“I shall never forget what you have done,”
Fred answered. “I can’t say anything
that seems worth saying—only I will try
that your goodness shall not be thrown away.”
“That’s enough. Good-by, and God
bless you.”
In that way they parted. But both of them walked
about a long while before they went out of the starlight.
Much of Fred’s rumination might be summed up
in the words, “It certainly would have been
a fine thing for her to marry Farebrother—but
if she loves me best and I am a good husband?”
Perhaps Mr. Farebrother’s might be concentrated
into a single shrug and one little speech. “To
think of the part one little woman can play in the
life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very
good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a
discipline!”
Now is there civil war within
the soul:
Resolve is thrust from off
the sacred throne
By clamorous Needs, and Pride
the grand-vizier
Makes humble compact, plays
the supple part
Of envoy and deft-tongued
apologist
For hungry rebels.
Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room,
and brought away no encouragement to make a raid on
luck. On the contrary, he felt unmixed disgust
with himself the next day when he had to pay four
or five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried
about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure
he had made, not only rubbing elbows with the men
at the Green Dragon but behaving just as they did.
A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly distinguishable
from a Philistine under the same circumstances:
the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent
reflections, and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable
cud in that way. His reason told him how the
affair might have been magnified into ruin by a slight
change of scenery—if it had been a gambling-house
that he had turned into, where chance could be clutched
with both hands instead of being picked up with thumb
and fore-finger. Nevertheless, though reason
strangled the desire to gamble, there remained the
feeling that, with an assurance of luck to the needful
amount, he would have liked to gamble, rather than
take the alternative which was beginning to urge itself
as inevitable.
That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode.
Lydgate had so many times boasted both to himself
and others that he was totally independent of Bulstrode,
to whose plans he had lent himself solely because
they enabled him to carry out his own ideas of professional
work and public benefit—he had so constantly
in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained
by the sense that he was making a good social use
of this predominating banker, whose opinions he thought
contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him
an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions—
that he had been creating for himself strong ideal
obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request
to him on his own account.
