Like many violent and implacable
men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness,
till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned
round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard. This was his
system with his tenants: he allowed them to get into arrears,
neglect their fences, reduce their stock, sell their straw, and
otherwise go the wrong way,- and then, when he became short of money
in consequence of this indulgence, he took the hardest measures and
would listen to no appeal. Godfrey knew all this, and felt it with the
greater force because he had constantly suffered annoyance from
witnessing his father's sudden fits of unrelentingness, for which
his own habitual irresolution deprived him of all sympathy. (He was
not critical on the faulty indulgence which preceded these fits;
that seemed to him natural enough.) Still there was just the chance,
Godfrey thought, that his father's pride might see this marriage in
a light that would induce him to hush it up, rather than turn his
son out and make the family the talk of the country for ten miles
round.
This was the view of the case that Godfrey managed to keep before
him pretty closely till midnight, and he went to sleep thinking that
he had done with inward debating. But when he awoke in the still
morning darkness he found it impossible to reawaken his evening
thoughts; it was as if they had been tired out and were not to be
roused to further work.
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