Buying a Horse | Page 4

round here in fifteen minutes, and I'll take
you out with her. Can you wait?"
"Wait!" My friend laughed in his turn.
The mare dashed up before the fifteen minutes had passed. She was
beautiful, black as a coal; and kind as a kitten, said her driver. My
friend thought her head was rather big. "Why, yes, she's a pony-horse;
that's what I like about her."
She trotted off wonderfully, and my friend felt that the thing was now
done.
The gentleman, who was driving, laid his head on one side, and
listened. "Clicks, don't she?"
"She does click," said my friend obligingly.
"Hear it?" asked the gentleman.
"Well, if you ask me," said my friend, "I don't hear it. What is
clicking?"

"Oh, striking the heel of her fore-foot with the toe of her hind-foot.
Sometimes it comes from bad shoeing. Some people like it. I don't
myself." After a while he added, "If you can get this mare for a hundred
and twenty-five, you'd better buy her."
"Well, I will," said my friend. He would have bought her, in fact, if she
had clicked like a noiseless sewing-machine. But the owner, remote as
Medford, and invisibly dealing, as usual, through a third person, would
not sell her for one and a quarter; he wanted one and a half. Besides,
another Party was trying to get her; and now ensued a negotiation
which for intricacy and mystery surpassed all the others. It was
conducted in my friend's interest by one who had the difficult task of
keeping the owner's imagination in check and his demands within
bounds, for it soon appeared that he wanted even more than one and a
half for her. Unseen and inaccessible, he grew every day more
unmanageable. He entered into relations with the other Party, and it all
ended in his sending her out one day after my friend had gone into the
country, and requiring him to say at once that he would give one and a
half. He was not at home, and he never saw the little mare again. This
confirmed him in the belief that she was the very horse he ought to
have had.
People had now begun to say to him, "Why don't you advertise?
Advertise for a gentleman's pony-horse and phaeton and harness
complete. You'll have a perfect procession of them before night." This
proved true. His advertisement, mystically worded after the fashion of
those things, found abundant response. But the establishments which he
would have taken he could not get at the figure he had set, and those
which his money would buy he would not have. They came at all hours
of the day; and he never returned home after an an absence without
meeting the reproach that now the very horse he wanted had just been
driven away, and would not be brought back, as his owner lived in
Billerica, and only happened to be down. A few equipages really
appeared desirable, but in regard to these his jaded faculties refused to
work: he could decide nothing; his volition was extinct; he let them
come and go.

It was at this period that people who had at first been surprised that he
wished to buy a horse came to believe that he had bought one, and were
astonished to learn that he had not. He felt the pressure of public
opinion.
He began to haunt the different sale-stables in town, and to look at
horses with a view to buying at private sale. Every facility for testing
them was offered him, but he could not make up his mind. In feeble
wantonness he gave appointments which he knew he should not keep,
and, passing his days in an agony of multitudinous indecision, he added
to the lies in the world the hideous sum of his broken engagements.
From time to time he forlornly appeared at the Chevaliers', and
refreshed his corrupted nature by contact with their sterling integrity.
Once he ventured into their establishment just before an auction began,
and remained dazzled by the splendor of a spectacle which I fancy can
be paralleled only by some dream of a mediæval tournament. The
horses, brilliantly harnessed, accurately shod, and standing tall on
burnished hooves, their necks curved by the check rein and their black
and blonde manes flowing over the proud arch, lustrous and wrinkled
like satin, were ranged in a glittering hemicycle. They affected my
friend like the youth and beauty of his earliest evening parties; he
experienced a sense of bashfulness, of sickening personal demerit. He
could not have had the audacity to bid on one of those superb creatures,
if all the Chevaliers together had whispered him that here at last was
the very horse.
I pass over an unprofitable interval in which