Part 10 (2/2)

When Mr. Lingard had gone, Mr. Flower asked Henry if he'd care to look at the horses. Henry sympathetically consented, though his knowledge of horse-flesh hardly equalled his knowledge of accounts. But with the healthy animal, in whatever form, one always feels more or less at home, as one feels at home with the green earth, or that simple creature the sea.

Mr. Flower led the way to a long stable where some fifty horses protruded brown and dappled haunches on either hand. It was all wonderfully clean and sweet, and the cobbled pavement, the straw beds, the hay tumbling in sweet-scented bunches into the stalls from the loft overhead, made you forget that around this bucolic enclosure swarmed and rotted the foulest slums of the city, garrets where coiners plied their amateur mints, and cellars where murderers lay hidden in the dark.

”It's like a breath of the country,” said Henry, unconsciously striking the right note.

”You're right there,” said Mr. Flower, at the same moment heartily slapping the s.h.i.+ning side of a big chestnut mare, after the approved manner of men who love horses. To thus belabour a horse on its hinder-parts would seem to be equivalent among the horse-breeding fraternity to chucking a buxom milkmaid under the chin.

”You're right there,” he said; ”and here's a good Derbys.h.i.+re la.s.s for you,” once more administering a sounding caress upon his sleek favourite.

The horse turned its head and whinnied softly at the attention; and it was evident it loved the very sound of Mr. Flower's voice.

”Have you ever been to Derbys.h.i.+re?” asked Mr. Flower, presently, and Henry immediately scented an idealism in the question.

”No,” he answered; ”but I believe it's a beautiful county.”

”Beautiful's no name for it,” said Mr. Flower; ”it's just a garden.”

And as Henry caught a glance of his eyes, he realised that Derbys.h.i.+re was Mr. Flower's poetry,--the poetry of a countryman imprisoned in the town,--and that when he died he just hoped to go to Derbys.h.i.+re.

”Ah, there are places there,--places like Miller's Dale, for instance,--I'd rather take my hat off to than any bishop,”--and Henry eagerly scented something of a thinker; ”for G.o.d made them for sure, and bishops--well--” and Mr. Flower wisely left the rest unsaid.

Thus they made the tour of the stables; and though Henry's remarks on the subject of slapped horse-flesh had been anything but those of an expert, it was tacitly agreed that Mr. Flower and he had taken to each other. Nor, as he presently found, were Mr. Flower's interests limited to horses.

”You're a reader, I see,” he said, presently, when they had returned to the office. ”Well, I don't get much time to read nowadays; but there's nothing I enjoy better, when I've got a pipe lit of an evening, than to sit and listen to my little daughter reading Thackeray or George Eliot.”

Of course Henry was interested.

”Now there was a woman who knew country life,” Mr. Flower continued.

”'Silas Marner,' or 'Adam Bede.' How wonderfully she gets at the very heart of the people! And not only that, but the very smell of country air.”

And Mr. Flower drew a long breath of longing for Miller's Dale.

Henry mentally furbished up his George Eliot to reply.

”And 'The Mill on the Floss'?” he said.

”And 'Scenes from Clerical Life,'” said Mr. Flower. ”There are some rare strokes of nature there.”

And so they went on comparing notes, till a little blue-eyed girl of about seventeen appeared, carrying a dainty lunch for Henry, and telling Mr. Flower that his own lunch was ready.

”This is my daughter of whom I spoke,” said Mr. Flower.

”She who reads Thackeray and George Eliot to you?” said the Man in Possession; and, when they had gone, he said to himself ”What a bright little face!”

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