الفصل الفصل 23 · Chapter XXIII

“Your horses of the Sun,” he said,

“And first-rate whip Apollo!

Whate’er they be, I’ll eat my head,

But I will beat them hollow.”

Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such

immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman

for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this

debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate. The creditor

was Mr. Bambridge, a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company

was much sought in Middlemarch by young men understood to be “addicted

to pleasure.” During the vacations Fred had naturally required more

amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Bambridge had been

accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and

the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a

small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at

billiards. The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds. Bambridge was

in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Vincy had backers;

but he had required something to show for it, and Fred had at first

given a bill with his own signature. Three months later he had renewed

this bill with the signature of Caleb Garth. On both occasions Fred had

felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds

at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his

confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we

know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable

disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the

folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater

mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about

agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in

costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing. Fred

felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should

have a run of luck, that by dint of “swapping” he should gradually

metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a

hundred at any moment—“judgment” being always equivalent to an

unspecified sum in hard cash. And in any case, even supposing negations

which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fred had always (at that

time) his father’s pocket as a last resource, so that his assets of

hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. Of what

might be the capacity of his father’s pocket, Fred had only a vague

notion: was not trade elastic? And would not the deficiencies of one

year be made up for by the surplus of another? The Vincys lived in an

easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the

family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of

economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion

that their father might pay for anything if he would. Mr. Vincy himself

had expensive Middlemarch habits—spent money on coursing, on his

cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts

with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything

one wants without any question of payment. But it was in the nature of

fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a

little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and

Fred disliked bad weather within doors. He was too filial to be

disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty

that it was transient; but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see

his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having

fun; for Fred was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under

scolding, it was chiefly for propriety’s sake. The easier course

plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend’s signature. Why not? With

the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason

why he should not have increased other people’s liabilities to any

extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything

were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order

of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young

gentleman.

With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their

more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning

each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to

oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as

other warmth. Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed

as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened

that Fred checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that

applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that

he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had

a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall

into a thoroughly unpleasant position—wear trousers shrunk with

washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to “duck

under” in any sort of way—was an absurdity irreconcilable with those

cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature. And Fred winced under

the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts.

Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at

once the poorest and the kindest—namely, Caleb Garth.

The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and

Rosamond were little ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight

connection between the two families through Mr. Featherstone’s double

marriage (the first to Mr. Garth’s sister, and the second to Mrs.

Vincy’s) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the

children rather than the parents: the children drank tea together out

of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together in play. Mary was a

little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in

the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from

an umbrella. Through all the stages of his education he had kept his

affection for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as a

second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his

family had long ceased. Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the

Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there

were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old

manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but

equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was

defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible

theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the building

business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of

surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time

entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living

narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay

twenty shillings in the pound. He had now achieved this, and from all

who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won

him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded

on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete

dinner-service. Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth,

and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her

bread—meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage;

in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall’s Questions

was something like a draper’s discrimination of calico trademarks, or a

courier’s acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better

off needed that sort of thing. And since Mary had been keeping Mr.

Featherstone’s house, Mrs. Vincy’s want of liking for the Garths had

been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should

engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents “lived in such a small

way.” Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to

Mrs. Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing

ardor of his affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those

who belonged to her.

Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went with

his request. He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount

of painful experience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth cautious

about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had

not proved themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of

Fred, was “sure the lad would turn out well—an open affectionate

fellow, with a good bottom to his character—you might trust him for

anything.” Such was Caleb’s psychological argument. He was one of those

rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others. He had a

certain shame about his neighbors’ errors, and never spoke of them

willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind from the best

mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order to

preconceive those errors. If he had to blame any one, it was necessary

for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various

diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his

pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other men’s work

than find fault with their doing. I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it

without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be

forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his

spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite’s clear young

eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future

from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a

friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he

must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly, he took the paper

and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached

his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again,

then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles

again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy

eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details

for once—you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb

Garth), and said in a comfortable tone,—

“It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse’s knees? And then,

these exchanges, they don’t answer when you have ’cute jockeys to deal

with. You’ll be wiser another time, my boy.”

Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his

signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for

whatever he did in the way of business he did well. He contemplated the

large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a

trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fred, said

“Good-by,” and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir

James Chettam’s new farm-buildings.

Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the

signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb was more

conscious, Mrs. Garth remained ignorant of the affair.

Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred’s sky, which altered his

view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone’s

present of money was of importance enough to make his color come and

go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a

proportionate disappointment. His failure in passing his examination,

had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his

father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home. Mr. Vincy

had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with,

Fred should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never

yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had

especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did

not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not “go on with that.”

Fred was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with

if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr.

Featherstone’s heir; that old gentleman’s pride in him, and apparent

fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct—just

as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act

kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of

his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy

who had stolen turnips. In fact, tacit expectations of what would be

done for him by uncle Featherstone determined the angle at which most

people viewed Fred Vincy in Middlemarch; and in his own consciousness,

what uncle Featherstone would do for him in an emergency, or what he

would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable

depth of aerial perspective. But that present of bank-notes, once made,

was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt, showed a

deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fred’s “judgment” or

by luck in some other shape. For that little episode of the alleged

borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting the

Bulstrode certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for

money towards meeting his actual debt. Fred was keen enough to foresee

that anger would confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having

borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle’s will would be taken

as a falsehood. He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious

affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete

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

Horrock—was evidently impressed with its merit. To get all the

advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how to draw

your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally. The

color of the horse was a dappled gray, and Fred happened to know that

Lord Medlicote’s man was on the look-out for just such a horse. After

all his running down, Bambridge let it out in the course of the

evening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go

for eighty pounds. Of course he contradicted himself twenty times over,

but when you know what is likely to be true you can test a man’s

admissions. And Fred could not but reckon his own judgment of a horse

as worth something. The farmer had paused over Fred’s respectable

though broken-winded steed long enough to show that he thought it worth

consideration, and it seemed probable that he would take it, with

five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond. In

that case Fred, when he had parted with his new horse for at least

eighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction,

and would have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the

bill; so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Garth would at the

utmost be twenty-five pounds. By the time he was hurrying on his

clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance of not losing

this rare chance, that if Bambridge and Horrock had both dissuaded him,

he would not have been deluded into a direct interpretation of their

purpose: he would have been aware that those deep hands held something

else than a young fellow’s interest. With regard to horses, distrust

was your only clew. But scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly

applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must

believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is

virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish

reliance on another. Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain,

and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the

dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in

addition—only five pounds more than he had expected to give.

But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate,

and without waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he set

out alone on his fourteen miles’ journey, meaning to take it very

quietly and keep his horse fresh.