having kept my oath, I still possess in the prime of life everything which a man could wish for. I am rich, and well thought of amongst my fellows. I am married to the woman whom I love, and life is flowing on with me as calmly and peacefully as the murmuring waters of a woodland stream in the middle of summer. And, above all, my heart is at ease, for I have kept my vow.

She is a strange mistress, indeed! Nothing have I sought or deserved of her, yet everything I have. Whilst he who was far above me in his deservings, and whose sufferings none save myself thoroughly understood, passed through a gloomy life, buffeted by every wind, stranded by every tide of fortune; misunderstood, wronged, falsely accused, and narrowly escaped remaining in men's minds only as a prototype of a passionate, unforgiving, Quixotic man.

That the world may know him as he was, and form a better judgment as to his character, I have gathered together the threads of my life indissolubly connected with his, and have turned them inside out. I have never indulged myself with the feminine luxury of a diary, but with a surer progress than of pen over paper has the record of my strange life been written into my mind; and so I tell it just as it all comes back to me, not as a professed story-teller, with harmonious dates and regular evolution of plot, and neatly paged chapters, but in a bolder way, leaving much to be guessed at, and some things untold. If there be any of whom I have occasion to speak still amongst the living (my life has so contracted of late that many have passed out of its horizon), let them remember for what purpose I write, and for his sake forbear to complain. If the sword were the pen, then would mine be the pen of a ready writer, and I might be able to touch lightly on their shortcomings, and gild over the black spots on my own life. But enough of excuses. I take up my pen a blunt Englishman, an athlete rather than a scholar, to write a plain story which shall serve not as a eulogy, but as a justification of the man to whom many years of my life have been ungrudgingly given. Let all those who may feel disposed to cavil at the disconnectedness of my loosely jointed story, remember this, and be silent.