Middlemarch
revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity. Now
Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs; he often
shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at what he called
Rosamond’s fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with
a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he
would even incur some trouble and self-restraint. It was under strong
inward pressure of this kind that Fred had taken the wise step of
depositing the eighty pounds with his mother. It was a pity that he had
not at once given them to Mr. Garth; but he meant to make the sum
complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had kept
twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which, planted
by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than threefold—a
very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young gentleman’s
infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.
Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the
suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as
necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that
diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is
carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous
imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and
having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there
must be to others in going aboard with it. Hopefulness has a pleasure
in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is
certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as
possible a share in the stake. Fred liked play, especially billiards,
as he liked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the
better because he wanted money and hoped to win. But the twenty pounds’
worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green
plot—all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the
roadside—and Fred found himself close upon the term of payment with no
money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with
his mother. The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present
which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Featherstone:
his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Vincy’s own habits
making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who was
rather exasperating. This horse, then, was Fred’s property, and in his
anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a
possession without which life would certainly be worth little. He made
the resolution with a sense of heroism—heroism forced on him by the
dread of breaking his word to Mr. Garth, by his love for Mary and awe
of her opinion. He would start for Houndsley horse-fair which was to be
held the next morning, and—simply sell his horse, bringing back the
money by coach?—Well, the horse would hardly fetch more than thirty
pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it would be folly
to balk himself of luck beforehand. It was a hundred to one that some
good chance would fall in his way; the longer he thought of it, the
less possible it seemed that he should not have a good chance, and the
less reasonable that he should not equip himself with the powder and
shot for bringing it down. He would ride to Houndsley with Bambridge
and with Horrock “the vet,” and without asking them anything expressly,
he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion. Before he set
out, Fred got the eighty pounds from his mother.
Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with
Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair,
thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an
unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have
had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a
gay young fellow. Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he
rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not
been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and
unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and
Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh
would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of
Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other
name than “pleasure” the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock
must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with
them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a
dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse
in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and
various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for
the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit
of these things was “gay.”
In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which
offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a
thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which
took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending
downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian
eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a
moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable
sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a
susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to
create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund
of humor—too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable
crust,—and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate
enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other. It is a
physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more
powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.
Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse’s fetlock, turned
sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse’s action for the space of
three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and
remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it
had been.
The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective.
A mixture of passions was excited in Fred—a mad desire to thrash
Horrock’s opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the
advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that Horrock
might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.
Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his
ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of
as being “given to indulgence”—chiefly in swearing, drinking, and
beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious
man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might
have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was
undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore
their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green
bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine
old tune, “Drops of brandy,” gave you after a while a sense of
returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a
slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to
several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in
the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes
about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses
and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its
pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his
memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and
sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without
turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of
passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of
his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it.
In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.
Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to
Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at
their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine
opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent
critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge’s weakness to be a gratuitous
flatterer. He had never before been so much struck with the fact that
this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the
roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.
“You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me,
Vincy! Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that
chestnut, and you gave him for this brute. If you set him cantering, he
goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but one worse roarer in my
life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he
used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take
him, but I said, ‘Thank you, Peg, I don’t deal in wind-instruments.’
That was what I said. It went the round of the country, that joke did.
But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of
yours.”
“Why, you said just now his was worse than mine,” said Fred, more
irritable than usual.
“I said a lie, then,” said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically. “There wasn’t a
penny to choose between ’em.”
Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way. When they
slackened again, Mr. Bambridge said—
“Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours.”
“I’m quite satisfied with his paces, I know,” said Fred, who required
all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; “I say
his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?”
Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he
had been a portrait by a great master.
Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on
reflection he saw that Bambridge’s depreciation and Horrock’s silence
were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better
of the horse than they chose to say.
That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought he
saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but
an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in
bringing with him his eighty pounds. A young farmer, acquainted with
Mr. Bambridge, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation
about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond,
implying that it was a public character. For himself he only wanted a
useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and
to give up hunting. The hunter was in a friend’s stable at some little
distance; there was still time for gentlemen to see it before dark. The
friend’s stable had to be reached through a back street where you might
as easily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim
street of that unsanitary period. Fred was not fortified against
disgust by brandy, as his companions were, but the hope of having at
last seen the horse that would enable him to make money was
exhilarating enough to lead him over the same ground again the first
thing in the morning. He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain
with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress of circumstances, Fred
felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the
constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond in a
way that he never would have done (the horse being a friend’s) if he
had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal—even