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Chapter 9 Godfrey rose and took his own breakfast earlier than usual, but lingered in the wainscoted parlour till his younger brothers had finished their meal and gone out; awaiting his father, who always took a walk with his managing man before breakfast. Every one breakfasted at a different hour in the Red House, and the Squire was always the latest, giving a long chance to a rather feeble morning appetite before he tried it. The table had been spread with substantial eatables nearly two hours before he presented himselfa tall, stout man of sixty, with a face in which the knit brow and rather hard glance seemed contradicted by the slack and feeble mouth. His person showed marks of habitual neglect, his dress was slovenly; and yet there was something in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined as he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the vicinity of their betters, wanted that self- possession and authoritativeness of voice and carriage which belonged to a man who thought of superiors as remote existences with whom he had personally little more to do than with America or the stars. The Squire had been used to parish homage all his lifeused to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best; and as he never associated with any gentry higher than himself, his opinion was not disturbed by comparison. He glanced at his son as he entered the room, and said, What, sir! havent you had your breakfast yet? But there was no pleasant morning greeting between them; not because of any unfriendliness, but because the sweet flower of courtesy is not a growth of such homes as the Red House. Yes, sir, said Godfrey, Ive had my breakfast, but I was waiting to speak to you. Ah! well, said the Squire, throwing himself indifferently into his chair, and speaking in a ponderous, coughing fashion, which was felt in Raveloe to be a sort of privilege of his rank, while he cut a piece of beef and held it up before the deerhound that had come in with him. Ring the bell for my ale, will you? You youngsters business is your own pleasure, mostly. Theres no hurry about it for anybody but yourselves. The Squires life was quite as idle as his sons, but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm. Godfrey waited before he spoke again until the ale had been brought and the door closedan interval during which Fleet, the deerhound, had consumed enough bits of beef to make a poor mans holiday dinner. Theres been a cursed piece of ill-luck with Wildfire, he began; happened the day before yesterday. What! broke his knees? said the Squire, after taking a draught of ale. I thought you knew how to ride better than that, sir. I never threw a horse down in my life. If I had, I might ha whistled for another, for my father wasnt quite so ready to unstring as some other fathers I know of. But they must turn over a new leafthey must. What with mortgages and arrears, Im as short o cash as a roadside pauper. And that fool Kimble says the newspapers talking about peace. Why, the country wouldnt have a leg to stand on. Prices ud run down like a jack, and I should never get my arrears, not if I sold all the fellows up. And theres that damned FowlerI wont put up with him any longer; Ive told Winthrop to go to Cox this very day. The lying scoundrel told me hed be sure to pay me a hundred last month. He takes advantage because hes on that outlying farm, and thinks I shall forget him. The Squire had delivered this speech in a coughing and interrupted manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a pretext for taking up the word again. He felt that his father meant to ward off any request for money on the ground of the misfortune with Wildfire, and that the emphasis he had thus been led to lay on his shortness of cash and his arrears was likely to produce an attitude of mind the utmost unfavourable for his own disclosure. But he must go on, now he had begun. Its worse than breaking the horses kneeshes been staked and killed, he said, as soon as his father was silent and had begun to cut his meat. But I wasnt thinking of asking you to buy me another horse; I was only thinking Id lost the means of paying you with the price of Wildfire, as Id meant to do. Dunsey |
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