The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective.
A mixture of passions was excited in Fred--a mad desire to thrash
Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the
advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that Horrock
might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.
Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his
ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken
of as being "given to indulgence"--chiefly in swearing, drinking, and
beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious
man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might
have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was
undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore
their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green
bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine
old tune, "Drops of brandy," gave you after a while a sense of
returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a
slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to
several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in
the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes
about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses
and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its
pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his
memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and
sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without
turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of
passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of
his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it.
In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.
Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to
Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at
their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine
opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent
critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge's weakness to be a gratuitous
flatterer. He had never before been so much struck with the fact that
this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the
roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.
"You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me,
Vincy! Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that
chestnut, and you gave him for this brute. If you set him cantering,
he goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but one worse roarer in
my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor;
he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to
take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in
wind-instruments.' That was what I said. It went the round of the
country, that joke did. But, what the hell! the horse was a penny
trumpet to that roarer of yours."