IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM

There was peace in Mr. Goren’s shop.  Badgered Ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with a headache—­any of our modern grandees under difficulties, might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided:  and he was an enviable man.  He loved his craft, he believed that he had not succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain; and, excepting that trifling coquetry with shirt-fronts, viz., the red crosses, which a shrewd rival had very soon eclipsed by representing nymphs triangularly posed, he devoted himself to his business from morning to night; as rigid in demanding respect from those beneath him, as he was profuse in lavishing it on his patrons.  His public boast was, that he owed no man a farthing; his secret comfort, that he possessed two thousand pounds in the Funds.  But Mr. Goren did not stop here.  Behind these external characteristics he nursed a passion.  Evan was astonished and pleased to find in him an enthusiastic fern-collector.  Not that Mr. Harrington shared the passion, but the sight of these brown roots spread out, ticketed, on the stained paper, after supper, when the shutters were up and the house defended from the hostile outer world; the old man poring over them, and naming this and that spot where, during his solitary Saturday afternoon and Sunday excursions, he had lighted on the rare samples exhibited this contrast of the quiet evening with the sordid day humanized Mr. Goren to him.  He began to see a spirit in the rigid tradesman not so utterly dissimilar to his own, and he fancied that he, too, had a taste for ferns.  Round Beckley how they abounded!

He told Mr. Goren so, and Mr. Goren said: 

‘Some day we’ll jog down there together, as the saying goes.’

Mr. Goren spoke of it as an ordinary event, likely to happen in the days to come:  not as an incident the mere mention of which, as being probable, stopped the breath and made the pulses leap.

For now Evan’s education taught him to feel that he was at his lowest degree.  Never now could Rose stoop to him.  He carried the shop on his back.  She saw the brand of it on his forehead.  Well! and what was Rose to him, beyond a blissful memory, a star that he had once touched?  Self-love kept him strong by day, but in the darkness of night came his misery; wakening from tender dreams, he would find his heart sinking under a horrible pressure, and then the fair fresh face of Rose swam over him; the hours of Beckley were revived; with intolerable anguish he saw that she was blameless—­that he alone was to blame.  Yet worse was it when his closed eyelids refused to conjure up the sorrowful lovely nightmare, and he lay like one in a trance, entombed-wretched Pagan! feeling all that had been blindly; when the Past lay beside him like a corpse that he had slain.