“I know that,” said Andy, “but what I object to is the dishonest dissimulation—yes, I can call it nothing else, dishonest dissimulation on your part.”
“I did it for the best,” said Sam with humble simplicity. “I wanted you to have a good pony and a cheap pony, and not to be bothered thinking if it was fit for a clergyman’s household or not, and I did it all for the best. But I made a mistake. I ought to have been more straighterer.”
“Is there anything else”—Andy paused for a word—“unusual about the animal?”
Sam scratched his chin and replied with reluctance—
“Well—there’s just one thing—he waltzes when he hears a band. Only there never _is_ a band.”
“I should like to know,” said Andy, rising and standing in a dignified attitude with a hand on a book, “what _you_ got out of this transaction?”
Then Sam threw himself, as it were, upon Andy’s mercy, and looked his master straight in the eye, with an honesty indescribable.
“I’ll be straight with you,” he said. “The man offered me half a crown, and I took it.”
He omitted to mention the other seventeen and six, because he felt that was between himself and the landlord of the Blue Tiger, where much of it had been expended, but he did, after a great deal of fumbling in a dingy pocket, produce a half-crown.
“Here it is,” he said in a voice charged with manly feeling. “You take it, sir. It justly belongs to you.”
“I don’t want your half-crown,” said Andy hastily.
“And I can easily sell the pony and trap for what you gave,” pursued Sam. “Hall, the butcher at Millsby, wants one for his wife. He’d jump at it.”
“Well, I’ll think the matter over,” said Andy. “You can go.”
But when he was alone the hot tea began to stimulate him, and he had a very pleasant sensation of repose after all the fresh air, following his sleepless night, and his depression suddenly lifted in that odd way which every one recognises who suffers from it at all. It is as if a cloud passed away from the spirit.
So Andy began to see that the end of everything was not come because he could not see Elizabeth for twenty-four hours. Then he remembered how the little pony had trotted on through the sunshine and through the rain like the game little creature it was, and he began to feel the first stirring of that affection which a decent man has for the horse or the dog that serves him faithfully. No, he would keep the pony, though it was such a secular-looking little animal, and he would go out now to see if the hot mash had been administered.