This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
By George Meredith
There was peace in Mr. Goren's shop. Badgered Ministers, bankruptmerchants, diplomatists with a headache—any of our modern grandees underdifficulties, might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided:and he was an enviable man. He loved his craft, he believed that he hadnot succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain; and, exceptingthat trifling coquetry with shirt-fronts, viz., the red crosses, which ashrewd rival had very soon eclipsed by representing nymphs triangularlyposed, he devoted himself to his business from morning to night; as rigidin demanding respect from those beneath him, as he was profuse inlavishing it on his patrons. His public boast was, that he owed no mana farthing; his secret comfort, that he possessed two thousand pounds inthe Funds. But Mr. Goren did not stop here. Behind these externalcharacteristics he nursed a passion. Evan was astonished and pleased tofind in him an enthusiastic fern-collector. Not that Mr. Harringtonshared the passion, but the sight of these brown roots spread out,ticketed, on the stained paper, after supper, when the shutters were upand the house defended from the hostile outer world; the old man poringover them, and naming this and that spot where, during his solitarySaturday afternoon and Sunday excursions, he had lighted on the raresamples exhibited this contrast of the quiet evening with the sordid dayhumanized Mr. Goren to him. He began to see a spirit in the rigidtradesman 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 daysto 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 lowestdegree. Never now could Rose stoop to him. He carried the shop on hisback. She saw the brand of it on his forehead. Well! and what was Roseto 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 hismisery; wakening from tender dreams, he would find his heart sinkingunder a horrible pressure, and then the fair fresh face of Rose swam overhim; the hours of Beckley were revived; with intolerable anguish he sawthat she was blameless—that he alone was to blame. Yet worse was itwhen his closed eyelids refused to conjure up the sorrowful lovelynightmare, and he lay like one in a trance, entombed-wretched Pagan!feeling all that had been blindly; when the Past lay beside him like acorpse that he had slain.
These nightly torments helped him to brave what the morning brought.Insensibly also, as Time hardened his sufferings, Evan asked himself whatthe shame of his position consisted in. He grew stiff-necked. His Paganvirt