She went over and fed Ruy once more with apples, Ruy was as greedy of them as a miser of coin; she talked with Robert, and presently asked him for how much he would sell the horse?
“Seventy pounds,” said Robert.
“But you only gave sixty for him.”
“I have to make my turn—my profit,” said Robert.
“Will you sell him to me?”
“Of course.”
“I will buy him,” said Felise.
“You shall have him—seventy pounds.”
“Sixty.”
“No—no.”
“Sixty-five.”
“Impossible.”
“Sixty-seven.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Sixty-seven—that is seven pounds profit, and all in a few days,” said Felise.
“Seventy pounds,” said Robert decidedly, and Felise saw that it was no use to bargain.
“Very well, seventy—I will bring you the money this evening; you will not part with him to anyone else in the meantime?”
“Why, no—certainly not.”
“I will come then, this evening.”
She returned home, and asked Mr. Goring for the pony-carriage to drive into the town; it was prepared, and she started alone.
So soon as she had left, Robert Godwin said to himself that he had been foolish to part with the horse so easily. She had so set her mind on the horse, he might have asked ninety safely. If he had kept him till the hunting-season some gentleman might have taken a fancy for him and gone still higher, perhaps a hundred and twenty. For the price of a horse is the price of a fancy, and goes up like stocks and shares when buyers are in the vein. Why, very likely she knew of someone who would give her ninety or a hundred for such a horse; very likely that was the secret of her eagerness to secure him. Robert felt that he had been “had;” it hurt his semiprofessional pride as a horse-dealer now and then, generally heavily to his gain.
The miser and the lover—despair, hope, and anger—were they not strangely mingled in this man?
A passionate lover would have given his lady the horse in a moment, especially if as rich as Robert Godwin. With all his riches, and his secret passion, he had but once given her a present. One fair-day—eight years since—for a marvel he spent fourpence (the groat is still a unit in country places) at a stall on “fairings,” a sort of sweet biscuit, thinking he might see her as he came home. He did see her, and gave her the groat’s worth of “fairings;” the child took them silently, not without some awe of his black face.
He had cleared ten pounds profit, and he was torturing himself because he feared he had missed an opportunity to make twenty.
Yet his hands were never still because of his unmanageable passion—he must work with them constantly; his heart’s bitterness was full to overflowing because he could not have her; the hope her presence gave was like a sword splitting his very heart in two. She stood by him and his lips were dumb—commonplaces are dumbness—his lips were closed with iron-bolts; he could not say one word to indicate his meaning, to seek her favour.
Are we cynical moderns right, after all, in our discredit of Fate? Could there possibly be some fate here, some of that irresistible destiny which in Sophocles carries its tyrant will through generation after generation? Petty circumstances unregarded lead men on, from step to step, from thought to thought, action to action; is this Fate?
The greed of the miser; the agony of the lover who knows that he cannot be loved; the pitiless animosity of the tyrant turning by reflex action against the creature of his love; the sharp sword of a hope that only shows what might be if—these are terrible goads.
XXV
Hurrying into the town as fast as her pony could take her, Felise was in deep anxiety, for she had bought the horse without the money to pay for him. She was so fearful lest Godwin should sell to someone else, lest Ruy should be sent away to some market at a distance and disappear, that she bid for him before she had made arrangements to obtain the money.
When she was brought a child to Mr. Goring, her fortune consisted of some fifty pounds and a set of pearls. Of the fifty pounds Goring had been obliged to spend four from time to time on necessities for his charge. At sixteen, he placed the remainder in a private savings-bank for her, and gave her the passbook. Since then she had drawn four more; there were consequently forty-two pounds remaining. The value of the pearls was one hundred and fifty, so they had been estimated; in fact, they had originally cost more. If only she could find someone to advance her twenty-eight pounds on these pearls, she could complete her purchase. She feared the difficulty arising from her sex, and from the fact that she was not yet of age.
She had no choice of persons, for there was but one to whom she could apply—a silversmith who was known to be wealthy. He hopped a little, or halted in some way in his gait; after advancing a step he paused, and drew his other foot up level in a sort of plaintive style, as much as to say, “I should indeed be a man if it were not for this infirmity.” This deliberative motion, extending into his ideas, had enabled him to accumulate a considerable fortune.
Now the silversmith had always shown a kind of friendship for Mr. Goring, inviting him into his private room if the latter brought his watch to be repaired, and now and then calling at Beechknoll as he drove past to regulate someone’s clock. Secretly he gave Mr. Goring to understand that, although his business position forbade him to openly take any part, their views really coincided. He looked on the Cornleigh family as an incubus, and their ways as despotic.
At heart he owned he was a radical, though Mrs. Cornleigh herself sometimes called at
