Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with
Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair,
thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an
unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have
had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a
gay young fellow. Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he
rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not
been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and
unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and
Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh
would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of
Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other
name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock
must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with
them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a
dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse
in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and
various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for
the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit
of these things was "gay."
In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which
offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a
thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which
took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending
downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian
eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a
moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable
sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a
susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to
create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund
of humor--too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable
crust,--and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate
enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other. It is a
physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more
powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.
Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock, turned
sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of
three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and
remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it
had been.