But it was no
longer possible for Keith to ignore its significance. It meant that
his father was ready to buy his services at any price; to bribe him
into silence.
His worst misgivings had never included such a possibility. In fact,
before going down to Devonshire he had never had any serious
misgivings at all. His position in his father's shop had hitherto
presented no difficulties to a sensitive honour. He had not been sure
that his honour was particularly sensitive, not more so, he supposed,
than other people's. Acting as part of the machinery of Rickman's, he
had sometimes made a clever bargain; he had never, so far as he knew,
driven a hard one. He was expected to make clever bargains, to buy
cheap and sell dear, to watch people's faces, lowering the price by
their anxiety to sell, raising it by their eagerness to buy. That was
his stern duty in the second-hand department. But there had been so
many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was
tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in
the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of
him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling.
And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman's, that he generally
paid for these excesses out of his own pocket, so that conscience was
satisfied both ways. Therefore there had been no moral element in his
dislike to Rickman's; he had shrunk from it with the half-fantastic
aversion of the mind, not with this sickening hatred of the soul.
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