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Middlemarch by George Eliot A Project Gutenberg Pu
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Middlemarch
By George Eliot
New York and Boston H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
PRELUDE
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious
mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,
at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled
with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking
forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother,
to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled
from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns,
but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic
reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from
their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.
Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were
many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a
brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel;
and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction,
some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile
self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.
She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly
not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who
found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant
unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes,
the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with
the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found
no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights
and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed
in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles
seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born
Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could
perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.
Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning
of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance,
and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has
fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine
incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more,
the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.
Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation
are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness
of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.
Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings
in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship
with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,
foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an
unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances,
instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.
----
CHAPTER I.
"Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
--The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that
she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which
the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile
as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity
from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion
gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or
from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the
addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless,
Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close
observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade
of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing
was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.
The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke
connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably
"good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would
not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers--anything
lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor
discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell,
but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political
troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.
Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house,
and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor,
naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter.
Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in
dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required
for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been
enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling;
but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it;
and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments,
only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew
many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;
and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,
made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation
for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual
life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp
and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic,
and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world
which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule
of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness,
and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects;
likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur
martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.
Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended
to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according
to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.
With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty,
and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve years old
and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous,
first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne,
their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the
disadvantages of their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange
with their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper,
miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled
in his younger years, and was held in this part of the county
to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke's
conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was
only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions,
and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying
them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some
hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his
own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning
which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly
in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults
and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk
or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long
all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some
command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress;
for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from
their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would
inherit Mr. Brooke's estate, presumably worth about three thousand
a-year--a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families,
still discussing Mr. Peel's late conduct on the Catholic question,
innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous plutocracy
which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with
such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes,
and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which
might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer,
or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady
of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor
by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought
herself living in the time of the Apostles--who had strange whims
of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old
theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with
a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere
with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would
naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.
Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard
of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics
were at large, one might know and avoid them.
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,
was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking,
while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual
and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking
Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind
than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her
by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably
reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she
was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects
of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled
pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an
indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms;
she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always
looked forward to renouncing it.
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed,
it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia
with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman
appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of
seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia:
Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from
Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good
for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor
to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance.
Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life,
retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that
she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born
in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony;
or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other
great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure;
but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks
even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a
lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband
was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
These peculiarities of Dorothea's character caused Mr. Brooke
to be all the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing
some middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces.
But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely
to be available for such a position, that he allowed himself to be
dissuaded by Dorothea's objections, and was in this case brave enough
to defy the world--that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector's wife,
and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner
of Loamshire. So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle's household, and
did not at all dislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with
another gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom
Dorothea felt some venerating expectation. This was the Reverend
Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning,
understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning
religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre
to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more
clearly ascertained on the publication of his book. His very name
carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise
chronology of scholarship.
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school
which she had set going in the village, and was taking her usual
place in the pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms
of the sisters, bent on finishing a plan for some buildings (a
kind of work which she delighted in), when Celia, who had been
watching her with a hesitating desire to propose something, said--
"Dorothea, dear, if you don't mind--if you are not very busy--suppose we
looked at mamma's jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six months
to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at them yet."
Celia's face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full
presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea
and principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious
electricity if you touched them incautiously. To her relief,
Dorothea's eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.
"What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar
or six lunar months?"
"It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of
April when uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he
had forgotten them till then. I believe you have never thought
of them since you locked them up in the cabinet here."
"Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know." Dorothea spoke
in a full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory.
She had her pencil in her hand, and was making tiny side-plans
on a margin.
Celia colored, and looked very grave. "I think, dear, we are
wanting in respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take
no notice of them. And," she added, after hesitating a little,
with a rising sob of mortification, "necklaces are quite usual now;
and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even than you are,
used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally--surely there are
women in heaven now who wore jewels." Celia was conscious of some
mental strength when she really applied herself to argument.
"You would like to wear them?" exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished
discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she
had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments.
"Of course, then, let us have them out. Why did you not tell me
before? But the keys, the keys!" She pressed her hands against
the sides of her head and seemed to despair of her memory.
"They are here," said Celia, with whom this explanation had been
long meditated and prearranged.
"Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box."
The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread out,
making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection,
but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest
that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set
in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it.
Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it round
her sister's neck, where it fitted almost as closely as a bracelet;
but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style of Celia's head
and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glass opposite.
"There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin.
But this cross you must wear with your dark dresses."
Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. "O Dodo, you must
keep the cross yourself."
"No, no, dear, no," said Dorothea, putting up her hand with
careless deprecation.
"Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you--in your black dress, now,"
said Celia, insistingly. "You MIGHT wear that."
"Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing
I would wear as a trinket." Dorothea shuddered slightly.
"Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it," said Celia, uneasily.
"No, dear, no," said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek.
"Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."
"But you might like to keep it for mamma's sake."
"No, I have other things of mamma's--her sandal-wood box which I am
so fond of--plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear.
We need discuss them no longer. There--take away your property."
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority
in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond
flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
"But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister,
will never wear them?"
"Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets
to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace
as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world
would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk."
Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. "It would be
a little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would
suit you better," she said, with some satisfaction. The complete
unfitness of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea,
made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes,
which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun
passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.
"How very beautiful these gems are!" said Dorothea, under a new current
of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. "It is strange how deeply colors
seem to penetrate one, like scent I suppose that is the reason why
gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John.
They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more
beautiful than any of them."
"And there is a bracelet to match it," said Celia. "We did not
notice this at first."
"They are lovely," said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet
on her finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards
the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought
was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them
in her mystic religious joy.
"You WOULD like those, Dorothea," said Celia, rather falteringly,
beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness,
and also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better
than purple amethysts. "You must keep that ring and bracelet--if
nothing else. But see, these agates are very pretty and quiet."
"Yes! I will keep these--this ring and bracelet," said Dorothea.
Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another
tone--"Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them,
and sell them!" She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister
was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought
to do.
"Yes, dear, I will keep these," said Dorothea, decidedly. "But take
all the rest away, and the casket."
She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still
looking at them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed
her eye at these little fountains of pure color.
"Shall you wear them in company?" said Celia, who was watching
her with real curiosity as to what she would do.
Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative
adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then
a keen discernment, which was not without a scorching quality.
If Miss Brooke ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be
for lack of inward fire.
"Perhaps," she said, rather haughtily. "I cannot tell to what level
I may sink."
Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended
her sister, and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift
of the ornaments which she put back into the box and carried away.
Dorothea too was unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing,
questioning the purity of her own feeling and speech in the scene
which had ended with that little explosion.
Celia's consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the
wrong: it was quite natural and justifiable that she should have
asked that question, and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was
inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the jewels,
or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them altogether.
"I am sure--at least, I trust," thought Celia, "that the wearing
of a necklace will not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see
that I should be bound by Dorothea's opinions now we are going
into society, though of course she herself ought to be bound by them.
But Dorothea is not always consistent."
Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard
her sister calling her.
"Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am
a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces."
As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against
her sister's arm caressingly. Celia understood the action.
Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her.
Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism
and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister.
The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature
without its private opinions?
CHAPTER II.
"`Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un
caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?'
`Lo que veo y columbro,' respondio Sancho, `no es sino un hombre
sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una
cosa que relumbra.' `Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,' dijo Don
Quijote."--CERVANTES.
"`Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a
dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' `What I see,'
answered Sancho, `is nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own,
who carries something shiny on his head.' `Just so,' answered Don
Quixote: `and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.'"
"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy
smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying
Davy's Agricultural Chemistry. "Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy;
I dined with him years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there
too--the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular.
I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him--and
I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's
an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too.
Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two.
That was true in every sense, you know."
Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning
of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from
the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered
how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners,
she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair
and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.
He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student;
as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the
red-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.
"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet,
"because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands,
and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern
of farming among my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"
"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into
electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor
of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal
myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything;
you can let nothing alone. No, no--see that your tenants don't sell
their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles,
you know. But your fancy farming will not do--the most expensive
sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."
"Surely," said Dorothea, "it is better to spend money in finding
out how men can make the most of the land which supports them all,
than in keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it. It is not
a sin to make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good
of all."
She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady,
but Sir James had appealed to her. He was accustomed to do so,
and she had often thought that she could urge him to many good actions
when he was her brother-in-law.
Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she
was speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
"Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know,"
said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. "I remember when we
were all reading Adam Smith. THERE is a book, now. I took in all
the new ideas at one time--human perfectibility, now. But some say,
history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have
argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little
too far--over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time;
but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time.
But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we
must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.
But talking of books, there is Southey's `Peninsular War.' I am
reading that of a morning. You know Southey?"
"No" said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke's impetuous
reason, and thinking of the book only. "I have little leisure for
such literature just now. I have been using up my eyesight on old
characters lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings;
but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to
an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed
too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead.
My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about
the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be,
in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary
to use the utmost caution about my eyesight."
This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length.
He delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon
to make a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of
his speech, occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head,
was the more conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke's
scrappy slovenliness. Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon
was the most interesting man she had ever seen, not excepting even
Monsieur Liret, the Vaudois clergyman who had given conferences
on the history of the Waldenses. To reconstruct a past world,
doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth--what
a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only
as a lamp-holder! This elevating thought lifted her above her
annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of political economy,
that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher
over all her lights.
"But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke," Sir James presently took
an opportunity of saying. "I should have thought you would enter
a little into the pleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me
send over a chestnut horse for you to try. It has been trained
for a lady. I saw you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag
not worthy of you. My groom shall bring Corydon for you every day,
if you will only mention the time."
"Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding.
I shall not ride any more," said Dorothea, urged to this brusque
resolution by a little annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting
her attention when she wanted to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.
"No, that is too hard," said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that
showed strong interest. "Your sister is given to self-mortification,
is she not?" he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
"I think she is," said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say
something that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily
as possible above her necklace. "She likes giving up."
"If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence,
not self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing
not to do what is very agreeable," said Dorothea.
Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident
that Mr. Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
"Exactly," said Sir James. "You give up from some high, generous motive."
"No, indeed, not exactly. I did not say that of myself,"
answered Dorothea, reddening. Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed,
and only from high delight or anger. At this moment she felt angry
with the perverse Sir James. Why did he not pay attention to Celia,
and leave her to listen to Mr. Casaubon?--if that learned man would
only talk, instead of allowing himself to be talked to by Mr. Brooke,
who was just then informing him that the Reformation either meant
something or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core,
but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre
of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the bridle
of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.
"I made a great study of theology at one time," said Mr. Brooke,
as if to explain the insight just manifested. "I know something
of all schools. I knew Wilberforce in his best days. Do you
know Wilberforce?"
Mr. Casaubon said, "No."
"Well, Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I
went into Parliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on
the independent bench, as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy."
Mr. Casaubon bowed, and observed that it was a wide field.
"Yes," said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, "but I have documents.
I began a long while ago to collect documents. They want arranging,
but when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got
an answer. I have documents at my back. But now, how do you arrange
your documents?"
"In pigeon-holes partly," said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled
air of effort.
"Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything
gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z."
"I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle," said Dorothea.
"I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects under each letter."
Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke,
"You have an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive."
"No, no," said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; "I cannot let young
ladies meddle with my documents. Young ladies are too flighty."
Dorothea felt hurt. Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had
some special reason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark
lay in his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among
all the other fragments there, and a chance current had sent it
alighting on HER.
When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said--
"How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!"
"Celia! He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw.
He is remarkably like the portrait of Locke. He has the same
deep eye-sockets."
"Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?"
"Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him,"
said Dorothea, walking away a little.
"Mr. Casaubon is so sallow."
"All the better. I suppose you admire a man with the complexion
of a cochon de lait."
"Dodo!" exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise. "I never
heard you make such a comparison before."
"Why should I make it before the occasion came? It is a good
comparison: the match is perfect."
Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.
"I wonder you show temper, Dorothea."
"It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human
beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never
see the great soul in a man's face."
"Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?" Celia was not without a touch
of naive malice.
"Yes, I believe he has," said Dorothea, with the full voice
of decision. "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet
on Biblical Cosmology."
"He talks very little," said Celia
"There is no one for him to talk to."
Celia thought privately, "Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam;
I believe she would not accept him." Celia felt that this was a pity.
She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet's interest.
Sometimes, indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not
make a husband happy who had not her way of looking at things;
and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister
was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were
like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down,
or even eating.
When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down
by her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive.
Why should he? He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him,
and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be
interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful.
She was thoroughly charming to him, but of course he theorized a
little about his attachment. He was made of excellent human dough,
and had the rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose,
would not set the smallest stream in the county on fire: hence he
liked the prospect of a wife to whom he could say, "What shall we do?"
about this or that; who could help her husband out with reasons,
and would also have the property qualification for doing so.
As to the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke,
he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and thought
that it would die out with marriage. In short, he felt himself
to be in love in the right place, and was ready to endure a great
deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could always put
down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should ever
like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose
cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man's mind--what there is of
it--has always the advantage of being masculine,--as the smallest
birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,--and
even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not
have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes
the limpest personality with a little gunk or starch in the form
of tradition.
"Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse,
Miss Brooke," said the persevering admirer. "I assure you,
riding is the most healthy of exercises."
"I am aware of it," said Dorothea, coldly. "I think it would
do Celia good--if she would take to it."
"But you are such a perfect horsewoman."
"Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be
easily thrown."
"Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be
a perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband."
"You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I
ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond
to your pattern of a lady." Dorothea looked straight before her,
and spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy,
in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her admirer.
"I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution.
It is not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong."
"It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me."
"Oh, why?" said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was listening.
"We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed,
in his measured way. "Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become
feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air.
We must keep the germinating grain away from the light."
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.
Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,
and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning
almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,
which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.
Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb
of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
"Certainly," said good Sir James. "Miss Brooke shall not be urged
to tell reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her
reasons would do her honor."
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea
had looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl
to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried
bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way,
as for a clergyman of some distinction.
However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation
with Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook
himself to Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a
house in town, and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London.
Away from her sister, Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James
said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was certainly very
agreeable as well as pretty, though not, as some people pretended,
more clever and sensible than the elder sister. He felt that he
had chosen the one who was in all respects the superior; and a man
naturally likes to look forward to having the best. He would
be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it.
CHAPTER III.
"Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . .
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange."
--Paradise Lost, B. vii.
If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss
Brooke as a suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce
her to accept him were already planted in her mind, and by the
evening of the next day the reasons had budded and bloomed.
For they had had a long conversation in the morning, while Celia,
who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness,
had escaped to the vicarage to play with the curate's ill-shod
but merry children.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir
of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of
her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope
of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent.
For he had been as instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;"
and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had
undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not
with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness
of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical
systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions
of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true
position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical
constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected
light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest
of truth was no light or speedy work. His notes already made
a formidable range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to
condense these voluminous still-accumulating results and bring them,
like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.
In explaining this to Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly
as he would have done to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles
of talking at command: it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin
phrase he always gave the English with scrupulous care, but he would
probably have done this in any case. A learned provincial clergyman
is accustomed to think of his acquaintances as of "lords, knyghtes,
and other noble and worthi men, that conne Latyn but lytille."
Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace
of this conception. Here was something beyond the shallows
of ladies' school literature: here was a living Bossuet,
whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety;
here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.
The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning,
for when Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes
which she could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton,
especially on the secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms
and articles of belief compared with that spiritual religion,
that submergence of self in communion with Divine perfection
which seemed to her to be expressed in the best Christian books
of widely distant ages, she found in Mr. Casaubon a listener
who understood her at once, who could assure her of his own
agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise conformity,
and could mention historical examples before unknown to her.
"He thinks with me," said Dorothea to herself, "or rather, he thinks
a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror.
And his feelings too, his whole experience--what a lake compared
with my little pool!"
Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things,
but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet,
ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief,
vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in
the shape of knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived;
for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description,
and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions:
starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops
and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
Because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore
clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.
He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure
of invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own
documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was
called into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host
picked up first one and then the other to read aloud from in a
skipping and uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage
to another with a "Yes, now, but here!" and finally pushing them
all aside to open the journal of his youthful Continental travels.
"Look here--here is all about Greece. Rhamnus, the ruins of
Rhamnus--you are a great Grecian, now. I don't know whether you
have given much study to the topography. I spent no end of time
in making out these things--Helicon, now. Here, now!--`We started
the next morning for Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.'
All this volume is about Greece, you know," Mr. Brooke wound up,
rubbing his thumb transversely along the edges of the leaves as he
held the book forward.
Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience;
bowed in the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary
as far as possible, without showing disregard or impatience;
mindful that this desultoriness was associated with the institutions
of the country, and that the man who took him on this severe mental
scamper was not only an amiable host, but a landholder and
custos rotulorum. Was his endurance aided also by the reflection
that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?
Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him,
on drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at
her his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine.
Before he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss
Brooke along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he
felt the disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful
companionship with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary
the serious toils of maturity. And he delivered this statement
with as much careful precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy
whose words would be attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon
was not used to expect that he should have to repeat or revise his
communications of a practical or personal kind. The inclinations
which he had deliberately stated on the 2d of October he would think
it enough to refer to by the mention of that date; judging by the
standard of his own memory, which was a volume where a vide supra
could serve instead of repetitions, and not the ordinary long-used
blotting-book which only tells of forgotten writing. But in this
case Mr. Casaubon's confidence was not likely to be falsified,
for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the eager interest
of a fresh young nature to which every variety in experience is an epoch.
It was three o'clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr. Casaubon
drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from Tipton;
and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along the shrubbery
and across the park that she might wander through the bordering wood
with no other visible companionship than that of Monk, the Great
St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in their walks.
There had risen before her the girl's vision of a possible future
for herself to which she looked forward with trembling hope, and she
wanted to wander on in that visionary future without interruption.
She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in her cheeks,
and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look at
with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket)
fell a little backward. She would perhaps be hardly characterized
enough if it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided
and coiled behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a
daring manner at a time when public feeling required the meagreness
of nature to be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls
and bows, never surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean.
This was a trait of Miss Brooke's asceticism. But there was nothing
of an ascetic's expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked
before her, not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity
of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes
of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.
All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform
times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had
referred the glow in her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary
images of young love: the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been
sufficiently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all
spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin,
and dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying companionship,
was a little drama which never tired our fathers and mothers,
and had been put into all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a
figure which would sustain the disadvantages of the shortwaisted
swallow-tail, and everybody felt it not only natural but necessary
to the perfection of womanhood, that a sweet girl should be at once
convinced of his virtue, his exceptional ability, and above all,
his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no persons then living--certainly
none in the neighborhood of Tipton--would have had a sympathetic
understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions about marriage
took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends
of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own fire,
and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern
of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
It had now entered Dorothea's mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish
to make her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched
her with a sort of reverential gratitude. How good of him--nay, it
would be almost as if a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside
her path and held out his hand towards her! For a long while she
had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind,
like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to made her life
greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?--she,
hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience
and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction
comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse.
With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought
that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life
in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal
of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the private experience
of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New,
and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir--with
a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict
than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable,
might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor
Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition,
the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a
nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent:
and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching,
hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth
of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led
no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once
exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best,
she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live
in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on.
Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured;
the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her
girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of
voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.
"I should learn everything then," she said to herself, still walking
quickly along the bridle road through the wood. "It would be my
duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works.
There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Every-day things with us
would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal.
I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen
it by. And then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should
see how it was possible to lead a grand life here--now--in England.
I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything
seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't
know;--unless it were building good cottages--there can be no
doubt about that. Oh, I hope I should be able to get the people
well housed in Lowick! I will draw plenty of plans while I have time."
Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the
presumptuous way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events,
but she was spared any inward effort to change the direction of her
thoughts by the appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning
of the road. The well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful
setters could leave no doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam.
He discerned Dorothea, jumped off his horse at once, and, having
delivered it to his groom, advanced towards her with something white
on his arm, at which the two setters were barking in an excited manner.
"How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke," he said, raising his
hat and showing his sleekly waving blond hair. "It has hastened
the pleasure I was looking forward to."
Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption. This amiable baronet,
really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity
of making himself agreeable to the elder sister. Even a prospective
brother-in-law may be an oppression if he will always be presupposing
too good an understanding with you, and agreeing with you even
when you contradict him. The thought that he had made the mistake
of paying his addresses to herself could not take shape: all her
mental activity was used up in persuasions of another kind.
But he was positively obtrusive at this moment, and his dimpled hands
were quite disagreeable. Her roused temper made her color deeply,
as she returned his greeting with some haughtiness.
Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying
to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
"I have brought a little petitioner," he said, "or rather,
I have brought him to see if he will be approved before his
petition is offered." He showed the white object under his arm,
which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature's most naive toys.
"It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely
as pets," said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that
very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
"Oh, why?" said Sir James, as they walked forward.
"I believe all the petting that is given them does not make
them happy. They are too helpless: their lives are too frail.
A weasel or a mouse that gets its own living is more interesting.
I like to think that the animals about us have souls something
like our own, and either carry on their own little affairs or can be
companions to us, like Monk here. Those creatures are parasitic."
"I am so glad I know that you do not like them," said good Sir James.
"I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond
of these Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?"
The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black
and expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided
that it had better not have been born. But she felt it necessary
to explain.
"You must not judge of Celia's feeling from mine. I think she likes
these small pets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very
fond of. It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it.
I am rather short-sighted."
"You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it
is always a good opinion."
What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?
"Do you know, I envy you that," Sir James said, as they continued
walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.
"I don't quite understand what you mean."
"Your power of forming an opinion. I can form an opinion of persons.
I know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know,
I have often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things
said on opposite sides."
"Or that seem sensible. Perhaps we don't always discriminate
between sense and nonsense."
Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.
"Exactly," said Sir James. "But you seem to have the power
of discrimination."
"On the contrary, I am often unable to decide. But that is
from ignorance. The right conclusion is there all the same,
though I am unable to see it."
"I think there are few who would see it more readily. Do you know,
Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in
the world of a plan for cottages--quite wonderful for a young lady,
he thought. You had a real GENUS, to use his expression.
He said you wanted Mr. Brooke to build a new set of cottages, but he
seemed to think it hardly probable that your uncle would consent.
Do you know, that is one of the things I wish to do--I mean, on my
own estate. I should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours,
if you would let me see it. Of course, it is sinking money;
that is why people object to it. Laborers can never pay rent to make
it answer. But, after all, it is worth doing."
"Worth doing! yes, indeed," said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting
her previous small vexations. "I think we deserve to be beaten
out of our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords--all
of us who let tenants live in such sties as we see round us.
Life in cottages might be happier than ours, if they were real
houses fit for human beings from whom we expect duties and affections."
"Will you show me your plan?"
"Yes, certainly. I dare say it is very faulty. But I have been
examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon's book, and picked
out what seem the best things. Oh what a happiness it would be to
set the pattern about here! I think instead of Lazarus at the gate,
we should put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate."
Dorothea was in the best temper now. Sir James, as brother in-law,
building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being
built at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation--it
would be as if the spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes
to make the life of poverty beautiful!
Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon
with Lovegood. He also took away a complacent sense that he was
making great progress in Miss Brooke's good opinion. The Maltese
puppy was not offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea
afterwards thought of with surprise; but she blamed herself for it.
She had been engrossing Sir James. After all, it was a relief
that there was no puppy to tread upon.
Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed
Sir James's illusion. "He thinks that Dodo cares about him,
and she only cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she
would refuse him if she thought he would let her manage everything
and carry out all her notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir
James would be! I cannot bear notions."
It was Celia's private luxury to indulge in this dislike.
She dared not confess it to her sister in any direct statement,
for that would be laying herself open to a demonstration that
she was somehow or other at war with all goodness. But on
safe opportunities, she had an indirect mode of making her negative
wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her down from her rhapsodic
mood by reminding her that people were staring, not listening.
Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait,
and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness.
When people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces
and features merely. She never could understand how well-bred
persons consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous
manner requisite for that vocal exercise.
It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit,
on which he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay
the night. Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him,
and was convinced that her first impressions had been just.
He was all she had at first imagined him to be: almost everything
he had said seemed like a specimen from a mine, or the inscription
on the door of a museum which might open on the treasures of
past ages; and this trust in his mental wealth was all the deeper
and more effective on her inclination because it was now obvious
that his visits were made for her sake. This accomplished
man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the pains
to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal
to her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction.
What delightful companionship! Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious
that trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk
of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth
with an odor of cupboard. He talked of what he was interested in,
or else he was silent and bowed with sad civility. To Dorothea
this was adorable genuineness, and religious abstinence from that
artificiality which uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence.
For she looked as reverently at Mr. Casaubon's religious elevation
above herself as she did at his intellect and learning.
He assented to her expressions of devout feeling, and usually with
an appropriate quotation; he allowed himself to say that he had gone
through some spiritual conflicts in his youth; in short, Dorothea saw
that here she might reckon on understanding, sympathy, and guidance.
On one--only one--of her favorite themes she was disappointed.
Mr. Casaubon apparently did not care about building cottages,
and diverted the talk to the extremely narrow accommodation
which was to be had in the dwellings of the ancient Egyptians,
as if to check a too high standard. After he was gone,
Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his;
and her mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying
conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the admitted
wickedness of pagan despots. Should she not urge these arguments
on Mr. Casaubon when he came again? But further reflection told
her that she was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such
a subject; he would not disapprove of her occupying herself with it
in leisure moments, as other women expected to occupy themselves
with their dress and embroidery--would not forbid it when--Dorothea
felt rather ashamed as she detected herself in these speculations.
But her uncle had been invited to go to Lowick to stay a couple
of days: was it reasonable to suppose that Mr. Casaubon delighted
in Mr. Brooke's society for its own sake, either with or without
documents?
Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir
James Chettam's readiness to set on foot the desired improvements.
He came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him
disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had
already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood's estimates,
and was charmingly docile. She proposed to build a couple of cottages,
and transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then
be pulled down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites.
Sir James said "Exactly," and she bore the word remarkably well.
Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very
useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were
fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law! It is difficult to say
whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing
blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question
in relation to her. But her life was just now full of hope and action:
she was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned
books from the library and reading many things hastily (that she
might be a little less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the
while being visited with conscientious questionings whether she were
not exalting these poor doings above measure and contemplating them
with that self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.
CHAPTER IV.
1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2d Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
"Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish," said Celia,
as they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.
"He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,"
said Dorothea, inconsiderately.
"You mean that he appears silly."
"No, no," said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand
on her sister's a moment, "but he does not talk equally well on
all subjects."
"I should think none but disagreeable people do," said Celia,
in her usual purring way. "They must be very dreadful to live with.
Only think! at breakfast, and always."
Dorothea laughed. "O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!"
She pinched Celia's chin, being in the mood now to think her
very winning and lovely--fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub,
and if it were not doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need
of salvation than a squirrel. "Of course people need not be always
talking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds when they
try to talk well."
"You mean that Sir James tries and fails."
"I was speaking generally. Why do you catechise me about Sir
James? It is not the object of his life to please me."
"Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?"
"Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister--that is all."
Dorothea had never hinted this before, waiting, from a certain
shyness on such subjects which was mutual between the sisters,
until it should be introduced by some decisive event. Celia blushed,
but said at once--
"Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo. When Tantripp
was brushing my hair the other day, she said that Sir James's man
knew from Mrs. Cadwallader's maid that Sir James was to marry
the eldest Miss Brooke."
"How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?"
said Dorothea, indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep
in her memory were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation.
"You must have asked her questions. It is degrading."
"I see no harm at all in Tantripp's talking to me. It is better
to hear what people say. You see what mistakes you make by taking
up notions. I am quite sure that Sir James means to make you an offer;
and he believes that you will accept him, especially since you
have been so pleased with him about the plans. And uncle too--I
know he expects it. Every one can see that Sir James is very much
in love with you."
The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the tears
welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered,
and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that she
recognized him as her lover. There was vexation too on account of Celia.
"How could he expect it?" she burst forth in her most impetuous manner.
"I have never agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I
was barely polite to him before."
"But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun
to feel quite sure that you are fond of him."
"Fond of him, Celia! How can you choose such odious expressions?"
said Dorothea, passionately.
"Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond
of a man whom you accepted for a husband."
"It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond
of him. Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must
have towards the man I would accept as a husband."
"Well, I am sorry for Sir James. I thought it right to tell you,
because you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are,
and treading in the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees;
it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.
That's your way, Dodo." Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage;
and she was not sparing the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe.
Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us
beings of wider speculation?
"It is very painful," said Dorothea, feeling scourged. "I can have
no more to do with the cottages. I must be uncivil to him. I must
tell him I will have nothing to do with them. It is very painful."
Her eyes filled again with tears.
"Wait a little. Think about it. You know he is going away for a day
or two to see his sister. There will be nobody besides Lovegood."
Celia could not help relenting. "Poor Dodo," she went on,
in an amiable staccato. "It is very hard: it is your favorite
FAD to draw plans."
"FAD to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my fellow-creatures'
houses in that childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can one
ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty
thoughts?"
No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself.
She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness
and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia
was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit,
a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence
in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The FAD of drawing plans! What was
life worth--what great faith was possible when the whole
effect of one's actions could be withered up into such parched
rubbish as that? When she got out of the carriage, her cheeks
were pale and her eyelids red. She was an image of sorrow,
and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been alarmed,
if Celia had not been close to her looking so pretty and composed,
that he at once concluded Dorothea's tears to have their origin in
her excessive religiousness. He had returned, during their absence,
from a journey to the county town, about a petition for the pardon
of some criminal.
"Well, my dears," he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him,
"I hope nothing disagreeable has happened while I have been away."
"No, uncle," said Celia, "we have been to Freshitt to look at
the cottages. We thought you would have been at home to lunch."
"I came by Lowick to lunch--you didn't know I came by Lowick. And I
have brought a couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea--in the library,
you know; they lie on the table in the library."
It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea,
thrilling her from despair into expectation. They were pamphlets
about the early Church. The oppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir
James was shaken off, and she walked straight to the library.
Celia went up-stairs. Mr. Brooke was detained by a message, but when
he re-entered the library, he found Dorothea seated and already
deep in one of the pamphlets which had some marginal manuscript
of Mr. Casaubon's,--taking it in as eagerly as she might have taken
in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary walk.
She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad
liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.
Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards
the wood-fire, which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice
between the dogs, and rubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly
towards Dorothea, but with a neutral leisurely air, as if he had
nothing particular to say. Dorothea closed her pamphlet, as soon
as she was aware of her uncle's presence, and rose as if to go.
Usually she would have been interested about her uncle's merciful
errand on behalf of the criminal, but her late agitation had made
her absent-minded.
"I came back by Lowick, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not as if with
any intention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his
usual tendency to say what he had said before. This fundamental
principle of human speech was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke.
"I lunched there and saw Casaubon's library, and that kind of thing.
There's a sharp air, driving. Won't you sit down, my dear?
You look cold."
Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation. Some times,
when her uncle's easy way of taking things did not happen to
be exasperating, it was rather soothing. She threw off her mantle
and bonnet, and sat down opposite to him, enjoying the glow,
but lifting up her beautiful hands for a screen. They were not
thin hands, or small hands; but powerful, feminine, maternal hands.
She seemed to be holding them up in propitiation for her passionate
desire to know and to think, which in the unfriendly mediums
of Tipton and Freshitt had issued in crying and red eyelids.
She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal. "What news
have you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?"
"What, poor Bunch?--well, it seems we can't get him off--he
is to be hanged."
Dorothea's brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.
"Hanged, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. "Poor Romilly! he
would have helped us. I knew Romilly. Casaubon didn't know Romilly.
He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is."
"When a man has great studies and is writing a great work,
he must of course give up seeing much of the world. How can
he go about making acquaintances?"
"That's true. But a man mopes, you know. I have always been a
bachelor too, but I have that sort of disposition that I never moped;
it was my way to go about everywhere and take in everything.
I never moped: but I can see that Casaubon does, you know. He wants
a companion--a companion, you know."
"It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion,"
said Dorothea, energetically.
"You like him, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise,
or other emotion. "Well, now, I've known Casaubon ten years,
ever since he came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of
him--any ideas, you know. However, he is a tiptop man and may
be a bishop--that kind of thing, you know, if Peel stays in.
And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear."
Dorothea could not speak.
"The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you. And he
speaks uncommonly well--does Casaubon. He has deferred to me,
you not being of age. In short, I have promised to speak to you,
though I told him I thought there was not much chance. I was bound
to tell him that. I said, my niece is very young, and that kind
of thing. But I didn't think it necessary to go into everything.
However, the long and the short of it is, that he has asked my
permission to make you an offer of marriage--of marriage, you know,"
said Mr. Brooke, with his explanatory nod. "I thought it better
to tell you, my dear."
No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke's manner,
but he did really wish to know something of his niece's mind, that,
if there were any need for advice, he might give it in time.
What feeling he, as a magistrate who had taken in so many ideas,
could make room for, was unmixedly kind. Since Dorothea did not
speak immediately, he repeated, "I thought it better to tell you,
my dear."
"Thank you, uncle," said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone.
"I am very grateful to Mr. Casaubon. If he makes me an offer,
I shall accept him. I admire and honor him more than any man I
ever saw."
Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone,
"Ah? . . . Well! He is a good match in some respects. But now,
Chettam is a good match. And our land lies together. I shall never
interfere against your wishes, my dear. People should have their
own way in marriage, and that sort of thing--up to a certain point,
you know. I have always said that, up to a certain point. I wish
you to marry well; and I have good reason to believe that Chettam
wishes to marry you. I mention it, you know."
"It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam,"
said Dorothea. "If he thinks of marrying me, he has made
a great mistake."
"That is it, you see. One never knows. I should have thought
Chettam was just the sort of man a woman would like, now."
"Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle," said Dorothea,
feeling some of her late irritation revive.
Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible
subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect
state of scientific prediction about them. Here was a fellow
like Chettam with no chance at all.
"Well, but Casaubon, now. There is no hurry--I mean for you.
It's true, every year will tell upon him. He is over five-and-forty,
you know. I should say a good seven-and-twenty years older than you.
To be sure,--if you like learning and standing, and that sort
of thing, we can't have everything. And his income is good--he has
a handsome property independent of the Church--his income is good.
Still he is not young, and I must not conceal from you, my dear,
that I think his health is not over-strong. I know nothing else
against him."
"I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,"
said Dorothea, with grave decision. "I should wish to have a husband
who was above me in judgment and in all knowledge."
Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, "Ah?--I thought you had more
of your own opinion than most girls. I thought you liked your
own opinion--liked it, you know."
"I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I
should wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could
help me to see which opinions had the best foundation, and would
help me to live according to them."
"Very true. You couldn't put the thing better--couldn't put
it better, beforehand, you know. But there are oddities in things,"
continued Mr. Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do
the best he could for his niece on this occasion. "Life isn't cast
in a mould--not cut out by rule and line, and that sort of thing.
I never married myself, and it will be the better for you and yours.
The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into
a noose for them. It IS a noose, you know. Temper, now.
There is temper. And a husband likes to be master."
"I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state
of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease,"
said poor Dorothea.
"Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners,
that kind of thing. I can see that Casaubon's ways might suit you
better than Chettam's. And you shall do as you like, my dear.
I would not hinder Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no
knowing how anything may turn out. You have not the same tastes
as every young lady; and a clergyman and scholar--who may be
a bishop--that kind of thing--may suit you better than Chettam.
Chettam is a good fellow, a good sound-hearted fellow, you know;
but he doesn't go much into ideas. I did, when I was his age.
But Casaubon's eyes, now. I think he has hurt them a little with too
much reading."
"I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me
to help him," said Dorothea, ardently.
"You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is,
I have a letter for you in my pocket." Mr. Brooke handed the letter
to Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, "There is not
too much hurry, my dear. Think about it, you know."
When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly
spoken strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a
striking manner. It was his duty to do so. But as to pretending
to be wise for young people,--no uncle, however much he had travelled
in his youth, absorbed the new ideas, and dined with celebrities
now deceased, could pretend to judge what sort of marriage would
turn out well for a young girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam.
In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt
blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions
of an irregular solid.
CHAPTER V.
"Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs,
rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick,
crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such
diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean,
dry, ill-colored . . . and all through immoderate pains and
extraordinary studies. If you will not believe the truth of this,
look upon great Tostatus and Thomas Aquainas' works; and tell me whether
those men took pains."--BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.
This was Mr. Casaubon's letter.
MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,--I have your guardian's permission to address
you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not,
I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence
than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my
own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my
becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you,
I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness
to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the
affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be
abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding
opportunity for observation has given the impression an added
depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I
had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections
to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think,
made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes:
a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds.
But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability
of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible
either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that
may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined,
as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.
It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination
of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid
in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but
for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say,
I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs,
but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion
of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last
without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union.
Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings;
and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you
how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment.
To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of
your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts.
In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted,
and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short
in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose
to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause
you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your
sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom
(were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual.
But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward
to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation
to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination
of hope.
In any case, I shall remain,
Yours with sincere devotion,
EDWARD CASAUBON.
Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees,
buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray: under the rush of solemn
emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly,
she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining,
in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.
She remained in that attitude till it was time to dress for dinner.
How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it
critically as a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed
by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she
was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade of initiation.
She was going to have room for the energies which stirred uneasily
under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and the petty
peremptoriness of the world's habits.
Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties;
now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind
that she could reverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow
of proud delight--the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen
by the man whom her admiration had chosen. All Dorothea's passion
was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life;
the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object
that came within its level. The impetus with which inclination
became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day
which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of
her life.
After dinner, when Celia was playing an "air, with variations,"
a small kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the
young ladies' education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer
Mr. Casaubon's letter. Why should she defer the answer? She wrote
it over three times, not because she wished to change the wording,
but because her hand was unusually uncertain, and she could not bear
that Mr. Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible.
She piqued herself on writing a hand in which each letter was
distinguishable without any large range of conjecture, and she meant
to make much use of this accomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon's eyes.
Three times she wrote.
MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,--I am very grateful to you for loving me,
and thinking me worthy to be your wife. I can look forward to no better
happiness than that which would be one with yours. If I said more,
it would only be the same thing written out at greater length,
for I cannot now dwell on any other thought than that I may be
through life
Yours devotedly,
DOROTHEA BROOKE.
Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library
to give him the letter, that he might send it in the morning.
He was surprised, but his surprise only issued in a few moments'
silence, during which he pushed about various objects on his
writing-table, and finally stood with his back to the fire,
his glasses on his nose, looking at the address of Dorothea's letter.
"Have you thought enough about this, my dear?" he said at last.
"There was no need to think long, uncle. I know of nothing to make
me vacillate. If I changed my mind, it must be because of something
important and entirely new to me."
"Ah!--then you have accepted him? Then Chettam has no chance?
Has Chettam offended you--offended you, you know? What is it you
don't like in Chettam?"
"There is nothing that I like in him," said Dorothea, rather impetuously.
Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one
had thrown a light missile at him. Dorothea immediately felt
some self-rebuke, and said--
"I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think--really
very good about the cottages. A well-meaning man."
"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies
a little in our family. I had it myself--that love of knowledge,
and going into everything--a little too much--it took me too far;
though that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female-line;
or it runs underground like the rivers in Greece, you know--it
comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers. I went
a good deal into that, at one time. However, my dear, I have
always said that people should do as they like in these things,
up to a certain point. I couldn't, as your guardian, have consented
to a bad match. But Casaubon stands well: his position is good.
I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though, and Mrs. Cadwallader will
blame me."
That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened.
She attributed Dorothea's abstracted manner, and the evidence of
further crying since they had got home, to the temper she had been
in about Sir James Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not
to give further offence: having once said what she wanted to say,
Celia had no disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects.
It had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with any one--
only to observe with wonder that they quarrelled with her, and looked
like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat's cradle
with them whenever they recovered themselves. And as to Dorothea,
it had always been her way to find something wrong in her sister's
words, though Celia inwardly protested that she always said just
how things were, and nothing else: she never did and never could
put words together out of her own head. But the best of Dodo was,
that she did not keep angry for long together. Now, though they
had hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet when Celia put
by her work, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which she was
always much the earlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low stool,
unable to occupy herself except in meditation, said, with the musical
intonation which in moments of deep but quiet feeling made her speech
like a fine bit of recitative--
"Celia, dear, come and kiss me," holding her arms open as she spoke.
Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little
butterfly kiss, while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms
and pressed her lips gravely on each cheek in turn.
"Don't sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon,"
said Celia, in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.
"No, dear, I am very, very happy," said Dorothea, fervently.
"So much the better," thought Celia. "But how strangely Dodo goes
from one extreme to the other."
The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to
Mr. Brooke, said, "Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter."
Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea,
said, "Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn't
wait to write more--didn't wait, you know."
It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should
be announced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following
the same direction as her uncle's, she was struck with the peculiar
effect of the announcement on Dorothea. It seemed as if something
like the reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across
her features, ending in one of her rare blushes. For the first time
it entered into Celia's mind that there might be something more
between Mr. Casaubon and her sister than his delight in bookish
talk and her delight in listening. Hitherto she had classed
the admiration for this "ugly" and learned acquaintance with the
admiration for Monsieur Liret at Lausanne, also ugly and learned.
Dorothea had never been tired of listening to old Monsieur Liret
when Celia's feet were as cold as possible, and when it had really
become dreadful to see the skin of his bald head moving about.
Why then should her enthusiasm not extend to Mr. Casaubon simply
in the same way as to Monsieur Liret? And it seemed probable
that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster's view of young people.
But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted
into her mind. She was seldom taken by surprise in this way,
her marvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally
preparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in.
Not that she now imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an accepted
lover: she had only begun to feel disgust at the possibility that
anything in Dorothea's mind could tend towards such an issue.
Here was something really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very
well not to accept Sir James Chettam, but the idea of marrying
Mr. Casaubon! Celia felt a sort of shame mingled with a sense
of the ludicrous. But perhaps Dodo, if she were really bordering
on such an extravagance, might be turned away from it: experience
had often shown that her impressibility might be calculated on.
The day was damp, and they were not going to walk out, so they both
went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia observed that Dorothea,
instead of settling down with her usual diligent interest to
some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an open book and looked
out of the window at the great cedar silvered with the damp.
She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate's children,
and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately.
Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know
of the momentous change in Mr. Casaubon's position since he had last
been in the house: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance
of what would necessarily affect her attitude towards him; but it was
impossible not to shrink from telling her. Dorothea accused herself
of some meanness in this timidity: it was always odious to her to
have any small fears or contrivances about her actions, but at this
moment she was seeking the highest aid possible that she might not
dread the corrosiveness of Celia's pretty carnally minded prose.
Her reverie was broken, and the difficulty of decision banished,
by Celia's small and rather guttural voice speaking in its usual tone,
of a remark aside or a "by the bye."
"Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?"
"Not that I know of."
"I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat
his soup so."
"What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?"
"Really, Dodo, can't you hear how he scrapes his spoon? And he
always blinks before he speaks. I don't know whether Locke blinked,
but I'm sure I am sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did."
"Celia," said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, "pray don't make
any more observations of that kind."
"Why not? They are quite true," returned Celia, who had her reasons
for persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.
"Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe."
"Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful.
I think it is a pity Mr. Casaubon's mother had not a commoner mind:
she might have taught him better." Celia was inwardly frightened,
and ready to run away, now she had hurled this light javelin.
Dorothea's feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could
be no further preparation.
"It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry
Mr. Casaubon."
Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before. The paper man she
was making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual
care of whatever she held in her hands. She laid the fragile
figure down at once, and sat perfectly still for a few moments.
When she spoke there was a tear gathering
"Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy." Her sisterly tenderness could
not but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears
were the fears of affection.
Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.
"It is quite decided, then?" said Celia, in an awed under tone.
"And uncle knows?"
"I have accepted Mr. Casaubon's offer. My uncle brought me
the letter that contained it; he knew about it beforehand."
"I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo,"
said Celia, with a slight sob. She never could have thought
that she should feel as she did. There was something funereal
in the whole affair, and Mr. Casaubon seemed to be the officiating
clergyman, about whom it would be indecent to make remarks.
"Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve. We should never admire
the same people. I often offend in something of the same way;
I am apt to speak too strongly of those who don't please me."
In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
much from Celia's subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms.
Of course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy
with this marriage. Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she
did about life and its best objects.
Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy.
In an hour's tete-a-tete with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him
with more freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring
out her joy at the thought of devoting herself to him, and of
learning how she might best share and further all his great ends.
Mr. Casaubon was touched with an unknown delight (what man would
not have been?) at this childlike unrestrained ardor: he was not
surprised (what lover would have been?) that he should be the object
of it.
"My dear young lady--Miss Brooke--Dorothea!" he said, pressing her
hand between his hands, "this is a happiness greater than I had ever
imagined to be in reserve for me. That I should ever meet with a
mind and person so rich in the mingled graces which could render
marriage desirable, was far indeed from my conception. You have
all--nay, more than all--those qualities which I have ever regarded
as the characteristic excellences of womanhood. The great charm
of your sex is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection,
and herein we see its fitness to round and complete the existence
of our own. Hitherto I have known few pleasures save of the severer
kind: my satisfactions have been those of the solitary student.
I have been little disposed to gather flowers that would wither
in my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place
them in your bosom."
No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention:
the frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog,
or the cawing of an amorous rook. Would it not be rash to conclude
that there was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike
us as the thin music of a mandolin?
Dorothea's faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon's words seemed
to leave unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or
infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for
whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
"I am very ignorant--you will quite wonder at my ignorance,"
said Dorothea. "I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken;
and now I shall be able to tell them all to you, and ask you about them.
But," she added, with rapid imagination of Mr. Casaubon's probable feeling,
"I will not trouble you too much; only when you are inclined to
listen to me. You must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects
in your own track. I shall gain enough if you will take me with you there."
"How should I be able now to persevere in any path without
your companionship?" said Mr. Casaubon, kissing her candid brow,
and feeling that heaven had vouchsafed him a blessing in every way
suited to his peculiar wants. He was being unconsciously wrought
upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden
calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends.
It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some
judges, so stupid, with all her reputed cleverness; as, for example,
in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking,
at Mr. Casaubon's feet, and kissing his unfashionable shoe-ties
as if he were a Protestant Pope. She was not in the least teaching
Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking
herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon.
Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage
should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon's house
was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion,
with much land attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by
the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the morning sermon.
CHAPTER VI.
My lady's tongue is like the meadow blades,
That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
Nice cutting is her function: she divides
With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
And makes intangible savings.
As Mr. Casaubon's carriage was passing out of the gateway,
it arrested the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with
a servant seated behind. It was doubtful whether the recognition
had been mutual, for Mr. Casaubon was looking absently before him;
but the lady was quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a "How do you do?"
in the nick of time. In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old
Indian shawl, it was plain that the lodge-keeper regarded her
as an important personage, from the low curtsy which was dropped
on the entrance of the small phaeton.
"Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?" said the
high-colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.
"Pretty well for laying, madam, but they've ta'en to eating their
eggs: I've no peace o' mind with 'em at all."
"Oh, the cannibals! Better sell them cheap at once. What will
you sell them a couple? One can't eat fowls of a bad character
at a high price."
"Well, madam, half-a-crown: I couldn't let 'em go, not under."
"Half-a-crown, these times! Come now--for the Rector's chicken-broth
on a Sunday. He has consumed all ours that I can spare.
You are half paid with the sermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that.
Take a pair of tumbler-pigeons for them--little beauties. You must
come and see them. You have no tumblers among your pigeons."
"Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see 'em after work.
He's very hot on new sorts; to oblige you."
"Oblige me! It will be the best bargain he ever made. A pair
of church pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat
their own eggs! Don't you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!"
The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs.
Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional
"SureLY, sureLY!"--from which it might be inferred that she would
have found the country-side somewhat duller if the Rector's lady
had been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint. Indeed, both the
farmers and laborers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton
would have felt a sad lack of conversation but for the stories
about what Mrs. Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably
high birth, descended, as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the
crowd of heroic shades--who pleaded poverty, pared down prices,
and cut jokes in the most companionable manner, though with a turn
of tongue that let you know who she was. Such a lady gave a
neighborliness to both rank and religion, and mitigated the bitterness
of uncommuted tithe. A much more exemplary character with an infusion
of sour dignity would not have furthered their comprehension
of the Thirty-nine Articles, and would have been less socially uniting.
Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader's merits from a different point
of view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library,
where he was sitting alone.
"I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here," she said, seating
herself comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin
but well-built figure. "I suspect you and he are brewing some
bad polities, else you would not be seeing so much of the lively man.
I shall inform against you: remember you are both suspicious characters
since you took Peel's side about the Catholic Bill. I shall tell
everybody that you are going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig
side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help
you in an underhand manner: going to bribe the voters with pamphlets,
and throw open the public-houses to distribute them. Come, confess!"
"Nothing of the sort," said Mr. Brooke, smiling and rubbing his
eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment.
"Casaubon and I don't talk politics much. He doesn't care much about
the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing.
He only cares about Church questions. That is not my line of action,
you know."
"Ra-a-ther too much, my friend. I have heard of your doings.
Who was it that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch?
I believe you bought it on purpose. You are a perfect Guy Faux.
See if you are not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming.
Humphrey would not come to quarrel with you about it, so I
am come."
"Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting--not
persecuting, you know."
"There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for
the hustings. Now, DO NOT let them lure you to the hustings,
my dear Mr. Brooke. A man always makes a fool of himself,
speechifying: there's no excuse but being on the right side,
so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing.
You will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You will make a Saturday
pie of all parties' opinions, and be pelted by everybody."
"That is what I expect, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not wishing
to betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch--"what I
expect as an independent man. As to the Whigs, a man who goes
with the thinkers is not likely to be hooked on by any party.
He may go with them up to a certain point--up to a certain point,
you know. But that is what you ladies never understand."
"Where your certain point is? No. I should like to be told how a man
can have any certain point when he belongs to no party--leading
a roving life, and never letting his friends know his address.
`Nobody knows where Brooke will be--there's no counting on Brooke'--that
is what people say of you, to be quite frank. Now, do turn respectable.
How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy
on you, and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?"
"I don't pretend to argue with a lady on politics," said Mr. Brooke,
with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly
conscious that this attack of Mrs. Cadwallader's had opened the
defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him.
"Your sex are not thinkers, you know--varium et mutabile
semper--that kind of thing. You don't know Virgil. I knew"--Mr.
Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the personal acquaintance
of the Augustan poet--"I was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know.
That was what HE said. You ladies are always against an
independent attitude--a man's caring for nothing but truth,
and that sort of thing. And there is no part of the county where
opinion is narrower than it is here--I don't mean to throw stones,
you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent line;
and if I don't take it, who will?"
"Who? Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position.
People of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home,
not hawk it about. And you! who are going to marry your niece,
as good as your daughter, to one of our best men. Sir James would
be cruelly annoyed: it will be too hard on him if you turn round now
and make yourself a Whig sign-board."
Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea's engagement had
no sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader's
prospective taunts. It might have been easy for ignorant observers
to say, "Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;" but where is a country
gentleman to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors? Who could taste
the fine flavor in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually,
like wine without a seal? Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan
up to a certain point.
"I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry
to say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece," said Mr. Brooke,
much relieved to see through the window that Celia was coming in.
"Why not?" said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise.
"It is hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it."
"My niece has chosen another suitor--has chosen him, you know.
I have had nothing to do with it. I should have preferred Chettam;
and I should have said Chettam was the man any girl would have chosen.
But there is no accounting for these things. Your sex is capricious,
you know."
"Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?"
Mrs. Cadwallader's mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities
of choice for Dorothea.
But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden,
and the greeting with her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity
of answering immediately. He got up hastily, and saying, "By the way,
I must speak to Wright about the horses," shuffled quickly out
of the room.
"My dear child, what is this?--this about your sister's engagement?"
said Mrs. Cadwallader.
"She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon," said Celia, resorting, as usual,
to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity
of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.
"This is frightful. How long has it been going on?"
"I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks."
"Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law."
"I am so sorry for Dorothea."
"Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose."
"Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul."
"With all my heart."
"Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man
with a great soul."
"Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now;
when the next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him."
"I'm sure I never should."
"No; one such in a family is enough. So your sister never cared
about Sir James Chettam? What would you have said to HIM
for a brother-in-law?"
"I should have liked that very much. I am sure he would have
been a good husband. Only," Celia added, with a slight blush
(she sometimes seemed to blush as she breathed), "I don't think
he would have suited Dorothea."
"Not high-flown enough?"
"Dodo is very strict. She thinks so much about everything,
and is so particular about what one says. Sir James never seemed
to please her."
"She must have encouraged him, I am sure. That is not very creditable."
"Please don't be angry with Dodo; she does not see things.
She thought so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir
James sometimes; but he is so kind, he never noticed it."
"Well," said Mrs. Cadwallader, putting on her shawl, and rising,
as if in haste, "I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him.
He will have brought his mother back by this time, and I must call.
Your uncle will never tell him. We are all disappointed, my dear.
Young people should think of their families in marrying. I set a bad
example--married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object
among the De Bracys--obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray
to heaven for my salad oil. However, Casaubon has money enough;
I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the family
quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.
By the bye, before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter
about pastry. I want to send my young cook to learn of her.
Poor people with four children, like us, you know, can't afford to keep
a good cook. I have no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me. Sir James's
cook is a perfect dragon."
In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter
and driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage,
her husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.
Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had
kept him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress,
intending to ride over to Tipton Grange. His horse was standing at
the door when Mrs. Cadwallader drove up, and he immediately appeared
there himself, whip in hand. Lady Chettam had not yet returned,
but Mrs. Cadwallader's errand could not be despatched in the presence
of grooms, so she asked to be taken into the conservatory close by,
to look at the new plants; and on coming to a contemplative stand,
she said--
"I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone
in love as you pretended to be."
It was of no use protesting, against Mrs. Cadwallader's way of
putting things. But Sir James's countenance changed a little.
He felt a vague alarm.
"I do believe Brooke is going to expose himself after all. I accused
him of meaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he
looked silly and never denied it--talked about the independent line,
and the usual nonsense."
"Is that all?" said Sir James, much relieved.
"Why," rejoined Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't
mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that
way--making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"
"He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense."
"That is what I told him. He is vulnerable to reason there--always
a few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness.
Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe
side for madness to dip on. And there must be a little crack
in the Brooke family, else we should not see what we are to see."
"What? Brooke standing for Middlemarch?"
"Worse than that. I really feel a little responsible. I always told
you Miss Brooke would be such a fine match. I knew there was a great
deal of nonsense in her--a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff.
But these things wear out of girls. However, I am taken by surprise
for once."
"What do you mean, Mrs. Cadwallader?" said Sir James. His fear lest
Miss Brooke should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren,
or some preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little
allayed by the knowledge that Mrs. Cadwallader always made the worst
of things. "What has happened to Miss Brooke? Pray speak out."
"Very well. She is engaged to be married." Mrs. Cadwallader
paused a few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her
friend's face, which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile,
while he whipped his boot; but she soon added, "Engaged to Casaubon."
Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up.
Perhaps his face had never before gathered so much concentrated
disgust as when he turned to Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, "Casaubon?"
"Even so. You know my errand now."
"Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!"
(The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming
and disappointed rival.)
"She says, he is a great soul.--A great bladder for dried peas
to rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.
"What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?" said Sir James.
"He has one foot in the grave."
"He means to draw it out again, I suppose."
"Brooke ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put
off till she is of age. She would think better of it then.
What is a guardian for?"
"As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Brooke!"
"Cadwallader might talk to him."
"Not he! Humphrey finds everybody charming I never can get him
to abuse Casaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I
tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do
with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it
as well as I can by abusing everybody myself. Come, come, cheer up!
you are well rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring
you to see the stars by daylight. Between ourselves, little Celia
is worth two of her, and likely after all to be the better match.
For this marriage to Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery."
"Oh, on my own account--it is for Miss Brooke's sake I think her
friends should try to use their influence."
"Well, Humphrey doesn't know yet. But when I tell him, you may
depend on it he will say, `Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow--and
young--young enough.' These charitable people never know vinegar from
wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic. However, if I
were a man I should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone.
The truth is, you have been courting one and have won the other.
I can see that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to
be admired. If it were any one but me who said so, you might think
it exaggeration. Good-by!"
Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton,
and then jumped on his horse. He was not going to renounce
his ride because of his friend's unpleasant news--only
to ride the faster in some other direction than that of Tipton Grange.
Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy
about Miss Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she
liked to think she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have
straightway contrived the preliminaries of another? Was there
any ingenious plot, any hide-and-seek course of action, which
might be detected by a careful telescopic watch? Not at all:
a telescope might have swept the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt,
the whole area visited by Mrs. Cadwallader in her phaeton,
without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion,
or any scene from which she did not return with the same unperturbed
keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In fact, if that
convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages,
one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know little
of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even
with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas
under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active
voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they
were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you
certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims
while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.
In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to
Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes
producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring
her the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally simple,
quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important,
and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world.
All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her,
when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way
in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying
their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir,
and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact
crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch
and widened the relations of scandal,--these were topics of which she
retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced them in
an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more
because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as she
did in game and vermin. She would never have disowned any one on the
ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin
would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating,
and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her.
But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred:
they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices,
and Mrs. Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not
paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design
in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.
A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort
of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred
scheme of the universe. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard
on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own
beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation
for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers.
With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came
near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel
that the Miss Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien
to her? especially as it had been the habit of years for her to
scold Mr. Brooke with the friendliest frankness, and let him know
in confidence that she thought him a poor creature. From the first
arrival of the young ladies in Tipton she had prearranged Dorothea's
marriage with Sir James, and if it had taken place would have been
quite sure that it was her doing: that it should not take place
after she had preconceived it, caused her an irritation which every
thinker will sympathize with. She was the diplomatist of Tipton
and Freshitt, and for anything to happen in spite of her was an
offensive irregularity. As to freaks like this of Miss Brooke's,
Mrs. Cadwallader had no patience with them, and now saw that her
opinion of this girl had been infected with some of her husband's
weak charitableness: those Methodistical whims, that air of being
more religious than the rector and curate together, came from
a deeper and more constitutional disease than she had been willing to believe.
"However," said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards
to her husband, "I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had
married Sir James, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman. He would
never have contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted,
she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities. But now I wish
her joy of her hair shirt."
It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for
Sir James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger
Miss Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards
the success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made
an impression on Celia's heart. For he was not one of those gentlemen
who languish after the unattainable Sappho's apple that laughs
from the topmost bough--the charms which
"Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand."
He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably
that he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he
had preferred. Already the knowledge that Dorothea had chosen
Mr. Casaubon had bruised his attachment and relaxed its hold.
Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some other feelings
towards women than towards grouse and foxes, and did not regard
his future wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the
excitements of the chase. Neither was he so well acquainted
with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an ideal
combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary
to the historical continuity of the marriage-tie. On the contrary,
having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us,
and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good
grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards
him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.
Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for
half an hour in a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened
his pace, and at last turned into a road which would lead him back
by a shorter cut. Various feelings wrought in him the determination
after all to go to the Grange to-day as if nothing new had happened.
He could not help rejoicing that he had never made the offer
and been rejected; mere friendly politeness required that he
should call to see Dorothea about the cottages, and now happily
Mrs. Cadwallader had prepared him to offer his congratulations,
if necessary, without showing too much awkwardness. He really
did not like it: giving up Dorothea was very painful to him;
but there was something in the resolve to make this visit forthwith
and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of file-biting and
counter-irritant. And without his distinctly recognizing the impulse,
there certainly was present in him the sense that Celia would be there,
and that he should pay her more attention than he had done before.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between
breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little
pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!"
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us
to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others.
CHAPTER VII.
"Piacer e popone
Vuol la sua stagione."
--Italian Proverb.
Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time
at the Grange in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship
occasioned to the progress of his great work--the Key to all
Mythologies--naturally made him look forward the more eagerly
to the happy termination of courtship. But he had deliberately
incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time
for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship,
to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals
of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this,
his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years.
Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling,
and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill
it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be
performed symbolically, Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was
the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him;
and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force
of masculine passion. Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that
Miss Brooke showed an ardent submissive affection which promised
to fulfil his most agreeable previsions of marriage. It had once
or twice crossed his mind that possibly there, was some deficiency
in Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment;
but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to himself
a woman who would have pleased him better; so that there was clearly
no reason to fall back upon but the exaggerations of human tradition.
"Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?"
said Dorothea to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship;
"could I not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton's
daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?"
"I fear that would be wearisome to you," said Mr. Casaubon, smiling;
"and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have
mentioned regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground
for rebellion against the poet."
"Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they
would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second
place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to
understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting.
I hope you don't expect me to be naughty and stupid?"
"I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every
possible relation of life. Certainly it might be a great advantage
if you were able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it
were well to begin with a little reading."
Dorothea seized this as a precious permission. She would not have
asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all
things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely
out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin
and Creek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her
a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly.
As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she
felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed
cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics
appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal
for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary--at least the
alphabet and a few roots--in order to arrive at the core of things,
and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian. And she
had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have
been satisfier' with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child,
to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with al:
her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought
too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much
more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be
the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour together,
like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover,
to whom a mistress's elementary ignorance and difficulties have
a touching fitness. Few scholars would have disliked teaching
the alphabet under such circumstances. But Dorothea herself
was a little shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity,
and the answers she got to some timid questions about the value
of the Greek accents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed
there might be secrets not capable of explanation to a woman's reason.
Mr. Brooke had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with
his usual strength upon it one day that he came into the library
while the reading was going forward.
"Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics,
that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman--too taxing, you know."
"Dorothea is learning to read the characters simply," said Mr. Casaubon,
evading the question. "She had the very considerate thought
of saving my eyes."
"Ah, well, without understanding, you know--that may not be so bad.
But there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music,
the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up
to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.
A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old
English tune. That is what I like; though I have heard most things--been
at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort.
But I'm a conservative in music--it's not like ideas, you know.
I stick to the good old tunes."
"Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,"
said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine
fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling
and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period.
She smiled and looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes.
If he had always been asking her to play the "Last Rose of Summer,"
she would have required much resignation. "He says there is only an old
harpsichord at Lowick, and it is covered with books."
"Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear. Celia, now,
plays very prettily, and is always ready to play. However,
since Casaubon does not like it, you are all right. But it's
a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort,
Casaubon: the bow always strung--that kind of thing, you know--will not do."
"I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my
ears teased with measured noises," said Mr. Casaubon. "A tune much
iterated has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind
perform a sort of minuet to keep time--an effect hardly tolerable,
I imagine, after boyhood. As to the grander forms of music,
worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as
an educating influence according to the ancient conception,
I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned."
"No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Dorothea.
"When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear
the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob."
"That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear," said Mr. Brooke.
"Casaubon, she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece
to take things more quietly, eh, Dorothea?"
He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really
thinking that it was perhaps better for her to be early married
to so sober a fellow as Casaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.
"It is wonderful, though," he said to himself as he shuffled out
of the room--"it is wonderful that she should have liked him.
However, the match is good. I should have been travelling out of my
brief to have hindered it, let Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will.
He is pretty certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon. That was a very
seasonable pamphlet of his on the Catholic Question:--a deanery
at least. They owe him a deanery."
And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness,
by remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought
of the Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make
on the incomes of the bishops. What elegant historian would
neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes
did not foresee the history of the world, or even their own
actions?--For example, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby,
little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great,
when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no
idea of future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches.
Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked,
is likely to outlast our coal.
But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted
by precedent--namely, that if he had foreknown his speech,
it might not have made any great difference. To think with pleasure
of his niece's husband having a large ecclesiastical income was
one thing--to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is
a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now,
And you her father. Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian in each gentleman."
It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he continued to like
going to the Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty
of seeing Dorothea for the first time in the light of a woman who was
engaged to another man. Of course the forked lightning seemed to pass
through him when he first approached her, and he remained conscious
throughout the interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he was,
it must be owned that his uneasiness was less than it would have
been if he had thought his rival a brilliant and desirable match.
He had no sense of being eclipsed by Mr. Casaubon; he was only shocked
that Dorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification
lost some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.
Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had
completely resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona
she had not affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable
and according to nature; he could not yet be quite passive under
the idea of her engagement to Mr. Casaubon. On the day when he
first saw them together in the light of his present knowledge,
it seemed to him that he had not taken the affair seriously enough.
Brooke was really culpable; he ought to have hindered it. Who could
speak to him? Something might be done perhaps even now, at least
to defer the marriage. On his way home he turned into the Rectory
and asked for Mr. Cadwallader. Happily, the Rector was at home,
and his visitor was shown into the study, where all the fishing
tackle hung. But he himself was in a little room adjoining,
at work with his turning apparatus, and he called to the baronet
to join him there. The two were better friends than any other
landholder and clergyman in the county--a significant fact
which was in agreement with the amiable expression of their faees.
Mr. Cadwallader was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile;
very plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable
ease and good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills
in the sunshine, quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it
rather ashamed of itself. "Well, how are you?" he said, showing a
hand not quite fit to be grasped. "Sorry I missed you before.
Is there anything particular? You look vexed."
Sir James's brow had a little crease in it, a little depression
of the eyebrow, which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.
"It is only this conduct of Brooke's. I really think somebody
should speak to him."
"What? meaning to stand?" said Mr. Cadwallader, going on with
the arrangement of the reels which he had just been turning.
"I hardly think he means it. But where's the harm, if he likes it?
Any one who objects to Whiggery should be glad when the Whigs don't
put up the strongest fellow. They won't overturn the Constitution
with our friend Brooke's head for a battering ram."
"Oh, I don't mean that," said Sir James, who, after putting down
his hat and throwing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse
his leg and examine the sole of his boot with much bitterness.
"I mean this marriage. I mean his letting that blooming young girl
marry Casaubon."
"What is the matter with Casaubon? I see no harm in him--if the girl
likes him."
"She is too young to know what she likes. Her guardian ought
to interfere. He ought not to allow the thing to be done in this
headlong manner. I wonder a man like you, Cadwallader--a man
with daughters, can look at the affair with indifference:
and with such a heart as yours! Do think seriously about it."
"I am not joking; I am as serious as possible," said the Rector,
with a provoking little inward laugh. "You are as bad as Elinor.
She has been wanting me to go and lecture Brooke; and I have reminded
her that her friends had a very poor opinion of the match she made
when she married me."
"But look at Casaubon," said Sir James, indignantly. "He must
be fifty, and I don't believe he could ever have been much more
than the shadow of a man. Look at his legs!"
"Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it
all your own way in the world. Tou don't under stand women.
They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
Elinor used to tell her sisters that she married me for my ugliness--it
was so various and amusing that it had quite conquered her prudence."
"You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you. But this is no
question of beauty. I don't LIKE Casaubon." This was Sir James's
strongest way of implying that he thought ill of a man's character.
"Why? what do you know against him?" said the Rector laying down
his reels, and putting his thumbs into his armholes with an air
of attention.
Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his
reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know
them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.
At last he said--
"Now, Cadwallader, has he got any heart?"
"Well, yes. I don't mean of the melting sort, but a sound kernel,
THAT you may be sure of. He is very good to his poor relations:
pensions several of the women, and is educating a young fellow at
a good deal of expense. Casaubon acts up to his sense of justice.
His mother's sister made a bad match--a Pole, I think--lost herself--at
any rate was disowned by her family. If it had not been for that,
Casaubon would not have had so much money by half. I believe he went
himself to find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them.
Every man would not ring so well as that, if you tried his metal.
YOU would, Chettam; but not every man."
"I don't know," said Sir James, coloring. "I am not so sure of myself."
He paused a moment, and then added, "That was a right thing for
Casaubon to do. But a man may wish to do what is right, and yet
be a sort of parchment code. A woman may not be happy with him.
And I think when a girl is so young as Miss Brooke is, her friends
ought to interfere a little to hinder her from doing anything foolish.
You laugh, because you fancy I have some feeling on my own account.
But upon my honor, it is not that. I should feel just the same if I
were Miss Brooke's brother or uncle."
"Well, but what should you do?"
"I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was
of age. And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off.
I wish you saw it as I do--I wish you would talk to Brooke about it."
Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw
Mrs. Cadwallader entering from the study. She held by the hand her
youngest girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa,
and was made comfortable on his knee.
"I hear what you are talking about," said the wife. "But you
will make no impression on Humphrey. As long as the fish rise
to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be. Bless you,
Casaubon has got a trout-stream, and does not care about fishing
in it himself: could there be a better fellow?"
"Well, there is something in that," said the Rector, with his quiet,
inward laugh. "It is a very good quality in a man to have
a trout-stream."
"But seriously," said Sir James, whose vexation had not yet spent itself,
"don't you think the Rector might do some good by speaking?"
"Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say," answered Mrs. Cadwallader,
lifting up her eyebrows. "I have done what I could: I wash
my hands of the marriage."
"In the first place," said the Rector, looking rather grave,
"it would be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke,
and make him act accordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy;
he will run into any mould, but he won't keep shape."
"He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage," said Sir James.
"But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon's
disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be
acting for the advantage of Miss Brooke? I know no harm of Casaubon.
I don't care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest;
but then he doesn't care about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he
took on the Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always
been civil to me, and I don't see why I should spoil his sport.
For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than
she would be with any other man."
"Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather
dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing
to say to each other."
"What has that to do with Miss Brooke's marrying him? She does
not do it for my amusement."
"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all
semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
"Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,"
said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound
feeling of an English layman.
"Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.
They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of
`Hop o' my Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since.
Ugh! And that is the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be
happy with."
"Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes," said the Rector. "I don't
profess to understand every young lady's taste."
"But if she were your own daughter?" said Sir James.
"That would be a different affair. She is NOT my daughter,
and I don't feel called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good
as most of us. He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to
the cloth. Some Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said
Casaubon was the learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was
the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent.
And upon my word, I don't see that one is worse or better than
the other." The Rector ended with his silent laugh. He always saw
the joke of any satire against himself. His conscience was large
and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without
any trouble.
Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke's
marriage through Mr. Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some
sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment.
It was a sign of his good disposition that he did not slacken
at all in his intention of carrying out Dorothea's de.
sign of the cottages. Doubtless this persistence was the best
course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be generous;
it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
She was now enough aware of Sir James's position with regard to her,
to appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord's duty,
to which he had at first been urged by a lover's complaisance,
and her pleasure in it was great enough to count for something
even in her present happiness. Per. haps she gave to Sir James
Chettam's cottages all the interest she could spare from Mr. Casaubon,
or rather from the symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust,
and passionate self devotion which that learned gentleman had set
playing in her soul. Hence it happened that in the good baronet's
succeed ing visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions
to Celia, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure
to Dorothea. She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation
towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there
is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman
who have no passion to hide or confess.
CHAPTER IX.
1st Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles
Is called "law-thirsty": all the struggle there
Was after order and a perfect rule.
Pray, where lie such lands now? . . .
2d Gent. Why, where they lay of old--in human souls.
Mr. Casaubon's behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory
to Mr. Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along,
shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see
her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have
made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she
may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly,
the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our
own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick
in company with her uncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon's home was
the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden,
was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.
In the beginning of his career, Mr. Casaubon had only held
the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession
of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here
and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest front,
with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the
drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope
of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures,
which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun.
This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked
rather melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here
were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance,
and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high,
not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone,
was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and
melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children,
many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things,
to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn,
with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark
evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air
of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself,
had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background.
"Oh dear!" Celia said to herself, "I am sure Freshitt Hall would
have been pleasanter than this." She thought of the white freestone,
the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James
smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment
in a rose-bush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed
from the most delicately odorous petals--Sir James, who talked
so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them,
and not about learning! Celia had those light young feminine tastes
which grave and weatherworn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife;
but happily Mr. Casaubon's bias had been different, for he would
have had no chance with Celia.
Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all
that she could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library,
the carpets and curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious
old maps and bird's-eye views on the walls of the corridor,
with here and there an old vase below, had no oppression for her,
and seemed more cheerful than the easts and pictures at the Grange,
which her uncle had long ago brought home from his travels--they
being probably among the ideas he had taken in at one time.
To poor Dorothea these severe classical nudities and smirking
Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring into
the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she had never been taught
how she could bring them into any sort of relevance with her life.
But the owners of Lowick apparently had not been travellers,
and Mr. Casaubon's studies of the past were not carried on by means
of such aids.
Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion.
Everything seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home
of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence
to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attention specially to some
actual arrangement and asked her if she would like an alteration.
All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing to alter.
His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no defect
for her. She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections,
interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence,
and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the
higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks
of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.
"Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which
room you would like to have as your boudoir," said Mr. Casaubon,
showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently
large to include that requirement.
"It is very kind of you to think of that," said Dorothea, "but I
assure you I would rather have all those matters decided for me.
I shall be much happier to take everything as it is--just as you
have been used to have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be.
I have no motive for wishing anything else."
"Oh, Dodo," said Celia, "will you not have the bow-windowed
room up-stairs?"
Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the
avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there
were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging
in a group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green
world with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged
and easy to upset. It was a room where one might fancy the ghost
of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery.
A light bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature
in calf, completing the furniture.
"Yes," said Mr. Brooke, "this would be a pretty room with some
new hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now."
"No, uncle," said Dorothea, eagerly. "Pray do not speak of
altering anything. There are so many other things in the world
that want altering--I like to take these things as they are.
And you like them as they are, don't you?" she added, looking at
Mr. Casaubon. "Perhaps this was your mother's room when she was young."
"It was," he said, with his slow bend of the head.
"This is your mother," said Dorothea, who had turned to examine
the group of miniatures. "It is like the tiny one you brought me;
only, I should think, a better portrait. And this one opposite,
who is this?"
"Her elder sister. They were, like you and your sister, the only
two children of their parents, who hang above them, you see."
"The sister is pretty," said Celia, implying that she thought
less favorably of Mr. Casaubon's mother. It was a new open ing
to Celia's imagination, that he came of a family who had all been
young in their time--the ladies wearing necklaces.
"It is a peculiar face," said Dorothea, looking closely. "Those deep
gray eyes rather near together--and the delicate irregular nose with
a sort of ripple in it--and all the powdered curls hanging backward.
Altogether it seems to me peculiar rather than pretty. There is
not even a family likeness between her and your mother."
"No. And they were not alike in their lot."
"You did not mention her to me," said Dorothea.
"My aunt made an unfortunate marriage. I never saw her."
Dorothea wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just
then to ask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer,
and she turned to the window to admire the view. The sun had lately
pierced the gray, and the avenue of limes cast shadows.
"Shall we not walk in the garden now?" said Dorothea.
"And you would like to see the church, you know," said Mr. Brooke.
"It is a droll little church. And the village. It all lies in a
nut-shell. By the way, it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages
are like a row of alms-houses--little gardens, gilly-flowers, that
sort of thing."
"Yes, please," said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, "I should
like to see all that." She had got nothing from him more graphic
about the Lowick cottages than that they were "not bad."
They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy
borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church,
Mr. Casaubon said. At the little gate leading into the churchyard
there was a pause while Mr. Casaubon went to the parsonage close
by to fetch a key. Celia, who had been hanging a little in the rear,
came up presently, when she saw that Mr. Casaubon was gone away,
and said in her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradict
the suspicion of any malicious intent--
"Do you know, Dorothea, I saw some one quite young coming up one
of the walks."
"Is that astonishing, Celia?"
"There may be a young gardener, you know--why not?" said Mr. Brooke.
"I told Casaubon he should change his gardener."
"No, not a gardener," said Celia; "a gentleman with a sketch-book. He
had light-brown curls. I only saw his back. But he was quite young."
"The curate's son, perhaps," said Mr. Brooke. "Ah, there is
Casaubon again, and Tucker with him. He is going to introduce Tucker.
You don't know Tucker yet."
Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the "inferior clergy,"
who are usually not wanting in sons. But after the introduction,
the conversation did not lead to any question about his family,
and the startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every
one but Celia. She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown
curls and slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker,
who was just as old and musty-looking as she would have expected
Mr. Casaubon's curate to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go
to heaven (for Celia wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners
of his mouth were so unpleasant. Celia thought with some dismalness
of the time she should have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the
curate had probably no pretty little children whom she could like,
irrespective of principle.
Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon
had not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able
to answer all Dorothea's questions about the villagers and the
other parishioners. Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick:
not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig,
and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small
boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants,
or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent;
and though the public disposition was rather towards laying
by money than towards spirituality, there was not much vice.
The speckled fowls were so numerous that Mr. Brooke observed,
"Your farmers leave some barley for the women to glean, I see.
The poor folks here might have a fowl in their pot, as the good French
king used to wish for all his people. The French eat a good many
fowls--skinny fowls, you know."
"I think it was a very cheap wish of his," said Dorothea, indignantly.
"Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned
a royal virtue?"
"And if he wished them a skinny fowl," said Celia, "that would
not be nice. But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls."
"Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was
subauditum; that is, present in the king's mind, but not uttered,"
said Mr. Casaubon, smiling and bending his head towards Celia,
who immediately dropped backward a little, because she could not bear
Mr. Casaubon to blink at her.
Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house. She felt
some disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was
nothing for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind
had glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred,
of finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger
share of the world's misery, so that she might have had more active
duties in it. Then, recurring to the future actually before her,
she made a picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon's
aims in which she would await new duties. Many such might reveal
themselves to the higher knowledge gained by her in that companionship.
Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would
not allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering
the garden through the little gate, Mr. Casaubon said--
"You seem a little sad, Dorothea. I trust you are pleased with
what you have seen."
"I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong,"
answered Dorothea, with her usual openness--"almost wishing that
the people wanted more to be done for them here. I have known
so few ways of making my life good for anything. Of course,
my notions of usefulness must be narrow. I must learn new ways
of helping people."
"Doubtless," said Mr. Casaubon. "Each position has its
corresponding duties. Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick,
will not leave any yearning unfulfilled."
"Indeed, I believe that," said Dorothea, earnestly. "Do not suppose
that I am sad."
"That is well. But, if you are not tired, we will take another way
to the house than that by which we came."
Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made
towards a fine yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds
on this side of the house. As they approached it, a figure,
conspicuous on a dark background of evergreens, was seated on
a bench, sketching the old tree. Mr. Brooke, who was walking
in front with Celia, turned his head, and said--
"Who is that youngster, Casaubon?"
They had come very near when Mr. Casaubon answered--
"That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson,
in fact," he added, looking at Dorothea, "of the lady whose portrait
you have been noticing, my aunt Julia."
The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy
light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him
at once with Celia's apparition.
"Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw.
Will, this is Miss Brooke."
The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat,
Dorothea could see a pair of gray eves rather near together,
a delicate irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair
falling backward; but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent,
threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the grandmother's
miniature. Young Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile,
as if he were charmed with this introduction to his future second
cousin and her relatives; but wore rather a pouting air of discontent.
"You are an artist, I see," said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book
and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.
"No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,"
said young Ladislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.
"Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way
myself at one time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I
call a nice thing, done with what we used to call BRIO."
Mr. Brooke held out towards the two girls a large colored sketch
of stony ground and trees, with a pool.
"I am no judge of these things," said Dorothea, not coldly, but with
an eager deprecation of the appeal to her. "You know, uncle, I never
see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised.
They are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some
relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to
feel--just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means
nothing to me." Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed
his head towards her, while Mr. Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly--
"Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style
of teaching, you know--else this is just the thing for girls--sketching,
fine art and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don't
understand morbidezza, and that kind of thing. You will come
to my house, I hope, and I will show you what I did in this way,"
he continued, turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled
from his preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up
his mind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going
to marry Casaubon, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures
would have confirmed that opinion even if he had believed her.
As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain
that she thought his sketch detestable. There was too much cleverness
in her apology: she was laughing both at her uncle and himself.
But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived
in an AEolian harp. This must be one of Nature's inconsistencies.
There could be no sort of passion in a girl who would marry Casaubon.
But he turned from her, and bowed his thanks for Mr. Brooke's invitation.
"We will turn over my Italian engravings together," continued that
good-natured man. "I have no end of those things, that I have laid
by for years. One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know.
Not you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas
get undermost--out of use, you know. You clever young men must
guard against indolence. I was too indolent, you know: else I
might have been anywhere at one time."
"That is a seasonable admonition," said Mr. Casaubon; "but now we
will pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired
of standing."
When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go
on with his sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an
expression of amusement which increased as he went on drawing,
till at last he threw back his head and laughed aloud. Partly it
was the reception of his own artistic production that tickled him;
partly the notion of his grave cousin as the lover of that girl;
and partly Mr. Brooke's definition of the place he might have
held but for the impediment of indolence. Mr. Will Ladislaw's
sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very agreeably: it was
the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture of sneering
and self-exaltation.
"What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?"
said Mr. Brooke, as they went on.
"My cousin, you mean--not my nephew."
"Yes, yes, cousin. But in the way of a career, you know."
"The answer to that question is painfully doubtful. On leaving Rugby
he declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly
have placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course
of studying at Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again,
without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he
calls culture, preparation for he knows not what. He declines
to choose a profession."
"He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose."
"I have always given him and his friends reason to understand
that I would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing
him with a scholarly education, and launching him respectably.
I am-therefore bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,"
said Mr. Casaubon, putting his conduct in the light of mere rectitude:
a trait of delicacy which Dorothea noticed with admiration.
"He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce
or a Mungo Park," said Mr. Brooke. "I had a notion of that myself
at one time."
"No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement
of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could
recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him
on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death.
But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurate knowledge
of the earth's surface, that he said he should prefer not to know
the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown
regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination."
"Well, there is something in that, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
who had certainly an impartial mind.
"It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy
and indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad
augury for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he
so far submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one."
"Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,"
said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable explanation.
"Because the law and medicine should be very serious professions
to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them."
"Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is
chiefly determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike
to steady application, and to that kind of acquirement which is
needful instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting
to self-indulgent taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has
stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work
regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies
or acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience.
I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent
the toil of years preparatory to a work not yet accomplished.
But in vain. To careful reasoning of this kind he replies
by calling himself Pegasus, and every form of prescribed work `harness.'"
Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could
say something quite amusing.
"Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton,
a Churchill--that sort of thing--there's no telling," said Mr. Brooke.
"Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?"
"Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year
or so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test
of freedom."
"That is very kind of you," said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
with delight. "It is noble. After all, people may really have
in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves,
may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.
We should be very patient with each other, I think."
"I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you
think patience good," said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea
were alone together, taking off their wrappings.
"You mean that I am very impatient, Celia."
"Yes; when people don't do and say just what you like." Celia had
become less afraid of "saying things" to Dorothea since this
engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.
CHAPTER X.
"He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear
than the skin of a bear not yet killed."--FULLER.
Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had
invited him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned
that his young relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this
cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix
on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe.
Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one
hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other,
it may confidently await those messages from the universe which
summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude
of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of
receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them.
He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken
too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had
fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made
himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted
from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him
that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution
and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would evolve
the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.
Even Caesar's fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment.
We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes
may be disguised in helpless embryos.--In fact, the world is full
of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation
producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed
at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small
taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world,
seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous
reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself.
He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no
mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor
in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general,
but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then,
without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake,
prophecy is the most gratuitous.
But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests
me more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin.
If to Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set
alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions,
does it follow that he was fairly represented in the minds of those
less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered their
judgments concerning him? I protest against any absolute conclusion,
any prejudice derived from Mrs. Cadwallader's contempt for a neighboring
clergyman's alleged greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam's poor
opinion of his rival's legs,--from Mr. Brooke's failure to elicit
a companion's ideas, or from Celia's criticism of a middle-aged
scholar's personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man
of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape
these unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors;
and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit
to have the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon,
speaking for himself, has rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not
therefore certain that there is no good work or fine feeling in him.
Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphs write
detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system been advanced
by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we turn
from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest,
what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or
capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors;
what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the
years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles
against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him,
and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is
important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think
he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want
of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with
perfect confidence; nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor
to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us.
Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was
liable to think that others were providentially made for him,
and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness
for the author of a "Key to all Mythologies," this trait is not
quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals,
claims some of our pity.
Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him
more nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto
shown their disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I
feel more tenderly towards his experience of success than towards
the disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the
day fixed for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find
his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial
garden scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be
bordered with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting bo him
than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did
not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another,
his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl
he had not won delight,--which he had also regarded as an object
to be found by search. It is true that he knew all the classical
passages implying the contrary; but knowing classical passages,
we find, is a mode of motion, which explains why they leave
so little extra force for their personal application.
Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood
had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that
large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we
all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger
of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances
were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which he could
account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him
just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively,
just when he exchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library
for his visits to the Grange. Here was a weary experience in which
he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which
sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship
without seeming nearer to the goal. And his was that worst
loneliness which would shrink from sympathy. He could not but wish
that Dorothea should think him not less happy than the world would
expect her successful suitor to be; and in relation to his authorship
he leaned on her young trust and veneration, he liked to draw
forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of encouragement
to himself: in talking to her he presented all his performance and
intention with the reflected confidence of the pedagogue, and rid
himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience which crowded
his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean shades.
For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted
to young ladies which had made the chief part of her education,
Mr. Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas;
and this sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction
to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally
unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness
for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine
into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest
sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions. That more complete
teaching would come--Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was
looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking
forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea would have cared
about any share in Mr. Casaubon's learning as mere accomplishment;
for though opinion in the neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton
had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described
her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies
mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character.
All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of
sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually
swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge--to
wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if
she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did,
under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience.
But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled
with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone
by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened
yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?
Surely learned men kept-the only oil; and who more learned than
Mr. Casaubon?
Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea's joyous grateful expectation
was unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious
of flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her
affectionate interest.
The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending
the wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious
for this because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.
"I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us," he said
one morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia
objected to go, and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship.
"You will have many lonely hours, Dorotheas, for I shall be
constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome,
and I should feel more at liberty if you had a companion."
The words "I should feel more at liberty" grated on Dorothea.
For the first time in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored
from annoyance.
"You must have misunderstood me very much," she said, "if you think
I should not enter into the value of your time--if you think that I
should not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using
it to the best purpose."
"That is very amiable in you, my dear Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon,
not in the least noticing that she was hurt; "but if you had a lady
as your companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone,
and we could thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time."
"I beg you will not refer to this again," said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning towards
him she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, "Pray do
not be anxious about me. I shall have so much to think of when I
am alone. And Tantripp will be a sufficient companion, just to take
care of me. I could not bear to have Celia: she would be miserable."
It was time to dress. There was to be a dinner-party that day,
the last of the parties which were held at the Grange as proper
preliminaries to the wedding, and Dorothea was glad of a reason
for moving away at once on the sound of the bell, as if she needed
more than her usual amount of preparation. She was ashamed of being
irritated from some cause she could not define even to herse1f;
for though she had no intention to be untruthful, her reply had not
touched the real hurt within her. Mr. Casaubon's words had been
quite reasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous sense
of aloofness on his part.
"Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind," she said
to herself. "How can I have a husband who is so much above me
without knowing that he needs me less than I need him?"
Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right,
she recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene
dignity when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray
dress--the simple lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow
and coiled massively behind, in keeping with the entire absence
from her manner and expression of all search after mere effect.
Sometimes when Dorothea was in company, there seemed to be as
complete an air of repose about her as if she had been a picture
of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air;
but these intervals of quietude made the energy of her speech
and emotion the more remarked when some outward appeal had
touched her.
She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening,
for the dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous
as to the male portion than any which had been held at the Grange
since Mr. Brooke's nieces had resided with him, so that the
talking was done in duos and trios more or less inharmonious.
There was the newly elected mayor of Middlemarch, who happened
to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law,
who predominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist,
others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary;
and there were various professional men. In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader
said that Brooke was beginning to treat the Middlemarchers,
and that she preferred the farmers at the tithe-dinner, who drank her
health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their grandfathers'
furniture. For in that part of the country, before reform had
done its notable part in developing the political consciousness,
there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction
of parties; so that Mr. Brooke's miscellaneous invitations seemed
to belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate
travel and habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.
Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity
was found for some interjectional "asides"
"A fine woman, Miss Brooke! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!"
said Mr. Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned
with the landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used
that oath in a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings,
stamping the speech of a man who held a good position.
Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that
gentleman disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed.
The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor
and coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like
an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage
implying the consciousness of a distinguished appearance.
"Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself
out a little more to please us. There should be a little filigree
about a woman--something of the coquette. A man likes a sort
of challenge. The more of a dead set she makes at you the better."
"There's some truth in that," said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.
"And, by God, it's usually the way with them. I suppose it answers
some wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?"
"I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source,"
said Mr. Bulstrode. "I should rather refer it to the devil."
"Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,"
said Mr. Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been
detrimental to his theology. "And I like them blond, with a
certain gait, and a swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayor's
daughter is more to my taste than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either.
If I were a marrying man I should choose Miss Vincy before either
of them."
"Well, make up, make up," said Mr. Standish, jocosely; "you see
the middle-aged fellows early the day."
Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going
to incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.
The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely's ideal was
of course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far,
would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter
of a Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion.
The feminine part of the company included none whom Lady
Chettam or Mrs. Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew,
the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding,
but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled
the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of
professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.
Lady Chettam, who attributed her own remarkable health to home-made
bitters united with constant medical attendance, entered with much
exercise of the imagination into Mrs. Renfrew's account of symptoms,
and into the amazing futility in her case of all, strengthening medicines.
"Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?" said the
mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively,
when Mrs. Renfrew's attention was called away.
"It strengthens the disease," said the Rector's wife, much too
well-born not to be an amateur in medicine. "Everything depends on the
constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile--that's
my view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the mill."
"Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce--reduce
the disease, you know, if you are right, my dear. And I think
what you say is reasonable."
"Certainly it is reasonable. You have two sorts of potatoes,
fed on the same soil. One of them grows more and more watery--"
"Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew--that is what I think.
Dropsy! There is no swelling yet--it is inward. I should say she ought
to take drying medicines, shouldn't you?--or a dry hot-air bath.
Many things might be tried, of a drying nature."
"Let her try a certain person's pamphlets," said Mrs. Cadwallader
in an undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter. "He does not want drying."
"Who, my dear?" said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick
as to nullify the pleasure of explanation.
"The bridegroom--Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster
since the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose."
"I should think he is far from having a good constitution,"
said Lady Chettam, with a still deeper undertone. "And then his
studies--so very dry, as you say."
"Really, by the side of Sir James, he looks like a death's head
skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this
time that girl will hate him. She looks up to him as an oracle now,
and by-and-by she will be at the other extreme. All flightiness!"
"How very shocking! I fear she is headstrong. But tell me--you
know all about him--is there anything very bad? What is the truth?"
"The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic--nasty to take,
and sure to disagree."
"There could not be anything worse than that," said Lady Chettam,
with so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have
learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's disadvantages.
"However, James will hear nothing against Miss Brooke. He says she
is the mirror of women still."
"That is a generous make-believe of his. Depend upon it, he likes
little Celia better, and she appreciates him. I hope you like my
little Celia?"
"Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile,
though not so fine a figure. But we were talking of physic.
Tell me about this new young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate. I am told he is
wonderfully clever: he certainly looks it--a fine brow indeed."
"He is a gentleman. I heard him talking to Humphrey. He talks well."
"Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland,
really well connected. One does not expect it in a practitioner
of that kind. For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing
with the servants; they are often all the cleverer. I assure you
I found poor Hicks's judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong.
He was coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution.
It was a loss to me his going off so suddenly. Dear me, what a
very animated conversation Miss Brooke seems to be having with this
Mr. Lydgate!"
"She is talking cottages and hospitals with him," said Mrs. Cadwallader,
whose ears and power of interpretation were quick. "I believe
he is a sort of philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him up."
"James," said Lady Chettam when her son came near, "bring Mr. Lydgate
and introduce him to me. I want to test him."
The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity
of making Mr. Lydgate's acquaintance, having heard of his success
in treating fever on a new plan.
Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave
whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him
impressiveness as a listener. He was as little as possible like the
lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his
toilet and utterance. Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in him.
He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar,
by admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar,
and he did not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others.
He did not approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping,
nor, on the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark. He said "I
think so" with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight
of agreement, that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.
"I am quite pleased with your protege," she said to Mr. Brooke
before going away.
"My protege?--dear me!--who is that?" said Mr. Brooke.
"This young Lydgate, the new doctor.-He seems to me to understand
his profession admirably."
"Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an
uncle of his who sent me a letter about him. However, I think he
is likely to be first-rate--has studied in Paris, knew Broussais;
has ideas, you know--wants to raise the profession."
"Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet,
that sort of thing," resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out
Lady Chettam, and had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.
"Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?--upsetting The old treatment,
which has made Englishmen what they re?" said Mr. Standish.
"Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us," said Mr. Bulstrode,
who spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly wir "I, for
my part, hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason
for confiding the new hospital to his management."
"That is all very fine," replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of
Mr. Bulstrode; "if you like him to try experiments on your hospital
patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection.
But I am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments
tried on me. I like treatment that has been tested a little."
"Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an
experiment, you know," said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.
"Oh, if you talk in that sense!" said Mr. Standish, with as much
disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards
a valuable client.
"I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without
reducing me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger," said Mr. Vincy,
the mayor, a florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh
in striking contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode.
"It's an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding
against the shafts of disease, as somebody said,--and I think it a
very good expression myself."
Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the
party early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for
the novelty of certain introductions, especially the introduction
to Miss Brooke, whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage
to that faded scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful,
gave her the piquancy of an unusual combination.
"She is a good creature--that fine girl--but a little too earnest,"
he thought. "It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are
always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand
the merits of any question, and usually fall hack on their moral
sense to settle things after their own taste."
Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate's style of woman any more
than Mr. Chichely's. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter,
whose mied was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated
to shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine
young women to purplefaced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe,
and might possibly have experience before him which would modify
his opinion as to the most excellent things in woman.
Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these
gentlemen under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party
she had become Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.
CHAPTER XI.
"But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes."
--BEN JONSON.
Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a
woman strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the
least suppose that he had lost his balance and fallen in love,
but he had said of that particular woman, "She is grace itself;
she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That is what a woman
ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music."
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life,
to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. But Rosamond
Vincy seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a man has seen
the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily,
his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution
rather than on his. Lydgate believed that he should not marry for
several years: not marry until he had trodden out a good clear path
for himself away from the broad road which was quite ready made.
He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon almost as long as it
had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and married: but this
learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had assembled his
voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation which precedes
performance,--often the larger part of a man's fame. He took a wife,
as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course,
and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation.
But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-century
before him instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent
on doing many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune
or even secure him a good income. To a man under such circumstances,
taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment,
however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to give
it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided by
a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke
would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty.
She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle.
The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your
work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise
with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.
Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to
Lydgate than the turn of Miss Brooke's mind, or to Miss Brooke than
the qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon.
But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots,
sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another,
which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the
frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor.
Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded
in her hand.
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had
not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional
dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children
for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes
which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse,
and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped
a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates,
gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs;
some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical,
and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence;
while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness
amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects
in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self
and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh
threads of connection--gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the
savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct;
while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived
blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of
closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties,
some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive
advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement
and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus,
who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman's
lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently
beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke,
and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy,
who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure
and pure blindness which give the largest range to choice in the flow
and color of drapery. But these things made only part of her charm.
She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school,
the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all
that was demanded in the accomplished female--even to extras,
such as the getting in and out of a carriage. Mrs. Lemon herself
had always held up Miss Vincy as an example: no pupil, she said,
exceeded that young lady for mental acquisition and propriety
of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional.
We cannot help the way in which people speak of us, and probably if
Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen, these heroines
would not have seemed poetical. The first vision of Rosamond would
have been enough with most judges to dispel any prejudice excited by
Mrs. Lemon's praise.
Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable
vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family;
for though Mr. Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter on,
had not been their doctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering system
adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections
and acquaintances. For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was
not connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? They were
old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations,
in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors
more or less decidedly genteel. Mr. Vincy's sister had made a wealthy
match in accepting Mr. Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born
in the town, and altogether of dimly known origin, was considered
to have done well in uniting himself with a real Middlemarch family;
on the other hand, Mr. Vincy had descended a little, having taken
an innkeeper's daughter. But on this side too there was a cheering
sense of money; for Mrs. Vincy's sister had been second wife
to rich old Mr. Featherstone, and had died childless years ago,
so that her nephews and nieces might be supposed to touch the
affections of the widower. And it happened that Mr. Bulstrode
and Mr. Featherstone, two of Peacock's most important patients,
had, from different causes, given an especially good reception to
his successor, who had raised some partisanship as well as discussion.
Mr. Wrench, medical attendant to the Vincy family, very early had
grounds for thinking lightly of Lydgate's professional discretion,
and there was no report about him which was not retailed at the
Vincys', where visitors were frequent. Mr. Vincy was more inclined
to general good-fellowship than to taking sides, but there was
no need for him to be hasty in making any new man acquaintance.
Rosamond silently wished that her father would invite Mr. Lydgate.
She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used
to--the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase
distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as boys.
She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose brothers,
she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more
interested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions.
But she would not have chosen to mention her wish to her father;
and he, for his part, was in no hurry on the subject. An alderman
about to be mayor must by-and-by enlarge his dinner-parties,
but at present there were plenty of guests at his well-spread table.
That table often remained covered with the relics of the family breakfast
long after Mr. Vincy had gone with his second son to the warehouse,
and when Miss Morgan was already far on in morning lessons with the
younger girls in the schoolroom. It awaited the family laggard,
who found any sort of inconvenience (to others) less disagreeable
than getting up when he was called. This was the case one morning
of the October in which we have lately seen Mr. Casaubon visiting
the Grange; and though the room was a little overheated with the fire,
which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner, Rosamond,
for some reason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer than usual,
now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her work
on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weariness.
Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen,
sat on the other side of the small work-table with an air
of more entire placidity, until, the clock again giving notice
that it was going to strike, she looked up from the lace-mending
which was occupying her plump fingers and rang the bell.
"Knock at Mr. Fred's door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has
struck half-past ten."
This was said without any change in the radiant good-humor of
Mrs. Vincy's face, in which forty-five years had delved neither
angles nor parallels; and pushing back her pink capstrings, she let
her work rest on her lap, while she looked admiringly at her daughter.
"Mamma," said Rosamond, "when Fred comes down I wish you would
not let him have red herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them
all over the house at this hour of the morning."
"Oh, my dear, you are so hard on your brothers! It is the only fault
I have to find with you. You are the sweetest temper in the world,
but you are so tetchy with your brothers."
"Not tetchy, mamma: you never hear me speak in an unladylike way."
"Well, but you want to deny them things."
"Brothers are so unpleasant."
"Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men. Be thankful if they
have good hearts. A woman must learn to put up with little things.
You will be married some day."
"Not to any one who is like Fred."
"Don't decry your own brother, my dear. Few young men have less
against them, although he couldn't take his degree--I'm sure I
can't understand why, for he seems to me most clever. And you know
yourself he was thought equal to the best society at college.
So particular as you are, my dear, I wonder you are not glad to have
such a gentlemanly young man for a brother. You are always finding
fault with Bob because he is not Fred."
"Oh no, mamma, only because he is Bob."
"Well, my dear, you will not find any Middlemarch young man who has
not something against him."
"But"--here Rosamond's face broke into a smile which suddenly revealed
two dimples. She herself thought unfavorably of these dimples and smiled
little in general society. "But I shall not marry any Middlemarch young man."
"So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick
of them; and if there's better to be had, I'm sure there's no girl
better deserves it."
"Excuse me, mamma--I wish you would not say, `the pick of them.'"
"Why, what else are they?"
"I mean, mamma, it is rather a vulgar expression."
"Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker. What should
I say?"
"The best of them."
"Why, that seems just as plain and common. If I had had time
to think, I should have said, `the most superior young men.'
But with your education you must know."
"What must Rosy know, mother?" said Mr. Fred, who had
slid in unobserved through the half-open door while the
ladies were bending over their work, and now going up
to the fire stood with his back towards it, warming the soles of his slippers.
"Whether it's right to say `superior young men,'" said Mrs. Vincy,
ringing the bell.
"Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is
getting to be shopkeepers' slang."
"Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?" said Rosamond,
with mild gravity.
"Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks
a class."
"There is correct English: that is not slang."
"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write
history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang
of poets."
"You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point."
"Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox
a leg-plaiter."
"Of course you can call it poetry if you like."
"Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang. I shall invent
a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips,
and give them to you to separate."
"Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!" said Mrs. Vincy,
with cheerful admiration.
"Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?" said Fred,
to the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast;
while he walked round the table surveying the ham, potted beef,
and other cold remnants, with an air of silent rejection, and polite
forbearance from signs of disgust.
"Should you like eggs, sir?"
"Eggs, no! Bring me a grilled bone."
"Really, Fred," said Rosamond, when the servant had left the room,
"if you must have hot things for breakfast, I wish you would come
down earlier. You can get up at six o'clock to go out hunting;
I cannot understand why you find it so difficult to get up on
other mornings."
"That is your want of understanding, Rosy. I can get up to go
hunting because I like it."
"What would you think of me if I came down two hours after every
one else and ordered grilled bone?"
"I should think you were an uncommonly fast young lady," said Fred,
eating his toast with the utmost composure.
"I cannot see why brothers are to make themselves disagreeable,
any more than sisters."
"I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so.
Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions."
"I think it describes the smell of grilled bone."
"Not at all. It describes a sensation in your little nose associated
with certain finicking notions which are the classics of Mrs. Lemon's
school. Look at my mother you don't see her objecting to everything
except what she does herself. She is my notion of a pleasant woman."
"Bless you both, my dears, and don't quarrel," said Mrs. Vincy,
with motherly cordiality. "Come, Fred, tell us all about the new doctor.
How is your uncle pleased with him?"
"Pretty well, I think. He asks Lydgate all sorts of questions and
then screws up his face while he hears the answers, as if they were
pinching his toes. That's his way. Ah, here comes my grilled bone."
"But how came you to stay out so late, my dear? You only said you
were going to your uncle's."
"Oh, I dined at Plymdale's. We had whist. Lydgate was there too."
"And what do you think of him? He is very gentlemanly, I suppose.
They say he is of excellent family--his relations quite county people."
"Yes," said Fred. "There was a Lydgate at John's who spent
no end of money. I find this man is a second cousin of his.
But rich men may have very poor devils for second cousins."
"It always makes a difference, though, to be of good family,"
said Rosamond, with a tone of decision which showed that she had thought
on this subject. Rosamond felt that she might have been happier
if she had not been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer.
She disliked anything which reminded her that her mother's father had
been an innkeeper. Certainly any one remembering the fact might think
that Mrs. Vincy had the air of a very handsome good-humored landlady,
accustomed to the most capricious orders of gentlemen.
"I thought it was odd his name was Tertius," said the
bright-faced matron, "but of course it's a name in the family.
But now, tell us exactly what sort of man he is."
"Oh, tallish, dark, clever--talks well--rather a prig, I think."
"I never can make out what you mean by a prig," said Rosamond.
"A fellow who wants to show that he has opinions."
"Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions," said Mrs. Vincy.
"What are they there for else?"
"Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for. But a prig
is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions."
"I suppose Mary Garth admires Mr. Lydgate," said Rosamond,
not without a touch of innuendo.
"Really, I can't say." said Fred, rather glumly, as he left
the table, and taking up a novel which he had brought down with him,
threw himself into an arm-chair. "If you are jealous of her,
go oftener to Stone Court yourself and eclipse her."
"I wish you would not be so vulgar, Fred. If you have finished,
pray ring the bell."
"It is true, though--what your brother says, Rosamond," Mrs. Vincy began,
when the servant had cleared the table. "It is a thousand pities
you haven't patience to go and see your uncle more, so proud
of you as he is, and wanted you to live with him. There's no
knowing what he might have done for you as well as for Fred.
God knows, I'm fond of having you at home with me, but I can part
with my children for their good. And now it stands to reason
that your uncle Featherstone will do something for Mary Garth."
"Mary Garth can bear being at Stone Court, because she likes that
better than being a governess," said Rosamond, folding up her work.
"I would rather not have anything left to me if I must earn it
by enduring much of my uncle's cough and his ugly relations."
"He can't be long for this world, my dear; I wouldn't hasten his end,
but what with asthma and that inward complaint, let us hope there
is something better for him in another. And I have no ill-will
toward's Mary Garth, but there's justice to be thought of.
And Mr. Featherstone's first wife brought him no money, as my sister did.
Her nieces and nephews can't have so much claim as my sister's.
And I must say I think Mary Garth a dreadful plain girl--more fit
for a governess."
"Every one would not agree with you there, mother," said Fred,
who seemed to be able to read and listen too.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy, wheeling skilfully, "if she
HAD some fortune left her,--a man marries his wife's relations,
and the Garths are so poor, and live in such a small way.
But I shall leave you to your studies, my dear; for I must go and do
some shopping."
"Fred's studies are not very deep," said Rosamond, rising with
her mamma, "he is only reading a novel."
"Well, well, by-and-by he'll go to his Latin and things,"
said Mrs. Vincy, soothingly, stroking her son's head. "There's a
fire in the smoking-room on purpose. It's your father's wish,
you know--Fred, my dear--and I always tell him you will be good,
and go to college again to take your degree."
Fred drew his mother's hand down to his lips, but said nothing.
"I suppose you are not going out riding to-day?" said Rosamond,
lingering a little after her mamma was gone.
"No; why?"
"Papa says I may have the chestnut to ride now."
"You can go with me to-morrow, if you like. Only I am going
to Stone Court, remember."
"I want to ride so much, it is indifferent to me where we go."
Rosamond really wished to go to Stone Court, of all other places.
"Oh, I say, Rosy," said Fred, as she was passing out of the room,
"if you are going to the piano, let me come and play some airs
with you."
"Pray do not ask me this morning."
"Why not this morning?"
"Really, Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute.
A man looks very silly playing the flute. And you play so out
of tune."
"When next any one makes love to you, Miss Rosamond, I will tell
him how obliging you are."
"Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute,
any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?"
"And why should you expect me to take you out riding?"
This question led to an adjustment, for Rosamond had set her mind
on that particular ride.
So Fred was gratified with nearly an hour's practice of "Ar hyd y nos,"
"Ye banks and braes," and other favorite airs from his "Instructor
on the Flute;" a wheezy performance, into which he threw much
ambition and an irrepressible hopefulness.
CHAPTER XII.
"He had more tow on his distaffe
Than Gerveis knew."
--CHAUCER.
The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning,
lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows
and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty
and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave
each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked
on them from childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses
were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing
a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew;
the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for
the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without
a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against
the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old,
old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations
of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life,
and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things
that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls--the
things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing
between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.
But the road, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we
have seen, was not a parish of muddy lanes and poor tenants; and it
was into Lowick parish that Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple
of miles' riding. Another mile would bring them to Stone Court,
and at the end of the first half, the house was already visible,
looking as if it had been arrested in its growth toward a stone
mansion by an unexpected budding of farm-buildings on its left flank,
which had hindered it from becoming anything more than the substantial
dwelling of a gentleman farmer. It was not the less agreeable
an object in the distance for the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks
which balanced the fine row of walnuts on the right.
Presently it was possible to discern something that might be a gig
on the circular drive before the front door.
"Dear me," said Rosamond, "I hope none of my uncle's horrible
relations are there."
"They are, though. That is Mrs. Waule's gig--the last yellow gig left,
I should think. When I see Mrs. Waule in it, I understand how yellow
can have been worn for mourning. That gig seems to me more funereal
than a hearse. But then Mrs. Waule always has black crape on.
How does she manage it, Rosy? Her friends can't always be dying."
"I don't know at all. And she is not in the least evangelical,"
said Rosamond, reflectively, as if that religious point of view
would have fully accounted for perpetual crape. "And, not poor,"
she added, after a moment's pause.
"No, by George! They are as rich as Jews, those Waules and Featherstones;
I mean, for people like them, who don't want to spend anything.
And yet they hang about my uncle like vultures, and are afraid
of a farthing going away from their side of the family. But I
believe he hates them all."
The Mrs. Waule who was so far from being admirable in the eyes
of these distant connections, had happened to say this very morning
(not at all with a defiant air, but in a low, muffied, neutral tone,
as of a voice heard through cotton wool) that she did not wish "to
enjoy their good opinion." She was seated, as she observed, on her own
brother's hearth, and had been Jane Featherstone five-and-twenty years
before she had been Jane Waule, which entitled her to speak when her
own brother's name had been made free with by those who had no right to it.
"What are you driving at there?" said Mr. Featherstone,
holding his stick between his knees and settling his wig,
while he gave her a momentary sharp glance, which seemed
to react on him like a draught of cold air and set him coughing.
Mrs. Waule had to defer her answer till he was quiet again,
till Mary Garth had supplied him with fresh syrup, and he had begun
to rub the gold knob of his stick, looking bitterly at the fire.
It was a bright fire, but it made no difference to the chill-looking
purplish tint of Mrs. Waule's face, which was as neutral as her voice;
having mere chinks for eyes, and lips that hardly moved in speaking.
"The doctors can't master that cough, brother. It's just like what I have;
for I'm your own sister, constitution and everything. But, as I
was saying, it's a pity Mrs. Vincy's family can't be better conducted."
"Tchah! you said nothing o' the sort. You said somebody had made
free with my name."
"And no more than can be proved, if what everybody says is true.
My brother Solomon tells me it's the talk up and down in Middlemarch
how unsteady young Vincy is, and has been forever gambling at
billiards since home he came."
"Nonsense! What's a game at billiards? It's a good gentlemanly game;
and young Vincy is not a clodhopper. If your son John took
to billiards, now, he'd make a fool of himself."
"Your nephew John never took to billiards or any other game, brother,
and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody
says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Vincy
the father's pocket. For they say he's been losing money for years,
though nobody would think so, to see him go coursing and keeping open
house as they do. And I've heard say Mr. Bulstrode condemns Mrs. Vincy
beyond anything for her flightiness, and spoiling her children so."!
"What's Bulstrode to me? I don't bank with him."
"Well, Mrs. Bulstrode is Mr. Vincy's own sister, and they do say that
Mr. Vincy mostly trades on the Bank money; and you may see yourself,
brother, when a woman past forty has pink strings always flying,
and that light way of laughing at everything, it's very unbecoming.
But indulging your children is one thing, and finding money to pay
their debts is another. And it's openly said that young Vincy has
raised money on his expectations. I don't say what expectations.
Miss Garth hears me, and is welcome to tell again. I know young
people hang together."
"No, thank you, Mrs. Waule," said Mary Garth. "I dislike hearing
scandal too much to wish to repeat it."
Mr. Featherstone rubbed the knob of his stick and made a brief
convulsive show of laughter, which had much the same genuineness
as an old whist-player's chuckle over a bad hand. Still looking
at the fire, he said--
"And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn't got expectations? Such
a fine, spirited fellow is like enough to have 'em."
There was a slight pause before Mrs. Waule replied, and when she
did so, her voice seemed to be slightly moistened with tears,
though her face was still dry.
"Whether or no, brother, it is naturally painful to me and my brother
Solomon to hear your name made free with, and your complaint being such
as may carry you off sudden, and people who are no more Featherstones
than the Merry-Andrew at the fair, openly reckoning on your property
coming to THEM. And me your own sister, and Solomon your own
brother! And if that's to be it, what has it pleased the Almighty
to make families for?" Here Mrs. Waule's tears fell, but with moderation.
"Come, out with it, Jane!" said Mr. Featherstone, looking at her.
"You mean to say, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him
money on what he says he knows about my will, eh?"
"I never said so, brother" (Mrs. Waule's voice had again become dry
and unshaken). "It was told me by my brother Solomon last night when
he called coming from market to give me advice about the old wheat,
me being a widow, and my son John only three-and-twenty, though steady
beyond anything. And he had it from most undeniable authority,
and not one, but many."
"Stuff and nonsense! I don't believe a word of it. It's all a
got-up story. Go to the window, missy; I thought I heard a horse.
See if the doctor's coming."
"Not got up by me, brother, nor yet by Solomon, who, whatever else he
may be--and I don't deny he has oddities--has made his will and parted
his property equal between such kin as he's friends with; though,
for my part, I think there are times when some should be considered
more than others. But Solomon makes it no secret what he means to do."
"The more fool he!" said Mr. Featherstone, with some difficulty;
breaking into a severe fit of coughing that required Mary Garth
to stand near him, so that she did not find out whose horses they
were which presently paused stamping on the gravel before the door.
Before Mr. Featherstone's cough was quiet, Rosamond entered,
bearing up her riding-habit with much grace. She bowed ceremoniously
to Mrs. Waule, who said stiffly, "How do you do, miss?" smiled and
nodded silently to Mary, and remained standing till the coughing
should cease, and allow her uncle to notice her.
"Heyday, miss!" he said at last, "you have a fine color.
Where's Fred?"
"Seeing about the horses. He will be in presently."
"Sit down, sit down. Mrs. Waule, you'd better go."
Even those neighbors who had called Peter Featherstone an old fox,
had never accused him of being insincerely polite, and his sister
was quite used to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he
marked his sense of blood-relationship. Indeed, she herself was
accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving
agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families.
She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in her
usual muffled monotone, "Brother, I hope the new doctor will be
able to do something for you. Solomon says there's great talk
of his cleverness. I'm sure it's my wish you should be spared.
And there's none more ready to nurse you than your own sister
and your own nieces, if you'd only say the word. There's Rebecca,
and Joanna, and Elizabeth, you know."
"Ay, ay, I remember--you'll see I've remembered 'em all--all
dark and ugly. They'd need have some money, eh? There never was
any beauty in the women of our family; but the Featherstones have
always had some money, and the Waules too. Waule had money too.
A warm man was Waule. Ay, ay; money's a good egg; and if you
've got money to leave behind you, lay it in a warm nest.
Good-by, Mrs. Waule." Here Mr. Featherstone pulled at both sides
of his wig as if he wanted to deafen himself, and his sister went
away ruminating on this oracular speech of his. Notwithstanding her
jealousy of the Vincys and of Mary Garth, there remained as the
nethermost sediment in her mental shallows a persuasion that her
brother Peter Featherstone could never leave his chief property
away from his blood-relations:--else, why had the Almighty carried
off his two wives both childless, after he had gained so much
by manganese and things, turning up when nobody expected it?--and
why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waules and Powderells
all sit ting in the same pew for generations, and the Featherstone
pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death,
everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the
family? The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos;
and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable.
But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle,
which the younger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the
satisfactory details of his appearance.
"You two misses go away," said Mr. Featherstone. "I want to speak
to Fred."
"Come into my room, Rosamond, you will not mind the cold for a
little while," said Mary. The two girls had not only known each
other in childhood, but had been at the same provincial school
together (Mary as an articled pupil), so that they had many memories
in common, and liked very well to talk in private. Indeed, this
tete-a-tete was one of Rosamond's objects in coming to Stone Court.
Old Featherstone would not begin the dialogue till the door had
been closed. He continued to look at Fred with the same twinkle
and with one of his habitual grimaces, alternately screwing
and widening his mouth; and when he spoke, it was in a low tone,
which might be taken for that of an informer ready to be bought off,
rather than for the tone of an offended senior. He was not a man
to feel any strong moral indignation even on account of trespasses
against himself. It was natural that others should want to get
an advantage over him, but then, he was a little too cunning for them.
"So, sir, you've been paying ten per cent for money which you've
promised to pay off by mortgaging my land when I'm dead and gone,
eh? You put my life at a twelvemonth, say. But I can alter my
will yet."
Fred blushed. He had not borrowed money in that way, for excellent
reasons. But he was conscious of having spoken with some confidence
(perhaps with more than he exactly remembered) about his prospect
of getting Featherstone's land as a future means of paying present debts.
"I don't know what you refer to, sir. I have certainly never
borrowed any money on such an insecurity. Please to explain."
"No, sir, it's you must explain. I can alter my will yet, let me
tell you. I'm of sound mind--can reckon compound interest in my head,
and remember every fool's name as well as I could twenty years ago.
What the deuce? I'm under eighty. I say, you must contradict
this story."
"I have contradicted it, sir," Fred answered, with a touch
of impatience, not remembering that his uncle did not verbally
discriminate contradicting from disproving, though no one was further
from confounding the two ideas than old Featherstone, who often
wondered that so many fools took his own assertions for proofs.
"But I contradict it again. The story is a silly lie."
"Nonsense! you must bring dockiments. It comes from authority."
"Name the authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed
the money, and then I can disprove the story."
"It's pretty good authority, I think--a man who knows most
of what goes on in Middlemarch. It's that fine, religious,
charitable uncle o' yours. Come now!" Here Mr. Featherstone
had his peculiar inward shake which signified merriment.
"Mr. Bulstrode?"
"Who else, eh?"
"Then the story has grown into this lie out of some sermonizing
words he may have let fall about me. Do they pretend that he named
the man who lent me the money?"
"If there is such a man, depend upon it Bulstrode knows him.
But, supposing you only tried to get the money lent, and didn't
get it--Bulstrode 'ud know that too. You bring me a writing
from Bulstrode to say he doesn't believe you've ever promised
to pay your debts out o' my land. Come now!"
Mr. Featherstone's face required its whole scale of grimaces as a
muscular outlet to his silent triumph in the soundness of his faculties.
Fred felt himself to be in a disgusting dilemma.
"You must be joking, sir. Mr. Bulstrode, like other men, believes scores
of things that are not true, and he has a prejudice against me.
I could easily get him to write that he knew no facts in proof
of the report you speak of, though it might lead to unpleasantness.
But I could hardly ask him to write down what he believes or does
not believe about me." Fred paused an instant, and then added,
in politic appeal to his uncle's vanity, "That is hardly a thing
for a gentleman to ask." But he was disappointed in the result.
"Ay, I know what you mean. You'd sooner offend me than Bulstrode.
And what's he?--he's got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of.
A speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil
leaves off backing him. And that's what his religion means: he
wants God A'mighty to come in. That's nonsense! There's one
thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church--and
it's this: God A'mighty sticks to the land. He promises land,
and He gives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.
But you take the other side. You like Bulstrode and speckilation
better than Featherstone and land."
"I beg your pardon, sir," said Fred, rising, standing with his
back to the fire and beating his boot with his whip. "I like
neither Bulstrode nor speculation." He spoke rather sulkily,
feeling himself stalemated.
"Well, well, you can do without me, that's pretty clear,"
said old Featherstone, secretly disliking the possibility that Fred
would show himself at all independent. "You neither want a bit
of land to make a squire of you instead of a starving parson,
nor a lift of a hundred pound by the way. It's all one to me.
I can make five codicils if I like, and I shall keep my bank-notes
for a nest-egg. It's all one to me."
Fred colored again. Featherstone had rarely given him presents
of money, and at this moment it seemed almost harder to part with
the immediate prospect of bank-notes than with the more distant
prospect of the land.
"I am not ungrateful, sir. I never meant to show disregard for
any kind intentions you might have towards me. On the contrary."
"Very good. Then prove it. You bring me a letter from Bulstrode
saying he doesn't believe you've been cracking and promising
to pay your debts out o' my land, and then, if there's any
scrape you've got into, we'll see if I can't back you a bit.
Come now! That's a bargain. Here, give me your arm. I'll try
and walk round the room."
Fred, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be
a little sorry for the unloved, unvenerated old man, who with his
dropsical legs looked more than usually pitiable in walking.
While giving his arm, he thought that he should not himself
like to be an old fellow with his constitution breaking up;
and he waited good-temperedly, first before the window to hear
the wonted remarks about the guinea-fowls and the weather-cock,
and then before the scanty book-shelves, of which the chief glories
in dark calf were Josephus, Culpepper, Klopstock's "Messiah,"
and several volumes of the "Gentleman's Magazine."
"Read me the names o' the books. Come now! you're a college man."
Fred gave him the titles.
"What did missy want with more books? What must you be bringing
her more books for?"
"They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading."
"A little too fond," said Mr. Featherstone, captiously. "She was
for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that.
She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day,
I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.
You mind and not bring her any more books, do you hear?"
"Yes, sir, I hear." Fred had received this order before, and had
secretly disobeyed it. He intended to disobey it again.
"Ring the bell," said Mr. Featherstone; "I want missy to come down."
Rosamond and Mary had been talking faster than their male friends.
They did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table
near the window while Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil,
and applied little touches of her finger-tips to her hair--hair
of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow. Mary Garth
seemed all the plainer standing at an angle between the two
nymphs--the one in the glass, and the one out of it, who looked
at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the
most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put into them,
and deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should
happen to be less exquisite. Only a few children in Middlemarch
looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed
by her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men
in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the
best girl in the world, and some called her an angel. Mary Garth,
on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown;
her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low;
and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis,
that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar
temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to
feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsive ness
of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast
with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some
effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase.
At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that
perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended
to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in
quantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required.
Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually
renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong
current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her
that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.
Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of a good
human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly
worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming headgear.
Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made
her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty.
For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary's reigning virtue:
she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her
own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough
in her to laugh at herself. When she and Rosamond happened both to be
reflected in the glass, she said, laughingly--
"What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are
the most unbecoming companion."
"Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible
and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality,"
said Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving
towards the new view of her neck in the glass.
"You mean my beauty," said Mary, rather sardonically.
Rosamond thought, "Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill."
Aloud she said, "What have you been doing lately?"
"I? Oh, minding the house--pouring out syrup--pretending to be
amiable and contented--learning to have a bad opinion of everybody."
"It is a wretched life for you."
"No," said Mary, curtly, with a little toss of her head. "I think
my life is pleasanter than your Miss Morgan's."
"Yes; but Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young."
"She is interesting to herself, I suppose; and I am not at all sure
that everything gets easier as one gets older."
"No," said Rosamond, reflectively; "one wonders what such people do,
without any prospect. To be sure, there is religion as a support.
But," she added, dimpling, "it is very different with you,'Mary.
You may have an offer."
"Has any one told you he means to make me one?"
"Of course not. I mean, there is a gentleman who may fall in love
with you, seeing you almost every day."
A certain change in Mary's face was chiefly determined by the resolve
not to show any change.
"Does that always make people fall in love?" she answered, carelessly;
"it seems to me quite as often a reason for detesting each other."
"Not when they are interesting and agreeable. I hear that Mr. Lydgate
is both."
"Oh, Mr. Lydgate!" said Mary, with an unmistakable lapse
into indifference. "You want to know something about him,"
she added, not choosing to indulge Rosamond's indirectness.
"Merely, how you like him."
"There is no question of liking at present. My liking always wants
some little kindness to kindle it. I am not magnanimous enough
to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me."
"Is he so haughty?" said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction.
"You know that he is of good family?"
"No; he did not give that as a reason."
"Mary! you are the oddest girl. But what sort of looking man
is he? Describe him to me."
"How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory: heavy eyebrows,
dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid white
hands--and--let me see--oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief.
But you will see him. You know this is about the time of his visits."
Rosamond blushed a little, but said, meditatively, "I rather
like a haughty manner. I cannot endure a rattling young man."
"I did not tell you that Mr. Lydgate was haughty; but il y en
a pour tous les gouts, as little Mamselle used to say, and if any
girl can choose the particular sort of conceit she would like,
I should think it is you, Rosy."
"Haughtiness is not conceit; I call Fred conceited."
"I wish no one said any worse of him. He should be more careful.
Mrs. Waule has been telling uncle that Fred is very unsteady."
Mary spoke from a girlish impulse which got the better of her judgment.
There was a vague uneasiness associated with the word "unsteady"
which she hoped Rosamond might say something to dissipate.
But she purposely abstained from mentioning Mrs. Waule's more
special insinuation.
"Oh, Fred is horrid!" said Rosamond. She would not have allowed
herself so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary.
"What do you mean by horrid?"
"He is so idle, and makes papa so angry, and says he will not
take orders."
"I think Fred is quite right."
"How can you say he is quite right, Mary? I thought you had more
sense of religion."
"He is not fit to be a clergyman."
"But he ought to be fit."--"Well, then, he is not what he ought to be.
I know some other people who are in the same case."
"But no one approves of them. I should not like to marry a clergyman;
but there must be clergymen."
"It does not follow that Fred must be one."
"But when papa has been at the expense of educating him for it!
And only suppose, if he should have no fortune left him?"
"I can suppose that very well," said Mary, dryly.
"Then I wonder you can defend Fred," said Rosamond, inclined to push
this point.
"I don't defend him," said Mary, laughing; "I would defend any
parish from having him for a clergyman."
"But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different."
"Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet."
"It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. You always take
Fred's part."
"Why should I not take his part?" said Mary, lighting up.
"He would take mine. He is the only person who takes the least
trouble to oblige me."
"You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary," said Rosamond,
with her gravest mildness; "I would not tell mamma for the world."
"What would you not tell her?" said Mary, angrily.
"Pray do not go into a rage, Mary," said Rosamond, mildly as ever.
"If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her
that I would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going
to do so, that I am aware. He certainly never has asked me."
"Mary, you are always so violent."
"And you are always so exasperating."
"I? What can you blame me for?"
"Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is
the bell--I think we must go down."
"I did not mean to quarrel," said Rosamond, putting on her hat.
"Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get
into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"
"Am I to repeat what you have said?" "Just as you please. I never
say what I am afraid of having repeated. But let us go down."
Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long
enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him,
and she herself was-so kind as to propose a second favorite song
of his--"Flow on, thou shining river"--after she had sung "Home,
sweet home" (which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach
approved of the sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls,
and also as fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing
for a song.
Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance,
and assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird's,
when Mr. Lydgate's horse passed the window.
His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged
patient--who can hardly believe that medicine would not "set him up"
if the doctor were only clever enough--added to his general disbelief
in Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this
vision of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously
to introduce as his niece, though he had never thought it worth
while to speak of Mary Garth in that light. Nothing escaped
Lydgate in Rosamond's graceful behavior: how delicately she waived
the notice which the old man's want of taste had thrust upon her
by a quiet gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion,
but showing them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she
addressed herself with so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate,
after quickly examining Mary more fully than he had done before,
saw an adorable kindness in Rosamond's eyes. But Mary from some
cause looked rather out of temper.
"Miss Rosy has been singing me a song--you've nothing to say
against that, eh, doctor?" said Mr. Featherstone. "I like it
better than your physic."
"That has made me forget how the time was going," said Rosamond,
rising to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing,
so that her flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection
above-her riding-habit. "Fred, we must really go."
"Very good," said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being
in the best spirits, and wanted to get away.
"Miss Vincy is a musician?" said Lydgate, following her with his eyes.
(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness
that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts
that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character,
and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
"The best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound," said Mr. Featherstone,
"let the next be who she will. Eh, Fred? Speak up for your sister."
"I'm afraid I'm out of court, sir. My evidence would be good
for nothing."
"Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle," said Rosamond,
with a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at
a distance.
Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip
before she did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed
and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their
eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at
by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.
I think Lydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond
blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment. After that,
she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of stupidity
her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with him.
Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called
falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.
Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had
woven a little future, of which something like this scene was
the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging
to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus,
have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind,
against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger
was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had
always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher,
and who had no connections at all like her own: of late, indeed,
the construction seemed to demand that he should somehow be
related to a baronet. Now that she and the stranger had met,
reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond
could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life.
She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she
held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen
in love at first sight of her. These things happened so often
at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion
showed all the better for it? Rosamond, though no older than Mary,
was rather used to being fallen in love with; but she, for her part,
had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both
fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly
corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch,
carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family,
and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven,
rank: a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful
to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly,
and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than
any fancied "might-be" such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.
Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied
and inclined to be silent. Rosamond, whose basis for her structure
had the usual airy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and
realistic imagination when the foundation had been once presupposed;
and before they had ridden a mile she was far on in the costume
and introductions of her wedded life, having determined on her
house in Middle-march, and foreseen the visits she would pay
to her husband's high-bred relatives at a distance, whose finished
manners she could appropriate as thoroughly as she had done
her school accomplishments, preparing herself thus for vaguer
elevations which might ultimately come. There was nothing financial,
still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared about what were
considered refinements, and not about the money that was to pay for them.
Fred's mind, on the other hand, was busy with an anxiety which
even his ready hopefulness could not immediately quell. He saw
no way of eluding Featherstone's stupid demand without incurring
consequences which he liked less even than the task of fulfilling it.
His father was already out of humor with him, and would be still
more so if he were the occasion of any additional coolness between
his own family and the Bulstrodes. Then, he himself hated having
to go and speak to his uncle Bulstrode, and perhaps after drinking
wine he had said many foolish things about Featherstone's property,
and these had been magnified by report. Fred felt that he made
a wretched figure as a fellow who bragged about expectations from
a queer old miser like Featherstone, and went to beg for certificates
at his bidding. But--those expectations! He really had them,
and he saw no agreeable alternative if he gave them up; besides,
he had lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old
Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it off. The whole affair
was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations
were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he
would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.
Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic bitterness.
To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable
heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and
Vyan--certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow,
with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode's name
in the matter was a fiction of old Featherstone's; nor could this
have made any difference to his position. He saw plainly enough
that the old man wanted to exercise his power by tormenting him
a little, and also probably to get some satisfaction out of seeing
him on unpleasant terms with Bulstrode. Fred fancied that he saw
to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone's soul, though in reality half
what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations.
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young
gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
Fred's main point of debate with himself was, whether he should tell
his father, or try to get through the affair without his father's
knowledge. It was probably Mrs. Waule who had been talking about him;
and if Mary Garth had repeated Mrs. Waule's report to Rosamond,
it would be sure to reach his father, who would as surely question
him about it. He said to Rosamond, as they slackened their pace--
"Rosy, did Mary tell you that Mrs. Waule had said anything about me?"
"Yes, indeed, she did."
"What?"
"That you were very unsteady."
"Was that all?"
"I should think that was enough, Fred."
"You are sure she said no more?"
"Mary mentioned nothing else. But really, Fred, I think you ought
to be ashamed."
"Oh, fudge! Don't lecture me. What did Mary say about it?"
"I am not obliged to tell you. You care so very much what Mary says,
and you are too rude to allow me to speak."
"Of course I care what Mary says. She is the best girl I know."
"I should never have thought she was a girl to fall in love with."
"How do you know what men would fall in love with? Girls never know."
"At least, Fred, let me advise YOU not to fall in love with her,
for she says she would not marry you if you asked her."
"She might have waited till I did ask her."
"I knew it would nettle you, Fred."
"Not at all. She would not have said so if you had not provoked her."
Before reaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole
affair as simply as possible to his father, who might perhaps take
on himself the unpleasant business of speaking to Bulstrode.
BOOK II.
OLD AND YOUNG.
CHAPTER XIII.
1st Gent. How class your man?--as better than the most,
Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?
2d Gent. Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books
The drifted relics of all time.
As well sort them at once by size and livery:
Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf
Will hardly cover more diversity
Than all your labels cunningly devised
To class your unread authors.
In consequence of what he had heard from Fred, Mr. Vincy determined
to speak with Mr. Bulstrode in his private room at the Bank
at half-past one, when he was usually free from other callers.
But a visitor had come in at one o'clock, and Mr. Bulstrode had so
much to say to him, that there was little chance of the interview
being over in half an hour. The banker's speech was fluent,
but it was also copious, and he used up an appreciable amount
of time in brief meditative pauses. Do not imagine his sickly
aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired sort: he had a pale
blond skin, thin gray-besprinkled brown hair, light-gray eyes,
and a large forehead. Loud men called his subdued tone an undertone,
and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with openness;
though there seems to be no reason why a loud man should not be given
to concealment of anything except his own voice, unless it can be
shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candor in the lungs.
Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening,
and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those
persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking
the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected
to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned
on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of
satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light
and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.
Hence Mr. Bulstrode's close attention was not agreeable to the
publicans and sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by some
to his being a Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical.
Less superficial reasoners among them wished to know who his father
and grandfather were, observing that five-and-twenty years ago nobody
had ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch. To his present visitor,
Lydgate, the scrutinizing look was a matter of indifference:
he simply formed an unfavorable opinion of the banker's constitution,
and concluded that he had an eager inward life with little enjoyment
of tangible things.
"I shall be exceedingly obliged if you will look in on me here
occasionally, Mr. Lydgate," the banker observed, after a brief pause.
"If, as I dare to hope, I have the privilege of finding you a
valuable coadjutor in the interesting matter of hospital management,
there will be many questions which we shall need to discuss
in private. As to the new hospital, which is nearly finished,
I shall consider what you have said about the advantages of the special
destination for fevers. The decision will rest with me, for though
Lord Medlicote has given the land and timber for the building,
he is not disposed to give his personal attention to the object."
"There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town
like this," said Lydgate. "A fine fever hospital in addition
to the old infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here,
when once we get our medical reforms; and what would do more for
medical education than the spread of such schools over the country?
A born provincial man who has a grain of public spirit as well as a
few ideas, should do what he can to resist the rush of everything
that is a little better than common towards London. Any valid
professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field,
in the provinces."
One of Lydgate's gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous,
yet capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment.
About his ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless
expectation of success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity
much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which
he had had no experience. But this proud openness was made lovable
by an expression of unaffected good-will. Mr. Bulstrode perhaps liked
him the better for the difference between them in pitch and manners;
he certainly liked him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a stranger
in Middlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person!--
even begin to be a better man.
"I shall rejoice to furnish your zeal with fuller opportunities,"
Mr. Bulstrode answered; "I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence
of my new hospital, should a maturer knowledge favor that issue,
for I am determined that so great an object shall not be shackled
by our two physicians. Indeed, I am encouraged to consider your
advent to this town as a gracious indication that a more manifest
blessing is now to be awarded to my efforts, which have hitherto
been much with stood. With regard to the old infirmary, we have
gained the initial point--I mean your election. And now I hope
you will not shrink from incurring a certain amount of jealousy
and dislike from your professional brethren by presenting yourself
as a reformer."
"I will not profess bravery," said Lydgate, smiling, "but I
acknowledge a good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I should not
care for my profession, if I did not believe that better methods
were to be found and enforced there as well as everywhere else."
"The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,"
said the banker. "I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status,
for our medical men are most of them connected with respectable
townspeople here. My own imperfect health has induced me to give
some attention to those palliative resources which the divine
mercy has placed within our reach. I have consulted eminent men
in the metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardness
under which medical treatment labors in our provincial districts."
"Yes;--with our present medical rules and education, one must
be satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner.
As to all the higher questions which determine the starting-point
of a diagnosis--as to the philosophy of medial evidence--any glimmering
of these can only come from a scientific culture of which country
practitioners have usually no more notion than the man in the moon."
Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form
which Lydgate had given to his agreement not quite suited to
his comprehension. Under such circumstances a judicious man changes
the topic and enters on ground where his own gifts may be more useful.
"I am aware," he said, "that the peculiar bias of medical
ability is towards material means. Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate,
I hope we shall not vary in sentiment as to a measure in which
you are not likely to be actively concerned, but in which your
sympathetic concurrence may be an aid to me. You recognize,
I hope; the existence of spiritual interests in your patients?"
"Certainly I do. But those words are apt to cover different
meanings to different minds."
"Precisely. And on such subjects wrong teaching is as fatal as
no teaching. Now a point which I have much at heart to secure is
a new regulation as to clerical attendance at the old infirmary.
The building stands in Mr. Farebrother's parish. You know
Mr. Farebrother?"
"I have seen him. He gave me his vote. I must call to thank him.
He seems a very bright pleasant little fellow. And I understand he
is a naturalist."
"Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate.
I suppose there is not a clergyman in this country who has
greater talents." Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative.
"I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent
in Middlemarch," said Lydgate, bluntly.
"What I desire," Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious,
"is that Mr. Farebrother's attendance at the hospital should be
superseded by the appointment of a chaplain--of Mr. Tyke, in fact--
and that no other spiritual aid should be called in."
"As a medial man I could have no opinion on such a point unless I knew
Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which
he was applied." Lydgate smiled, but he was bent on being circumspect.
"Of course you cannot enter fully into the merits of this measure
at present. But"--here Mr. Bulstrode began to speak with a more
chiselled emphasis--"the subject is likely to be referred to
the medical board of the infirmary, and what I trust I may ask
of you is, that in virtue of the cooperation between us which I
now look forward to, you will not, so far as you are concerned,
be influenced by my opponents in this matter."
"I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes," said Lydgate.
"The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession."
"My responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, is of a broader kind.
With me, indeed, this question is one of sacred accountableness;
whereas with my opponents, I have good reason to say that it
is an occasion for gratifying a spirit of worldly opposition.
But I shall not therefore drop one iota of my convictions, or cease
to identify myself with that truth which an evil generation hates.
I have devoted myself to this object of hospital-improvement, but I
will boldly confess to you, Mr. Lydgate, that I should have no interest
in hospitals if I believed that nothing more was concerned therein
than the cure of mortal diseases. I have another ground of action,
and in the face of persecution I will not conceal it."
Mr. Bulstrode's voice had become a loud and agitated whisper as he
said the last words.
"There we certainly differ," said Lydgate. But he was not sorry
that the door was now opened, and Mr. Vincy was announced.
That florid sociable personage was become more interesting to him
since he had seen Rosamond. Not that, like her, he had been weaving
any future in which their lots were united; but a man naturally
remembers a charming girl with pleasure, and is willing to dine
where he may see her again. Before he took leave, Mr. Vincy
had given that invitation which he had been "in no hurry about,"
for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that she thought her uncle
Featherstone had taken the new doctor into great favor.
Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out
a glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box.
"I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?"
"No, no; I've no opinion of that system. Life wants padding,"
said Mr. Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory. "However," he
went on, accenting the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance,
"what I came here to talk about was a little affair of my
young scapegrace, Fred's."
"That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite
as different views as on diet, Vincy."
"I hope not this time." (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.)
"The fact is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. Somebody has
been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man,
to try to set him against Fred. He's very fond of Fred, and is
likely to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good
as told Fred that he means to leave him his land, and that makes
other people jealous."
"Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from
me as to the course you have pursued with your eldest son. It was
entirely from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church:
with a family of three sons and four daughters, you were not
warranted in devoting money to an expensive education which has
succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idle habits.
You are now reaping the consequences."
To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely
shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.
When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready,
in the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on
politics generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance
to the framework of things which seems to throw questions of private
conduct into the background. And this particular reproof irritated
him more than any other. It was eminently superfluous to him to be
told that he was reaping the consequences. But he felt his neck
under Bulstrode's yoke; and though he usually enjoyed kicking,
he was anxious to refrain from that relief.
"As to that, Bulstrode, it's no use going back. I'm not one of your
pattern men, and I don't pretend to be. I couldn't foresee everything
in the trade; there wasn't a finer business in Middlemarch than ours,
and the lad was clever. My poor brother was in the Church, and would
have done well--had got preferment already, but that stomach fever
took him off: else he might have been a dean by this time. I think I
was justified in what I tried to do for Fred. If you come to religion,
it seems to me a man shouldn't want to carve out his meat to an ounce
beforehand:--one must trust a little to Providence and be generous.
It's a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little:
in my opinion, it's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance."
"I don't wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy,
when I say that what you have been uttering just now is one mass
of worldliness and inconsistent folly."
"Very well," said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions,
"I never professed to be anything but worldly; and, what's more,
I don't see anybody else who is not worldly. I suppose you don't
conduct business on what you call unworldly principles.
The only difference I see is that one worldliness is a little bit
honester than another."
"This kind of discussion is unfruitful, Vincy," said Mr. Bulstrode,
who, finishing his sandwich, had thrown himself back in his chair,
and shaded his eyes as if weary. "You had some more particular business."
"Yes, yes. The long and short of it is, somebody has told
old Featherstone, giving you as the authority, that Fred has been
borrowing or trying to borrow money on the prospect of his land.
Of course you never said any such nonsense. But the old fellow will
insist on it that Fred should bring him a denial in your handwriting;
that is, just a bit of a note saying you don't believe a word
of such stuff, either of his having borrowed or tried to borrow
in such a fool's way. I suppose you can have no objection to do that."
"Pardon me. I have an objection. I am by no means sure that your son,
in his recklessness and ignorance--I will use no severer word--
has not tried to raise money by holding out his future prospects,
or even that some one may not have been foolish enough to supply him
on so vague a presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending
as of other folly in the world."
"But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money
on the pretence of any understanding about his uncle's land.
He is not a liar. I don't want to make him better than he is.
I have blown him up well--nobody can say I wink at what he does.
But he is not a liar. And I should have thought--but I may be wrong--
that there was no religion to hinder a man from believing the best
of a young fellow, when you don't know worse. It seems to me it would
be a poor sort of religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing
to say you don't believe such harm of him as you've got no good reason
to believe."
"I am not at all sure that I should be befriending your son by smoothing
his way to the future possession of Featherstone's property.
I cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply
as a harvest for this world. You do not like to hear these things,
Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called upon to tell you that I
have no motive for furthering such a disposition of property
as that which you refer to. I do not shrink from saying that it
will not tend to your son's eternal welfare or to the glory of God.
Why then should you expect me to pen this kind of affidavit,
which has no object but to keep up a foolish partiality and secure
a foolish bequest?"
"If you mean to hinder everybody from having money but saints
and evangelists, you must give up some profitable partnerships,
that's all I can say," Mr. Vincy burst out very bluntly.
"It may be for the glory of God, but it is not for the glory of the
Middlemarch trade, that Plymdale's house uses those blue and green
dyes it gets from the Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk,
that's all I know about it. Perhaps if other people knew so much
of the profit went to the glory of God, they might like it better.
But I don't mind so much about that--I could get up a pretty row,
if I chose."
Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered. "You pain me
very much by speaking in this way, Vincy. I do not expect you
to understand my grounds of action--it is not an easy thing even
to thread a path for principles in the intricacies of the world--
still less to make the thread clear for the careless and the scoffing.
You must remember, if you please, that I stretch my tolerance
towards you as my wife's brother, and that it little becomes you
to complain of me as withholding material help towards the worldly
position of your family. I must remind you that it is not your
own prudence or judgment that has enabled you to keep your place
in the trade."
"Very likely not; but you have been no loser by my trade yet,"
said Mr. Vincy, thoroughly nettled (a result which was seldom much
retarded by previous resolutions). "And when you married Harriet,
I don't see how you could expect that our families should not hang
by the same nail. If you've changed your mind, and want my family
to come down in the world, you'd better say so. I've never changed;
I'm a plain Churchman now, just as I used to be before doctrines
came up. I take the world as I find it, in trade and everything else.
I'm contented to be no worse than my neighbors. But if you want
us to come down in the world, say so. I shall know better what to
do then."
"You talk unreasonably. Shall you come down in the world for want
of this letter about your son?"
"Well, whether or not, I consider it very unhandsome of you to refuse it.
Such doings may be lined with religion, but outside they have
a nasty, dog-in-the-manger look. You might as well slander Fred:
it comes pretty near to it when you refuse to say you didn't set
a slander going. It's this sort of thing---this tyrannical spirit,
wanting to play bishop and banker everywhere--it's this sort of thing
makes a man's name stink."
"Vincy, if you insist on quarrelling with me, it will be exceedingly
painful to Harriet as well as myself," said Mr. Bulstrode,
with a trifle more eagerness and paleness than usual.
"I don't want to quarrel. It's for my interest--and perhaps
for yours too--that we should be friends. I bear you no grudge;
I think no worse of you than I do of other people. A man who half
starves himself, and goes the length in family prayers, and so on,
that you do, believes in his religion whatever it may be: you could
turn over your capital just as fast with cursing and swearing:--
plenty of fellows do. You like to be master, there's no denying that;
you must be first chop in heaven, else you won't like it much.
But you're my sister's husband, and we ought to stick together;
and if I know Harriet, she'll consider it your fault if we quarrel
because you strain at a gnat in this way, and refuse to do Fred a
good turn. And I don't mean to say I shall bear it well. I consider
it unhandsome."
Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily
at his brother-in-law, meaning to imply a demand for a decisive answer.
This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing
Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection
of himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer's
mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men;
and perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene
would end. But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its
waters even in the rain, when they are worse than useless;
and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.
It was not in Mr. Bulstrode's nature to comply directly in consequence
of uncomfortable suggestions. Before changing his course,
he always needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance
with his habitual standard. He said, at last--
"I will reflect a little, Vincy. I will mention the subject
to Harriet. I shall probably send you a letter."
"Very well. As soon as you can, please. I hope it will all be
settled before I see you to-morrow."
CHAPTER XIV.
"Follows here the strict receipt
For that sauce to dainty meat,
Named Idleness, which many eat
By preference, and call it sweet:
First watch for morsels, like a hound
Mix well with buffets, stir them round
With good thick oil of flatteries,
And froth with mean self-lauding lies.
Serve warm: the vessels you must choose
To keep it in are dead men's shoes."
Mr. Bulstrode's consultation of Harriet seemed to have had the effect
desired by Mr. Vincy, for early the next morning a letter came
which Fred could carry to Mr. Featherstone as the required testimony.
The old gentleman was staying in bed on account of the cold weather,
and as Mary Garth was not to be seen in the sitting-room, Fred
went up-stairs immediately and presented the letter to his uncle,
who, propped up comfortably on a bed-rest, was not less able than
usual to enjoy his consciousness of wisdom in distrusting and
frustrating mankind. He put on his spectacles to read the letter,
pursing up his lips and drawing down their corners.
"Under the circumstances I will not decline to state my conviction--
tchah! what fine words the fellow puts! He's as fine as an auctioneer--
that your son Frederic has not obtained any advance of money
on bequests promised by Mr. Featherstone--promised? who said I
had ever promised? I promise nothing--I shall make codicils as long
as I like--and that considering the nature of such a proceeding,
it is unreasonable to presume that a young man of sense and character
would attempt it--ah, but the gentleman doesn't say you are a
young man of sense and character, mark you that, sir!--As to my own
concern with any report of such a nature, I distinctly affirm that I
never made any statement to the effect that your son had borrowed money
on any property that might accrue to him on Mr. Featherstone's demise--
bless my heart! `property'--accrue--demise! Lawyer Standish is
nothing to him. He couldn't speak finer if he wanted to borrow.
Well," Mr. Featherstone here looked over his spectacles at Fred,
while he handed back the letter to him with a contemptuous gesture, "you
don't suppose I believe a thing because Bulstrode writes it out fine, eh?"
Fred colored. "You wished to have the letter, sir. I should
think it very likely that Mr. Bulstrode's denial is as good
as the authority which told you what he denies."
"Every bit. I never said I believed either one or the other.
And now what d' you expect?" said Mr. Featherstone, curtly, keeping on
his spectacles, but withdrawing his hands under his wraps.
"I expect nothing, sir." Fred with difficulty restrained himself
from venting his irritation. "I came to bring you the letter.
If you like I will bid you good morning."
"Not yet, not yet. Ring the bell; I want missy to come."
It was a servant who came in answer to the bell.
"Tell missy to come!" said Mr. Featherstone, impatiently. "What business
had she to go away?" He spoke in the same tone when Mary came.
"Why couldn't you sit still here till I told you to go? want
my waistcoat now. I told you always to put it on the bed."
Mary's eyes looked rather red, as if she had been crying. It was
clear that Mr. Featherstone was in one of his most snappish humors
this morning, and though Fred had now the prospect of receiving
the much-needed present of money, he would have preferred being free
to turn round on the old tyrant and tell him that Mary Garth was
too good to be at his beck. Though Fred had risen as she entered
the room, she had barely noticed him, and looked as if her nerves
were quivering with the expectation that something would be thrown
at her. But she never had anything worse than words to dread.
When she went to reach the waistcoat from a peg, Fred went up
to her and said, "Allow me."
"Let it alone! You bring it, missy, and lay it down here,"
said Mr. Featherstone. "Now you go away again till I call you,"
he added, when the waistcoat was laid down by him. It was usual
with him to season his pleasure in showing favor to one person
by being especially disagreeable to another, and Mary was always
at hand to furnish the condiment. When his own relatives came
she was treated better. Slowly he took out a bunch of keys from
the waistcoat pocket, and slowly he drew forth a tin box which was
under the bed-clothes.
"You expect I am going to give you a little fortune, eh?" he said,
looking above his spectacles and pausing in the act of opening
the lid.
"Not at all, sir. You were good enough to speak of making me
a present the other day, else, of course, I should not have
thought of the matter." But Fred was of a hopeful disposition,
and a vision had presented itself of a sum just large enough
to deliver him from a certain anxiety. When Fred got into debt,
it always seemed to him highly probable that something or other--
he did not necessarily conceive what--would come to pass enabling
him to pay in due time. And now that the providential occurrence
was apparently close at hand, it would have been sheer absurdity
to think that the supply would be short of the need: as absurd
as a faith that believed in half a miracle for want of strength
to believe in a whole one.
The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes-one after the other,
laying them down flat again, while Fred leaned back in his chair,
scorning to look eager. He held himself to be a gentleman at heart,
and did not like courting an old fellow for his money. At last,
Mr. Featherstone eyed him again over his spectacles and presented him
with a little sheaf of notes: Fred could see distinctly that there
were but five, as the less significant edges gaped towards him.
But then, each might mean fifty pounds. He took them, saying--
"I am very much obliged to you, sir," and was going to roll them
up without seeming to think of their value. But this did not suit
Mr. Featherstone, who was eying him intently.
"Come, don't you think it worth your while to count 'em? You take
money like a lord; I suppose you lose it like one."
"I thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, sir. But I
shall be very happy to count them."
Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them. For they
actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness
had decided that they must be. What can the fitness of things mean,
if not their fitness to a man's expectations? Failing this,
absurdity and atheism gape behind him. The collapse for Fred was severe
when he found that he held no more than five twenties, and his share
in the higher education of this country did not seem to help him.
Nevertheless he said, with rapid changes in his fair complexion--
"It is very handsome of you, sir."
"I should think it is," said Mr. Featherstone, locking his box
and replacing it, then taking off his spectacles deliberately,
and at length, as if his inward meditation had more deeply
convinced him, repeating, "I should think it handsome."
"I assure you, sir, I am very grateful," said Fred, who had had
time to recover his cheerful air.
"So you ought to be. You want to cut a figure in the world, and I
reckon Peter Featherstone is the only one you've got to trust to."
Here the old man's eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction
in the consciousness that this smart young fellow relied upon him,
and that the smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing so.
"Yes, indeed: I was not born to very splendid chances. Few men have
been more cramped than I have been," said Fred, with some sense of
surprise at his own virtue, considering how hardly he was dealt with.
"It really seems a little too bad to have to ride a broken-winded hunter,
and see men, who, are not half such good judges as yourself,
able to throw away any amount of money on buying bad bargains."
"Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now. Eighty pound
is enough for that, I reckon--and you'll have twenty pound over
to get yourself out of any little scrape," said Mr. Featherstone,
chuckling slightly.
"You are very good, sir," said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast
between the words and his feeling.
"Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode.
You won't get much out of his spekilations, I think. He's got
a pretty strong string round your father's leg, by what I hear, eh?"
"My father never tells me anything about his affairs, sir."
"Well, he shows some sense there. But other people find 'em out
without his telling. HE'LL never have much to leave you:
he'll most-like die without a will--he's the sort of man to do it--
let 'em make him mayor of Middlemarch as much as they like.
But you won't get much by his dying without a will, though you
ARE the eldest son."
Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable
before. True, he had never before given him quite so much money at once.
"Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode's, sir?" said Fred,
rising with the letter as if he would put it in the fire.
"Ay, ay, I don't want it. It's worth no money to me."
Fred carried the letter to the fire, and thrust the poker through
it with much zest. He longed to get out of the room, but he was
a little ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle,
to run away immediately after pocketing the money. Presently, the
farm-bailiff came up to give his master a report, and Fred, to his
unspeakable relief, was dismissed with the injunction to come again soon.
He had longed not only to be set free from his uncle, but also
to find Mary Garth. She was now in her usual place by the fire,
with sewing in her hands and a book open on the little table
by her side. Her eyelids had lost some of their redness now,
and she had her usual air of self-command.
"Am I wanted up-stairs?" she said, half rising as Fred entered.
"No; I am only dismissed, because Simmons is gone up."
Mary sat down again, and resumed her work. She was certainly
treating him with more indifference than usual: she did not know
how affectionately indignant he had felt on her behalf up-stairs.
"May I stay here a little, Mary, or shall I bore you?"
"Pray sit down," said Mary; "you will not be so heavy a bore
as Mr. John Waule, who was here yesterday, and he sat down without
asking my leave."
"Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you."
"I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious
things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition
of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind
to her, and to whom she is grateful. I should have thought that I,
at least, might have been safe from all that. I have no ground
for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near
me is in love with me."
Mary did not mean to betray any feeling, but in spite of herself
she ended in a tremulous tone of vexation.
"Confound John Waule! I did not mean to make you angry. I didn't
know you had any reason for being grateful to me. I forgot what
a great service you think it if any one snuffs a candle for you.
Fred also had his pride, and was not going to show that he knew
what had called forth this outburst of Mary's.
"Oh, I am not angry, except with the ways of the world. I do
like to be spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel
as if I could understand a little more than I ever hear even from
young gentlemen who have been to college." Mary had recovered,
and she spoke with a suppressed rippling under-current of laughter
pleasant to hear.
"I don't care how merry you are at my expense this morning,"
said Fred, "I thought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It
is a shame you should stay here to be bullied in that way."
"Oh, I have an easy life--by comparison. I have tried being
a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond
of wandering on its own way. I think any hardship is better
than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really
doing it. Everything here I can do as well as any one else could;
perhaps better than some--Rosy, for example. Though she is just the
sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned with ogres in fairy tales."
"ROSY!" cried Fred, in a tone of profound brotherly scepticism.
"Come, Fred!" said Mary, emphatically; "you have no right to be
so critical."
"Do you mean anything particular--just now?"
"No, I mean something general--always."
"Oh, that I am idle and extravagant. Well, I am not fit to be
a poor man. I should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich."
"You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it
has not pleased God to call you," said Mary, laughing.
"Well, I couldn't do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you
could do yours as a governess. You ought to have a little
fellow-feeling there, Mary."
"I never said you ought to be a clergyman. There are other sorts
of work. It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some
course and act accordingly."
"So I could, if--" Fred broke off, and stood up, leaning against
the mantel-piece.
"If you were sure you should not have a fortune?"
"I did not say that. You want to quarrel with me. It is too bad
of you to be guided by what other people say about me."
"How can I want to quarrel with you? I should be quarrelling with
all my new books," said Mary, lifting the volume on the table.
"However naughty you may be to other people, you are good to me."
"Because I like you better than any one else. But I know you
despise me."
"Yes, I do--a little," said Mary, nodding, with a smile.
"You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions
about everything."
"Yes, I should." Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly
mistress of the situation. When a conversation has taken a wrong turn
for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.
This was what Fred Vincy felt.
"I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known--
ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some
new fellow who strikes a girl."
"Let me see," said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly;
"I must go back on my experience. There is Juliet--she seems
an example of what you say. But then Ophelia had probably known
Hamlet a long while; and Brenda Troil--she had known Mordaunt Merton
ever since they were children; but then he seems to have been
an estimable young man; and Minna was still more deeply in love
with Cleveland, who was a stranger. Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor;
but then she did not fall in love with him. And there are Olivia
and Sophia Primrose, and Corinne--they may be said to have fallen
in love with new men. Altogether, my experience is rather mixed."
Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers
was very dear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear
windows where observation sat laughingly. He was certainly an
affectionate fellow, and as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown
in love with his old playmate, notwithstanding that share in the higher
education of the country which had exalted his views of rank and income.
"When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could
be a better fellow--could do anything--I mean, if he were sure
of being loved in return."
"Not of the least use in the world for him to say he COULD
be better. Might, could, would--they are contemptible auxiliaries."
"I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some
one woman to love him dearly."
"I think the goodness should come before he expects that."
"You know better, Mary. Women don't love men for their goodness."
"Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad."
"It is hardly fair to say I am bad."
"I said nothing at all about you."
"I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say
that you love me--if you will not promise to marry me--I mean,
when I am able to marry."
"If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly
not promise ever to marry you."
"I think that is quite wicked, Mary. If you love me, you ought
to promise to marry me."
"On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you
even if I did love you."
"You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife.
Of course: I am but three-and-twenty."
"In that last point you will alter. But I am not so sure of any
other alteration. My father says an idle man ought not to exist,
much less, be married."
"Then I am to blow my brains out?"
"No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your
examination. I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully easy."
"That is all very fine. Anything is easy to him. Not that
cleverness has anything to do with it. I am ten times cleverer
than many men who pass."
"Dear me!" said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; "that accounts
for the curates like Mr. Crowse. Divide your cleverness by ten,
and the quotient--dear me!--is able to take a degree. But that only
shows you are ten times more idle than the others."
"Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?"
"That is not the question--what I want you to do. You have a
conscience of your own, I suppose. There! there is Mr. Lydgate.
I must go and tell my uncle."
"Mary," said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; "if you will not
give me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better."
"I will not give you any encouragement," said Mary, reddening.
"Your friends would dislike it, and so would mine. My father would
think it a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt,
and would not work!"
Fred was stung, and released her hand. She walked to the door,
but there she turned and said: "Fred, you have always been so good,
so generous to me. I am not ungrateful. But never speak to me in
that way again."
"Very well," said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip.
His complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white.
Like many a plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly
in love, and with a plain girl, who had no money! But having
Mr. Featherstone's land in the background, and a persuasion that,
let Mary say what she would, she really did care for him, Fred was
not utterly in despair.
When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking her
to keep them for him. "I don't want to spend that money, mother.
I want it to pay a debt with. So keep it safe away from my fingers."
"Bless you, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy. She doted on her eldest son
and her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two
naughtiest children. The mother's eyes are not always deceived
in their partiality: she at least can best judge who is the tender,
filial-hearted child. And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.
Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him
particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability
to spend the hundred pounds. For the creditor to whom he owed
a hundred and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill
signed by Mary's father.
CHAPTER XV.
"Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.
"Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:
"Lo! she turns--immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight's aged truth--
Many-named Nature!"
A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take
his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness
is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and
digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially
in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history,
where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with
us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived
when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our
needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked
slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger
after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would
be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots,
and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light
I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not
dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known
to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those
who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch.
For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded,
envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at
least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--
known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions.
There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether
a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an
impression was significant of great things being expected from him.
For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood
to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the
most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness
was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients'
immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except
that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong; each lady
who saw medical truth in Wrench and "the strengthening treatment"
regarding Toller and "the lowering system" as medical perdition.
For the heroic times of copious bleeding and blistering had not
yet departed, still less the times of thorough-going theory,
when disease in general was called by some bad name, and treated
accordingly without shilly-shally--as if, for example, it were
to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with
blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The strengtheners
and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody's opinion,
which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.
Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate
could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,
who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme,
and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat,
there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather
more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch.
And this was true. He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many
men are not quite common--at which they are hopeful of achievement,
resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit
in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon,
if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.
He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school.
His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three
children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education,
it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing
him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the
score of family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who early
get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something
particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake,
and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any
subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on
a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips
listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen
to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow,
and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five
minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on:
if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's
Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.
Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running
and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true
of him at ten years of age; he had then read through "Chrysal,
or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was neither milk for babes,
nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already
occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for though he
"did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them.
It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked,
but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.
He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark
had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed
to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the
conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than
was necessary for mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional
result of expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats,
and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation,
a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for
a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless,
indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs
and dingy labels--the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had
never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them.
They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get
them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from
the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude,
just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he
opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage
that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much
acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae
were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light
startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted
mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course
left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics,
but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection
with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed,
so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at
his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself
how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold.
But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from
his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of.
endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight
by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge.
From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.
We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes
to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally
parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that
we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's
"makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging
of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested
in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed
with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?
In the story of this passion, too, the development varies:
sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and
final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with
the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude
of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course
determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats,
there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own
deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming
to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross,
is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their
ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor
of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked
like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.
Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their
gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly:
you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them,
when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions:
or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was
the better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took
the form of a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief
in his bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation
in makeshift called his 'prentice days; and he carried to his
studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the
medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world;
presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art;
offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest
and the social good. Lydgate's nature demanded this combination:
he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of
fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study.
He cared not only for "cases," but for John and Elizabeth,
especially Elizabeth.
There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform,
and gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject
its venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor
of genuine though undemanded qualifications. He went to study
in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again
he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner,
and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical
knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well
as of the general advance: he would keep away from the range of
London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity,
however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the independent value of
his work. For it must be remembered that this was a dark period;
and in spite of venerable colleges which used great efforts to secure
purity of knowledge by making it scarce, and to exclude error
by a rigid exclusiveness in relation to fees and appointments,
it happened that very ignorant young gentlemen were promoted in town,
and many more got a legal right to practise over large areas
in the country. Also, the high standard held up to the public
mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction
to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained
by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from
having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice
chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred
that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only
be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic
prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.
Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as
to the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must
exist in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change
in the units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers.
He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference
towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably
upon the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making
an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients.
But he did not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than
was common. He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with
the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical
conception and make a link in the chain of discovery.
Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should
dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little
of the great originators until they have been lifted up among
the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel,
for example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he
not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons
to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk
on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his
gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him
a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local
personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares,
which made the retarding friction of his course towards final
companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not blind to the
dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence in his
resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being seven-and-twenty,
he felt himself experienced. And he was not going to have his
vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes
of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry
with that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object
with the assiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination
in the hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other:
the careful observation and inference which was his daily work,
the use of the lens to further his judgment in special cases,
would further his thought as an instrument of larger inquiry.
Was not this the typical pre-eminence of his profession? He would
be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that very means keep himself
in the track of far-reaching investigation. On one point he may
fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his career:
he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they
are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that
they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.
He intended to begin in his own case some particular reforms which
were quite certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem
than the demonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these
reforms was to act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision,
and simply prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage
from druggists. This was an innovation for one who had chosen
to adopt the style of general practitioner in a country town,
and would be felt as offensive criticism by his professional brethren.
But Lydgate meant to innovate in his treatment also, and he was wise
enough to see that the best security for his practising honestly
according to his belief was to get rid of systematic temptations
to the contrary.
Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers
than the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world
when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor,
even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829
the dark territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited
young adventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute
towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession.
The more he became interested in special questions of disease,
such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the
need for that fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the
beginning of the century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious
career of Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but,
like another Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs.
That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,
fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be
understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;
but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues,
out of which the various organs--brain, heart, lungs, and so on--
are compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up
in various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,
each material having its peculiar composition and proportions.
No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure
or its parts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without
knowing the nature of the materials. And the conception wrought
out by Bichat, with his detailed study of the different tissues,
acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light
would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections
and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into
account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action
of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and
intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical
practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths,
and there was still scientific work to be done which might have
seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts
in the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis;
but it was open to another mind to say, have not these structures
some common basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet,
gauze, net, satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be
another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things,
and revising ail former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's
work, already vibrating along many currents of the European mind,
Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate
relations of living structure, and help to define men's thought more
accurately after the true order. The work had not yet been done,
but only prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation.
What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question--
not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such
missing of the right word befalls many seekers. And he counted on
quiet intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads
of investigation--on many hints to be won from diligent application,
not only of the scalpel, but of the microscope, which research
had begun to use again with new enthusiasm of reliance. Such was
Lydgate's plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch,
and great work for the world.
He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his
action should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made
life interesting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh
and other mystic rites of costly observance, which the eight
hundred pounds left him after buying his practice would certainly
not have gone far in paying for. He was at a starting-point
which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting,
if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could
appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose,
with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance,
all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swims and makes
his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would remain
even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character
too is a process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making,
as much as the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there
were both virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding.
The faults will not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of
your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some
one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful;
whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness;
who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native.
prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down
the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?
All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but then,
they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam,
and would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters.
The particular faults from which these delicate generalities are
distilled have distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent,
and grimaces; filling up parts in very various dramas. Our vanities
differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit,
but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make
in which one of us differs from another. Lydgate's conceit
was of the arrogant sort, never simpering, never impertinent,
but massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous.
He would do a great deal for noodles, being sorry for them,
and feeling quite sure that they could have no power over him:
he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in Paris,
in order to turn them against some of their own doctrines.
All his faults were marked by kindred traits, and were those of a
man who had a fine baritone, whose clothes hung well upon him,
and who even in his ordinary gestures had an air of inbred distinction.
Where then lay the spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured
of that careless grace. How could there be any commonness in a man
so well-bred, so ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual
in his views of social duty? As easily as there may be stupidity
in a man of genius if you take him unawares on the wrong subject,
or as many a man who has the best will to advance the social
millennium might be ill-inspired in imagining its lighter pleasures;
unable to go beyond Offenbach's music, or the brilliant punning in the
last burlesque. Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the complexion
of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy,
were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world:
that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor,
did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women,
or the desirability of its being known (without his telling)
that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not
mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did so it
was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would
lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an
incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.
As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuous folly,
which he meant to be final, since marriage at some distant period
would of course not be impetuous. For those who want to be
acquainted with Lydgate it will be good to know what was that case
of impetuous folly, for it may stand as an example of the fitful
swerving of passion to which he was prone, together with the
chivalrous kindness which helped to make him morally lovable.
The story can be told without many words. It happened when he
was studying in Paris, and just at the time when, over and above
his other work, he was occupied with some galvanic experiments.
One evening, tired with his experimenting, and not being able
to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits
to some repose under their trying and mysterious dispensation of
unexplained shocks, and went to finish his evening at the theatre
of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a melodrama which he
had already seen several times; attracted, not by the ingenious
work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress whose part
it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing
duke of the piece. Lydgate was in love with this actress, as a
man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak to.
She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile, and rounded
majestic form, having that sort of beauty which carries a sweet
matronliness even in youth, and her voice was a soft cooing.
She had but lately come to Paris, and bore a virtuous reputation,
her husband acting with her as the unfortunate lover. It was her
acting which was "no better than it should be," but the public
was satisfied. Lydgate's only relaxation now was to go and look
at this woman, just as he might have thrown himself under the
breath of the sweet south on a bank of violets for a while,
without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he would presently return.
But this evening the old drama had a new catastrophe. At the moment
when the heroine was to act the stabbing of her lover, and he
was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbed her husband,
who fell as death willed. A wild shriek pierced the house,
and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were
demanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time.
Lydgate leaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on to the stage,
and was active in help, making the acquaintance of his heroine by
finding a contusion on her head and lifting her gently in his arms.
Paris rang with the story of this death:--was it a murder? Some of
the actress's warmest admirers were inclined to believe in her guilt,
and liked her the better for it (such was the taste of those times);
but Lydgate was not one of these. He vehemently contended for
her innocence, and the remote impersonal passion for her beauty
which he had felt before, had passed now into personal devotion,
and tender thought of her lot. The notion of murder was absurd:
no motive was discoverable, the young couple being understood to dote
on each other; and it was not unprecedented that an accidental
slip of the foot should have brought these grave consequences.
The legal investigation ended in Madame Laure's release.
Lydgate by this time had had many interviews with her, and found
her more and more adorable. She talked little; but that was
an additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful;
her presence was enough, like that of the evening light.
Lydgate was madly anxious about her affection, and jealous lest
any other man than himself should win it and ask her to marry him.
But instead of reopening her engagement at the Porte Saint Martin,
where she would have been all the more popular for the fatal episode,
she left Paris without warning, forsaking her little court of admirers.
Perhaps no one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all
science had come to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure,
stricken by ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no
faithful comforter. Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult
to find as some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate
gathered indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons.
He found her at last acting with great success at Avignon under
the same name, looking more majestic than ever as a forsaken wife
carrying her child in her arms. He spoke to her after the play,
was received with the usual quietude which seemed to him beautiful
as clear depths of water, and obtained leave to visit her the next day;
when he was bent on telling her that he adored her, and on asking
her to marry him. He knew that this was like the sudden impulse
of a madman--incongruous even with his habitual foibles. No matter!
It was the one thing which he was resolved to do. He had two selves
within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other
and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick
alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we
rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent
self pauses and awaits us.
To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
towards her.
"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him
the next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking
at him with eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating
animal wonders. "Are all Englishmen like that?"
"I came because I could not live without trying to see you.
You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife;
I will wait, but I want you to promise that you will marry me--
no one else."
Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from
under her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty,
and knelt close to her knees.
"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way,
keeping her arms folded. "My foot really slipped."
"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly. "It was a fatal accident--
a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "I MEANT
TO DO IT."
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled:
moments seemed to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently.
"He was brutal to you: you hated him."
"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris,
and not in my country; that was not agreeable to me."
"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. "And you planned
to murder him?"
"I did not plan: it came to me in the play--I MEANT TO DO IT."
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
looked at her. He saw this woman--the first to whom he had given
his young adoration--amid the throng of stupid criminals.
"You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands.
I will never have another."
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his
Paris chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him.
He was saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness
of his heart and his belief that human life might be made better.
But he had more reason than ever for trusting his judgment,
now that it was so experienced; and henceforth he would take
a strictly scientific view of woman, entertaining no expectations
but such as were justified beforehand.
No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's
past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any
eager attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves
of what did not come under their own senses. Not only young virgins
of that town, but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to
conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes,
contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had
been shaping him for that instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact,
counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.
CHAPTER XVI.
"All that in woman is adored
In thy fair self I find--
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind."
--SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.
The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried
chaplain to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers;
and Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light
on the power exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode. The banker
was evidently a ruler, but there was an opposition party,
and even among his supporters there were some who allowed it to be
seen that their support was a compromise, and who frankly stated
their impression that the general scheme of things, and especially
the casualties of trade, required you to hold a candle to the devil.
Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could
touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence
that was at once ready and severe--ready to confer obligations,
and severe in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious
man always at his post, a chief share in administering the town
charities, and his private charities were both minute and abundant.
He would take a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the
shoemaker's son, and he would watch over Tegg's church-going; he would
defend Mrs. Strype the washerwoman against Stubbs's unjust exaction
on the score of her drying-ground, and he would himself-scrutinize
a calumny against Mrs. Strype. His private minor loans were numerous,
but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before
and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbors'
hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has
got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out
of all proportion to its external means. It was a principle with
Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use
it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual
conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make
clear to himself what God's glory required. But, as we have seen,
his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There were many
crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only weigh
things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since
Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and
drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything,
he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of mastery.
The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy's table when Lydgate
was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode
did not, he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the
part of the host himself, though his reasons against the proposed
arrangement turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke's sermons,
which were all doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother,
whose sermons were free from that taint. Mr. Vincy liked well enough
the notion of the chaplain's having a salary, supposing it were given
to Farebrother, who was as good a little fellow as ever breathed,
and the best preacher anywhere, and companionable too.
"What line shall you take, then?" said Mr. Chichely, the coroner,
a great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy's.
"Oh, I'm precious glad I'm not one of the Directors now.
I shall vote for referring the matter to the Directors and the
Medical Board together. I shall roll some of my responsibility
on your shoulders, Doctor," said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at
Dr. Sprague, the senior physician of the town, and then at
Lydgate who sat opposite. "You medical gentlemen must consult
which sort of black draught you will prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"
"I know little of either," said Lydgate; "but in general,
appointments are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking.
The fittest man for a particular post is not always the best
fellow or the most agreeable. Sometimes, if you wanted to get
a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows
whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question."
Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most "weight,"
though Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more "penetration,"
divested his large heavy face of all expression, and looked
at his wine-glass while Lydgate was speaking. Whatever was not
problematical and suspected about this young man--for example,
a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition
to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders--
was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed
thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least
one copy marked "own" was bound in calf. For my part I have some
fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one's self-satisfaction is an
untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
Lydgate's remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company.
Mr. Vincy said, that if he could have HIS way, he would not put
disagreeable fellows anywhere.
"Hang your reforms!" said Mr. Chichely. "There's no greater humbug
in the world. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick
to put in new men. I hope you are not one of the `Lancet's' men,
Mr. Lydgate--wanting to take the coronership out of the hands
of the legal profession: your words appear to point that way."
"I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr. Sprague, "no man more:
he is an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the
respectability of the profession, which everybody knows depends
on the London Colleges, for the sake of getting some notoriety
for himself. There are men who don't mind about being kicked blue
if they can only get talked about. But Wakley is right sometimes,"
the Doctor added, judicially. "I could mention one or two points
in which Wakley is in the right."
"Oh, well," said Mr. Chichely, "I blame no man for standing up in favor
of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know
how a coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?"
"In my opinion," said Lydgate, "legal training only makes a man more
incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind.
People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales
by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any
particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer
is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.
How is he to know the action of a poison? You might as well say
that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato crops."
"You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner's business
to conduct the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence
of the medical witness?" said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.
"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself," said Lydgate.
"Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance
of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not
to be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats
of the stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."
Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was
his Majesty's coroner, and ended innocently with the question,
"Don't you agree with me, Dr. Sprague?"
"To a certain extent--with regard to populous districts, and in
the metropolis," said the Doctor. "But I hope it will be long before
this part of the country loses the services of my friend Chichely,
even though it might get the best man in our profession to succeed him.
I am sure Vincy will agree with me."
"Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man,"
said Mr. Vincy, jovially. "And in my opinion,
you're safest with a lawyer. Nobody can know everything.
Most things are `visitation of God.' And as to poisoning,
why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we join the ladies?"
Lydgate's private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the
very coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he
had not meant to be personal. This was one of the difficulties
of moving in good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist
on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office. Fred Vincy
had called Lydgate a prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined
to call him prick-eared; especially when, in the drawing-room,
he seemed to be making himself eminently agreeable to Rosamond,
whom he had easily monopolized in a tete-a-tete, since Mrs. Vincy
herself sat at the tea-table. She resigned no domestic function
to her daughter; and the matron's blooming good-natured face,
with the two volatile pink strings floating from her fine throat,
and her cheery manners to husband and children, was certainly among
the great attractions of the Vincy house--attractions which made
it all the easier to fall in love with the daughter. The tinge
of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity in Mrs. Vincy gave more effect
to Rosamond's refinement, which was beyond what Lydgate had expected.
Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the
impression of refined manners, and the right thing said seems
quite astonishingly right when it is accompanied with exquisite
curves of lip and eyelid. And Rosamond could say the right thing;
for she was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every
tone except the humorous. Happily she never attempted to joke,
and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.
She and Lydgate readily got into conversation. He regretted
that he had not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court.
The only pleasure he allowed himself during the latter part of his
stay in Paris was to go and hear music.
"You have studied music, probably?" said Rosamond.
"No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;
but the music that I don't know at all, and have no notion about,
delights me--affects me. How stupid the world is that it does not
make more use of such a pleasure within its reach!"
"Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless. There are hardly
any good musicians. I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well."
"I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,
leaving you to fancy the tune--very much as if it were tapped on
a drum?"
"Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer," said Rosamond, with one of her
rare smiles. "But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors."
Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation,
in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be made
out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if
the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her;
and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready,
self-possessed grace. Since he had had the memory of Laure,
Lydgate had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divine
cow no longer attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite.
But he recalled himself.
"You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope."
"I will let you hear my attempts, if you like," said Rosamond.
"Papa is sure to insist on my singing. But I shall tremble before you,
who have heard the best singers in Paris. I have heard very little:
I have only once been to London. But our organist at St. Peter's
is a good musician, and I go on studying with him."
"Tell me what you saw in London."
"Very little." (A more naive girl would have said, "Oh, everything!"
But Rosamond knew better.) "A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw
country girls are always taken to."
"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate, looking at
her with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond
blush with pleasure. But she remained simply serious, turned her long
neck a little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits--
an habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a
kitten's paw. Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten:
she was a sylph caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.
"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; "I pass
at Middlemarch. I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors.
But I am really afraid of you."
"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men,
though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could
teach me a thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear
if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is
a common language between women and men, and so the bears can
get taught."
"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder
him from jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the
other side of the room, where Fred having opened the piano,
at his father's desire, that Rosamond might give them some music,
was parenthetically performing "Cherry Ripe!" with one hand. Able men
who have passed their examinations will do these things sometimes,
not less than the plucked Fred.
"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make
Mr. Lydgate ill," said Rosamond. "He has an ear."
Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.
Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "You perceive,
the bears will not always be taught."
"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting
it upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment.
"Some good rousing tunes first."
Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school
(close to a county town with a memorable history that had its
relics in church and castle) was one of those excellent musicians
here and there to be found in our provinces, worthy to compare
with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offers more
plentiful conditions of musical celebrity. Rosamond, with the
executant's instinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave
forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision
of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time.
A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond's fingers;
and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes,
and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity,
if it be only that of an interpreter. Lydgate was taken possession of,
and began to believe in her as something exceptional. After all,
he thought, one need not be surprised to find the rare conjunctions
of nature under circumstances apparently unfavorable: come where
they may, they always depend on conditions that are not obvious.
He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her any compliments,
leaving that to others, now that his admiration was deepened.
Her singing was less remarkable? but also well trained, and sweet
to hear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang "Meet
me by moonlight," and "I've been roaming;" for mortals must share
the fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be
always classical. But Rosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan"
with effect, or Haydn's canzonets, or "Voi, che sapete,"
or "Batti, batti"--she only wanted to know what her audience liked.
Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.
Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest
little girl on her lap, softly beating the child's hand up and
down in time to the music. And Fred, notwithstanding his general
scepticism about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance,
wishing he could do the same thing on his flute. It was the pleasantest
family party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch.
The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety,
and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional
in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had east
a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements
which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys' there was always whist,
and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly
impatient of the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in--
a handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty,
whose black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his
quick gray eyes. He came like a pleasant change in the light,
arresting little Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being
led out of the room by Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some
special word, and seeming to condense more talk into ten minutes
than had been held all through the evening. He claimed from
Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come and see him. "I can't
let you off, you know, because I have some beetles to show you.
We collectors feel an interest in every new man till he has seen
all we have to show him."
But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,
"Come now, let us be serious! Mr. Lydgate? not play? Ah! you are
too young and light for this kind of thing."
Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so
painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort
in this certainly not erudite household. He could half understand it:
the good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the
provision for passing the time without any labor of intelligence,
might make the house beguiling to people who had no particular
use for their odd hours.
Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan,
who was brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy
often said, just the sort of person for a governess. Lydgate did
not mean to pay many such visits himself. They were a wretched
waste of the evenings; and now, when he had talked a little
more to Rosamond, he meant to excuse himself and go.
"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she said,
when the whist-players were settled. "We are very stupid, and you
have been used to something quite different."
"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike," said Lydgate.
"But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town
to be more stupid than any other. I have made up my mind to take
Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town
will take me in the same way. I have certainly found some charms
in it which are much greater than I had expected."
"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased
with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.
"No, I mean something much nearer to me."
Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "Do you
care about dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever
men ever dance."
"I would dance with you if you would allow me."
"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh. "I was only
going to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know
whether you would feel insulted if you were asked to come."
"Not on the condition I mentioned."
After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving towards
the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr. Farebrother's play,
which was masterly, and also his face, which was a striking mixture
of the shrewd and the mild. At ten o'clock supper was brought in
(such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was punch-drinking;
but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water. He was winning,
but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers should end,
and Lydgate at last took his leave.
But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in the brisk
air towards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr. Farebrother's church,
which stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight.
It was the oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but
a vicarage worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that,
and he wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money
he won at cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant fellow,
but Bulstrode may have his good reasons." Many things would be
easier to Lydgate if it should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was
generally justifiable. "What is his religious doctrine to me, if he
carries some good notions along with it? One must use such brains
as are to be found."
These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her
music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt
on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no agitation,
and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years;
and therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being
in love with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire
Rosamond exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about
Laure was not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other
woman Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question,
it would have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy,
who had just the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--
polished, refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the
delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with
a force of demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence.
Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife would have
that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be
classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its
very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--
his more pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever,
which he was specially interested in, because he had known Louis
in Paris, and had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order
to ascertain the specific differences of typhus and typhoid.
He went home and read far into the smallest hour, bringing a much
more testing vision of details and relations into this pathological
study than he had ever thought it necessary to apply to the
complexities of love and marriage, these being subjects on which he
felt himself amply informed by literature, and that traditional
wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation of men.
Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him that delightful
labor of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the
exercise of disciplined power--combining and constructing with the
clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge;
and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature,
standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength
of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--
reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits
of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man
with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations
of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream.
But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar
and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle
actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer
darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward
light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing
even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space.
He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance
finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous
invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing
its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation;
he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes
which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares
which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime,
that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy
or unhappy consciousness.
As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers
in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head,
in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from
examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its
connections with all the rest of our existence--seems, as it were,
to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float
with the repose of unexhausted strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant
delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less
lucky men who were not of his profession.
"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought,
"I might have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other,
and lived always in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any
profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain,
and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is
nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the
exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the
old fogies in the parish too. It is rather harder for a clergyman:
Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures
of the evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough,
and as he took up his bed-candle his lips were curled with that
incipient smile which is apt to accompany agreeable recollections.
He was an ardent fellow, but at present his ardor was absorbed in
love of his work and in the ambition of making his life recognized
as a factor in the better life of mankind--like other heroes of
science who had nothing but an obscure country practice to begin with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world
of which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate
that he had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond,
who had neither any reason for throwing her marriage into distant
perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from
that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words,
and phrases, which makes a large part in the lives of most girls.
He had not meant to look at her or speak to her with more than
the inevitable amount of admiration and compliment which a man
must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed to him that his
enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for he feared
falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at her
possession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered
every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents
of a preconceived romance--incidents which gather value from the
foreseen development and climax. In Rosamond's romance it was not
necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of
his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession
and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant
fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him
from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect
of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial
condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with
vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite
equal to the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers.
It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to discern very subtly the
faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss Brookes
accompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and seated among
the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding their plain dress.
If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with
the sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your
power of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether
red cloth and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort.
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in
their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common
table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according
to their appetite.
Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it
was excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young
men might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her,
to believe at once that Lydgate could be no exception. His looks
and words meant more to her than other men's, because she cared
more for them: she thought of them diligently, and diligently
attended to that perfection of appearance, behavior, sentiments,
and all other elegancies, which would find in Lydgate a more
adequate admirer than she had yet been conscious of.
For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable
to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in
sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends,
in practising her music, and in being from morning till night her
own standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her
own consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more
variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.
She found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best,
and she knew much poetry by heart. Her favorite poem was "Lalla Rookh."
"The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!"
was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys;
and the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion
in country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals.
But Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a
ridiculous pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would
be all laid aside as soon as she was married? While her aunt Bulstrode,
who had a sisterly faithfulness towards her brother's family,
had two sincere wishes for Rosamond--that she might show a more
serious turn of mind, and that she might meet with a husband whose
wealth corresponded to her habits.
CHAPTER XVII.
"The clerkly person smiled and said
Promise was a pretty maid,
But being poor she died unwed."
The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the
next evening, lived in an old parsonage, built of stone,
venerable enough to match the church which it looked out upon.
All the furniture too in the house was old, but with another
grade of age--that of Mr. Farebrother's father and grandfather.
There were painted white chairs, with gilding and wreaths on them,
and some lingering red silk damask with slits in it. There were
engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other celebrated lawyers
of the last century; and there were old pier-glasses to reflect them,
as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas resembling
a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief against
the dark wainscot This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room into
which Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive him,
who were also old-fashioned, and of a faded but genuine respectability:
Mrs. Farebrother, the Vicar's white-haired mother, befrilled and
kerchiefed with dainty cleanliness, up right, quick-eyed, and
still under seventy; Miss Noble, her sister, a tiny old lady
of meeker aspect, with frills and kerchief decidedly more worn
and mended; and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar's elder sister,
well-looking like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women
are apt to be who spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection
to their elders. Lydgate had not expected to see so quaint a group:
knowing simply that Mr. Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought
of being ushered into a snuggery where the chief furniture would
probably be books and collections of natural objects. The Vicar
himself seemed to wear rather a changed aspect, as most men do
when acquaintances made elsewhere see them for the first time
in their own homes; some indeed showing like an actor of genial
parts disadvantageously cast for the curmudgeon in a new piece.
This was not the case with Mr. Farebrother: he seemed a trifle milder
and more silent, the chief talker being his mother, while he only put
in a good-humored moderating remark here and there. The old lady
was evidently accustomed to tell her company what they ought to think,
and to regard no subject as quite safe without her steering.
She was afforded leisure for this function by having all her little
wants attended to by Miss Winifred. Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble
carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit
of sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake;
looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacup
with a small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped.
Pray think no ill of Miss Noble. That basket held small savings
from her more portable food, destined for the children of her poor
friends among whom she trotted on fine mornings; fostering and
petting all needy creatures being so spontaneous a delight to her,
that she regarded it much as if it had been a pleasant vice that she
was addicted to. Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal
from those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing,
and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire.
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality
and precision. She presently informed him that they were not often
in want of medical aid in that house. She had brought up her
children to wear flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last
habit she considered the chief reason why people needed doctors.
Lydgate pleaded for those whose fathers and mothers had over-eaten
themselves, but Mrs. Farebrother held that view of things dangerous:
Nature was more just than that; it would be easy for any felon
to say that his ancestors ought to have been hanged instead of him.
If those he had bad fathers and mothers were bad themselves, they were
hanged for that. There was no need to go back on what you couldn't see.
"My mother is like old George the Third," said the Vicar,
"she objects to metaphysics."
"I object to what is wrong, Camden. I say, keep hold of a
few plain truths, and make everything square with them. When I was young,
Mr. Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong.
We knew our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and
our duty. Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.
But now, if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable
to be contradicted."
"That makes rather a pleasant time of it for those who like
to maintain their own point," said Lydgate.
"But my mother always gives way," said the Vicar, slyly.
"No, no, Camden, you must not lead Mr. Lydgate into a mistake about
ME. I shall never show that disrespect to my parents, to give
up what they taught me. Any one may see what comes of turning.
If you change once, why not twenty times?"
"A man might see good arguments for changing once, and not see
them for changing again," said Lydgate, amused with the decisive
old lady.
"Excuse me there. If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting,
when a man has no constancy of mind. My father never changed, and he
preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man--
few better. When you get me a good man made out of arguments,
I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's
my opinion, and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out."
"About the dinner certainly, mother," said Mr. Farebrother.
"It is the same thing, the dinner or the man. I am nearly seventy,
Mr. Lydgate, and I go upon experience. I am not likely to follow
new lights, though there are plenty of them here as elsewhere.
I say, they came in with the mixed stuffs that will neither wash
nor wear. It was not so in my youth: a Churchman was a Churchman,
and a clergyman, you might be pretty sure, was a gentleman,
if nothing else. But now he may be no better than a Dissenter,
and want to push aside my son on pretence of doctrine. But whoever
may wish to push him aside, I am proud to say, Mr. Lydgate,
that he will compare with any preacher in this kingdom, not to speak
of this town, which is but a low standard to go by; at least,
to my thinking, for I was born and bred at Exeter."
"A mother is never partial," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.
"What do you think Tyke's mother says about him?"
"Ah, poor creature! what indeed?" said Mrs. Farebrother, her sharpness
blunted for the moment by her confidence in maternal judgments.
"She says the truth to herself, depend upon it."
"And what is the truth?" said-Lydgate. "I am curious to know."
"Oh, nothing bad at all," said Mr. Farebrother. "He is a
zealous fellow: not very learned, and not very wise, I think--
because I don't agree with him."
"Why, Camden!" said Miss Winifred, "Griffin and his wife told me
only to-day, that Mr. Tyke said they should have no more coals
if they came to hear you preach."
Mrs. Farebrother laid down her knitting, which she had resumed after
her small allowance of tea and toast, and looked at her son as if to
say "You hear that?" Miss Noble said, "Oh poor things! poor things!"
in reference, probably, to the double loss of preaching and coal.
But the Vicar answered quietly--
"That is because they are not my parishioners. And I don't think
my sermons are worth a load of coals to them."
"Mr. Lydgate," said Mrs. Farebrother, who could not let this pass,
"you don't know my son: he always undervalues himself. I tell
him he is undervaluing the God who made him, and made him a most
excellent preacher."
"That must be a hint for me to take Mr. Lydgate away to
my study, mother," said the Vicar, laughing. "I promised
to show you my collection," he added, turning to Lydgate; "shall we go?"
All three ladies remonstrated. Mr. Lydgate ought not to be
hurried away without being allowed to accept another cup of tea:
Miss Winifred had abundance of good tea in the pot. Why was Camden
in such haste to take a visitor to his den? There was nothing
but pickled vermin, and drawers full of blue-bottles and moths,
with no carpet on the floor. Mr. Lydgate must excuse it. A game
at cribbage would be far better. In short, it was plain that a vicar
might be adored by his womankind as the king of men and preachers,
and yet be held by them to stand in much need of their direction.
Lydgate, with the usual shallowness of a young bachelor.
wondered that Mr. Farebrother had not taught them better.
"My mother is not used to my having visitors who can take any interest
in my hobbies," said the Vicar, as he opened the door of his study,
which was indeed as bare of luxuries for the body as the ladies
had implied, unless a short porcelain pipe and a tobacco-box were
to be excepted.
"Men of your profession don't generally smoke," he said. Lydgate smiled
and shook his head. "Nor of mine either, properly, I suppose.
You will hear that pipe alleged against me by Bulstrode and Company.
They don't know how pleased the devil would be if I gave it up."
"I understand. You are of an excitable temper and want a sedative.
I am heavier, and should get idle with it. I should rush into idleness,
and stagnate there with all my might."
"And you mean to give it all to your work. I am some ten
or twelve years older than you, and have come to a compromise.
I feed a weakness or two lest they should get clamorous. See,"
continued the Vicar, opening several small drawers, "I fancy I
have made an exhaustive study of the entomology of this district.
I am going on both with the fauna and flora; but I have at least
done my insects well. We are singularly rich in orthoptera:
I don't know whether--Ah! you have got hold of that glass jar--
you are looking into that instead of my drawers. You don't really
care about these things?"
"Not by the side of this lovely anencephalous monster.
I have never had time to give myself much to natural history.
I was early bitten with an interest in structure, and it is what
lies most directly in my profession. I have no hobby besides.
I have the sea to swim in there."
"Ah! you are a happy fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, turning on his
heel and beginning to fill his pipe. "You don't know what it is
to want spiritual tobacco--bad emendations of old texts, or small
items about a variety of Aphis Brassicae, with the well-known
signature of Philomicron, for the `Twaddler's Magazine;' or a learned
treatise on the entomology of the Pentateuch, including all the
insects not mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites
in their passage through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant,
as treated by Solomon, showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs
with the results of modern research. You don't mind my fumigating you?"
Lydgate was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its
implied meaning--that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the
right vocation. The neat fitting-up of drawers and shelves, and the
bookcase filled with expensive illustrated books on Natural History,
made him think again of the winnings at cards and their destination.
But he was beginning to wish that the very best construction
of everything that Mr. Farebrother did should be the true one.
The Vicar's frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort Chat comes
from an uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment
of others, but simply the relief of a desire to do with as little
pretence as possible. Apparently he was not without a sense that
his freedom of speech might seem premature, for he presently said--
"I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you,
Mr. Lydgate, and know you better than you know me. You remember
Trawley who shared your apartment at Paris for some time?
I was a correspondent of his, and he told me a good deal about you.
I was not quite sure when you first came that you were the same man.
I was very glad when I found that you were. Only I don't forget
that you have not had the like prologue about me."
Lydgate divined some delicacy of feeling here, but did not half
understand it. "By the way," he said, "what has become of Trawley?
I have quite lost sight of him. He was hot on the French
social systems, and talked of going to the Backwoods to found
a sort of Pythagorean community. Is he gone?"
"Not at all. He is practising at a German bath, and has married
a rich patient."
Then my notions wear the best, so far," said Lydgate, with a
short scornful laugh. "He would have it, the medical profession was
an inevitable system of humbug. I said, the fault was in the men--
men who truckle to lies and folly. Instead of preaching against
humbug outside the walls, it might be better to set up a disinfecting
apparatus within. In short--I am reporting my own conversation--
you may be sure I had all the good sense on my side."
"Your scheme is a good deal more difficult to carry out than the
Pythagorean community, though. You have not only got the old Adam
in yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants
of the original Adam who form the society around you. You see,
I have paid twelve or thirteen years more than you for my knowledge
of difficulties. But"--Mr. Farebrother broke off a moment,
and then added, "you are eying that glass vase again. Do you want
to make an exchange? You shall not have it without a fair barter."
"I have some sea-mice--fine specimens--in spirits. And I will
throw in Robert Brown's new thing--`Microscopic Observations
on the Pollen of Plants'--if you don't happen to have it already."
"Why, seeing how you long for the monster, I might ask a higher price.
Suppose I ask you to look through my drawers and agree with me
about all my new species?" The Vicar, while he talked in this way,
alternately moved about with his pipe in his mouth, and returned to hang
rather fondly over his drawers. "That would be good discipline, you know,
for a young doctor who has to please his patients in Middlemarch.
You must learn to be bored, remember. However, you shall have
the monster on your own terms."
"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's
nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?"
said Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather
absently at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed
in exquisite writing. "The shortest way is to make your value felt,
so that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not."
"With all my heart. But then you must be sure of having the value,
and you must keep yourself independent. Very few men can do that.
Either you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing,
or you wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellows
pull you. But do look at these delicate orthoptera!"
Lydgate had after all to give some scrutiny to each drawer,
the Vicar laughing at himself, and yet persisting in the exhibition.
"Apropos of what you said about wearing harness," Lydgate began,
after they had sat down, "I made up my mind some time ago to do
with as little of it as-possible. That was why I determined not to
try anything in London, for a good many years at least. I didn't
like what I saw when I was studying there--so much empty bigwiggism,
and obstructive trickery. In the country, people have less pretension
to knowledge, and are less of companions, but for that reason they
affect one's amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood,
and can follow one's own course more quietly."
"Yes--well--you have got a good start; you are in the right profession,
the work you feel yourself most fit for. Some people miss that,
and repent too late. But you must not be too sure of keeping
your independence."
"You mean of family ties?" said Lydgate, conceiving that these
might press rather tightly on Mr. Farebrother.
"Not altogether. Of course they make many things more difficult.
But a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man,
and keep him more independent. There's a parishioner of mine--
a fine fellow, but who would hardly have pulled through as he has done
without his wife. Do you know the Garths? I think they were not
Peacock's patients."
"No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone's, at Lowick."
"Their daughter: an excellent girl."
"She is very quiet--I have hardly noticed her."
"She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it."
"I don't understand," said Lydgate; he could hardly say "Of course."
"Oh, she gauges everybody. I prepared her for confirmation--
she is a favorite of mine."
Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring
to know more about the Garths. At last the Vicar laid down his pipe,
stretched out his legs, and turned his bright eyes with a smile
towards Lydgate, saying--
"But we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be.
We have our intrigues and our parties. I am a party man,
for example, and Bulstrode is another. If you vote for me you
will offend Bulstrode."
"What is there against Bulstrode?" said Lydgate, emphatically.
"I did not say there was anything against him except that.
If you vote against him you will make him your enemy."
"I don't know that I need mind about that," said Lydgate,
rather proudly; "but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals,
and he spends large sums on useful public objects. He might help me
a good deal in carrying out my ideas. As to his religious notions--
why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep
if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. I look for the
man who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations."
"Very good. But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will
not offend me, you know," said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly.
"I don't translate my own convenience into other people's duties.
I am opposed to Bulstrode in many ways. I don't like the set
he belongs to: they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to
make their neighbors uncomfortable than to make them better.
Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really
look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish
them for heaven. But," he added, smilingly, "I don't say that
Bulstrode's new hospital is a bad thing; and as to his wanting to oust
me from the old one--why, if he thinks me a mischievous fellow,
he is only returning a compliment. And I am not a model clergyman--
only a decent makeshift."
Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself.
A model clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own
profession the finest in the world, and take all knowledge as mere
nourishment to his moral pathology and therapeutics. He only said,
"What reason does Bulstrode give for superseding you?"
"That I don't teach his opinions--which he calls spiritual religion;
and that I have no time to spare. Both statements are true.
But then I could make time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds.
That is the plain fact of the case. But let us dismiss it.
I only wanted to tell you that if you vote for your arsenic-man,
you are not to cut me in consequence. I can't spare you.
You are a sort of circumnavigator come to settle among us, and will
keep up my belief in the antipodes. Now tell me all about them
in Paris."
CHAPTER XVIII.
"Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence;
Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
May languish with the scurvy."
Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the
chaplaincy gathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without telling
himself the reason, he deferred the predetermination on which side he
should give his vote. It would really have been a matter of total
indifference to him--that is to say, he would have taken the more
convenient side, and given his vote for the appointment of Tyke without
any hesitation--if he had not cared personally for Mr. Farebrother.
But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph's grew with
growing acquaintanceship. That, entering into Lydgate's position
as a new-comer who had his own professional objects to secure,
Mr. Farebrother should have taken pains rather to warn off than
to obtain his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and generosity,
which Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to. It went along with other
points of conduct in Mr. Fare brother which were exceptionally fine,
and made his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem
divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few
men could have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother,
aunt, and sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped
his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure
of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably
self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these
matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny;
and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards
the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies
seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims
were not needed to account for their actions. Then, his preaching
was ingenious and pithy, like the preaching of the English Church
in its robust age, and his sermons were delivered without book.
People outside his parish went to hear him; and, since to fill the
church was always the most difficult part of a clergyman's function,
here was another ground for a careless sense of superiority.
Besides, he was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank,
without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational
flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends.
Lydgate liked him heartily, and wished for his friendship.
With this feeling uppermost, he continued to waive the question
of the chaplaincy, and to persuade himself that it was not only
no proper business of his, but likely enough never to vex him
with a demand for his vote. Lydgate, at Mr. Bulstrode's request,
was laying down plans for the internal arrangements of the new hospital,
and the two were often in consultation. The banker was always
presupposing that he could count in general on Lydgate as a coadjutor,
but made no special recurrence to the coming decision between Tyke
and Farebrother. When the General Board of the Infirmary had met,
however, and Lydgate had notice that the question of the chaplaincy
was thrown on a council of the directors and medical men, to meet
on the following Friday, he had a vexed sense that he must make up
his mind on this trivial Middlemarch business. He could not help
hearing within him the distinct declaration that Bulstrode was
prime minister, and that the Tyke affair was a question of office
or no office; and he could not help an equally pronounced dislike
to giving up the prospect of office. For his observation was
constantly confirming Mr. Farebrother's assurance that the banker
would not overlook opposition. "Confound their petty politics!"
was one of his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative
process of shaving, when he had begun to feel that he must really
hold a court of conscience on this matter. Certainly there were
valid things to be said against the election of Mr. Farebrother:
he had too much on his hands already, especially considering
how much time he spent on non-clerical occupations. Then again
it was a continually repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate's esteem,
that the Vicar should obviously play for the sake of money,
liking the play indeed, but evidently liking some end which it served.
Mr. Farebrother contended on theory for the desirability of all games,
and said that Englishmen's wit was stagnant for want of them;
but Lydgate felt certain that he would have played very much less
but for the money. There was a billiard-room at the Green Dragon,
which some anxious mothers and wives regarded as the chief temptation
in Middlemarch. The Vicar was a first-rate billiard-player, and
though he did not frequent the Green Dragon, there were reports
that he had sometimes been there in the daytime and had won money.
And as to the chaplaincy, he did not pretend that he cared for it,
except for the sake of the forty pounds. Lydgate was no Puritan,
but he did not care for play, and winning money at it had always
seemed a meanness to him; besides, he had an ideal of life which made
this subservience of conduct to the gaining of small sums thoroughly
hateful to him. Hitherto in his own life his wants had been supplied
without any trouble to himself, and his first impulse was always to be
liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a gentleman;
it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for getting half-crowns.
He had always known in a general way that he was not rich, but he
had never felt poor, and he had no power of imagining the part
which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.
Money had never been a motive to him. Hence he was not ready
to frame excuses for this deliberate pursuit of small gains.
It was altogether repulsive to him, and he never entered into any
calculation of the ratio between the Vicar's income and his more or
less necessary expenditure. It was possible that he would not have
made such a calculation in his own case.
And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact
told more strongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before.
One would know much better what to do if men's characters were
more consistent, and especially if one's friends were invariably fit
for any function they desired to undertake! Lydgate was convinced
that if there had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would
have voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject:
he did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode's. On the other hand,
there was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was
simply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had
time for extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke,
except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant.
Really, from his point of view, Bulstrode was thoroughly justified.
But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something
to make him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little
exasperated at being obliged to wince. He did not like frustrating
his own best purposes by getting on bad terms with Bulstrode;
he did not like voting against Farebrother, and helping to deprive
him of function and salary; and the question occurred whether
the additional forty pounds might not leave the Vicar free from
that ignoble care about winning at cards. Moreover, Lydgate did
not like the consciousness that in voting for Tyke he should be
voting on the side obviously convenient for himself. But would
the end really be his own convenience? Other people would say so,
and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the
sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.
What then? He for his own part knew that if his personal prospects
simply had been concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut
for the banker's friendship or enmity. What he really cared for
was a medium for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all,
was he not bound to prefer the object of getting a good hospital,
where he could demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever
and test therapeutic results, before anything else connected
with this chaplaincy? For the first time Lydgate was feeling
the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions,
and their frustrating complexity. At the end of his inward debate,
when he set out for the hospital, his hope was really in the chance
that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to the question,
and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for voting.
I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is begotten
by circumstances--some feeling rushing warmly and making resolve easy,
while debate in cool blood had only made it more difficult.
However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on which side he
would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting the subjection
which had been forced upon him. It would have seemed beforehand
like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his unmixed
resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives,
each of which was repugnant to him. In his student's chambers,
he had prearranged his social action quite differently.
Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other surgeons,
and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr. Bulstrode,
treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still absent.
The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was problematical,
and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had been generally
supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out to be unanimous,
or rather, though of different minds, they concurred in action.
Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had foreseen,
an adherent of Mr. Farebrother. The Doctor was more than suspected
of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it
is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in,
the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being
still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest
ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the
Doctor which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing
of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain
that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation
of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer,
and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been
a general presumption against his medical skill.
On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for
Dr. Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind,
and such as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment,
whether of Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to
particular tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do,
on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church
must stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man
was not a mere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms;
if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a particular providence in relation to her
stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his part liked to keep the mental
windows open and objected to fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer
jested about the Athanasian Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's "Essay
on Man." He objected to the rather free style of anecdote in which
Dr. Sprague indulged, preferring well-sanctioned quotations, and liking
refinement of all kinds: it was generally known that he had some
kinship to a bishop, and sometimes spent his holidays at "the palace."
Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline,
not to be distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance:
whereas Dr. Sprague was superfluously tall; his trousers got creased
at the knees, and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed
necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and out,
and up and down, as if he had come to see after the roofing.
In short, he had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a
disease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect
it lurking and to circumvent it. They enjoyed about equally the
mysterious privilege of medical reputation, and concealed with much
etiquette their contempt for each other's skill. Regarding themselves
as Middlemarch institutions, they were ready to combine against
all innovators, and against non-professionals given to interference.
On this ground they were both in their hearts equally averse to
Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr. Minchin had never been in open hostility
with him, and never differed from him without elaborate explanation
to Mrs. Bulstrode, who had found that Dr. Minchin alone understood
her constitution. A layman who pried into the professional
conduct of medical men, and was always obtruding his reforms,--
though he was less directly embarrassing to the two physicians
than to the surgeon-apothecaries who attended paupers by contract,
was nevertheless offensive to the professional nostril as such;
and Dr. Minchin shared fully in the new pique against Bulstrode,
excited by his apparent determination to patronize Lydgate.
The long-established practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller;
were just now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy,
in which they agreed that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to
serve Bulstrode's purpose. To non-medical friends they had already
concurred in praising the other young practitioner, who had come into
the town on Mr. Peacock's retirement without further recommendation
than his own merits and such argument for solid professional
acquirement as might be gathered from his having apparently wasted
no time on other branches of knowledge. It was clear that Lydgate,
by not dispensing drugs, intended to cast imputations on his equals,
and also to obscure the limit between his own rank as a general
practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in the interest
of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various grades,--
especially against a man who had not been to either of the English
universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside
study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience
in Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed,
but hardly sound.
Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified
with Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety
of interchangeable names for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds
were enabled to form the same judgment concerning it.
Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly. to the group assembled when
he entered, "I go for Farebrother. A salary, with all my heart.
But why take it from the Vicar? He has none too much--has to insure
his life, besides keeping house, and doing a vicar's charities.
Put forty pounds in his pocket and you'll do no harm. He's a
good fellow, is Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him
as will serve to carry orders."
"Ho, ho! Doctor," said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger
of some standing--his interjection being something between a laugh
and a Parliamentary disapproval; "we must let you have your say.
But what we have to consider is not anybody's income--it's the souls
of the poor sick people"--here Mr. Powderell's voice and face had a
sincere pathos in them. "He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke.
I should vote against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke--
I should indeed."
"Mr. Tyke's opponents have not asked any one to vote against
his conscience, I believe," said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner
of fluent speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair
were turned with some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell.
"But in my judgment it behoves us, as Directors, to consider whether
we will regard it as our whole business to carry out propositions
emanating from a single quarter. Will any member of the committee
aver that he would have entertained the idea of displacing the
gentleman who has always discharged the function of chaplain here,
if it had not been suggested to him by parties whose disposition
it is to regard every institution of this town as a machinery
for carrying out their own views? I tax no man's motives:
let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I do say,
that there are influences at work here which are incompatible
with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is
usually dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting
themselves could not afford either morally or financially to avow.
I myself am a layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention
to the divisions in the Church and--"
"Oh, damn the divisions!" burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and
town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the board, but now looked
in hurriedly, whip in hand. "We have nothing to do with them here.
Farebrother has been doing the work--what there was--without pay,
and if pay is to be given, it should be given to him. I call it
a confounded job to take the thing away from Farebrother."
"I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give their
remarks a personal bearing," said Mr. Plymdale. "I shall vote
for the appointment of Mr. Tyke, but I should not have known,
if Mr. Hackbutt hadn't hinted it, that I was a Servile Crawler."
"I disclaim any personalities. I expressly said, if I may be
allowed to repeat, or even to conclude what I was about to say--"
"Ah, here's Minchin!" said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody
turned away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness
of superior gifts in Middlemarch. "Come, Doctor, I must have you
on the right side, eh?"
"I hope so," said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and there;
"at whatever cost to my feelings."
"If there's any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man
who is turned out, I think," said Mr. Frank Hawley.
"I confess I have feelings on the other side also. I have a
divided esteem," said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands. "I consider
Mr. Tyke an exemplary man--none more so--and I believe him to be
proposed from unimpeachable motives. I, for my part, wish that I
could give him my vote. But I am constrained to take a view of the
case which gives the preponderance to Mr. Farebrother's claims.
He is an amiable man, an able preacher, and has been longer among us."
Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent. Mr. Plymdale settled
his cravat, uneasily.
"You don't set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman
ought to be, I hope," said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier,
who had just come in. "I have no ill-will towards him, but I think
we owe something to the public, not to speak of anything higher,
in these appointments. In my opinion Farebrother is too lax for
a clergyman. I don't wish to bring up particulars against him;
but he will make a little attendance here go as far as he can."
"And a devilish deal better than too much," said Mr. Hawley,
whose bad language was notorious in that part of the county.
"Sick people can't bear so much praying and preaching.
And that methodistical sort of religion is bad for the spirits--
bad for the inside, eh?" he added, turning quickly round to the four
medical men who were assembled.
But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen,
with whom there were greetings more or less cordial. These were
the Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of St. Peter's, Mr. Bulstrode,
and our friend Mr. Brooke of Tipton, who had lately allowed himself
to be put on the board of directors in his turn, but had never before
attended, his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode's exertions.
Lydgate was the only person still expected.
Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale and
self-restrained as usual. Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical,
wished for the appointment of his friend Mr. Tyke, a zealous
able man, who, officiating at a chapel of ease, had not a cure
of souls too extensive to leave him ample time for the new duty.
It was desirable that chaplaincies of this kind should be entered
on with a fervent intention: they were peculiar opportunities
for spiritual influence; and while it was good that a salary should
be allotted, there was the more need for scrupulous watching lest
the office should be perverted into a mere question of salary.
Mr. Thesiger's manner had so much quiet propriety that objectors
could only simmer in silence.
Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter.
He had not himself attended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he
had a strong interest in whatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch,
and was most happy to meet the gentlemen present on any public question--
"any public question, you know," Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod
of perfect understanding. "I am a good deal occupied as a magistrate,
and in the collection of documentary evidence, but I regard my time
as being at the disposal of the public--and, in short, my friends
have convinced me that a chaplain with a salary--a salary, you know--
is a very good thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and
vote for the appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an
unexceptionable man, apostolic and eloquent and everything of that kind--
and I am the last man to withhold my vote--under the circumstances,
you know."
"It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side of
the question, Mr. Brooke," said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was afraid
of nobody, and was a Tory suspicious of electioneering intentions.
"You don't seem to know that one of the worthiest men we have
has been doing duty as chaplain here for years without pay,
and that Mr. Tyke is proposed to supersede him."
"Excuse me, Mr. Hawley," said Mr. Bulstrode. "Mr. Brooke has been
fully informed of Mr. Farebrother's character and position."
"By his enemies," flashed out Mr. Hawley.
"I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here,"
said Mr. Thesiger.
"I'll swear there is, though," retorted Mr. Hawley.
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, "the merits
of the question may be very briefly stated, and if any one present
doubts that every gentleman who is about to give his vote has
not been fully informed, I can now recapitulate the considerations
that should weigh on either side."
"I don't see the good of that," said Mr. Hawley. "I suppose we all
know whom we mean to vote for. Any man who wants to do justice does
not wait till the last minute to hear both sides of the question.
I have no time to lose, and I propose that the matter be put to the
vote at once."
A brief but still hot discussion followed before each person wrote
"Tyke" or "Farebrother" on a piece of paper and slipped it into
a glass tumbler; and in the mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.
"I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present,"
said Mr. Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice. Then, looking up
at Lydgate--
"There is a casting-vote still to be given. It is yours, Mr. Lydgate:
will you be good enough to write?"
"The thing is settled now," said Mr. Wrench, rising. "We all know
how Mr. Lydgate will vote."
"You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir," said Lydgate,
rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.
"I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode.
Do you regard that meaning as offensive?"
"It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist from voting
with him on that account." Lydgate immediately wrote down "Tyke."
So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary,
and Lydgate continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode. He was really
uncertain whether Tyke were not the more suitable candidate,
and yet his consciousness told him that if he had been quite free
from indirect bias he should have voted for Mr. Farebrother.
The affair of the chaplaincy remained a sore point in his memory
as a case in which this petty medium of Middlemarch had been
too strong for him. How could a man be satisfied with a decision
between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more
than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it
at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.
But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before.
The character of the publican and sinner is not always practically
incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us
scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than
the faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes.
But the Vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest
tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he
was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them
in this--that he could excuse other; for thinking slightly of him,
and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told
against him.
"The world has been to strong for ME, I know," he said one
day to Lydgate. "But then I am not a mighty man--I shall never
be a man of renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable;
but Prodicus makes it easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves
were enough. Another story says that he came to hold the distaff,
and at last wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve
might keep a man right if everybody else's resolve helped him."
The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped
being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of
possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference
from our own failure. Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable
infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.
CHAPTER XIX.
"L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia
Della sua palma, sospirando, letto."
--Purgatorio, vii.
When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor,
when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon,
born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome.
In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil
by forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry
full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets;
and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the
flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase
due to the painter's fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill
some dull blanks with love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated
the times with its leaven and entered into everybody's food; it was
fermenting still as a distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain
long-haired German artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who
worked or idled near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.
One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long,
but abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment,
had just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican
and was looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from
the adjoining round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not
to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up
to him and placing a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent,
"Come here, quick! else she will have changed her pose."
Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly
along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne,
then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness
of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like
ease and tenderness. They were just in time to see another
figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble:
a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne,
was clad in Quakerish gray drapery; her long cloak, fastened at
the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful
ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward
the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face
around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking
at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were
fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor.
But she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused
as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them,
immediately turned away to join a maid-servant and courier
who were loitering along the hall at a little distance off.
"What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?" said the
German, searching in his friend's face for responding admiration,
but going on volubly without waiting for any other answer.
"There lies antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death,
but arrested in the complete contentment of its sensuous perfection:
and here stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness
of Christian centuries in its bosom. But she should be dressed
as a nun; I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker;
I would dress her as a nun in my picture. However, she is married;
I saw her wedding-ring on that wonderful left hand, otherwise I
should have thought the sallow Geistlicher was her father.
I saw him parting from her a good while ago, and just now I found her
in that magnificent pose. Only think! he is perhaps rich, and would
like to have her portrait taken. Ah! it is no use looking after her--
there she goes! Let us follow her home!"
"No, no," said his companion, with a little frown.
"You are singular, Ladislaw. You look struck together. Do you
know her?"
"I know that she is married to my cousin," said Will Ladislaw,
sauntering down the hall with a preoccupied air, while his German
friend kept at his side and watched him eagerly.
"What! the Geistlicher? He looks more like an uncle--a more
useful sort of relation."
"He is not my uncle. I tell you he is my second cousin,"
said Ladislaw, with some irritation.
"Schon, schon. Don't be snappish. You are not angry with me
for thinking Mrs. Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna
I ever saw?"
"Angry? nonsense. I have only seen her once before, for a couple
of minutes, when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I
left England. They were not married then. I didn't know they
were coming to Rome."
"But you will go to see them now--you will find out what they have
for an address--since you know the name. Shall we go to the post?
And you could speak about the portrait."
"Confound you, Naumann! I don't know what I shall do. I am not
so brazen as you."
"Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you
were an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique
form animated by Christian sentiment--a sort of Christian Antigone--
sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion."
"Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of
her existence--the divinity passing into higher completeness
and all but exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas.
I am amateurish if you like: I do NOT think that all the universe
is straining towards the obscure significance of your pictures."
"But it is, my dear!--so far as it is straining through me,
Adolf Naumann: that stands firm," said the good-natured painter,
putting a hand on Ladislaw's shoulder, and not in the least disturbed
by the unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone. "See now!
My existence presupposes the existence of the whole universe--
does it NOT? and my function is to paint--and as a painter
I have a conception which is altogether genialisch, of your
great-aunt or second grandmother as a subject for a picture;
therefore, the universe is straining towards that picture through
that particular hook or claw which it puts forth in the shape of me--
not true?"
"But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart it?--
the case is a little less simple then."
"Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing--
picture or no picture--logically."
Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud
in his face broke into sunshiny laughter.
"Come now, my friend--you will help?" said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.
"No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody's service
as models. And you want to express too much with your painting.
You would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background
which every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against.
And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are
poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead
of raising them. Language is a finer medium."
"Yes, for those who can't paint," said Naumann. "There you have
perfect right. I did not recommend you to paint, my friend."
The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose
to appear stung. He went on as if he had not heard.
"Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague.
After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you
with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about
representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies!
You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their
very breathing: they change from moment to moment.--This woman whom
you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice,
pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her."
"I see, I see. You are jealous. No man must presume to think
that he can paint your ideal. This is serious, my friend!
Your great-aunt! `Der Neffe als Onkel' in a tragic sense--ungeheuer!"
"You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt again."
"How is she to be called then?"
"Mrs. Casaubon."
"Good. Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find
that she very much wishes to be painted?"
"Yes, suppose!" said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone,
intended to dismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated
by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation.
Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt
as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are
characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes
for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.
Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain
innocently quiet.
CHAPTER XX.
"A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love."
Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir
of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment
to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually
controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others
will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone.
And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.
Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could
state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought
and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness
was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault
of her own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice,
and with the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated
her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very
first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above
her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could
not entirely share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience
of her girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history,
where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession
with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness
of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome,
and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand
in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently survive
in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr. Casaubon,
but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the
chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most
glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive
out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth
and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which
her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a
knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes,
and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts,
Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.
But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic
broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly
on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English
and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on
art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature
turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles,
fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave
the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain;
a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic
acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous
preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible
Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background
for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea
had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas,
palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all
that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy
of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager
Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long
vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous
light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals,
sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing
forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense,
and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking
of them, preparing strange associations which remained through
her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images
which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze;
and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life
continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy,
the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets
and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was
being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease
of the retina.
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything
very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled
out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them,
while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose
that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks
after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic.
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real
future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do
not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,
has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind;
and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had
a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be
like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we
should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state
the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I
have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would
have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows,
for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew
its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of
Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him,
was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand
from what it had been in her maiden dream. It was too early yet
for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more
for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary
a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later
to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life
without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her;
but she was now in an interval when the very force of her nature
heightened its confusion. In this way, the early months of marriage
often are times of critical tumult--whether that of a shrimp-pool
or of deeper waters--which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace.
But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms
of expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable?
Oh waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his
ability to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it;
or his provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand?
And was not Rome the place in all the world to give free play
to such accomplishments? Besides, had not Dorothea's enthusiasm
especially dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps
the sadness with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?--
And that such weight pressed on Mr. Casaubon was only plainer
than before.
All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same,
the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday.
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you
are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few
imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity
of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse
than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear
altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon
the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it.
To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see
your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes
quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and
believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable
of flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a
character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted
in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks
since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt
with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air
which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced
by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?
I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional
and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment
is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure
of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed,
expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked
on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you
make no way and that the sea is not within sight--that, in fact,
you are exploring an enclosed basin.
In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on
some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see
the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness
of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future,
she had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible
arguments to be brought against Mr. Casaubon's entirely new view
of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking that
hereafter she should see this subject which touched him so nearly
from the same high ground whence doubtless it had become so important
to him. Again, the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissal
with which he treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts,
was easily accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and
preoccupation in which she herself shared during their engagement.
But now, since they had been in Rome, with all the depths of her
emotion roused to tumultuous activity, and with life made a new
problem by new elements, she had been becoming more and more aware,
with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into
inward fits of anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.
How far the judicious Hooker or any other hero of erudition would
have been the same at Mr. Casaubon's time of life, she had no means
of knowing, so that he could not have the advantage of comparison;
but her husband's way of commenting on the strangely impressive objects
around them had begun to affect her with a sort of mental shiver:
he had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himself worthily,
but only of acquitting himself. What was fresh to her mind was worn
out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever
been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long
shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment
of knowledge.
When he said, "Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay
a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,"--it seemed
to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, "Should you
like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated
frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think
it worth while to visit."
"But do you care about them?" was always Dorothea's question.
"They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent
the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic
invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned
as a genuine mythical product. But if you like these wall-paintings
we can easily drive thither; and you ill then, I think, have seen
the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit
in a visit to Rome. He is the painter who has been held to combine
the most complete grace of form with sublimity of expression.
Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of conoscenti."
This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a
clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify
the glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she
knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her.
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent
creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge
seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
On other subjects indeed Mr. Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation
and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of enthusiasm,
and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous direction of
his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she dragged him away
from it. But she was gradually ceasing to expect with her former
delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening where she
followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets
and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri,
or in an exposure of other mythologists' ill-considered parallels,
easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors.
With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows,
and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about
the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon,
might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged
to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling--if he would have held
her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and
understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience,
and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return,
so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual
knowledge and affection--or if she could have fed her affection with
those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman,
who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll,
creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her
own love. That was Dorothea's bent. With all her yearning to know
what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor
enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon's coat-sleeve,
or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other
sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety,
to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at
the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded
these manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made his
clerical toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for
those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff
cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.
And by a sad contradiction Dorothea's ideas and resolves seemed
like melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they
had been but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere
victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through
that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation,
of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more
complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty.
Poor Dorothea! she was certainly troublesome--to herself chiefly;
but this morning for the first time she had been troublesome to
Mr. Casaubon.
She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination
to shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned
a face all cheerful attention to her husband when he said,
"My dear Dorothea, we must now think of all that is yet left undone,
as a preliminary to our departure. I would fain have returned home
earlier that we might have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my
inquiries here have been protracted beyond their anticipated period.
I trust, however, that the time here has not been passed unpleasantly
to you. Among the sights of Europe, that of Rome has ever been
held one of the most striking and in some respects edifying.
I well remember that I considered it an epoch in my life when I
visited it for the first time; after the fall of Napoleon, an event
which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I think it is one
among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has been applied--
`See Rome and die:' but in your case I would propose an emendation
and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy wife."
Mr. Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious
intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down,
and concluding with a smile. He had not found marriage a rapturous state,
but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable husband,
who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved to be.
"I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay--I mean,
with the result so far as your studies are concerned," said Dorothea,
trying to keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband.
"Yes," said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes
the word half a negative. "I have been led farther than I had foreseen,
and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which,
though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit.
The task, notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been
a somewhat laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me
from that too continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours
of study which has been the snare of my solitary life."
"I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you,"
said Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she
had supposed that Mr. Casaubon's mind had gone too deep during
the day to be able to get to the surface again. I fear there
was a little temper in her reply. "I hope when we get to Lowick,
I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more
into what interests you."
"Doubtless, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow.
"The notes I have here made will want sifting, and you can,
if you please, extract them under my direction."
"And all your notes," said Dorothea, whose heart had already
burned within her on this subject, so that now she could not help
speaking with her tongue. "All those rows of volumes--will you not
now do what you used to speak of?--will you not make up your mind
what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which
will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write
to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me:
I can be of no other use." Dorothea, in a most unaccountable,
darkly feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full
of tears.
The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing
to Mr. Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea's words
were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could
have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles
as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her
husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently
to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.
In Mr. Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration
to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible
to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness:
always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without,
they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the
full acceptance of our humiliating confessions--how much more by
hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer,
those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive
against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel
outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife--nay, of a
young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen-scratches
and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded
canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything
with a malign power of inference. Here, towards this particular
point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match
Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact.
He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping
the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this
capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most
exasperating of all criticism,--that which sees vaguely a great
many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.
For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon's
face had a quick angry flush upon it.
"My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety,
"you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons,
adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured
by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers. It had been easy
for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion;
but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted
with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the
smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other.
And it were well if all such could be admonished to discriminate
judgments of which the true subject-matter lies entirely beyond
their reach, from those of which the elements may be compassed
by a narrow and superficial survey."
This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual
with Mr. Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation,
but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round
grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not
only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world
which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing
everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship
with her husband's chief interests?
"My judgment WAS a very superficial one--such as I am capable
of forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed
no rehearsal. "You showed me the rows of notebooks--you have often
spoken of them--you have often said that they wanted digesting.
But I never heard you speak of the writing that is to be published.
Those were very simple facts, and my judgment went no farther.
I only begged you to let me be of some good to you."
Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply,
taking up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it.
Both were shocked at their mutual situation--that each should
have betrayed anger towards the other. If they had been at home,
settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash
would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey,
the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground
that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is,
to say the least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed
your longitude extensively and placed yourselves in a moral
solitude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation
difficult and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly
be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughest minds.
To Dorothea's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed like a catastrophe,
changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was a new pain,
he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found himself
in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had been
able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged
him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously
given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just
where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence
against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he
only given it a more substantial presence?
Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present.
To have reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would
have been a show of persistent anger which Dorothea's conscience
shrank from, seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty.
However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to
claim justice, but to give tenderness. So when the carriage
came to the door, she drove with Mr. Casaubon to the Vatican,
walked with him through the stony avenue of inscriptions, and when
she parted with him at the entrance to the Library, went on through
the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what was around her.
She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would drive anywhere.
It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann had first
seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at
the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw
with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical
mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure,
and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted,
Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall
of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding
abstraction which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see
the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues:
she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home
and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads;
and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful
devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's
mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were
apt sooner or later to flow--the reaching forward of the whole
consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.
There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.
CHAPTER XXI.
"Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
No contrefeted termes had she
To semen wise."
--CHAUCER.
It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was
securely alone. But she was presently roused by a knock at the door,
which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in."
Tantripp had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman
waiting in the lobby. The courier had told him that only Mrs. Casaubon
was at home, but he said he was a relation of Mr. Casaubon's: would
she see him?
"Yes," said Dorothea, without pause; "show him into the salon."
Her chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she
had seen him at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon's
generosity towards him, and also that she had been interested
in his own hesitation about his career. She was alive to anything
that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this
moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her
self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her husband's goodness,
and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate
in all kind deeds. She waited a minute or two, but when she passed
into the next room there were just signs enough that she had been
crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing
than usual. She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of good-will
which is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him.
He was the elder by several years, but at that moment he looked
much the younger, for his transparent complexion flushed suddenly,
and he spoke with a shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference
of his manner with his male companion, while Dorothea became all
the calmer with a wondering desire to put him at ease.
"I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome,
until this morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum," he said.
"I knew you at once--but--I mean, that I concluded Mr. Casaubon's
address would be found at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious
to pay my respects to him and you as early as possible."
"Pray sit down. He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear
of you, I am sure," said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly
between the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing
to a chair opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron.
The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking.
"Mr. Casaubon is much engaged; but you will leave your address--
will you not?--and he will write to you."
"You are very good," said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his
diffidence in the interest with which he was observing the signs
of weeping which had altered her face. "My address is on my card.
But if you will allow me I will call again to-morrow at an hour
when Mr. Casaubon is likely to be at home."
"He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you
can hardly see him except by an appointment. Especially now.
We are about to leave Rome, and he is very busy. He is usually away
almost from breakfast till dinner. But I am sure he will wish you
to dine with us."
Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments. He had never been fond
of Mr. Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation,
would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition. But the idea
of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations
about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept
in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young
creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her,
groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)--
this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust:
he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally
unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.
For an instant he felt that the struggle, was causing a queer
contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort
he resolved it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile.
Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back
from her face too. Will Ladislaw's smile was delightful, unless you
were angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light
illuminating the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing
about every curve and line as if some Ariel were touching them
with a new charm, and banishing forever the traces of moodiness.
The reflection of that smile could not but have a little merriment
in it too, even under dark eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea
said inquiringly, "Something amuses you?"
"Yes," said Will, quick in finding resources. "I am thinking
of the sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you
annihilated my poor sketch with your criticism."
"My criticism?" said Dorothea, wondering still more. "Surely not.
I always feel particularly ignorant about painting."
"I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what
was most cutting. You said--I dare say you don't remember it as I do--
that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you.
At least, you implied that." Will could laugh now as well as smile.
"That was really my ignorance," said Dorothea, admiring
Will's good-humor. "I must have said so only because I never could see
any beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought
very fine. And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome.
There are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy.
At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescos,
or with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe--like a child present
at great ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions;
I feel myself in the presence of some higher life than my own.
But when I begin to examine the pictures one by on the life goes
out of them, or else is something violent and strange to me.
It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so much all at once,
and not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able
to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people
talk of the sky."
"Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must
be acquired," said Will. (It was impossible now to doubt the
directness of Dorothea's confession.) "Art is an old language
with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes
the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere
sense of knowing. I enjoy the art of all sorts here immensely;
but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to pieces I should
find it made up of many different threads. There is something
in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the process."
"You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Dorothea, with a new
direction of interest. "You mean to make painting your profession?
Mr. Casaubon will like to hear that you have chosen a profession."
"No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness. "I have quite made
up my mind against it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been
seeing a great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from
Frankfort with one of them. Some are fine, even brilliant fellows--
but I should not like to get into their way of looking at the world
entirely from the studio point of view."
"That I can understand," said Dorothea, cordially. "And in Rome
it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted
in the world than pictures. But if you have a genius for painting,
would it not be right to take that as a guide? Perhaps you might
do better things than these--or different, so that there might not
be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place."
There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it
into frankness. "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes
of that sort. I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch
of doing well what has been done already, at least not so well
as to make it worth while. And I should never succeed in anything
by dint of drudgery. If things don't come easily to me I never get them."
"I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,"
said Dorothea, gently. She was rather shocked at this mode of taking
all life as a holiday.
"Yes, I know Mr. Casaubon's opinion. He and I differ."
The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Dorothea.
She was all the more susceptible about Mr. Casaubon because of her
morning's trouble.
"Certainly you differ," she said, rather proudly. "I did not
think of comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labor
as Mr. Casaubon's is not common."
Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional impulse
to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr. Casaubon.
It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshipping this husband:
such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband
in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of
their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
"No, indeed," he answered, promptly. "And therefore it is a pity
that it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is,
for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world.
If Mr. Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal
of trouble."
"I do not understand you," said Dorothea, startled and anxious.
"I merely mean," said Will, in an offhand way, "that the Germans
have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at
results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass
while they have made good roads. When I was with Mr. Casaubon I
saw that he deafened himself in that direction: it was almost
against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by a German.
I was very sorry."
Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate
that vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode
in which Dorothea would be wounded. Young Mr. Ladislaw was not at
all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement
is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.
Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her
husband's life might be void, which left her no energy to spare
for the question whether this young relative who was so much
obliged to him ought not to have repressed his observation.
She did not even speak, but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in
the piteousness of that thought.
Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather ashamed,
imagining from Dorothea's silence that he had offended her still more;
and having also a conscience about plucking the tail-feathers
from a benefactor.
"I regretted it especially," he resumed, taking the usual course
from detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude
and respect towards my cousin. It would not signify so much
in a man whose talents and character were less distinguished."
Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling,
and said in her saddest recitative, "How I wish I had learned German
when I was at Lausanne! There were plenty of German teachers.
But now I can be of no use."
There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will
in Dorothea's last words. The question how she had come to accept
Mr. Casaubon--which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying
that she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances--was not now
to be answered on any such short and easy method. Whatever else
she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever
and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling.
She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait
and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul
came forth so directly and ingenuously. The AEolian harp again
came into his mind.
She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.
And if Mr. Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to
his lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would
have been an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall
at her feet. But he was something more unmanageable than a dragon:
he was a benefactor with collective society at his back, and he
was at that moment entering the room in all the unimpeachable
correctness of his demeanor, while Dorothea was looking animated
with a newly roused alarm and regret, and Will was looking animated
with his admiring speculation about her feelings.
Mr. Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure,
but he did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting,
when Will rose and explained his presence. Mr. Casaubon was less
happy than usual, and this perhaps made him look all the dimmer
and more faded; else, the effect might easily have been produced by
the contrast of his young cousin's appearance. The first impression
on seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which added to the
uncertainty of his changing expression. Surely, his very features
changed their form, his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small;
and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis.
When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light,
and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation.
Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.
As Dorothea's eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was
perhaps not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled
with other causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm
on his behalf which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness
fed by the realities of his lot and not by her own dreams.
Yet it was a source of greater freedom to her that Will was there;
his young equality was agreeable, and also perhaps his openness
to conviction. She felt an immense need of some one to speak to,
and she had never before seen any one who seemed so quick and pliable,
so likely to understand everything.
Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably
as well as pleasantly in Rome--had thought his intention was to remain
in South Germany--but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he
could converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary.
Ladislaw understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took
his leave.
Dorothea's eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down
wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head
and looked on the floor. A little flushed, and with bright eyes,
she seated herself beside him, and said--
"Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning. I was wrong.
I fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome."
"I am glad that you feel that, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon.
He spoke quietly and bowed. his head a little, but there was still
an uneasy feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.
"But you do forgive me?" said Dorothea, with a quick sob. In her
need for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate
her own fault. Would not love see returning penitence afar off,
and fall on its neck and kiss it?
"My dear Dorothea--`who with repentance is not satisfied, is not
of heaven nor earth:'--you do not think me worthy to be banished
by that severe sentence," said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself
to make a strong statement, and also to smile faintly.
Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob
would insist on falling.
"You are excited, my dear.. And I also am feeling some unpleasant
consequences of too much mental disturbance," said Mr. Casaubon.
In fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not
to have received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he abstained,
partly from the sense that it would be ungracious to bring
a new complaint in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment,
partly because he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself
by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray that jealousy
of disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers
that there was none to spare in other directions. There is a sort
of jealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion,
but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
"I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch.
They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.
But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with
which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear
expectation dies, or some new motive is born. Today she had
begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting
a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the
waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness
in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as
an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun
to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her
to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become
wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive
with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling--
an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity
of objects--that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the
lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
CHAPTER XXII.
"Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone,
Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien."
--ALFRED DE MUSSET.
Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day,
and gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation.
On the contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way
of drawing her husband into conversation and of deferentially
listening to him than she had ever observed in any one before.
To be sure, the listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted!
Will talked a good deal himself, but what he said was thrown in with
such rapidity, and with such an unimportant air of saying something
by the way, that it seemed a gay little chime after the great bell.
If Will was not always perfect, this was certainly one of his good days.
He described touches of incident among the poor people in Rome,
only to be seen by one who could move about freely; he found
himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the unsound opinions
of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and Catholicism;
and passed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful picture
of the enjoyment he got out of the very miscellaneousness of Rome,
which made the mind flexible with constant comparison, and saved
you from seeing the world's ages as a set of box-like partitions
without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon's studies, Will observed,
had always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps
never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed
that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole:
the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive.
Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to Dorothea,
and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item
to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di
Foligno or the Laocoon. A sense of contributing to form the world's
opinion makes conversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon
too was not without his pride in his young wife, who spoke better
than most women, as indeed he had perceived in choosing her.
Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon's statement
that his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days,
and that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason
for staying in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon
should not go away without seeing a studio or two. Would not
Mr. Casaubon take her? That sort of thing ought not to be missed:
it was quite special: it was a form of life that grew like a small
fresh vegetation with its population of insects on huge fossils.
Will would be happy to conduct them--not to anything wearisome,
only to a few examples.
Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him,
could not but ask her if she would be interested in such visits:
he was now at her service during the whole day; and it was agreed
that Will should come on the morrow and drive with them.
Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom
even Mr. Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced
he led the way to the studio of his friend Adolf Naumann,
whom he mentioned as one of the chief renovators of Christian art,
one of those who had not only revived but expanded that grand
conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the successive
ages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls
of all periods became as it were contemporaries. Will added
that he had made himself Naumann's pupil for the nonce.
"I have been making some oil-sketches under him," said Will.
"I hate copying. I must put something of my own in. Naumann has
been painting the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have
been making a sketch of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered
Kings in his Chariot. I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann,
and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning. But this time
I mean to outdo him in breadth of intention. I take Tamburlaine
in his chariot for the tremendous course of the world's physical
history lashing on the harnessed dynasties. In my opinion, that is
a good mythical interpretation." Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon,
who received this offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily,
and bowed with a neutral air.
"The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much," said Dorothea.
"I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give.
Do you intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?"
"Oh yes," said Will, laughing, "and migrations of races and
clearings of forests--and America and the steam-engine. Everything
you can imagine!"
"What a difficult kind of shorthand!" said Dorothea, smiling towards
her husband. "It would require all your knowledge to be able
to read it."
Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will. He had a suspicion that he
was being laughed at. But it was not possible to include Dorothea
in the suspicion.
They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present;
his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious
person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap,
so that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the
beautiful young English lady exactly at that time.
The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his
finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon
as much as he did Dorothea. Will burst in here and there with ardent
words of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend's work;
and Dorothea felt that she was getting quite new notions as to
the significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied
thrones with the simple country as a background, and of saints
with architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally
wedged in their skulls. Some things which had seemed monstrous
to her were gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning:
but all this was apparently a branch of knowledge in which
Mr. Casaubon had not interested himself.
"I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than
have to read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand
these pictures sooner than yours with the very wide meaning,"
said Dorothea, speaking to Will.
"Don't speak of my painting before Naumann," said Will. "He will
tell you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"
"Is that true?" said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann,
who made a slight grimace and said--
"Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting. His walk must
be belles-lettres. That is wi-ide."
Naumann's pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the
word satirically. Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh:
and Mr. Casaubon, while he felt some disgust at the artist's German
accent, began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.
The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will
aside for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at
Mr. Casaubon, came forward again and said--
"My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say
that a sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the
St. Thomas Aquinas in my picture there. It is too much to ask;
but I so seldom see just what I want--the idealistic in the real."
"You astonish me greatly, sir," said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved
with a glow of delight; "but if my poor physiognomy, which I have
been accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any
use to you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor,
I shall feel honored. That is to say, if the operation will not
be a lengthy one; and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object to the delay."
As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it
had been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest
and worthiest among the sons of men. In that case her tottering
faith would have become firm again.
Naumann's apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the
sketch went on at once as well as the conversation. Dorothea sat
down and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had
done for a long while before. Every one about her seemed good,
and she said to herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant,
would have been full of beauty its sadness would have been winged
with hope. No nature could be less suspicious than hers:
when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and
the honorable susceptibility of sparrows, and was proportionately
indignant when their baseness was made manifest.
The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about
English polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile
had perched himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.
Presently Naumann said--"Now if I could lay this by for half
an hour and take it up again--come and look, Ladislaw--I think
it is perfect so far."
Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration
is too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret--
"Ah--now--if I could but have had more--but you have other engagements--
I could not ask it--or even to come again to-morrow."
"Oh, let us stay!" said Dorothea. "We have nothing to do to-day except
go about, have we?" she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon.
"It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible."
"I am at your service, sir, in the matter," said Mr. Casaubon,
with polite condescension. "Having given up the interior of my
head to idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work
in this way."
"You are unspeakably good--now I am happy!" said Naumann, and then
went on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch
as if he were considering that. Putting it aside for a moment,
he looked round vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors,
and afterwards turning to Mr. Casaubon, said--
"Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be
unwilling to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight
sketch of her--not, of course, as you see, for that picture--
only as a single study."
Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him,
and Dorothea said, at once, "Where shall I put myself?"
Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to
adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected
airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions,
when the painter said, "It is as Santa Clara that I want you to stand--
leaning so, with your cheek against your hand--so--looking at
that stool, please, so!"
Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint's feet
and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he
was adjusting her arm. All this was impudence and desecration,
and he repented that he had brought her.
The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about
and occupied Mr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did
not in the end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman,
as was clear from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Casaubon would
be tired. Naumann took the hint and said--
"Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife."
So Mr. Casaubon's patience held out further, and when after all it
turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect
if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow.
On the morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once.
The result of all was so far from displeasing to Mr. Casaubon,
that he arranged for the purchase of the picture in which Saint
Thomas Aquinas sat among the doctors of the Church in a disputation
too abstract to be represented, but listened to with more or less
attention by an audience above. The Santa Clara, which was spoken of
in the second place, Naumann declared himself to be dissatisfied with--
he could not, in conscience, engage to make a worthy picture of it;
so about the Santa Clara the arrangement was conditional.
I will not dwell on Naumann's jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon
that evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all
which Will joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann
mention any detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated
at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most
ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips?
She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could
not say just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet,
when after some resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons
to his friend's studio, he had been allured by the gratification
of his pride in being the person who could grant Naumann such an
opportunity of studying her loveliness--or rather her divineness,
for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodily prettiness
were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Tipton and its neighborhood,
as well as Dorothea herself, would have been surprised at her beauty
being made so much of. In that part of the world Miss Brooke had
been only a "fine young woman.")
"Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann. Mrs. Casaubon
is not to be talked of as if she were a model," said Will.
Naumann stared at him.
"Schon! I will talk of my Aquinas. The head is not a bad type,
after all. I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been
flattered to have his portrait asked for. Nothing like these
starchy doctors for vanity! It was as I thought: he cared much
less for her portrait than his own."
"He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will,
with gnashing impetuosity. His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were
not known to his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them,
and wishing that he could discharge them all by a check.
Naumann gave a shrug and said, "It is good they go away soon, my dear.
They are spoiling your fine temper."
All Will's hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing
Dorothea when she was alone. He only wanted her to take more
emphatic notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special
in her remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be.
He was rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, reach he
saw was her usual state of feeling. The remote worship of a woman
throned out of their reach plays a great part in men's lives,
but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition,
some approving sign by which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without
descending from her high place. That was precisely what Will wanted.
But there were plenty of contradictions in his imaginative demands.
It was beautiful to see how Dorothea's eyes turned with wifely
anxiety and beseeching to Mr. Casaubon: she would have lost some
of her halo if she had been without that duteous preoccupation;
and yet at the next moment the husband's sandy absorption of such
nectar was too intolerable; and Will's longing to say damaging things
about him was perhaps not the less tormenting because he felt the
strongest reasons for restraining it.
Will had not been invited to dine the next day. Hence he persuaded
himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time
was the middle of the day, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.
Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of
Will had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him,
especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit. When he entered
she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for Celia.
She greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course,
and said at once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand--
"I am so glad you are come. Perhaps you understand all about cameos,
and can tell me if these are really good. I wished to have you
with us in choosing them, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought
there was not time. He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall
go away in three days. I have been uneasy about these cameos.
Pray sit down and look at them."
"I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake
about these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat.
And the color is fine: it will just suit you."
"Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion.
You saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty--
at least I think so. We were never so long away from each other in our
lives before. She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life.
I found out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos,
and I should be sorry for them not to be good--after their kind."
Dorothea added the last words with a smile.
"You seem not to care about cameos," said Will, seating himself at
some distance from her, and observing her while she closed the oases.
"No, frankly, I don't think them a great object in life," said Dorothea
"I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should
have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere."
"I suppose I am dull about many things," said Dorothea, simply.
"I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life.
And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie
outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one.
It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most
people are shut out from it."
"I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously.
"You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement.
If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness,
and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others.
The best piety is to enjoy--when you can. You are doing the most
then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet.
And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of
all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight--
in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the
world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery?
I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery,
and want to make your life a martyrdom." Will had gone further than
he intended, and checked himself. But Dorothea's thought was not
taking just the same direction as his own, and she answered without any
special emotion--
"Indeed you mistake me. I am not a sad, melancholy creature. I am
never unhappy long together. I am angry and naughty--not like Celia:
I have a great outburst, and then all seems glorious again.
I cannot help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.
I should be quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is
so much that I don't know the reason of--so much that seems to me
a consecration of ugliness rather than beauty. The painting and
sculpture may be wonderful, but the feeling is often low and brutal,
and sometimes even ridiculous. Here and there I see what takes me
at once as noble--something that I might compare with the Alban
Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian Hill; but that makes it
the greater pity that there is so little of the best kind among all
that mass of things over which men have toiled so."
"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer
things want that soil to grow in."
"Oh dear," said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
of her anxiety; "I see it must be very difficult to do anything good.
I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our
lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures,
if they could be put on the wall."
Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more,
but changed her mind and paused.
"You are too young--it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts,"
said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head habitual to him.
"You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous--
as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like the boy
in the legend. You have been brought up in some of those horrible
notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like Minotaurs
And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick:
you will be buried alive. It makes me savage to think of it!
I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such
a prospect."
Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so much
kindness in it for Dorothea's heart, which had always been giving out
ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings around her,
that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a gentle smile--
"It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you
did not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another
kind of life. But Lowick is my chosen home."
The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him
to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her:
it was clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were
both silent for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an
air of saying at last what had been in her mind beforehand.
"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice
that you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate
when I speak hastily."
"What was it?" said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity
quite new in her. "I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire
as it goes. I dare say I shall have to retract."
"I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German--I mean,
for the subjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in. I have been thinking
about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Casaubon's learning he must
have before him the same materials as German scholars--has he not?"
Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she
was in the strange situation of consulting a third person about
the adequacy of Mr. Casaubon's learning.
"Not exactly the same materials," said Will, thinking that he
would be duly reserved. "He is not an Orientalist, you know.
He does not profess to have more than second-hand knowledge there."
"But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written
a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern things;
and they are still used. Why should Mr. Casaubon's not be valuable,
like theirs?" said Dorothea, with more remonstrant energy.
She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been
having in her own mind.
"That depends on the line of study taken," said Will, also getting
a tone of rejoinder. "The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as
changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new
points of view. Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements,
or a book to refute Paracelsus? Do you not see that it is no use
now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century--
men like Bryant--and correcting their mistakes?--living in a lumber-room
and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?"
"How can you bear to speak so lightly?" said Dorothea, with a look
between sorrow and anger. "If it were as you say, what could
be sadder than so much ardent labor all in vain? I wonder it does
not affect you more painfully, if you really think that a man
like Mr. Casaubon, of so much goodness, power, and learning,
should in any way fail in what has been the labor of his best years."
She was beginning to be shocked that she had got to such a point
of supposition, and indignant with Will for having led her to it.
"You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling,"
said Will. "But if you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit.
I am not in a position to express my feeling toward Mr. Casaubon:
it would be at best a pensioner's eulogy."
"Pray excuse me," said Dorothea, coloring deeply. "I am aware,
as you say, that I am in fault in having introduced the subject.
Indeed, I am wrong altogether. Failure after long perseverance is
much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called
a failure."
"I quite agree with you," said Will, determined to change the situation--
"so much so that I have made up my mind not to run that risk of
never attaining a failure. Mr. Casaubon's generosity has perhaps
been dangerous to me, and I mean to renounce the liberty it has
given me. I mean to go back to England shortly and work my own way--
depend on nobody else than myself."
"That is fine--I respect that feeling," said Dorothea,
with returning kindness. "But Mr. Casaubon, I am sure, has never
thought of anything in the matter except what was most for your welfare."
"She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she
has married him," said Will to himself. Aloud he said, rising--
"I shall not see you again."
"Oh, stay till Mr. Casaubon comes," said Dorothea, earnestly. "I am
so glad we met in Rome. I wanted to know you."?
"And I have made you angry," said Will. "I have made you think
ill of me."
"Oh no. My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do
not say just what I like. But I hope I am not given to think ill
of them. In the end I am usually obliged to think ill of myself.
for being so impatient."
"Still, you don't like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought
to you."
"Not at all," said Dorothea, with the most open kindness.
"I like you very much."
Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have
been of more importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing,
but looked lull, not to say sulky.
"And I am quite interested to see what you will do," Dorothea went
on cheerfully. "I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation.
If it were not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow--
there are so many things, besides painting, that I am quite
ignorant of. You would hardly believe how little I have taken
in of music and literature, which you know so much of. I wonder
what your vocation will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?"
"That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern
that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel,
that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on
the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously
into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
One may have that condition by fits only."
"But you leave out the poems," said Dorothea. "I think they are wanted
to complete the poet. I understand what you mean about knowledge
passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience.
But I am sure I could never produce a poem."
"You ARE a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--
what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods," said Will,
showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the
spring-time and other endless renewals.
"I am very glad to hear it," said Dorothea, laughing out her words
in a bird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude
in her eyes. "What very kind things you say to me!"
"I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind--
that I could ever be of the slightest service to you I fear I shall
never have the opportunity." Will spoke with fervor.
"Oh yes," said Dorothea, cordially. "It will come; and I shall
remember how well you wish me. I quite hoped that we should be friends
when I first saw you--because of your relationship to Mr. Casaubon."
There was a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, and Will was
conscious that his own were obeying a law of nature and filling too.
The allusion to Mr. Casaubon would have spoiled all if anything at
that moment could have spoiled the subduing power, the sweet dignity,
of her noble unsuspicious inexperience.
"And there is one thing even now that you can do," said Dorothea, rising
and walking a little way under the strength of a recurring impulse.
"Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of that subject--
I mean about Mr. Casaubon's writings--I mean in that kind of way.
It was I who led to it. It was my fault. But promise me."
She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will,
looking gravely at him.
"Certainly, I will promise you," said Will, reddening however.
If he never said a cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left
off receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible
to hate him the more. The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe;
and Will was at least ready with that accomplishment. He said that he
must go now without waiting for Mr. Casaubon, whom he would come
to take leave of at the last moment. Dorothea gave him her hand,
and they exchanged a simple "Good-by."
But going out of the porte cochere he met Mr. Casaubon,
and that gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin,
politely waived the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow,
which would be sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure.
"I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr. Ladislaw,
which I think will heighten your opinion of him," said Dorothea
to her husband in the coarse of the evening. She had mentioned
immediately on his entering that Will had just gone away, and would
come again, but Mr. Casaubon had said, "I met him outside, and we
made our final adieux, I believe," saying this with the air and tone
by which we imply that any subject, whether private or public,
does not interest us enough to wish for a further remark upon it.
So Dorothea had waited.
"What is that, my love?" said Mr Casaubon (he always said "my love"
when his manner was the coldest).
"He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up
his dependence on your generosity. He means soon to go back to England,
and work his own way. I thought you would consider that a good sign,"
said Dorothea, with an appealing look into her husband's neutral face.
"Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would
addict himself?"
"No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him
in your generosity. Of course he will write to you about it.
Do you not think better of him for his resolve?"
"I shall await his communication on the subject," said Mr. Casaubon.
"I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did
for him was his own welfare. I remembered your goodness in what you
said about him when I first saw him at Lowick," said Dorothea,
putting her hand on her husband's
"I had a duty towards him," said Mr. Casaubon, laying his other
hand on Dorothea's in conscientious acceptance of her caress,
but with a glance which he could not hinder from being uneasy.
"The young man, I confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me,
nor need we, I think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours
to determine beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated."
Dorothea did not mention Will again.
BOOK III.
WAITING FOR DEATH.
CHAPTER XXIII.
"Your horses of the Sun," he said,
"And first-rate whip Apollo!
Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head,
But I will beat them hollow."
Fred Vincy, we have seen. had a debt on his mind, and though no
such immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young
gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected
with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate.
The creditor was Mr. Bambridge a horse-dealer of the neighborhood,
whose company was much sought in Middlemarch by young men understood
to be "addicted to pleasure." During the vacations Fred had naturally
required more amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Bambridge
had been accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire
of horses and the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter,
but also to make a small advance by which he might be able to meet some
losses at billiards. The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds.
Bambridge was in no alarm about his money, being sure that young
Vincy had backers; but he had required something to show for it,
and Fred had at first given a bill with his own signature.
Three months later he had renewed this bill with the signature
of Caleb Garth. On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he
should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in
his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence
should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know,
is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable
disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or
the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater
mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring
about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste
in costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing.
Fred felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle,
that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of "swapping" he
should gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse
that would fetch a hundred at any moment--"judgment" being always
equivalent to an unspecified sum in hard cash. And in any case,
even supposing negations which only a morbid distrust could imagine,
Fred had always (at that time) his father's pocket as a last resource,
so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity
about them. Of what might be the capacity of his father's pocket,
Fred had only a vague notion: was not trade elastic?
And would not the deficiencies of one year be made up for by the
surplus of another? The Vincys lived in an easy profuse way,
not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits
and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy,
and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion
that their father might pay for anything if he would. Mr. Vincy
himself had expensive Middlemarch habits--spent money on coursing,
on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running
accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting
everything one wants without any question of payment. But it was
in the nature of fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses:
there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had
to disclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors.
He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he
bore the thunder with the certainty that it was transient;
but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see his mother cry,
and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun;
for Fred was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under scolding,
it was chiefly for propriety's sake. The easier course plainly,
was to renew the bill with a friend's signature. Why not? With the
superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why
he should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent,
but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything
were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal
order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable
young gentleman.
With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice
to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses,
and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he
will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being
as communicable as other warmth. Still there is always a certain
number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until the others
have refused; and it happened that Fred checked off all his friends
but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable;
being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be
maintained about mankind generally) had a right to be free from
anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall into a thoroughly
unpleasant position--wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton,
have to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck under" in any sort
of way--was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful
intuitions implanted in him by nature. And Fred winced under the
idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts.
Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply
to was at once the poorest and the kindest--namely, Caleb Garth.
The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he
and Rosamond were little ones, and the Garths were better off,
the slight connection between the two families through
Mr. Featherstone's double marriage (the first to Mr. Garth's sister,
and the second to Mrs. Vincy's) had led to an acquaintance which
was carried on between the children rather than the parents:
the children drank tea together out of their toy teacups, and spent
whole days together in play. Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred
at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world making
her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella.
Through all the stages of his education he had kept his affection
for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as a second
home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his
family had long ceased. Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous,
the Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife,
for there were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though
old manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected
with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent social
superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice,
though hardly expressible theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth
had failed in the building business, which he had unfortunately
added to his other avocations of surveyor, valuer, and agent,
had conducted that business for a time entirely for the benefit of
his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to the
utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound.
He had now achieved this, and from all who did not think it
a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won him due esteem;
but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem,
in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.
Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth, and frequently
spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread--
meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage;
in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's Questions
was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks,
or a courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman
who was better off needed that sort of thing. And since Mary had
been keeping Mr. Featherstone's house, Mrs. Vincy's want of liking
for the Garths had been converted into something more positive,
by alarm lest Fred should engage himself to this plain girl,
whose parents "lived in such a small way." Fred, being aware of this,
never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs. Garth, which had of late
become more frequent, the increasing ardor of his affection
for Mary inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her.
Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went
with his request. He obtained it without much difficulty,
for a large amount of painful experience had not sufficed to make
Caleb Garth cautious about his own affairs, or distrustful of his
fellow-men when they had not proved themselves untrustworthy;
and he had the highest opinion of Fred, was "sure the lad
would turn out well--an open affectionate fellow, with a good
bottom to his character--you might trust him for anything."
Such was Caleb's psychological argument. He was one of those
rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.
He had a certain shame about his neighbors' errors, and never spoke
of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind
from the best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices
in order to preconceive those errors. If he had to blame any one,
it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach,
or describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations
with the odd money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he
would rather do other men's work than find fault with their doing.
I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.
When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it
without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would
be forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed
his spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite's clear
young eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about
the future from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an
occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving
his signature he must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly,
he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at
his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink
and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him,
lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression in the
outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar
mildness (pardon these details for once--you would have learned to
love them if you had known Caleb Garth), and said in a comfortable tone--
"It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse's knees?
And then, these exchanges, they don't answer when you have 'cute
jockeys to deal with. You'll be wiser another time, my boy."
Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write
his signature with the care which he always gave to that performance;
for whatever he did in the way of business he did well.
He contemplated the large well-proportioned letters and final flourish,
with his head a trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it
to Fred, said "Good-by," and returned forthwith to his absorption
in a plan for Sir James Chettam's new farm-buildings.
Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of
the signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb
was more conscious, Mrs. Garth remained ignorant of the affair.
Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred's sky, which altered his
view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone's
present of money was of importance enough to make his color come
and go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a
proportionate disappointment. His failure in passing his examination,
had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable
by his father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home.
Mr. Vincy had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put
up with, Fred should turn out and get his living how he could;
and he had never yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son,
who had especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things
that he did not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not "go
on with that." Fred was conscious that he would have been yet more
severely dealt with if his family as well as himself had not secretly
regarded him as Mr. Featherstone's heir; that old gentleman's pride
in him, and apparent fondness for him, serving in the stead of more
exemplary conduct--just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery
we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile,
and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he
were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips. In fact, tacit expectations
of what would be done for him by uncle Featherstone determined
the angle at which most people viewed Fred Vincy in Middlemarch;
and in his own consciousness, what uncle Featherstone would do for him
in an emergency, or what he would do simply as an incorporated luck,
formed always an immeasurable depth of aerial perspective. But that
present of bank-notes, once made, was measurable, and being applied
to the amount of the debt, showed a deficit which had still to be
filled up either by Fred's "judgment" or by luck in some other shape.
For that little episode of the alleged borrowing, in which he had
made his father the agent in getting the Bulstrode certificate,
was a new reason against going to his father for money towards meeting
his actual debt. Fred was keen enough to foresee that anger would
confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having borrowed expressly
on the strength of his uncle's will would be taken as a falsehood.
He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious affair,
and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete
revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity.
Now Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs;
he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at
what he called Rosamond's fibs (it is only brothers who can associate
such ideas with a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation
of falsehood he would even incur some trouble and self-restraint.
It was under strong inward pressure of this kind that Fred had taken
the wise step of depositing the eighty pounds with his mother.
It was a pity that he had not at once given them to Mr. Garth;
but he meant to make the sum complete with another sixty, and with a
view to this, he had kept twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort
of seed-corn, which, planted by judgment, and watered by luck,
might yield more than threefold--a very poor rate of multiplication
when the field is a young gentleman's infinite soul, with all the
numerals at command.
Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the
suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes
as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency
to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity,
but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up
a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according
to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees
the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it.
Hopefulness has a pleasure in making a throw of any kind,
because the prospect of success is certain; and only a more generous
pleasure in offering as many as possible a share in the stake.
Fred liked play, especially billiards, as he liked hunting or riding
a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the better because he wanted
money and hoped to win. But the twenty pounds' worth of seed-corn
had been planted in vain in the seductive green plot--all of it at
least which had not been dispersed by the roadside--and Fred found
himself close upon the term of payment with no money at command
beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with his mother.
The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present which
had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Featherstone:
his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Vincy's own
habits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son
who was rather exasperating. This horse, then, was Fred's property,
and in his anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice
a possession without which life would certainly be worth little.
He made the resolution with a sense of heroism--heroism forced on him
by the dread of breaking his word to Mr. Garth, by his love for Mary
and awe of her opinion. He would start for Houndsley horse-fair
which was to be held the next morning, and--simply sell his horse,
bringing back the money by coach?--Well, the horse would hardly
fetch more than thirty pounds, and there was no knowing what
might happen; it would be folly to balk himself of luck beforehand.
It was a hundred to one that some good chance would fall in his way;
the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemed that he
should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he should
not equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down.
He would ride to Houndsley with Bambridge and with Horrock "the vet,"
and without asking them anything expressly, he should virtually get
the benefit of their opinion. Before he set out, Fred got the eighty
pounds from his mother.
Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company
with Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley
horse-fair, thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual;
and but for an unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand,
he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and of doing
what might be expected of a gay young fellow. Considering that Fred
was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners
and speech of young men who had not been to the university,
and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous
as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and Horrock
was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would
not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming
which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other name
than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock must
certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them
at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with
a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous
horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat,
and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business,
but for the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined
that the pursuit of these things was "gay."
In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness
which offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance,
gave him a thrilling association with horses (enough to specify
the hat-brim which took the slightest upward angle just to escape
the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him
a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin
seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards,
gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile,
of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind,
and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the
reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humor--
too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust,--
and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate
enough to know it, would be THE thing and no other. It is
a physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been
more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.
Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock,
turned sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the
space of three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle,
and remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical
than it had been.
The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective.
A mixture of passions was excited in Fred--a mad desire to thrash
Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain
the advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that
Horrock might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.
Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth
his ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes
spoken of as being "given to indulgence"--chiefly in swearing,
drinking, and beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him
called him a vicious man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest
of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing
to do with morality. He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his
drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole,
flourished like the green bay-tree. But his range of conversation
was limited, and like the fine old tune, "Drops of brandy," gave you
after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might
make weak heads dizzy. But a slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was
felt to give tone and character to several circles in Middlemarch;
and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room
at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes about the heroes
of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts
which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even
among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his memory was
chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and sold;
the number of miles they would trot you in no time without turning
a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate
asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his
hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it.
In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.
Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going
to Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly
at their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a
genuine opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from
such eminent critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge's weakness to be
a gratuitous flatterer. He had never before been so much struck
with the fact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree
which required the roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.
"You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody
but me, Vincy! Why, you never threw your leg across a finer
horse than that chestnut, and you gave him for this brute.
If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers.
I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan:
it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he used to drive him in
his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said,
`Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in wind-instruments.' That was what
I said. It went the round of the country, that joke did. But,
what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours."
"Why, you said just now his was worse than mine," said Fred,
more irritable than usual.
"I said a lie, then," said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically. "There wasn't
a penny to choose between 'em."
Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way.
When they slackened again, Mr. Bambridge said--
"Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours."
"I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know," said Fred, who required
all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him;
"I say his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?"
Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he
had been a portrait by a great master.
Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion;
but on reflection he saw that Bambridge's depreciation and Horrock's
silence were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they
thought better of the horse than they chose to say.
That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought
he saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse,
but an opening which made him congratulate himself on his
foresight in bringing with him his eighty pounds. A young farmer,
acquainted with Mr. Bambridge, came into the Red Lion, and entered
into conversation about parting with a hunter, which he introduced
at once as Diamond, implying that it was a public character.
For himself he only wanted a useful hack, which would draw upon occasion;
being about to marry and to give up hunting. The hunter was in
a friend's stable at some little distance; there was still time
for gentlemen to see it before dark. The friend's stable had to be
reached through a back street where you might as easily have been
poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim street of that
unsanitary period. Fred was not fortified against disgust by brandy,
as his companions were, but the hope of having at last seen the horse
that would enable him to make money was exhilarating enough to lead
him over the same ground again the first thing in the morning.
He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain with the farmer,
Bambridge would; for the stress of circumstances, Fred felt,
was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the
constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond
in a way that he never would have done (the horse being a friend's)
if he had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at
the animal--even Horrock--was evidently impressed with its merit.
To get all the advantage of being with men of this sort, you must
know how to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes
things literally. The color of the horse was a dappled gray,
and Fred happened to know that Lord Medlicote's man was on the look-out
for just such a horse. After all his running down, Bambridge let
it out in the course of the evening, when the farmer was absent,
that he had seen worse horses go for eighty pounds. Of course he
contradicted himself twenty times over, but when you know what is
likely to be true you can test a man's admissions. And Fred could
not but reckon his own judgment of a horse as worth something.
The farmer had paused over Fred's respectable though broken-winded
steed long enough to show that he thought it worth consideration,
and it seemed probable that he would take it, with five-and-twenty
pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond. In that case Fred,
when he had parted with his new horse for at least eighty pounds,
would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction, and would
have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the bill;
so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Garth would at
the utmost be twenty-five pounds. By the time he was hurrying
on his clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance
of not losing this rare chance, that if Bambridge and Horrock had
both dissuaded him, he would not have been deluded into a direct
interpretation of their purpose: he would have been aware that those
deep hands held something else than a young fellow's interest.
With regard to horses, distrust was your only clew. But scepticism,
as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come
to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever
that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment,
even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another.
Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain, and even before
the fair had well set in, had got possession of the dappled gray,
at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in addition--only five
pounds more than he had expected to give.
But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate,
and without waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he
set out alone on his fourteen miles' journey, meaning to take it
very quietly and keep his horse fresh.
CHAPTER XXIV.
"The offender's sorrow brings but small relief
To him who wears the strong offence's cross."
--SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious
events at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he
had known in his life before. Not that he had been disappointed
as to the possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain
could be concluded with Lord Medlicote's man, this Diamond,
in which hope to the amount of eighty pounds had been invested,
had without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a most
vicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom,
and had ended in laming himself severely by catching his leg in
a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was no more redress
for this than for the discovery of bad temper after marriage--
which of course old companions were aware of before the ceremony.
For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual elasticity
under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that he
had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting
any more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty
would be presented in five days. Even if he had applied to his
father on the plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss,
Fred felt smartingly that his father would angrily refuse to rescue
Mr. Garth from the consequence of what he would call encouraging
extravagance and deceit. He was so utterly downcast that he could
frame no other project than to go straight to Mr. Garth and tell
him the sad truth, carrying with him the fifty pounds, and getting
that sum at least safely out of his own hands. His father, being at
the warehouse, did not yet know of the accident: when he did,
he would storm about the vicious brute being brought into his stable;
and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred wanted to get away
with all his courage to face the greater. He took his father's nag,
for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr. Garth,
he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary. In fact,
it is probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her,
his conscience would hare been much less active both in previously
urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare
himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task,
but to act as directly and simply as he could. Even much stronger
mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the
being they love best. "The theatre of all my actions is fallen,"
said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they
are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.
Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that
time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable
in character.
Mr. Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house,
which was a little way outside the town--a homely place with an orchard
in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building,
which before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was
now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen. We get
the fonder of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own,
as our friends have. The Garth family, which was rather a large one,
for Mary had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their
old house, from which all the best furniture had long been sold.
Fred liked it too, knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt
deliciously of apples and quinces, and until to-day he had never come
to it without pleasant expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now
with the sense that he should probably have to make his confession before
Mrs. Garth, of whom he was rather more in awe than of her husband.
Not that she was inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies,
as Mary was. In her present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth
never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said,
borne the yoke in her youth, and learned self-control. She had that
rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it
without murmuring. Adoring her husband's virtues, she had very early
made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests,
and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous
enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children's frilling,
and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears
of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr. Garth's want of prudence
and the sums he might have had if he had been like other men.
Hence these fair neighbors thought her either proud or eccentric,
and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as "your fine Mrs. Garth."
She was not without her criticism of them in return, being more
accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch, and--where is
the blameless woman?--apt to be a little severe towards her own sex,
which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate.
On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards
the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these
were natural. Also, it must be admitted that Mrs. Garth was a trifle
too emphatic in her resistance to what she held to be follies:
the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a
little too strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot
that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard,
she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all
the stockings. She had sometimes taken pupils in a peripatetic fashion,
making them follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate.
She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent
lather while she corrected their blunders "without looking,"--
that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know
all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone--that, in short,
she might possess "education" and other good things ending in
"tion," and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being
a useless doll. When she made remarks to this edifying effect,
she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not hinder
her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth
like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto.
Certainly, the exemplary Mrs. Garth had her droll aspects, but her
character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains
a flavor of skin.
Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been
disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have
excused Mary for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included
in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex.
But this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it
the harder to Fred that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion.
And the circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more
unpleasant than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early
to look at some repairs not far off. Mrs. Garth at certain hours was
always in the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several
occupations at once there--making her pies at the well-scoured deal
table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements
at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving
lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite
to her at the table with their books and slates before them.
A tub and a clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated
an intermittent wash of small things also going on.
Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling
her pastry--applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches,
while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right
views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of
multitude or signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing.
She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary,
but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin,
a solid matronly figure, and a remarkable firmness of glance.
In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful
Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm.
Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become
like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry--the mother
too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy--
"Such as I am, she will shortly be."
"Now let us go through that once more," said Mrs. Garth,
pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic
young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson.
"`Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity
or plurality of idea'--tell me again what that means, Ben."
(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite
ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried
to hold her "Lindley Murray" above the waves.)
"Oh--it means--you must think what you mean," said Ben, rather peevishly.
"I hate grammar. What's the use of it?"
"To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can
be understood," said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.
"Should you like to speak as old Job does?"
"Yes," said Ben, stoutly; "it's funnier. He says, `Yo goo'--
that's just as good as `You go.'"
"But he says, `A ship's in the garden,' instead of `a sheep,'"
said Letty, with an air of superiority. "You might think he meant
a ship off the sea."
"No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly," said Ben. "How could
a ship off the sea come there?"
"These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part
of grammar," said Mrs. Garth. "That apple-peel is to be eaten by
the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty.
Job has only to speak about very plain things. How do you think
you would write or speak about anything more difficult, if you
knew no more of grammar than he does? You would use wrong words,
and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making people
understand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person.
What would you do then?"
"I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense
that this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.
"I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth,
accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring.
Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse,
and said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday,
about Cincinnatus."
"I know! he was a farmer," said Ben.
"Now, Ben, he was a Roman--let ME tell," said Letty, using her
elbow contentiously.
"You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing."
"Yes, but before that--that didn't come first--people wanted him,"
said Letty.
"Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first,"
insisted Ben. "He was a wise man, like my father, and that made
the people want his advice. And he was a brave man, and could fight.
And so could my father--couldn't he, mother?"
"Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,"
said Letty, frowning. "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak."
"Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the
caps from the tub. "When your brother began, you ought to have
waited to see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look,
pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows!
Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter
behave so." (Mrs. Garth delivered this awful sentence with much
majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed
volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive,
life was already a painful affair.) "Now, Ben."
"Well--oh--well--why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they
were all blockheads, and--I can't tell it just how you told it--
but they wanted a man to be captain and king and everything--"
"Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without
a wish to make her mother repent.
"Very well, dictator!" said Ben, contemptuously. "But that isn't
a good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates."
"Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs. Garth,
carefully serious. "Hark, there is a knock at the door! Run, Letty,
and open it."
The knock was Fred's; and when Letty said that her father was not in
yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative.
He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see
Mrs. Garth in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there.
He put his arm round Letty's neck silently, and led her into
the kitchen without his usual jokes and caresses.
Mrs. Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise
was not a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said,
quietly continuing her work--
"You, Fred, so early in the day? You look quite pale.
Has anything happened?"
"I want to speak to Mr. Garth," said Fred, not yet ready to say more--
"and to you also," he added, after a little pause, for he had no
doubt that Mrs. Garth knew everything about the bill, and he must
in the end speak of it before her, if not to her solely.
"Caleb will be in again in a few minutes," said Mrs. Garth, who imagined
some trouble between Fred and his father. "He is sure not to be long,
because he has some work at his desk that must be done this morning.
Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?"
"But we needn't go on about Cincinnatus, need we?" said Ben,
who had taken Fred's whip out of his hand, and was trying its
efficiency on the eat.
"No, go out now. But put that whip down. How very mean of you
to whip poor old Tortoise! Pray take the whip from him, Fred."
"Come, old boy, give it me," said Fred, putting out his hand.
"Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up
the whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.
"Not to-day--another time. I am not riding my own horse."
"Shall you see Mary to-day?"
"Yes, I think so," said Fred, with an unpleasant twinge.
"Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun."
"Enough, enough, Ben! run away," said Mrs. Garth, seeing that Fred
was teased. . .
"Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs. Garth?" said Fred,
when the children were gone and it was needful to say something
that would pass the time. He was not yet sure whether he should
wait for Mr. Garth, or use any good opportunity in conversation
to confess to Mrs. Garth herself, give her the money and ride away.
"One--only one. Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven.
I am not getting a great income now," said Mrs. Garth, smiling.
"I am at a low ebb with pupils. But I have saved my little
purse for Alfred's premium: I have ninety-two pounds.
He can go to Mr. Hanmer's now; he is just at the right age."
This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Garth was on
the brink of losing ninety-two pounds and more. Fred was silent.
"Young gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that,"
Mrs. Garth innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border.
"And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer:
he wants to give the boy a good chance. There he is! I hear him
coming in. We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?"
When they entered the parlor Caleb had thrown down his hat and was
seated at his desk.
"What! Fred, my boy!" he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his
pen still undipped; "you are here betimes." But missing the usual
expression of cheerful greeting in Fred's face, he immediately added,
"Is there anything up at home?--anything the matter?"
"Yes, Mr. Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will
give you a bad opinion of me. I am come to tell you and Mrs. Garth
that I can't keep my word. I can't find the money to meet the bill
after all. I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty
pounds towards the hundred and sixty."
While Fred was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them
on the desk before Mr. Garth. He had burst forth at once with the
plain fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources.
Mrs. Garth was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for
an explanation. Caleb blushed, and after a little pause said--
"Oh, I didn't tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred;
it was for a hundred and sixty pounds. He made sure he could meet
it himself."
There was an evident change in Mrs. Garth's face, but it was
like a change below the surface of water which remains smooth.
She fixed her eyes on Fred, saying--
"I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money
and he has refused you."
"No," said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty;
"but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use,
I should not like to mention Mr. Garth's name in the matter."
"It has come at an unfortunate time," said Caleb, in his hesitating way,
looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper,
"Christmas upon us--I'm rather hard up just now. You see, I have
to cut out everything like a tailor with short measure. What can
we do, Susan? I shall want every farthing we have in the bank.
It's a hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it!"
"I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for
Alfred's premium," said Mrs. Garth, gravely and decisively,
though a nice ear might have discerned a slight tremor in some
of the words. "And I have no doubt that Mary has twenty pounds
saved from her salary by this time. She will advance it."
Mrs. Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least
calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively.
Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in
considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could
be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions. But she had made
Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse.
Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted
almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable,
and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied
himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach
might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on
other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen.
Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest
motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings
who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw
himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.
"I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs. Garth--ultimately," he stammered out.
"Yes, ultimately," said Mrs. Garth, who having a special dislike
to fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram.
"But boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be
apprenticed at fifteen." She had never been so little inclined
to make excuses for Fred.
"I was the most in the wrong, Susan," said Caleb. "Fred made sure
of finding the money. But I'd no business to be fingering bills.
I suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?"
he added, fixing his merciful gray eyes on Fred. Caleb was too delicate,
to specify Mr. Featherstone.
"Yes, I have tried everything--I really have. I should have had
a hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse
which I was about to sell. My uncle had given me eighty pounds,
and I paid away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I
was going to sell for eighty or more--I meant to go without a horse--
but now it has turned out vicious and lamed itself. I wish I and the
horses too had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you.
There's no one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Garth have
always been so kind to me. However, it's no use saying that.
You will always think me a rascal now."
Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he
was getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being
sorry was not of much use to the Garths. They could see him mount,
and quickly pass through the gate.
"I am disappointed in Fred Vincy," said Mrs. Garth. "I would not have
believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts.
I knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would
be so mean as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could
the least afford to lose."
"I was a fool, Susan:"
"That you were," said the wife, nodding and smiling. "But I
should not have gone to publish it in the market-place. Why should
you keep such things from me? It is just so with your buttons:
you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your
wristband hanging. If I had only known I might have been ready
with some better plan."
"You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan," said Caleb, looking feelingly
at her. "I can't abide your losing the money you've scraped
together for Alfred."
"It is very well that I HAD scraped it together; and it is you
who will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself.
You must give up your bad habits. Some men take to drinking,
and you have taken to working without pay. You must indulge yourself
a little less in that. And you must ride over to Mary, and ask the
child what money she has."
Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his
head slowly, and fitting his finger-tips together with much nicety.
"Poor Mary!" he said. "Susan," he went on in a lowered tone,
"I'm afraid she may be fond of Fred."
"Oh no! She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think
of her in any other than a brotherly way."
Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles,
drew up his chair to the desk, and said, "Deuce take the bill--
I wish it was at Hanover! These things are a sad interruption
to business!"
The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory
expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine.
But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him
utter the word "business," the peculiar tone of fervid veneration,
of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated
symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.
Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value,
the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor
by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid
hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer
where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen,
the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine,
were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber,
and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along
the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce
in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort
wherever exact work had to be turned out,--all these sights of his
youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets.
had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers,
a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been
to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor,
which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of "business;"
and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been
chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining
than most of the special men in the county.
His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the
categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these
advanced times. He divided them into "business, politics, preaching,
learning, and amusement." He had nothing to say against the last four;
but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods
than his own. In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks,
but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he
had not such close contact with "business" as to get often honorably
decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine,
or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never
regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue
on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think
his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work,
and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness
was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb,
and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept
any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did
not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building,
correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had
a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could
not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness
of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss:
and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up
all forms of his beloved "business" which required that talent.
He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could
do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within
his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them,
because he did his work well, charged very little, and often declined
to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the Garths were poor,
and "lived in a small way." However, they did not mind it.
CHAPTER XXV.
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.
. . . . . . .
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."
--W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience
Fred Vincy wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not
expect him, and when his uncle was not down-stairs in that case
she might be sitting alone in the wainscoted parlor. He left his
horse in the yard to avoid making a noise on the gravel in front,
and entered the parlor without other notice than the noise of the
door-handle. Mary was in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi's
recollections of Johnson, and looked up with the fun still in her face.
It gradually faded as she saw Fred approach her without speaking,
and stand before her with his elbow on the mantel-piece, looking ill.
She too was silent, only raising her eyes to him inquiringly.
"Mary," he began, "I am a good-for-nothing blackguard."
"I should think one of those epithets would do at a time," said Mary,
trying to smile, but feeling alarmed.
"I know you will never think well of me any more. You will think
me a liar. You will think me dishonest. You will think I didn't
care for you, or your father and mother. You always do make
the worst of me, I know."
"I cannot deny that I shall think all that of you, Fred, if you give
me good reasons. But please to tell me at once what you have done.
I would rather know the painful truth than imagine it."
"I owed money--a hundred and sixty pounds. I asked your father to put
his name to a bill. I thought it would not signify to him. I made
sure of paying the money myself, and I have tried as hard as I could.
And now, I have been so unlucky--a horse has turned out badly--
I can only pay fifty pounds. And I can't ask my father for the money:
he would not give me a farthing. And my uncle gave me a hundred a
little while ago. So what can I do? And now your father has no ready
money to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-two
pounds that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too.
You see what a--"
"Oh, poor mother, poor father!" said Mary, her eyes filling
with tears, and a little sob rising which she tried to repress.
She looked straight before her and took no notice of Fred,
all the consequences at home becoming present to her. He too
remained silent for some moments, feeling more miserable than ever.
"I wouldn't have hurt you for the world, Mary," he said at last.
"You can never forgive me."
"What does it matter whether I forgive you?" said Mary, passionately.
"Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money
she has been earning by lessons for four years, that she might
send Alfred to Mr. Hanmer's? Should you think all that pleasant
enough if I forgave you?"
"Say what you like, Mary. I deserve it all."
"I don't want to say anything," said Mary, more quietly, "and my
anger is of no use." She dried her eyes, threw aside her book,
rose and fetched her sewing.
Fred followed her with his eyes, hoping that they would meet hers,
and in that way find access for his imploring penitence. But no!
Mary could easily avoid looking upward.
"I do care about your mother's money going," he said, when she
was seated again and sewing quickly. "I wanted to ask you, Mary--
don't you think that Mr. Featherstone--if you were to tell him--
tell him, I mean, about apprenticing Alfred--would advance the money?"
"My family is not fond of begging, Fred. We would rather work for
our money. Besides, you say that Mr. Featherstone has lately given
you a hundred pounds. He rarely makes presents; he has never made
presents to us. I am sure my father will not ask him for anything;
and even if I chose to beg of him, it would be of no use."
"I am so miserable, Mary--if you knew how miserable I am, you would
be sorry for me."
"There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish
people always think their own discomfort of more importance than
anything else in the world. I see enough of that every day."
"It is hardly fair to call me selfish. If you knew what things
other young men do, you would think me a good way off the worst."
"I know that people who spend a great deal of money on
themselves without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish.
They are always thinking of what they can get for themselves,
and not of what other people may lose."
"Any man may be unfortunate, Mary, and find himself unable to pay
when he meant it. There is not a better man in the world than
your father, and yet he got into trouble."
"How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fred?"
said Mary, in a deep tone of indignation. "He never got into
trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he
was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people.
And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make good everybody's loss."
"And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary.
It is not generous to believe the worst of a man. When you have
got any power over him, I think you might try and use it to make
him better i but that is what you never do. However, I'm going,"
Fred ended, languidly. "I shall never speak to you about anything again.
I'm very sorry for all the trouble I've caused--that's all."
Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up.
There is often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary's
hard experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very
different from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness.
At Fred's last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like
what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty
truant child, which may lose itself and get harm. And when,
looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity
for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties.
"Oh, Fred, how ill you look! Sit down a moment. Don't go yet.
Let me tell uncle that you are here. He has been wondering that
he has not seen you for a whole week." Mary spoke hurriedly,
saying the words that came first without knowing very well what
they were, but saying them in a half-soothing half-beseeching tone,
and rising as if to go away to Mr. Featherstone. Of course Fred
felt as if the clouds had parted and a gleam had come: he moved
and stood in her way.
"Say one word, Mary, and I will do anything. Say you will not think
the worst of me--will not give me up altogether."
"As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you," said Mary,
in a mournful tone. "As if it were not very painful to me to see you
an idle frivolous creature. How can you bear to be so contemptible,
when others are working and striving, and there are so many things
to be done--how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world
that is useful? And with so much good in your disposition, Fred,--
you might be worth a great deal."
"I will try to be anything you like, Mary, if you will say that you
love me."
"I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be
hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him.
What will you be when you are forty? Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose--
just as idle, living in Mrs. Beck's front parlor--fat and shabby,
hoping somebody will invite you to dinner--spending your morning in
learning a comic song--oh no! learning a tune on the flute."
Mary's lips had begun to curl with a smile as soon as she had
asked that question about Fred's future (young souls are mobile),
and before she ended, her face had its full illumination of fun.
To him it was like the cessation of an ache that Mary could laugh
at him, and with a passive sort of smile he tried to reach her hand;
but she slipped away quickly towards the door and said, "I shall
tell uncle. You MUST see him for a moment or two."
Fred secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the
fulfilment of Mary's sarcastic prophecies, apart from that "anything"
which he was ready to do if she would define it He never dared
in Mary's presence to approach the subject of his expectations from
Mr. Featherstone, and she always ignored them, as if everything
depended on himself. But if ever he actually came into the property,
she must recognize the change in his position. All this passed through
his mind somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle.
He stayed but a little while, excusing himself on the ground that he
had a cold; and Mary did not reappear before he left the house.
But as he rode home, he began to be more conscious of being ill,
than of being melancholy.
When Caleb Garth arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Mary was
not surprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit,
and was not at all fond of having to talk with Mr. Featherstone.
The old man, on the other hand, felt himself ill at ease with a
brother-in-law whom he could not annoy, who did not mind about
being considered poor, had nothing to ask of him, and understood
all kinds of farming and mining business better than he did.
But Mary had felt sure that her parents would want to see her,
and if her father had not come, she would have obtained leave to go
home for an hour or two the next day. After discussing prices during
tea with Mr. Featherstone Caleb rose to bid him good-by, and said,
"I want to speak to you, Mary."
She took a candle into another large parlor, where there was no fire,
and setting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table,
turned round to her father, and putting her arms round his neck kissed
him with childish kisses which he delighted in,--the expression
of his large brows softening as the expression of a great beautiful
dog softens when it is caressed. Mary was his favorite child,
and whatever Susan might say, and right as she was on all other subjects,
Caleb thought it natural that Fred or any one else should think
Mary more lovable than other girls.
"I've got something to tell you, my dear," said Caleb in his
hesitating way. "No very good news; but then it might be worse."
"About money, father? I think I know what it is."
"Ay? how can that be? You see, I've been a bit of a fool again,
and put my name to a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother
has got to part with her savings, that's the worst of it, and even they
won't quite make things even. We wanted a hundred and ten pounds:
your mother has ninety-two, and I have none to spare in the bank;
and she thinks that you have some savings."
"Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds. I thought you
would come, father, so I put it in my bag. See! beautiful white
notes and gold."
Mary took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into
her father's hand.
"Well, but how--we only want eighteen--here, put the rest back,
child,--but how did you know about it?" said Caleb, who, in his
unconquerable indifference to money, was beginning to be chiefly
concerned about the relation the affair might have to Mary's affections.
"Fred told me this morning."
"Ah! Did he come on purpose?"
"Yes, I think so. He was a good deal distressed."
"I'm afraid Fred is not to be trusted, Mary," said the father,
with hesitating tenderness. "He means better than he acts, perhaps.
But I should think it a pity for any body's happiness to be wrapped
up in him, and so would your mother."
"And so should I, father," said Mary, not looking up, but putting
the back of her father's hand against her cheek.
"I don't want to pry, my dear. But I was afraid there might be
something between you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you.
You see, Mary"--here Caleb's voice became more tender; he had been
pushing his hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he
turned his eyes on his daughter--"a woman, let her be as good as
she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her.
Your mother has had to put up with a good deal because of me."
Mary turned the back of her father's hand to her lips and smiled
at him.
"Well, well, nobody's perfect, but"--here Mr. Garth shook his head
to help out the inadequacy of words--"what I am thinking of is--
what it must be for a wife when she's never sure of her husband,
when he hasn't got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing
the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched.
That's the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may get fond
of each other before they know what life is, and they may think
it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns
into working day, my dear. However, you have more sense than most,
and you haven't been kept in cotton-wool: there may be no occasion
for me to say this, but a father trembles for his daughter, and you are
all by yourself here."
"Don't fear for me, father," said Mary, gravely meeting
her father's eyes; "Fred has always been very good to me;
he is kind-hearted and affectionate, and not false, I think,
with all his self-indulgence. But I will never engage myself
to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering
away his time on the chance that others will provide for him.
You and my mother have taught me too much pride for that."
"That's right--that's right. Then I am easy," said Mr. Garth,
taking up his {hat or bet. ????} But it's hard to run away with
your earnings, eh child."
"Father!" said Mary, in her deepest tone of remonstrance.
"Take pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home," was her
last word before he closed the outer door on himself.
"I suppose your father wanted your earnings," said old Mr. Featherstone,
with his usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Mary returned
to him. "He makes but a tight fit, I reckon. You're of age now;
you ought to be saving for yourself."
"I consider my father and mother the best part of myself, sir,"
said Mary, coldly.
Mr. Featherstone grunted: he could not deny that an ordinary sort
of girl like her might be expected to be useful, so he thought
of another rejoinder, disagreeable enough to be always apropos.
"If Fred Vincy comes to-morrow, now, don't you keep him chattering:
let him come up to me."
CHAPTER XXVI.
"He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it
were otherwise--that I could beat him while he railed at me.--"
--Troilus and Cressida.
But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that
were quite peremptory. From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley
streets in search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad
bargain in horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment
which for a day or two had deemed mere depression and headache,
but which got so much worse when he returned from his visit to Stone
Court that, going into the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa,
and in answer to his mother's anxious question, said, "I feel very ill:
I think you must send for Wrench."
Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a
"slight derangement," and did not speak of coming again on the morrow.
He had a due value for the Vincys' house, but the wariest men are apt
to be dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go
through their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer.
Mr. Wrench was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig:
he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife
and seven children; and he was already rather late before setting out
on a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Tipton,
the decease of Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch
practice in that direction. Great statesmen err, and why not small
medical men? Mr. Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels,
which this time had black and drastic contents. Their effect was
not alleviating to poor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said
to believe that he was "in for an illness," rose at his usual easy
hour the next morning and went down-stairs meaning to breakfast,
but succeeded in nothing but in sitting and shivering by the fire.
Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds,
and Mrs. Vincy seeing her darling's changed looks and general misery,
began to cry and said she would send for Dr. Sprague.
"Oh, nonsense, mother! It's nothing," said Fred, putting out his
hot dry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right. I must have taken
cold in that nasty damp ride."
"Mamma!" said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the
dining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street called
Lowick Gate), "there is Mr. Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one.
If I were you I would call him in. He has cured Ellen Bulstrode.
They say he cures every one."
Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant,
thinking only of Fred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was
only two yards off on the other side of some iron palisading,
and turned round at the sudden sound of the sash, before she called
to him. In two minutes he was in the room, and Rosamond went out,
after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting
with her sense of what was becoming.
Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy's mind insisted
with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance,
especially on what Mr. Wrench had said and had not said about
coming again. That there might be an awkward affair with Wrench,
Lydgate saw at once; but the ease was serious enough to make him
dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fred was in the
pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just
the wrong medicines. He must go to bed immediately, must have a
regular nurse, and various appliances and precautions must be used,
about which Lydgate was particular. Poor Mrs. Vincy's terror at these
indications of danger found vent in such words as came most easily.
She thought it "very ill usage on the part of Mr. Wrench, who had
attended their house so many years in preference to Mr. Peacock,
though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend. Why Mr. Wrench should
neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life
of her understand. He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher's when they had
the measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Vincy have wished that he should.
And if anything should happen--"
Here poor Mrs. Vincy's spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat
and good-humored face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall
out of Fred's hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door,
and now came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench,
said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising,
and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings:
he would go immediately to the druggist's and have a prescription
made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench
and tell him what had been done.
"But you must come again--you must go on attending Fred. I can't
have my boy left to anybody who may come or not. I bear nobody
ill-will, thank God, and Mr. Wrench saved me in the pleurisy,
but he'd better have let me die--if--if--"
"I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?" said Lydgate,
really believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely
with a case of this kind.
"Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate," said Rosamond, coming to
her mother's aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.
When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did
not care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go
on now, whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have
fever in the house. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come
to dinner on Thursday. And Pritchard needn't get up any wine:
brandy was the best thing against infection. "I shall drink brandy,"
added Mr. Vincy, emphatically--as much as to say, this was not
an occasion for firing with blank-cartridges. "He's an uncommonly
unfortunate lad, is Fred. He'd need have--some luck by-and-by to make
up for all this--else I don't know who'd have an eldest son."
"Don't say so, Vincy," said the mother, with a quivering lip,
"if you don't want him to be taken from me."
"It will worret you to death, Lucy; THAT I can see," said Mr. Vincy,
more mildly. "However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter."
(What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow
have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about his--
the Mayor's--family.) "I'm the last man to give in to the cry about
new doctors, or new parsons either--whether they're Bulstrode's
men or not. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will."
Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he
could be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has
placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation,
especially if he happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand.
Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on
the point of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable
among them. He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening,
but his temper was somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear
Mrs. Vincy say--
"Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?--
To go away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been
stretched a corpse!"
Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection,
and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard
Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.
"I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor,
who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air,
and how broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.--
"To let fever get unawares into a house like this. There are
some things that ought to be actionable, and are not so--
that's my opinion."
But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of
being instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,
inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact,"
Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions,
which would not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment,
but he afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case.
The house might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle
to anybody on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability
on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too,
and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs
by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself.
He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack,
to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people.
That cant about cures was never got up by sound practitioners.
This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire.
To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous,
and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet.
He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which all work
must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as much
as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.
However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys,
and the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch.
Some said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy
had threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him of
poisoning her son. Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate's passing
by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers,
and that Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward.
Many people believed that Lydgate's coming to the town at all was
really due to Bulstrode; and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting
stitches and gathered her information in misleading fragments
caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it into her head
that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode's, a fact which
seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen.
She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother,
who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing--
"I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should
be sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate."
"Why, mother," said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh,
"you know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North.
He never heard of Bulstrode before he came here."
"That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,"
said the old lady, with an air of precision.--"But as to Bulstrode--
the report may be true of some other son."
CHAPTER XXVII.
Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man.
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your
ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science,
has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive
surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid,
will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions;
but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination,
and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine
series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is
demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially
and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion
of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive
optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches
are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent--
of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own
who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who
seemed to have arranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake
in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity.
It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond
had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her
parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Lydgate thought
the precaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the
children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred's
illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma.
Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman;
and Mr. Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her
account than on Fred's. But for his insistence she would have
taken no rest: her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of
her costume which had always been se fresh and gay, she was like
a sick bird with languid eye and plumage ruffled, her senses
dulled to the sights and sounds that used most to interest her.
Fred's delirium, in which he seemed to be wandering out of her reach,
tore her heart. After her first outburst against-Mr. Wrench
she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to Lydgate.
She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his arm
moaning out, "Save my boy." Once she pleaded, "He has always been
good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother,"--
as if poor Fred's suffering were an accusation against him.
All the deepest fibres of the mother's memory were stirred, and the
young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her,
was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her,
before he was born.
"I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy," Lydgate would say. "Come down with
me and let us talk about the food." In that way he led her to the
parlor where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising her
into taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her.
There was a constant understanding between him and Rosamond on
these matters. He almost always saw her before going to the sickroom,
and she appealed to him as to what she could do for mamma.
Her presence of mind and adroitness in carrying out his hints
were admirable, and it is not wonderful that the idea of seeing
Rosamond began to mingle itself with his interest in the case.
Especially when the critical stage was passed, and he began to feel
confident of Fred's recovery. In the more doubtful time, he had
advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could, would rather have
remained neutral on Wrench's account); but after two consultations,
the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there was every reason
to make him assiduous. Morning and evening he was at Mr. Vincy's,
and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became simply feeble,
and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but conscious of it,
so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all, the illness had made
a festival for her tenderness.
Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits,
when old Mr. Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that
Fred-must make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone,
could not do without him, and missed his visits sadly. The old
man himself was getting bedridden. Mrs. Vincy told these messages
to Fred when he could listen, and he turned towards her his delicate,
pinched face, from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away,
and in which the eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some
word about Mary--wondering what she felt about his illness.
No word passed his lips; but "to hear with eyes belongs to love's
rare wit," and the mother in the fulness of her heart not only
divined Fred's longing, but felt ready for any sacrifice in order
to satisfy him.
"If I can only see my boy strong again," she said, in her loving folly;
"and who knows?--perhaps master of Stone Court! and he can marry
anybody he likes then."
"Not if they won't have me, mother," said Fred. The illness had
made him childish, and tears came as he spoke.
"Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy,
secretly incredulous of any such refusal.
She never left Fred's side when her husband was not in the house,
and thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone.
Lydgate, naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it
seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together
were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.
They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the
looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it
really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant
and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet.
But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down,
and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were
more conscious than before. There was no help for this in science,
and as Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed to be no help
for it in folly. It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longer
considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing
Rosamond alone were very much reduced.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels
that the other is feeling something, having once existed,
its effect is not to be done away with. Talk about the weather
and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollow device,
and behavior can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes
a mutual fascination--which of course need not mean anything deep
or serious. This was the way in which Rosamond and Lydgate slid
gracefully into ease, and made their intercourse lively again.
Visitors came and went as usual, there was once more music in
the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr. Vincy's
mayoralty returned. Lydgate, whenever he could, took his seat
by Rosamond's side, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself
her captive--meaning, all the while, not to be her captive.
The preposterousness of the notion that he could at once set up a
satisfactory establishment as a married man was a sufficient guarantee
against danger. This play at being a little in love was agreeable,
and did not interfere with graver pursuits. Flirtation, after all,
was not necessarily a singeing process. Rosamond, for her part,
had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure
of being admired by some one worth captivating, and she did not
distinguish flirtation from love, either in herself or in another.
She seemed to be sailing with a fair wind just whither she would go,
and her thoughts were much occupied with a handsome house in
Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant. She was
quite determined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly
of all the visitors who were not agreeable to her at her father's;
and she imagined the drawing-room in her favorite house with various
styles of furniture.
Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself;
he seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his
enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant's,
and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her
taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him.
How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher!
Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on
no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing
and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention;
they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips
and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose:
even Fred was above them, having at least the accent and manner
of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listened to,
bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority,
and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity,
without ever having to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he
entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile,
she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage.
If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that
delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any
other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology
or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of
the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise
a knowledge of what it consisted in. But Rosamond was not one
of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose
behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being
steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that her rapid
forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society
were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma?
On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise
and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been
detected in that immodest prematureness--indeed, would probably
have disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed
any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of
correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing,
private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness,
which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date.
Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots,
nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except
as something necessary which other people would always provide.
She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements
were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light--
they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please.
Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favorite pupil,
who by general consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound
of beauty, cleverness, and amiability.
Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there
was no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence
in their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning
for them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a
third person; still they had no interviews or asides from which
a third person need have been excluded. In fact, they flirted;
and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else.
If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt
and be wise at the same time? Really, the men in Middlemarch,
except Mr. Farebrother, were great bores, and Lydgate did not care
about commercial politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation?
He was often invited to the Bulstrodes'; but the girls there were
hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs. Bulstrode's NAIVE way
of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this
life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once
of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from
the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness. The Vincys'
house, with all its faults, was the pleasanter by contrast; besides,
it nourished Rosamond--sweet to look at as a half-opened blush-rose,
and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man.
But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with
Miss Vincy. One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late,
when several other visitors were there. The card-table had drawn
off the elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches
in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in
tete-a-tete with Rosamond. He had brought the last "Keepsake,"
the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress
at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could
be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and
gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles,
and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories
as interesting. Rosamond was gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied
that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium
for "paying addresses"--the very thing to please a nice girl.
He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied
with his own appearance. To superficial observers his chin had too
vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed.
And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his
satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
"I think the Honorable Mrs. S. is something like you," said Mr. Ned.
He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it
rather languishingly.
"Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that,"
said Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young
Plymdale's hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come.
She went on with her tatting all the while.
"I did not say she was as beautiful as you are," said Mr. Ned,
venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.
"I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer," said Rosamond,
feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman
a second time.
But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached
Rosamond's corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on
the other side of her, young Plymdale's jaw fell like a barometer
towards the cheerless side of change. Rosamond enjoyed not only
Lydgate's presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy.
"What a late comer you are!" she said, as they shook hands.
"Mamma had given you up a little while ago. How do you find Fred?"
"As usual; going on well, but slowly. I want him to go away--
to Stone Court, for example. But your mamma seems to have
some objection."
"Poor fellow!" said Rosamond, prettily. "You will see Fred
so changed," she added, turning to the other suitor; "we have
looked to Mr. Lydgate as our guardian angel during this illness."
Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the "Keepsake"
towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed
up his chill, as if in wonderment at human folly.
"What are you laughing at so profanely?" said Rosamond,
with bland neutrality.
"I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest--the engravings
or the writing here," said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone,
while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the
book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage,
as Rosamond thought. "Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church:
did you ever see such a `sugared invention'--as the Elizabethans
used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I
will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen
in the land."
"You are so severe, I am frightened at you," said Rosamond,
keeping her amusement duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale had lingered
with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.
"There are a great many celebrated people writing in the `Keepsake,'
at all events," he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid.
"This is the first time I have heard it called silly."
"I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,"
said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. "I suspect you
know nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E. L." Rosamond herself
was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily
commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint
that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste.
"But Sir Walter Scott--I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him,"
said young Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.
"Oh, I read no literature now," said Lydgate, shutting the book,
and pushing it away. "I read so much when I was a lad, that I
suppose it will last me all my life. I used to know Scott's poems
by heart."
"I should like to know when you left off," said Rosamond, "because
then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know."
"Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing," said Mr. Ned,
purposely caustic.
"On the contrary," said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling
with exasperating confidence at Rosamond. "It would be worth
knowing by the fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me."
Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking
that Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it
had ever been his ill-fortune to meet.
"How rash you are!" said Rosamond, inwardly delighted. "Do you
see that you have given offence?"
"What! is it Mr. Plymdale's book? I am sorry. I didn't think
about it."
"I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first
came here--that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds."
"Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will. Don't I
listen to her willingly?"
To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged.
That they were some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her mind;
and ideas, we know, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the necessary
materials being at hand. It is true, Lydgate had the counter-idea
of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a shadow east
by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking.
Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond's idea,
which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes,
whereas Lydgate's lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets
melted without knowing it.
That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see
how a process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest;
and he wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual.
The reveries from which it was difficult for him to detach himself
were ideal constructions of something else than Rosamond's virtues,
and the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown. Moreover, he was
beginning to feel some zest for the growing though half-suppressed
feud between him and the other medical men, which was likely to become
more manifest, now that Bulstrode's method of managing the new
hospital was about to be declared; and there were various inspiriting
signs that his non-acceptance by some of Peacock's patients might be
counterbalanced by the impression he had produced in other quarters.
Only a few days later, when he had happened to overtake Rosamond
on the Lowick road and had got down from his horse to walk by her
side until he had quite protected her from a passing drove, he had
been stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling him
in to a house of some importance where Peacock had never attended;
and it was the second instance of this kind. The servant was Sir
James Chettam's, and the house was Lowick Manor.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
1st Gent. All times are good to seek your wedded home
Bringing a mutual delight.
2d Gent. Why, true.
The calendar hath not an evil day
For souls made one by love, and even death
Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves
While they two clasped each other, and foresaw
No life apart.
Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, returning from their wedding journey,
arrived at Lowick Manor in the middle of January. A light snow
was falling as they descended at the door, and in the morning,
when Dorothea passed from her dressing-room avenue the blue-green
boudoir that we know of, she saw the long avenue of limes lifting
their trunks from a white earth, and spreading white branches
against the dun and motionless sky. The distant flat shrank
in uniform whiteness and low-hanging uniformity of cloud.
The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she
saw it before: the slag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost
in his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature
in the bookcase looked morn like immovable imitations of books.
The bright fire of dry oak-boughs burning on the dogs seemed an
incongruous renewal of life and glow--like the figure of Dorothea
herself as she entered carrying the red-leather cases containing
the cameos for Celia.
She was glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth
can glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair
and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips;
her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white
of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling
down her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own,
a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against
the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow. As she laid the cameo-
cases on the table in the bow-window, she unconsciously kept her
hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking out on the still,
white enclosure which made her visible world.
Mr. Casaubon, who had risen early complaining of palpitation,
was in the library giving audience to his curate Mr. Tucker.
By-and-by Celia would come in her quality of bridesmaid as well
as sister, and through the next weeks there would be wedding visits
received and given; all in continuance of that transitional life
understood to correspond with the excitement of bridal felicity,
and keeping up the sense of busy ineffectiveness, as of a dream
which the dreamer begins to suspect. The duties of her married life,
contemplated as so great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the
furniture and the white vapor-walled landscape. The clear heights
where she expected to walk in full communion had become difficult
to see even in her imagination; the delicious repose of the soul on
a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effort and alarmed
with dim presentiment. When would the days begin of that active
wifely devotion which was to strengthen her husband's life and exalt
her own? Never perhaps, as she had preconceived them; but somehow--
still somehow. In this solemnly pledged union of her life,
duty would present itself in some new form of inspiration and give
a new meaning to wifely love.
Meanwhile there was the snow and the low arch of dun vapor--
there was the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world,
where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid--
where the sense of connection with a manifold pregnant existence
had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming
from without in claims that would have shaped her energies.--
"What shall I do?" "Whatever you please, my dear: "that had been
her brief history since she had left off learning morning lessons
and practising silly rhythms on the hated piano. Marriage, which was
to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet
freed her from the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty: it had not even
filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness.
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment
which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape,
with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly
stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from
the daylight.
In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing
but the dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning
away from the window she walked round the room. The ideas and
hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room
nearly three months before were present now only as memories:
she judged them as we judge transient and departed things.
All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own,
and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a
nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away
from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted,
was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came
to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something
which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature
of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage--
of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was
alive now--the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong look,
a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends
who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it
out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears
in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience
Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at
this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it
had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it.
Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage.
Nay, the colors deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger,
the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was
masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her
on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest
movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted.
The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea:
she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and
looked up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her.
But the smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she
said aloud--
"Oh, it was cruel to speak so! How sad--how dreadful!"
She rose quickly and went out of the room, hurrying along the corridor,
with the irresistible impulse to go and see her husband and inquire
if she could do anything for him. Perhaps Mr. Tucker was gone
and Mr. Casaubon was alone in the library. She felt as if all
her morning's gloom would vanish if she could see her husband
glad because of her presence.
But when she reached the head of the dark oak there was Celia
coming up, and below there was Mr. Brooke, exchanging welcomes
and congratulations with Mr. Casaubon.
"Dodo!" said Celia, in her quiet staccato; then kissed her sister,
whose arms encircled her, and said no more. I think they both
cried a little in a furtive manner, while Dorothea ran down-stairs
to greet her uncle.
"I need not ask how you are, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, after kissing
her forehead. "Rome has agreed with you, I see--happiness, frescos,
the antique--that sort of thing. Well, it's very pleasant to
have you back again, and you understand all about art now, eh?
But Casaubon is a little pale, I tell him--a little pale, you know.
Studying hard in his holidays is carrying it rather too far.
I overdid it at one time"--Mr. Brooke still held Dorothea's hand,
but had turned his face to Mr. Casaubon--"about topography,
ruins, temples--I thought I had a clew, but I saw it would carry
me too far, and nothing might come of it. You may go any length
in that sort of thing, and nothing may come of it, you know."
Dorothea's eyes also were turned up to her husband's face with some
anxiety at the idea that those who saw him afresh after absence
might be aware of signs which she had not noticed.
"Nothing to alarm you, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, observing
her expression. "A little English beef and mutton will soon make
a difference. It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the
portrait of Aquinas, you know--we got your letter just in time.
But Aquinas, now--he was a little too subtle, wasn't he?
Does anybody read Aquinas?"
"He is not indeed an author adapted to superficial minds,"
said Mr. Casaubon, meeting these timely questions with dignified patience.
"You would like coffee in your own room, uncle?" said Dorothea,
coming to the rescue.
"Yes; and you must go to Celia: she has great news to tell you,
you know. I leave it all to her."
The blue-green boudoir looked much more cheerful when Celia was
seated there in a pelisse exactly like her sister's, surveying
the cameos with a placid satisfaction, while the conversation
passed on to other topics.
"Do you think it nice to go to Rome on a wedding journey?"
said Celia, with her ready delicate blush which Dorothea was used
to on the smallest occasions.
"It would not suit all--not you, dear,
for example," said Dorothea, quietly.
No one would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey to Rome.
"Mrs. Cadwallader says it is nonsense, people going a long journey
when they are married. She says they get tired to death of
each other, and can't quarrel comfortably, as they would at home.
And Lady Chettam says she went to Bath." Celia's color changed
again and again--seemed
To come and go with tidings from the heart,
As it a running messenger had been.
It must mean more than Celia's blushing usually did.
"Celia! has something happened?" said Dorothea, in a tone full
of sisterly feeling. "Have you really any great news to tell me?"
"It was because you went away, Dodo. Then there was nobody but me
for Sir James to talk to," said Celia, with a certain roguishness
in her eyes.
"I understand. It is as I used to hope and believe," said Dorothea,
taking her sister's face between her hands, and looking at her
half anxiously. Celia's marriage seemed more serious than it used
to do.
"It was only three days ago," said Celia. "And Lady Chettam
is very kind."
"And you are very happy?"
"Yes. We are not going to be married yet. Because every thing
is to be got ready. And I don't want to be married so very soon,
because I think it is nice to be engaged. And we shall be married
all our lives after."
"I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty. Sir James is a good,
honorable man," said Dorothea, warmly.
"He has gone on with the cottages, Dodo. He will tell you about
them when he comes. Shall you be glad to see him?"
"Of course I shall. How can you ask me?"
"Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned," said Celia,
regarding Mr. Casaubon's learning as a kind of damp which might
in due time saturate a neighboring body.
CHAPTER XXIX.
"I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate
paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort."--GOLDSMITH.
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea--
but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible
one with regard to this marriage? protest against all our interest,
all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that
look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded,
and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping
to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable
to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful
to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him,
and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. He had done
nothing exceptional in marrying--nothing but what society sanctions,
and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets. It had occurred
to him that he must not any longer defer his intention of matrimony,
and he had reflected that in taking a wife, a man of good position
should expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady--the younger
the better, because more educable and submissive--of a rank
equal to his own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition,
and good understanding. On such a young lady he would make handsome
settlements, and he would neglect no arrangement for her happiness:
in return, he should receive family pleasures and leave behind him
that copy of himself which seemed so urgently required of a man--
to the sonneteers of the sixteenth century. Times had altered
since then, and no sonneteer had insisted on Mr. Casaubon's leaving
a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing
copies of his mythological key; but he had always intended to acquit
himself by marriage, and the sense that he was fast leaving the
years behind him, that the world was getting dimmer and that he
felt lonely, was a reason to him for losing no more time in overtaking
domestic delights before they too were left behind by the years.
And when he had seen Dorothea he believed that he had found even
more than he demanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him
as would enable him to dispense with a hired secretary, an aid
which Mr. Casaubon had never yet employed and had a suspicious
dread of. (Mr. Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was
expected to manifest a powerful mind.) Providence, in its kindness,
had supplied him with the wife he needed. A wife, a modest
young lady, with the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities
of her sex, is sure to think her husband's mind powerful.
Whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting
her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could hardly occur to him.
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think
as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl
happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man
could choose not only his wife hut his wife's husband! Or as if he
were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person!--
When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was only natural;
and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to begin.
He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an
enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame,
and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too
languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight;
it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched,
thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of
that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all
that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness
which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy,
and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation
or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon
had many scruples: he was capable of a severe self-restraint;
he was resolute in being a man of honor according to the code;
he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct
these ends had been attained; but the difficulty of making his Key
to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind;
and the pamphlets--or "Parerga" as he called them--by which he tested
his public and deposited small monumental records of his march,
were far from having been seen in all their significance.
He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was
in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the
leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old
acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension
which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk,
and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy
impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy
embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim:
even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his
own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in
immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten
Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him.
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and
yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life
and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--
never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have
our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness
of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action,
but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid,
scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would
make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon's uneasiness.
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask
and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little
eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under
anxious control.
To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before,
to sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing
happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage,
as we have seen, he found himself under a new depression in
the consciousness that the new bliss was not blissful to him.
Inclination yearned back to its old, easier custom. And the deeper
he went in domesticity the more did the sense of acquitting himself
and acting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction.
Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself,
was fated to become an outward requirement, and Edward Casaubon
was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably all requirements. Even drawing
Dorothea into use in his study, according to his own intention
before marriage, was an effort which he was always tempted to defer,
and but for her pleading insistence it might never have begun.
But she had succeeded in making it a matter of course that she should
take her place at an early hour in the library and have work either
of reading aloud or copying assigned her. The work had been easier
to define because Mr. Casaubon had adopted an immediate intention:
there was to be a new Parergon, a small monograph on some
lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries
whereby certain assertions of Warburton's could be corrected.
References were extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless;
and sentences were actually to be written in the shape wherein they
would be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity.
These minor monumental productions were always exciting to Mr. Casaubon;
digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations,
or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other
in his brain. And from the first there was to be a Latin dedication
about which everything was uncertain except that it was not to be
addressed to Carp: it was a poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon that he
had once addressed a dedication to Carp in which he had numbered
that member of the animal kingdom among the viros nullo aevo
perituros, a mistake which would infallibly lay the dedicator open
to ridicule in the next age, and might even be chuckled over by Pike
and Tench in the present.
Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I
began to say a little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the
library where he had breakfasted alone. Celia at this time was on
a second visit to Lowick, probably the last before her marriage,
and was in the drawing-room expecting Sir James.
Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband's mood, and she
saw that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour.
She was going silently to her desk when he said, in that distant
tone which implied that he was discharging a disagreeable duty--
"Dorothea, here is a letter for you, which was enclosed in one
addressed to me."
It was a letter of two pages, and she immediately looked at the signature.
"Mr. Ladislaw! What can he have to say to me?" she exclaimed,
in a tone of pleased surprise. "But," she added, looking at
Mr. Casaubon, "I can imagine what he has written to you about."
"You can, if you please, read the letter," said Mr. Casaubon,
severely pointing to it with his pen, and not looking at her.
"But I may as well say beforehand, that I must decline the proposal it
contains to pay a visit here. I trust I may be excused for desiring
an interval of complete freedom from such distractions as have been
hitherto inevitable, and especially from guests whose desultory
vivacity makes their presence a fatigue."
There had been no clashing of temper between Dorothea and her
husband since that little explosion in Rome, which had left such
strong traces in her mind that it had been easier ever since
to quell emotion than to incur the consequence of venting it.
But this ill-tempered anticipation that she could desire visits
which might be disagreeable to her husband, this gratuitous defence
of himself against selfish complaint on her part, was too sharp
a sting to be meditated on until after it had been resented.
Dorothea had thought that she could have been patient with John Milton,
but she had never imagined him behaving in this way; and for a moment
Mr. Casaubon seemed to be stupidly undiscerning and odiously unjust.
Pity, that "new-born babe" which was by-and-by to rule many a
storm within her, did not "stride the blast" on this occasion.
With her first words, uttered in a tone that shook him, she startled
Mr. Casaubon into looking at her, and meeting the flash of her eyes.
"Why do you attribute to me a wish for anything that would annoy you?
You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against.
Wait at least till I appear to consult my own pleasure apart
from yours."
"Dorothea, you are hasty," answered Mr. Casaubon, nervously.
Decidedly, this woman was too young to be on the formidable level
of wifehood--unless she had been pale and feature less and taken
everything for granted.
"I think it was you who were first hasty in your false suppositions
about my feeling," said Dorothea, in the same tone. The fire was
not dissipated yet, and she thought it was ignoble in her husband
not to apologize to her.
"We will, if you please, say no more on this subject, Dorothea.
I have neither leisure nor energy for this kind of debate."
Here Mr. Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he would return to
his writing, though his hand trembled so much that the words seemed
to be written in an unknown character. There are answers which,
in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room,
and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice
is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than
in philosophy.
Dorothea left Ladislaw's two letters unread on her husband's
writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation
within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we
hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected
of mean cupidity. She did not in the least divine the subtle
sources of her husband's bad temper about these letters:
she only knew that they had caused him to offend her. She began
to work at once, and her hand did not tremble; on the contrary,
in writing out the quotations which had been given to her the
day before, she felt that she was forming her letters beautifully,
and it seemed to her that she saw the construction of the Latin she
was copying, and which she was beginning to understand, more clearly
than usual. In her indignation there was a sense of superiority,
but it went out for the present in firmness of stroke, and did
not compress itself into an inward articulate voice pronouncing
the once "affable archangel" a poor creature.
There had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and Dorothea
had not looked away from her own table, when she heard the loud bang
of a book on the floor, and turning quickly saw Mr. Casaubon on the
library steps clinging forward as if he were in some bodily distress.
She started up and bounded towards him in an instant: he was evidently
in great straits for breath. Jumping on a stool she got close
to his elbow and said with her whole soul melted into tender alarm--
"Can you lean on me, dear?"
He was still for two or three minutes, which seemed endless to her,
unable to speak or move, gasping for breath. When at last he
descended the three steps and fell backward in the large chair
which Dorothea had drawn close to the foot of the ladder,
he no longer gasped but seemed helpless and about to faint.
Dorothea rang the bell violently, and presently Mr. Casaubon was
helped to the couch: he did not faint, and was gradually reviving,
when Sir James Chettam came in, having been met in the hall with
the news that Mr. Casaubon had "had a fit in the library."
"Good God! this is just what might have been expected," was his
immediate thought. If his prophetic soul had been urged to particularize,
it seemed to him that "fits" would have been the definite expression
alighted upon. He asked his informant, the butler, whether the
doctor had been sent for. The butler never knew his master want
the doctor before; but would it not be right to send for a physician?
When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr. Casaubon could make
some signs of his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction
from her first terror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side now
rose and herself proposed that some one should ride off for a medical man.
"I recommend you to send for Lydgate," said Sir James. "My mother
has called him in, and she has found him uncommonly clever.
She has had a poor opinion of the physicians since my father's death."
Dorothea appealed to her husband, and he made a silent sign of approval.
So Mr. Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon, for the
messenger, who was Sir James Chettam's man and knew Mr. Lydgate, met him
leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his arm to Miss Vincy.
Celia, in the drawing-room, had known nothing of the trouble till
Sir James told her of it. After Dorothea's account, he no longer
considered the illness a fit, but still something "of that nature."
"Poor dear Dodo--how dreadful!" said Celia, feeling as much grieved
as her own perfect happiness would allow. Her little hands were clasped,
and enclosed by Sir James's as a bud is enfolded by a liberal calyx.
"It is very shocking that Mr. Casaubon should be ill; but I never
did like him. And I think he is not half fond enough of Dorothea;
and he ought to be, for I am sure no one else would have had him--
do you think they would?"
"I always thought it a horrible sacrifice of your sister,"
said Sir James.
"Yes. But poor Dodo never did do what other people do, and I think
she never will."
"She is a noble creature," said the loyal-hearted Sir James.
He had just had a fresh impression of this kind, as he had seen
Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her husband's neck and
looking at him with unspeakable sorrow. He did not know how much
penitence there was in the sorrow.
"Yes," said Celia, thinking it was very well for Sir James to say so,
but HE would not have been comfortable with Dodo. "Shall I go
to her? Could I help her, do you think?"
"I think it would be well for you just to go and see her before
Lydgate comes," said Sir James, magnanimously. "Only don't stay long."
While Celia was gone he walked up and down remembering what he had
originally felt about Dorothea's engagement, and feeling a revival
of his disgust at Mr. Brooke's indifference. If Cadwallader--
if every one else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done,
the marriage might have been hindered. It was wicked to let a
young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort
to save her. Sir James had long ceased to have any regrets on his
own account: his heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia.
But he had a chivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service
of woman among the ideal glories of old chivalry?): his disregarded
love had not turned to bitterness; its death had made sweet odors--
floating memories that clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea.
He could remain her brotherly friend, interpreting her actions with
generous trustfulness.
CHAPTER XXX.
"Qui veut delasser hors de propos, lasse."--PASCAL.
Mr. Casaubon had no second attack of equal severity with the first,
and in a few days began to recover his usual condition.
But Lydgate seemed to think the case worth a great deal of attention.
He not only used his stethoscope (which had not become a matter
of course in practice at that time), but sat quietly by his patient
and watched him. To Mr. Casaubon's questions about himself,
he replied that the source of the illness was the common error
of intellectual men--a too eager and monotonous application:
the remedy was, to be satisfied with moderate work, and to seek
variety of relaxation. Mr. Brooke, who sat by on one occasion,
suggested that Mr. Casaubon should go fishing, as Cadwallader did,
and have a turning-room, make toys, table-legs, and that kind
of thing.
"In short, you recommend me to anticipate the arrival of my
second childhood," said poor Mr. Casaubon, with some bitterness.
"These things," he added, looking at Lydgate, "would be to me such
relaxation as tow-picking is to prisoners in a house of correction."
"I confess," said Lydgate, smiling, "amusement is rather
an unsatisfactory prescription. It is something like telling
people to keep up their spirits. Perhaps I had better say,
that you must submit to be mildly bored rather than to go on working."
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play back. gammon with
you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game
than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion.
To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you
must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study:
conchology, now: it always think that must be a light study.
Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--`Roderick Random,'
`Humphrey Clinker:' they are a little broad, but she may read
anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me
laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches.
We have no such humor now. I have gone through all these things,
but they might be rather new to you."
"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent
Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due
respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works
he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."
"You see," said the able magistrate to Lydgate, when they were
outside the door, "Casaubon has been a little narrow: it leaves him
rather at a loss when you forbid him his particular work, which I
believe is something very deep indeed--in the line of research,
you know. I would never give way to that; I was always versatile.
But a clergyman is tied a little tight. If they would make him
a bishop, now!--he did a very good pamphlet for Peel. He would
have more movement then, more show; he might get a little flesh.
But I recommend you to talk to Mrs. Casaubon. She is clever enough
for anything, is my niece. Tell her, her husband wants liveliness,
diversion: put her on amusing tactics."
Without Mr. Brooke's advice, Lydgate had determined on speaking
to Dorothea. She had not been present while her uncle was throwing
out his pleasant suggestions as to the mode in which life at Lowick
might be enlivened, but she was usually by her husband's side, and the
unaffected signs of intense anxiety in her face and voice about whatever
touched his mind or health, made a drama which Lydgate was inclined
to watch. He said to himself that he was only doing right in telling
her the truth about her husband's probable future, but he certainly
thought also that it would be interesting to talk confidentially
with her. A medical man likes to make psychological observations,
and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted
into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
Lydgate had often been satirical on this gratuitous prediction,
and he meant now to be guarded.
He asked for Mrs. Casaubon, but being told that she was out walking,
he was going away, when Dorothea and Celia appeared, both glowing
from their struggle with the March wind. When Lydgate begged to speak
with her alone, Dorothea opened the library door which happened
to be the nearest, thinking of nothing at the moment but what he
might have to say about Mr. Casaubon. It was the first time
she had entered this room since her husband had been taken ill,
and the servant had chosen not to open the shutters. But there was
light enough to read by from the narrow upper panes of the windows.
"You will not mind this sombre light," said Dorothea, standing in
the middle of the room. "Since you forbade books, the library has
been out of the question. But Mr. Casaubon will soon be here again,
I hope. Is he not making progress?"
"Yes, much more rapid progress than I at first expected.
Indeed, he is already nearly in his usual state of health."
"You do not fear that the illness will return?" said Dorothea,
whose quick ear had detected some significance in Lydgate's tone.
"Such cases are peculiarly difficult to pronounce upon," said Lydgate.
"The only point on which I can be confident is that it will be
desirable to be very watchful on Mr. Casaubon's account, lest he
should in any way strain his nervous power."
"I beseech you to speak quite plainly," said Dorothea, in an
imploring tone. "I cannot bear to think that there might be
something which I did not know, and which, if I had known it,
would have made me act differently." The words came out like a cry:
it was evident that they were the voice of some mental experience
which lay not very far off.
"Sit down," she added, placing herself on the nearest chair,
and throwing off her bonnet and gloves, with an instinctive discarding
of formality where a great question of destiny was concerned.
"What you say now justifies my own view," said Lydgate. "I think it
is one's function as a medical man to hinder regrets of that sort
as far as possible. But I beg you to observe that Mr. Casaubon's
case is precisely of the kind in which the issue is most difficult
to pronounce upon. He may possibly live for fifteen years or more,
without much worse health than he has had hitherto."
Dorothea had turned very pale, and when Lydgate paused she said
in a low voice, "You mean if we are very careful."
"Yes--careful against mental agitation of all kinds, and against
excessive application."
"He would be miserable, if he had to give up his work," said Dorothea,
with a quick prevision of that wretchedness.
"I am aware of that. The only course is to try by all means,
direct and indirect, to moderate and vary his occupations.
With a happy concurrence of circumstances, there is, as I said,
no immediate danger from that affection of the heart, which I believe
to have been the cause of his late attack. On the other hand,
it is possible that the disease may develop itself more rapidly:
it is one of those eases in which death is sometimes sudden.
Nothing should be neglected which might be affected by such
an issue."
There was silence for a few moments, while Dorothea sat as if she
had been turned to marble, though the life within her was so intense
that her mind had never before swept in brief time over an equal
range of scenes and motives.
"Help me, pray," she said, at last, in the same low voice as before.
"Tell me what I can do."
"What do you think of foreign travel? You have been lately in Rome,
I think."
The memories which made this resource utterly hopeless were a new
current that shook Dorothea out of her pallid immobility.
"Oh, that would not do--that would be worse than anything," she said
with a more childlike despondency, while the tears rolled down.
"Nothing will be of any use that he does not enjoy."
"I wish that I could have spared you this pain," said Lydgate,
deeply touched, yet wondering about her marriage. Women just like
Dorothea had not entered into his traditions.
"It was right of you to tell me. I thank you for telling me
the truth."
"I wish you to understand that I shall not say anything
to enlighten Mr. Casaubon himself. I think it desirable
for him to know nothing more than that he must not overwork
him self, and must observe certain rules. Anxiety
of any kind would be precisely the most unfavorable condition for him."
Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time?
unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her.
He was bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had
been alone would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob
in her voice--
"Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life
and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring
all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else.--
And I mind about nothing else--"
For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him
by this involuntary appeal--this cry from soul to soul, without other
consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same
embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life.
But what could he say now except that he should see Mr. Casaubon
again to-morrow?
When he was gone, Dorothea's tears gushed forth, and relieved
her stifling oppression. Then she dried her eyes, reminded that
her distress must not be betrayed to her husband; and looked
round the room thinking that she must order the servant to attend
to it as usual, since Mr. Casaubon might now at any moment wish
to enter. On his writing-table there were letters which had lain
untouched since the morning when he was taken ill, and among them,
as Dorothea. well remembered, there were young Ladislaw's letters,
the one addressed to her still unopened. The associations of
these letters had been made the more painful by that sudden attack
of illness which she felt that the agitation caused by her anger
might have helped to bring on: it would be time enough to read
them when they were again thrust upon her, and she had had no
inclination to fetch them from the library. But now it occurred
to her that they should be put out of her husband's sight:
whatever might have been the sources of his annoyance about them,
he must, if possible, not be annoyed again; and she ran her eyes
first over the letter addressed to him to assure herself whether or
not it would be necessary to write in order to hinder the offensive visit.
Will wrote from Rome, and began by saying that his obligations to
Mr. Casaubon were too deep for all thanks not to seem impertinent.
It was plain that if he were not grateful, he must be the
poorest-spirited rascal who had ever found a generous friend.
To expand in wordy thanks would be like saying, "I am honest."
But Will had come to perceive that his defects--defects which
Mr. Casaubon had himself often pointed to--needed for their correction
that more strenuous position which his relative's generosity
had hitherto prevented from being inevitable. He trusted that he
should make the best return, if return were possible, by showing
the effectiveness of the education for which he was indebted,
and by ceasing in future to need any diversion towards himself of funds
on which others might have a better claim. He was coming to England,
to try his fortune, as many other young men were obliged to do whose
only capital was in their brains. His friend Naumann had desired him
to take charge of the "Dispute"--the picture painted for Mr. Casaubon,
with whose permission, and Mrs. Casaubon's, Will would convey it to
Lowick in person. A letter addressed to the Poste Restante in Paris
within the fortnight would hinder him, if necessary, from arriving
at an inconvenient moment. He enclosed a letter to Mrs. Casaubon
in which he continued a discussion about art, begun with her in Rome.
Opening her own letter Dorothea saw that it was a lively continuation
of his remonstrance with her fanatical sympathy and her want of
sturdy neutral delight in things as they were--an outpouring of his
young vivacity which it was impossible to read just now. She had
immediately to consider what was to be done about the other letter:
there was still time perhaps to prevent Will from coming to Lowick.
Dorothea ended by giving the letter to her uncle, who was still
in the house, and begging him to let Will know that Mr. Casaubon
had been ill, and that his health would not allow the reception
of any visitors.
No one more ready than Mr. Brooke to write a letter: his only
difficulty was to write a short one, and his ideas in this case
expanded over the three large pages and the inward foldings.
He had simply said to Dorothea--
"To be sure, I will write, my dear. He's a very clever young fellow--
this young Ladislaw--I dare say will be a rising young man.
It's a good letter--marks his sense of things, you know.
However, I will tell him about Casaubon."
But the end of Mr. Brooke's pen was a thinking organ, evolving sentences,
especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind could
well overtake them. It expressed regrets and proposed remedies,
which, when Mr. Brooke read them, seemed felicitously worded--
surprisingly the right thing, and determined a sequel which he
had never before thought of. In this case, his pen found it such
a pity young Ladislaw should not have come into the neighborhood.
just at that time, in order that Mr. Brooke might make his acquaintance
more fully, and that they might go over the long-neglected Italian
drawings together--it also felt such an interest in a young man
who was starting in life with a stock of ideas--that by the end of
the second page it had persuaded Mr. Brooke to invite young Ladislaw,
since he could not be received at Lowick, to come to Tipton Grange.
Why not? They could find a great many things to do together,
and this was a period of peculiar growth--the political horizon
was expanding, and--in short, Mr. Brooke's pen went off into a little
speech which it had lately reported for that imperfectly edited organ
the "Middlemarch Pioneer." While Mr. Brooke was sealing this letter,
he felt elated with an influx of dim projects:--a young man capable
of putting ideas into form, the "Pioneer" purchased to clear
the pathway for a new candidate, documents utilized--who knew what
might come of it all? Since Celia was going to marry immediately,
it would be very pleasant to have a young fellow at table with him,
at least for a time.
But he went away without telling Dorothea what he had put into
the letter, for she was engaged with her husband, and--in fact,
these things were of no importance to her.
CHAPTER XXXI.
How will you know the pitch of that great bell
Too large for you to stir? Let but a flute
Play 'neath the fine-mixed metal listen close
Till the right note flows forth, a silvery rill.
Then shall the huge bell tremble--then the mass
With myriad waves concurrent shall respond
In low soft unison.
Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon,
and laid some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have
for that formal studious man thirty years older than herself.
"Of course she is devoted to her husband," said Rosamond,
implying a notion of necessary sequence which the scientific
man regarded as the prettiest possible for a woman; but she
was thinking at the same time that it was not so very melancholy
to be mistress of Lowick Manor with a husband likely to die soon.
"Do you think her very handsome?"
"She certainly is handsome, but I have not thought about it,"
said Lydgate.
"I suppose it would be unprofessional," said Rosamond, dimpling.
"But how your practice is spreading! You were called in before
to the Chettams, I think; and now, the Casaubons."
"Yes," said Lydgate, in a tone of compulsory admission. "But I
don't really like attending such people so well as the poor.
The cases are more monotonous, and one has to go through more fuss
and listen more deferentially to nonsense."
"Not more than in Middlemarch," said Rosamond. "And at least you go
through wide corridors and have the scent of rose-leaves everywhere."
"That is true, Mademoiselle de Montmorenci," said Lydgate,
just bending his head to the table and lifting with his fourth finger
her delicate handkerchief which lay at the mouth of her reticule,
as if to enjoy its scent, while he looked at her with a smile.
But this agreeable holiday freedom with which Lydgate hovered
about the flower of Middlemarch, could not continue indefinitely.
It was not more possible to find social isolation in that town
than elsewhere, and two people persistently flirting could
by no means escape from "the various entanglements, weights,
blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on."
Whatever Miss Vincy did must be remarked, and she was perhaps the more
conspicuous to admirers and critics because just now Mrs. Vincy,
after some struggle, had gone with Fred to stay a little while at
Stone Court, there being no other way of at once gratifying old
Featherstone and keeping watch against Mary Garth, who appeared a less
tolerable daughter-in-law in proportion as Fred's illness disappeared.
Aunt Bulstrode, for example, came a little oftener into Lowick
Gate to see Rosamond, now she was alone. For Mrs. Bulstrode had
a true sisterly feeling for her brother; always thinking that he
might have married better, but wishing well to the children.
Now Mrs. Bulstrode had a long-standing intimacy with Mrs. Plymdale.
They had nearly the same preferences in silks, patterns for underclothing,
china-ware, and clergymen; they confided their little troubles
of health and household management to each other, and various little
points of superiority on Mrs. Bulstrode's side, namely, more decided
seriousness, more admiration for mind, and a house outside the town,
sometimes served to give color to their conversation without dividing
them--well-meaning women both, knowing very little of their own motives.
Mrs. Bulstrode, paying a morning visit to Mrs. Plymdale, happened to
say that she could not stay longer, because she was going to see
poor Rosamond.
"Why do you say `poor Rosamond'?" said Mrs. Plymdale, a round-eyed
sharp little woman, like a tamed falcon.
"She is so pretty, and has been brought up in such thoughtlessness.
The mother, you know, had always that levity about her, which makes
me anxious for the children."
"Well, Harriet, if I am to speak my mind," said Mrs. Plymdale,
with emphasis, "I must say, anybody would suppose you and
Mr. Bulstrode would be delighted with what has happened,
for you have done everything to put Mr. Lydgate forward."
"Selina, what do you mean?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, in genuine surprise.
"Not but what I am truly thankful for Ned's sake," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"He could certainly better afford to keep such a wife than
some people can; but I should wish him to look elsewhere.
Still a mother has anxieties, and some young men would take to
a bad life in consequence. Besides, if I was obliged to speak,
I should say I was not fond of strangers coming into a town."
"I don't know, Selina," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with a little emphasis
in her turn. "Mr. Bulstrode was a stranger here at one time.
Abraham and Moses were strangers in the land, and we are told to
entertain strangers. And especially," she added, after a slight pause,
"when they are unexceptionable."
"I was not speaking in a religious sense, Harriet. I spoke
as a mother."
"Selina, I am sure you have never heard me say anything against
a niece of mine marrying your son."
"Oh, it is pride in Miss Vincy--I am sure it is nothing else,"
said Mrs. Plymdale, who had never before given all her confidence
to "Harriet" on this subject. "No young man in Middlemarch
was good enough for her: I have heard her mother say as much.
That is not a Christian spirit, I think. But now, from all I hear,
she has found a man AS proud as herself."
"You don't mean that there is anything between Rosamond and Mr. Lydgate?"
said Mrs. Bulstrode, rather mortified at finding out her own ignorance
"Is it possible you don't know, Harriet?"
"Oh, I go about so little; and I am not fond of gossip; I really
never hear any. You see so many people that I don't see.
Your circle is rather different from ours."
"Well, but your own niece and Mr. Bulstrode's great favorite--
and yours too, I am sure, Harriet! I thought, at one time,
you meant him for Kate, when she is a little older."
"I don't believe there can be anything serious at present,"
said Mrs. Bulstrode. "My brother would certainly have told me."
"Well, people have different ways, but I understand that nobody
can see Miss Vincy and Mr. Lydgate together without taking them
to be engaged. However, it is not my business. Shall I put up
the pattern of mittens?"
After this Mrs. Bulstrode drove to her niece with a mind newly weighted.
She was herself handsomely dressed, but she noticed with a little
more regret than usual that Rosamond, who was just come in and
met her in walking-dress, was almost as expensively equipped.
Mrs. Bulstrode was a feminine smaller edition of her brother,
and had none of her husband's low-toned pallor. She had a good
honest glance and used no circumlocution.
"You are alone, I see, my dear," she said, as they entered the
drawing-room together, looking round gravely. Rosamond felt sure
that her aunt had something particular to say, and they sat down near
each other. Nevertheless, the quilling inside Rosamond's bonnet
was so charming that it was impossible not to desire the same kind
of thing for Kate, and Mrs. Bulstrode's eyes, which were rather fine,
rolled round that ample quilled circuit, while she spoke.
"I have just heard something about you that has surprised me
very much, Rosamond."
"What is that, aunt?" Rosamond's eyes also were roaming over her
aunt's large embroidered collar.
"I can hardly believe it--that you should be engaged without my
knowing it--without your father's telling me." Here Mrs. Bulstrode's
eyes finally rested on Rosamond's, who blushed deeply, and said--
"I am not engaged, aunt."
"How is it that every one says so, then--that it is the town's talk?"
"The town's talk is of very little consequence, I think,"
said Rosamond, inwardly gratified.
"Oh, my dear, be more thoughtful; don't despise your neighbors so.
Remember you are turned twenty-two now, and you will have no fortune:
your father, I am sure, will not be able to spare you anything.
Mr. Lydgate is very intellectual and clever; I know there is an
attraction in that. I like talking to such men myself; and your
uncle finds him very useful. But the profession is a poor one here.
To be sure, this life is not everything; but it is seldom a medical
man has true religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.
And you are not fit to marry a poor man.
"Mr. Lydgate is not a poor man, aunt. He has very high connections."
"He told me himself he was poor."
"That is because he is used to people who have a high style
"My dear Rosamond, YOU must not think of living in high style."
Rosamond looked down and played with her reticule. She was not
a fiery young lady and had no sharp answers, but she meant to live
as she pleased.
"Then it is really true?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking very earnestly
at her niece. "You are thinking of Mr. Lydgate--there is some
understanding between you, though your father doesn't know. Be open,
my dear Rosamond: Mr. Lydgate has really made you an offer?"
Poor Rosamond's feelings were very unpleasant. She had been quite
easy as to Lydgate's feeling and intention, but now when her aunt
put this question she did not like being unable to say Yes.
Her pride was hurt, but her habitual control of manner helped her.
"Pray excuse me, aunt. I would rather not speak on the subject."
"You would not give your heart to a man without a decided prospect,
I trust, my dear. And think of the two excellent offers I know
of that you have refused!--and one still within your reach, if you
will not throw it away. I knew a very great beauty who married
badly at last, by doing so. Mr. Ned Plymdale is a nice young man--
some might think good-looking; and an only son; and a large business
of that kind is better than a profession. Not that marrying
is everything I would have you seek first the kingdom of God.
But a girl should keep her heart within her own power."
"I should never give it to Mr. Ned Plymdale, if it were. I have already
refused him. If I loved, I should love at once and without change,"
said Rosamond, with a great sense of being a romantic heroine,
and playing the part prettily.
"I see how it is, my dear," said Mrs. Bulstrode, in a melancholy voice,
rising to go. "You have allowed your affections to be engaged
without return."
"No, indeed, aunt," said Rosamond, with emphasis.
"Then you are quite confident that Mr. Lydgate has a serious
attachment to you?"
Rosamond's cheeks by this time were persistently burning, and she
felt much mortification. She chose to be silent, and her aunt went
away all the more convinced.
Mr. Bulstrode in things worldly and indifferent was disposed to do
what his wife bade him, and she now, without telling her reasons,
desired him on the next opportunity to find out in conversation
with Mr. Lydgate whether he had any intention of marrying soon.
The result was a decided negative. Mr. Bulstrode, on being
cross-questioned, showed that Lydgate had spoken as no man
would who had any attachment that could issue in matrimony.
Mrs. Bulstrode now felt that she had a serious duty before her,
and she soon managed to arrange a tete-a-tete with Lydgate,
in which she passed from inquiries about Fred Vincy's health,
and expressions of her sincere anxiety for her brother's large family,
to general remarks on the dangers which lay before young people
with regard to their settlement in life. Young men were often wild
and disappointing, making little return for the money spent on them,
and a girl was exposed to many circumstances which might interfere
with her prospects.
"Especially when she has great attractions, and her parents see
much company," said Mrs. Bulstrode "Gentlemen pay her attention,
and engross her all to themselves, for the mere pleasure of the moment,
and that drives off others. I think it is a heavy responsibility,
Mr. Lydgate, to interfere with the prospects of any girl."
Here Mrs. Bulstrode fixed her eyes on him, with an unmistakable
purpose of warning, if not of rebuke.
"Clearly," said Lydgate, looking at her--perhaps even staring
a little in return. "On the other hand, a man must be a great
coxcomb to go about with a notion that he must not pay attention
to a young lady lest she should fall in love with him, or lest
others should think she must."
"Oh, Mr. Lydgate, you know well what your advantages are.
You know that our young men here cannot cope with you. Where you
frequent a house it may militate very much against a girl's making
a desirable settlement in life, and prevent her from accepting
offers even if they are made."
Lydgate was less flattered by his advantage over the Middlemarch Orlandos
than he was annoyed by the perception of Mrs. Bulstrode's meaning.
She felt that she had spoken as impressively as it was necessary to do,
and that in using the superior word "militate" she had thrown a noble
drapery over a mass of particulars which were still evident enough.
Lydgate was fuming a little, pushed his hair back with one hand,
felt curiously in his waistcoat-pocket with the other, and then stooped
to beckon the tiny black spaniel, which had the insight to decline
his hollow caresses. It would not have been decent to go away,
because he had been dining with other guests, and had just taken tea.
But Mrs. Bulstrode, having no doubt that she had been understood,
turned the conversation.
Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore
palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.
The next day Mr. Farebrother, parting from Lydgate in the street,
supposed that they should meet at Vincy's in the evening.
Lydgate answered curtly, no--he had work to do--he must give up going
out in the evening.
"What! you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping
your ears?" said the Vicar. "Well, if you don't mean to be won
by the sirens, you are right to take precautions in time."
A few days before, Lydgate would have taken no notice of these words
as anything more than the Vicar's usual way of putting things.
They seemed now to convey an innuendo which confirmed the impression
that he had been making a fool of himself and behaving so as to
be misunderstood: not, he believed, by Rosamond herself; she, he
felt sure, took everything as lightly as he intended it. She had
an exquisite tact and insight in relation to all points of manners;
but the people she lived among were blunderers and busybodies.
However, the mistake should go no farther. He resolved--and kept
his resolution--that he would not go to Mr. Vincy's except on business.
Rosamond became very unhappy. The uneasiness first stirred
by her aunt's questions grew and grew till at the end of ten
days that she had not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the
blank that might possibly come--into foreboding of that ready,
fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals.
The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that
a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden.
She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love,
and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful
aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last six months.
Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne--
as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of
costumes and no hope of a coach.
There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all
alike called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage
which is an apology for everything (in literature and the drama).
Happily Rosamond did not think of committing any desperate act:
she plaited her fair hair as beautifully as usual, and kept herself
proudly calm. Her most cheerful supposition was that her aunt
Bulstrode had interfered in some way to hinder Lydgate's visits:
everything was better than a spontaneous indifference in him.
Any one who imagines ten days too short a time--not for falling
into leanness, lightness, or other measurable effects of passion, but--
for the whole spiritual circuit of alarmed conjecture and disappointment,
is ignorant of what can go on in the elegant leisure of a young
lady's mind.
On the eleventh day, however, Lydgate when leaving Stone Court
was requested by Mrs. Vincy to let her husband know that there
was a marked change in Mr. Featherstone's health, and that she
wished him to come to Stone Court on that day. Now Lydgate
might have called at the warehouse, or might have written a
message on a leaf of his pocket-book and left it at the door.
Yet these simple devices apparently did not occur to him,
from which we may conclude that he had no strong objection to calling
at the house at an hour when Mr. Vincy was not at home, and leaving
the message with Miss Vincy. A man may, from various motives,
decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would
be gratified that nobody missed him. It would be a graceful,
easy way of piecing on the new habits to the old, to have a few
playful words with Rosamond about his resistance to dissipation,
and his firm resolve to take long fasts even from sweet sounds.
It must be confessed, also, that momentary speculations as to all the
possible grounds for Mrs. Bulstrode's hints had managed to get woven
like slight clinging hairs into the more substantial web of his thoughts.
Miss Vincy was alone, and blushed so deeply when Lydgate came in that he
felt a corresponding embarrassment, and instead of any playfulness,
he began at once to speak of his reason for calling, and to beg her,
almost formally, to deliver the message to her father. Rosamond,
who at the first moment felt as if her happiness were returning,
was keenly hurt by Lydgate's manner; her blush had departed, and she
assented coldly, without adding an unnecessary word, some trivial
chain-work which she had in her hands enabling her to avoid looking
at Lydgate higher than his chin. In all failures, the beginning
is certainly the half of the whole. After sitting two long moments
while he moved his whip and could say nothing, Lydgate rose to go,
and Rosamond, made nervous by her struggle between mortification
and the wish not to betray it, dropped her chain as if startled,
and rose too, mechanically. Lydgate instantaneously stooped to pick
up the chain. When he rose he was very near to a lovely little
face set on a fair long neck which he had been used to see turning
about under the most perfect management of self-contented grace.
But as he raised his eyes now he saw a certain helpless quivering
which touched him quite newly, and made him look at Rosamond with a
questioning flash. At this moment she was as natural as she had ever
been when she was five years old: she felt that her tears had risen,
and it was no use to try to do anything else than let them stay
like water on a blue flower or let them fall over her cheeks,
even as they would.
That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch:
it shook flirtation into love. Remember that the ambitious man
who was looking at those Forget-me-nots under the water was very
warm-hearted and rash. He did not know where the chain went;
an idea had thrilled through the recesses within him which had
a miraculous effect in raising the power of passionate love lying
buried there in no sealed sepulchre, but under the lightest,
easily pierced mould. His words were quite abrupt and awkward;
but the tone made them sound like an ardent, appealing avowal.
"What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me, pray."
Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before. I am not sure
that she knew what the words were: but she looked at Lydgate and the
tears fell over her cheeks. There could have been no more complete
answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else,
completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden
belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy,
actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly--
he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering--and kissed
each of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving
at an understanding, but it was a short way. Rosamond was
not angry, but she moved backward a little in timid happiness,
and Lydgate could now sit near her and speak less incompletely.
Rosamond had to make her little confession, and he poured out words
of gratitude and tenderness with impulsive lavishment. In half
an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own,
but the woman's to whom he had bound himself.
He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just returned
from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he
heard of Mr. Featherstone's demise. The felicitous word "demise,"
which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even
above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power,
and communicates its definiteness to our action. Considered as
a demise, old Featherstone's death assumed a merely legal aspect,
so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial,
without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy
hated both solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe struck
about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real property?
Mr. Vincy was inclined to take a jovial view of all things that evening:
he even observed to Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution
after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as ever again;
and when his approbation of Rosamond's engagement was asked for,
he gave it with astonishing facility, passing at once to general
remarks on the desirableness of matrimony for young men and maidens,
and apparently deducing from the whole the appropriateness of a little
more punch.
CHAPTER XXXII.
"They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk."
--SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.
The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone's
insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him,
was a feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts
of the old man's blood-relations, who naturally manifested more
their sense of the family tie and were more visibly numerous now
that he had become bedridden. Naturally: for when "poor Peter"
had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous
beetles for whom the cook prepares boiling water could have been
less welcome on a hearth which they had reasons for preferring,
than those persons whose Featherstone blood was ill-nourished, not
from penuriousness on their part, but from poverty. Brother Solomon
and Sister Jane were rich, and the family candor and total abstinence
from false politeness with which they were always received
seemed to them no argument that their brother in the solemn act
of making his will would overlook the superior claims of wealth.
Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to banish from
his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should hare kept
away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no shadow
of such claims. They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good egg,
and should be laid in a warm nest.
But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and all the needy exiles, held a
different point of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces
to be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there,
from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination.
To the poorer and least favored it seemed likely that since Peter
had done nothing for them in his life, he would remember them
at the last. Jonah argued that men liked to make a surprise of
their wills, while Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he
left the best part of his money to those who least expected it.
Also it was not to be thought but that an own brother "lying there"
with dropsy in his legs must come to feel that blood was thicker
than water, and if he didn't alter his will, he might have money
by him. At any rate some blood-relations should be on the premises
and on the watch against those who were hardly relations at all.
Such things had been known as forged wills and disputed wills,
which seemed to have the golden-hazy advantage of somehow enabling
non-legatees to live out of them. Again, those who were no
blood-relations might be caught making away with things--and poor
Peter "lying there" helpless! Somebody should be on the watch.
But in this conclusion they were at one with Solomon and Jane;
also, some nephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still greater
subtilty as to what might be done by a man able to "will away"
his property and give himself large treats of oddity, felt in a handsome
sort of way that there was a family interest to be attended to,
and thought of Stone Court as a place which it would be nothing
but right for them to visit. Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs. Cranch,
living with some wheeziness in the Chalky Flats, could not undertake
the journey; but her son, as being poor Peter's own nephew,
could represent her advantageously, and watch lest his uncle Jonah
should make an unfair use of the improbable things which seemed
likely to happen. In fact there was a general sense running in
the Featherstone blood that everybody must watch everybody else,
and that it would be well for everybody else to reflect that the
Almighty was watching him.
Thus Stone Court continually saw one or other blood-relation
alighting or departing, and Mary Garth had the unpleasant task
of carrying their messages to Mr. Featherstone, who would see
none of them, and sent her down with the still more unpleasant
task of telling them so. As manager of the household she felt
bound to ask them in good provincial fashion to stay and eat;
but she chose to consult Mrs. Vincy on the point of extra
down-stairs consumption now that Mr. Featherstone was laid up.
"Oh, my dear, you must do things handsomely where there's last
illness and a property. God knows, I don't grudge them every ham
in the house--only, save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed
veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep
open house in these last illnesses," said liberal Mrs. Vincy,
once more of cheerful note and bright plumage.
But some of the visitors alighted and did not depart after the handsome
treating to veal and ham. Brother Jonah, for example (there are
such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest
aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt
and bloated at greater expense)--Brother Jonah, I say, having come
down in the world, was mainly supported by a calling which he was
modest enough not to boast of, though it was much better than swindling
either on exchange or turf, but which did not require his presence
at Brassing so long as he had a good corner to sit in and a supply
of food. He chose the kitchen-corner, partly because he liked
it best, and partly because he did not want to sit with Solomon,
concerning whom he had a strong brotherly opinion. Seated in a famous
arm-chair and in his best suit, constantly within sight of good cheer,
he had a comfortable consciousness of being on the premises,
mingled with fleeting suggestions of Sunday and the bar at the Green Man;
and he informed Mary Garth that he should not go out of reach of his
brother Peter while that poor fellow was above ground. The troublesome
ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
Jonah was the wit among the Featherstones, and joked with the maid-
servants when they came about the hearth, but seemed to consider
Miss Garth a suspicious character, and followed her with cold eyes.
Mary would have borne this one pair of eyes with comparative ease,
but unfortunately there was young Cranch, who, having come all
the way from the Chalky Flats to represent his mother and watch
his uncle Jonah, also felt it his duty to stay and to sit chiefly
in the kitchen to give his uncle company. Young Cranch was not
exactly the balancing point between the wit and the idiot,--
verging slightly towards the latter type, and squinting so as to
leave everything in doubt about his sentiments except that they
were not of a forcible character. When Mary Garth entered the
kitchen and Mr. Jonah Featherstone began to follow her with his cold
detective eyes, young Cranch turning his head in the same direction
seemed to insist on it that she should remark how he was squinting,
as if he did it with design, like the gypsies when Borrow read
the New Testament to them. This was rather too much for poor Mary;
sometimes it made her bilious, sometimes it upset her gravity.
One day that she had an opportunity she could not resist describing
the kitchen scene to Fred, who would not be hindered from
immediately going to see it, affecting simply to pass through.
But no sooner did he face the four eyes than he had to rush through
the nearest door which happened to lead to the dairy, and there
under the high roof and among the pans he gave way to laughter
which made a hollow resonance perfectly audible in the kitchen.
He fled by another doorway, but Mr. Jonah, who had not before seen
Fred's white complexion, long legs, and pinched delicacy of face,
prepared many sarcasms in which these points of appearance were
wittily combined with the lowest moral attributes.
"Why, Tom, YOU don't wear such gentlemanly trousers--
you haven't got half such fine long legs," said Jonah to his nephew,
winking at the same time, to imply that there was something more in
these statements than their undeniableness. Tom looked at his legs,
but left it uncertain whether he preferred his moral advantages
to a more vicious length of limb and reprehensible gentility of trouser.
In the large wainscoted parlor too there were constantly pairs
of eyes on the watch, and own relatives eager to be "sitters-up."
Many came, lunched, and departed, but Brother Solomon and the lady
who had been Jane Featherstone for twenty-five years before she
was Mrs. Waule found it good to be there every day for hoars,
without other calculable occupation than that of observing the
cunning Mary Garth (who was so deep that she could be found out
in nothing) and giving occasional dry wrinkly indications of crying--
as if capable of torrents in a wetter season--at the thought
that they were not allowed to go into Mr. Featherstone's room.
For the old man's dislike of his own family seemed to get stronger
as he got less able to amuse himself by saying biting things to them.
Too languid to sting, he had the more venom refluent in his blood.
Not fully believing the message sent through Mary Garth, they had
presented themselves together within the door of the bedroom,
both in black--Mrs. Waule having a white handkerchief partially unfolded
in her hand--and both with faces in a sort of half-mourning purple;
while Mrs. Vincy with her pink cheeks and pink ribbons flying
was actually administering a cordial to their own brother,
and the light-complexioned Fred, his short hair curling as might
be expected in a gambler's, was lolling at his ease in a large chair.
Old Featherstone no sooner caught sight of these funereal figures
appearing in spite of his orders than rage came to strengthen
him more successfully than the cordial. He was propped up on
a bed-rest, and always had his gold-headed stick lying by him.
He seized it now and swept it backwards and forwards in as large
an area as he could, apparently to ban these ugly spectres,
crying in a hoarse sort of screech--
"Back, back, Mrs. Waule! Back, Solomon!"
"Oh, Brother. Peter," Mrs. Waule began--but Solomon put his hand
before her repressingly. He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy,
with small furtive eyes, and was not only of much blander temper but
thought himself much deeper than his brother Peter; indeed not likely
to be deceived in any of his fellow-men, inasmuch as they could not
well be more greedy and deceitful than he suspected them of being.
Even the invisible powers, he thought, were likely to be soothed
by a bland parenthesis here and there--coming from a man of property,
who might have been as impious as others.
"Brother Peter," he said, in a wheedling yet gravely official tone,
"It's nothing but right I should speak to you about the Three Crofts
and the Manganese. The Almighty knows what I've got on my mind--"
"Then he knows more than I want to know," said Peter, laying down
his stick with a show of truce which had a threat in it too,
for he reversed the stick so as to make the gold handle a club
in case of closer fighting, and looked hard at Solomon's bald head.
"There's things you might repent of, Brother, for want of speaking
to me," said Solomon, not advancing, however. "I could sit up
with you to-night, and Jane with me, willingly, and you might take
your own time to speak, or let me speak."
"Yes, I shall take my own time--you needn't offer me yours,"
said Peter.
"But you can't take your own time to die in, Brother," began Mrs. Waule,
with her usual woolly tone. "And when you lie speechless you may
be tired of having strangers about you, and you may think of me
and my children"--but here her voice broke under the touching
thought which she was attributing to her speechless brother;
the mention of ourselves being naturally affecting.
"No, I shan't," said old Featherstone, contradictiously.
"I shan't think of any of you. I've made my will, I tell you,
I've made my will." Here he turned his head towards Mrs. Vincy,
and swallowed some more of his cordial.
"Some people would be ashamed to fill up a place belonging by rights to
others," said Mrs. Waule, turning her narrow eyes in the same direction.
"Oh, sister," said Solomon, with ironical softness, "you and me
are not fine, and handsome, and clever enough: we must be humble
and let smart people push themselves before us."
Fred's spirit could not bear this: rising and looking
at Mr. Featherstone, he said, "Shall my mother
and I leave the room, sir, that you may be alone with your friends?"
"Sit down, I tell you," said old Featherstone, snappishly.
"Stop where you are. Good-by, Solomon," he added, trying to wield
his stick again, but failing now that he had reversed the handle.
"Good-by, Mrs. Waule. Don't you come again."
"I shall be down-stairs, Brother, whether or no," said Solomon.
"I shall do my duty, and it remains to be seen what the Almighty
will allow."
"Yes, in property going out of families," said Mrs. Waule,
in continuation,--"and where there's steady young men to carry on.
But I pity them who are not such, and I pity their mothers.
Good-by, Brother Peter."
"Remember, I'm the eldest after you, Brother, and prospered from
the first, just as you did, and have got land already by the name
of Featherstone," said Solomon, relying much on that reflection,
as one which might be suggested in the watches of the night.
"But I bid you good-by for the present."
Their exit was hastened by their seeing old Mr. Featherstone pull his
wig on each side and shut his eyes with his mouth-widening grimace,
as if he were determined to be deaf and blind.
None the less they came to Stone Court daily and sat below at the post
of duty, sometimes carrying on a slow dialogue in an undertone in which
the observation and response were so far apart, that any one hearing
them might have imagined himself listening to speaking automata,
in some doubt whether the ingenious mechanism would really work,
or wind itself up for a long time in order to stick and be silent.
Solomon and Jane would have been sorry to be quick: what that led
to might be seen on the other side of the wall in the person
of Brother Jonah.
But their watch in the wainscoted parlor was sometimes varied
by the presence of other guests from far or near. Now that Peter
Featherstone was up-stairs, his property could be discussed with
all that local enlightenment to be found on the spot: some rural
and Middlemarch neighbors expressed much agreement with the family
and sympathy with their interest against the Vincys, and feminine
visitors were even moved to tears, in conversation with Mrs. Waule,
when they recalled the fact that they themselves had been disappointed
in times past by codicils and marriages for spite on the part
of ungrateful elderly gentlemen, who, it might have been supposed,
had been spared for something better. Such conversation paused suddenly,
like an organ when the bellows are let drop, if Mary Garth came into
the room; and all eyes were turned on her as a possible legatee,
or one who might get access to iron chests.
But the younger men who were relatives or connections of the family,
were disposed to admire her in this problematic light, as a girl
who showed much conduct, and who among all the chances that were
flying might turn out to be at least a moderate prize. Hence she
had her share of compliments and polite attentions.
Especially from Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, a distinguished bachelor
and auctioneer of those parts, much concerned in the sale of land
and cattle: a public character, indeed, whose name was seen on widely
distributed placards, and who might reasonably be sorry for those who
did not know of him. He was second cousin to Peter Featherstone,
and had been treated by him with more amenity than any other relative,
being useful in matters of business; and in that programme of his
funeral which the old man had himself dictated, he had been named
as a Bearer. There was no odious cupidity in Mr. Borthrop Trumbull--
nothing more than a sincere sense of his own merit, which, he was aware,
in case of rivalry might tell against competitors; so that if Peter
Featherstone, who so far as he, Trumbull, was concerned, had behaved
like as good a soul as ever breathed, should have done anything handsome
by him, all he could say was, that he had never fished and fawned,
but had advised him to the best of his experience, which now extended
over twenty years from the time of his apprenticeship at fifteen,
and was likely to yield a knowledge of no surreptitious kind.
His admiration was far from being confined to himself, but was
accustomed professionally as well as privately to delight in estimating
things at a high rate. He was an amateur of superior phrases,
and never used poor language without immediately correcting himself--
which was fortunate, as he was rather loud, and given to predominate,
standing or walking about frequently, pulling down his waistcoat
with the air of a man who is very much of his own opinion,
trimming himself rapidly with his fore-finger, and marking each new
series in these movements by a busy play with his large seals.
There was occasionally a little fierceness in his demeanor,
but it was directed chiefly against false opinion, of which there
is so much to correct in the world that a man of some reading
and experience necessarily has his patience tried. He felt that
the Featherstone family generally was of limited understanding,
but being a man of the world and a public character, took everything
as a matter of course, and even went to converse with Mr. Jonah
and young Cranch in the kitchen, not doubting that he had impressed
the latter greatly by his leading questions concerning the
Chalky Flats. If anybody had observed that Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
being an auctioneer, was bound to know the nature of everything,
he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently with the sense
that he came pretty near that. On the whole, in an auctioneering way,
he was an honorable man, not ashamed of his business, and feeling
that "the celebrated Peel, now Sir Robert," if introduced to him,
would not fail to recognize his importance.
"I don't mind if I have a slice of that ham, and a glass of that ale,
Miss Garth, if you will allow me," he said, coming into the parlor
at half-past eleven, after having had the exceptional privilege
of seeing old Featherstone, and standing with his back to the fire
between Mrs. Waule and Solomon.
"It's not necessary for you to go out;--let me ring the bell."
"Thank you," said Mary, "I have an errand."
"Well, Mr. Trumbull, you're highly favored," said Mrs. Waule.
"What! seeing the old man?" said the auctioneer, playing with his seals
dispassionately. "Ah, you see he has relied on me considerably."
Here he pressed his lips together, and frowned meditatively.
"Might anybody ask what their brother has been saying?" said Solomon,
in a soft tone of humility, in which he had a sense of luxurious cunning,
he being a rich man and not in need of it.
"Oh yes, anybody may ask," said Mr. Trumbull, with loud and
good-humored though cutting sarcasm. "Anybody may interrogate.
Any one may give their remarks an interrogative turn," he continued,
his sonorousness rising with his style. "This is constantly done
by good speakers, even when they anticipate no answer. It is what we
call a figure of speech--speech at a high figure, as one may say."
The eloquent auctioneer smiled at his own ingenuity.
"I shouldn't be sorry to hear he'd remembered you, Mr. Trumbull,"
said Solomon. "I never was against the deserving. It's the
undeserving I'm against."
"Ah, there it is, you see, there it is," said Mr. Trumbull,
significantly. "It can't be denied that undeserving people have
been legatees, and even residuary legatees. It is so, with testamentary
dispositions." Again he pursed up his lips and frowned a little.
"Do you mean to say for certain, Mr. Trumbull, that my brother has
left his land away from our family?" said Mrs. Waule, on whom,
as an unhopeful woman, those long words had a depressing effect.
"A man might as well turn his land into charity land at once as
leave it to some people," observed Solomon, his sister's question
having drawn no answer.
"What, Blue-Coat land?" said Mrs. Waule, again. "Oh, Mr. Trumbull,
you never can mean to say that. It would be flying in the face
of the Almighty that's prospered him."
While Mrs. Waule was speaking, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull walked
away from the fireplace towards the window, patrolling with
his fore-finger round the inside of his stock, then along his
whiskers and the curves of his hair. He now walked to Miss
Garth's work-table, opened a book which lay there and read
the title aloud with pompous emphasis as if he were offering it for sale:
"`Anne of Geierstein' (pronounced Jeersteen) or the `Maiden
of the Mist, by the author of Waverley.'" Then turning the page,
he began sonorously--"The course of four centuries has well-nigh
elapsed since the series of events which are related in the
following chapters took place on the Continent." He pronounced
the last truly admirable word with the accent on the last syllable,
not as unaware of vulgar usage, but feeling that this novel delivery
enhanced the sonorous beauty which his reading had given to the whole.
And now the servant came in with the tray, so that the moments
for answering Mrs. Waule's question had gone by safely, while she
and Solomon, watching Mr. Trumbull's movements, were thinking that
high learning interfered sadly with serious affairs. Mr. Borthrop
Trumbull really knew nothing about old Featherstone's will;
but he could hardly have been brought to declare any ignorance
unless he had been arrested for misprision of treason.
"I shall take a mere mouthful of ham and a glass of ale,"
he said, reassuringly. "As a man with public business, I take a snack
when I can. I will back this ham," he added, after swallowing some
morsels with alarming haste, "against any ham in the three kingdoms.
In my opinion it is better than the hams at Freshitt Hall--
and I think I am a tolerable judge."
"Some don't like so much sugar in their hams," said Mrs. Waule.
"But my poor brother would always have sugar."
"If any person demands better, he is at liberty to do so;
but, God bless me, what an aroma! I should be glad to buy in
that quality, I know. There is some gratification to a gentleman"--
here Mr. Trumbull's voice conveyed an emotional remonstrance--
"in having this kind of ham set on his table."
He pushed aside his plate, poured out his glass of ale and drew
his chair a little forward, profiting by the occasion to look
at the inner side of his legs, which he stroked approvingly--
Mr. Trumbull having all those less frivolous airs and gestures
which distinguish the predominant races of the north.
"You have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth," he observed,
when Mary re-entered. "It is by the author of `Waverley': that
is Sir Walter Scott. I have bought one of his works myself--
a very nice thing, a very superior publication, entitled `Ivanhoe.'
You will not get any writer to beat him in a hurry, I think--
he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have just been
reading a portion at the commencement of `Anne of Jeersteen.'
It commences well." (Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull:
they al ways commenced, both in private life and on his handbills.)
"You are a reader, I see. Do you subscribe to our Middlemarch library?"
"No," said Mary. "Mr. Fred Vincy brought this book."
"I am a great bookman myself," returned Mr. Trumbull.
"I have no less than two hundred volumes in calf, and I
flatter myself they are well selected. Also pictures
by Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Titian, Vandyck, and others.
I shall be happy to lend you any work you like to mention, Miss Garth."
"I am much obliged," said Mary, hastening away again, "but I have
little time for reading."
"I should say my brother has done something for HER in his will,"
said Mr. Solomon, in a very low undertone, when she had shut the door
behind her, pointing with his head towards the absent Mary.
"His first wife was a poor match for him, though," said Mrs. Waule.
"She brought him nothing: and this young woman is only her niece,--
and very proud. And my brother has always paid her wage."
"A sensible girl though, in my opinion," said Mr. Trumbull, finishing his
ale and starting up with an emphatic adjustment of his waistcoat.
"I have observed her when she has been mixing medicine in drops.
She minds what she is doing, sir. That is a great point in a woman,
and a great point for our friend up-stairs, poor dear old soul.
A man whose life is of any value should think of his wife as a nurse:
that is what I should do, if I married; and I believe I have lived
single long enough not to make a mistake in that line. Some men
must marry to elevate themselves a little, but when I am in need
of that, I hope some one will tell me so--I hope some individual
will apprise me of the fact. I wish you good morning, Mrs. Waule.
Good morning, Mr. Solomon. I trust we shall meet under less
melancholy auspices."
When Mr. Trumbull had departed with a fine bow, Solomon,
leaning forward, observed to his sister, "You may depend,
Jane, my brother has left that girl a lumping sum."
"Anybody would think so, from the way Mr. Trumbull talks,"
said Jane. Then, after a pause, "He talks as if my daughters
wasn't to be trusted to give drops."
"Auctioneers talk wild," said Solomon. "Not but what Trumbull has
made money."
CHAPTER XXXIII.
"Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation."
--2 Henry VI.
That night after twelve o'clock Mary Garth relieved the watch in
Mr. Featherstone's room, and sat there alone through the small hours.
She often chose this task, in which she found some pleasure,
notwithstanding the old man's testiness whenever he demanded
her attentions. There were intervals in which she could sit
perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light.
The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn
existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires,
the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving
her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse
herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for,
having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely
to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time
in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already
come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud,
nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.
Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom
she honored, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which
was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims.
She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day,
her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy
added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions,
carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies
opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves
exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow
under a lamp they alone were rosy. Yet there were some illusions
under Mary's eyes which were not quite comic to her. She was
secretly convinced, though she had no other grounds than her close
observation of old Featherstone's nature, that in spite of his
fondness for having the Vincys about him, they were as likely to be
disappointed as any of the relations whom he kept at a distance.
She had a good deal of disdain for Mrs. Vincy's evident alarm lest
she and Fred should be alone together, but it did not hinder her
from thinking anxiously of the way in which Fred would be affected,
if it should turn out that his uncle had left him as poor as ever.
She could make a butt of Fred when he was present, but she did
not enjoy his follies when he was absent.
Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind not overbalanced
by passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches
its own powers with interest. Mary had plenty of merriment within.
Her thought was not veined by any solemnity or pathos about
the old man on the bed: such sentiments are easier to affect
than to feel about an aged creature whose life is not visibly
anything but a remnant of vices. She had always seen the most
disagreeable side of Mr. Featherstone. he was not proud of her,
and she was only useful to him. To be anxious about a soul that is
always snapping at you must be left to the saints of the earth;
and Mary was not one of them. She had never returned him a
harsh word, and had waited on him faithfully: that was her utmost.
Old Featherstone himself was not in the least anxious about his soul,
and had declined to see Mr. Tucker on the subject.
To-night he had not snapped, and for the first hour or two he lay
remarkably still, until at last Mary heard him rattling his bunch of
keys against the tin box which he always kept in the bed beside him.
About three o'clock he said, with remarkable distinctness,
"Missy, come here!"
Mary obeyed, and found that he had already drawn the tin box
from under the clothes, though he usually asked to have this done
for him; and he had selected the key. He now unlocked the box,
and, drawing from it another key, looked straight at her with eyes
that seemed to have recovered all their sharpness and said,
"How many of 'em are in the house?"
"You mean of your own relations, sir," said Mary, well used
to the old man's way of speech. He nodded slightly and she went on.
"Mr. Jonah Featherstone and young Cranch are sleeping here."
"Oh ay, they stick, do they? and the rest--they come every day,
I'll warrant--Solomon and Jane, and all the young uns?
They come peeping, and counting and casting up?"
"Not all of them every day. Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule are here
every day, and the others come often."
The old man listened with a grimace while she spoke, and then said,
relaxing his face, "The more fools they. You hearken, missy.
It's three o'clock in the morning, and I've got all my faculties
as well as ever I had in my life. I know all my property,
and where the money's put out, and everything. And I've made
everything ready to change my mind, and do as I like at the last.
Do you hear, missy? I've got my faculties."
"Well, sir?" said Mary, quietly.
He now lowered his tone with an air of deeper cunning. "I've made
two wills, and I'm going to burn one. Now you do as I tell you.
This is the key of my iron chest, in the closet there. You push well
at the side of the brass plate at the top, till it goes like a bolt:
then you can put the key in the front lock and turn it. See and
do that; and take out the topmost paper--Last Will and Testament--
big printed."
"No, sir," said Mary, in a firm voice, "I cannot do that."
"Not do it? I tell you, you must," said the old man, his voice
beginning to shake under the shock of this resistance.
"I cannot touch your iron chest or your will. I must refuse to do
anything that might lay me open to suspicion."
"I tell you, I'm in my right mind. Shan't I do as I like at the last?
I made two wills on purpose. Take the key, I say."
"No, sir, I will not," said Mary, more resolutely still.
Her repulsion was getting stronger.
"I tell you, there's no time to lose."
"I cannot help that, sir. I will not let the close of your life
soil the beginning of mine. I will not touch your iron chest
or your will." She moved to a little distance from the bedside.
The old man paused with a blank stare for a little while, holding the
one key erect on the ring; then with an agitated jerk he began
to work with his bony left hand at emptying the tin box before him.
"Missy," he began to say, hurriedly, "look here! take the money--
the notes and gold--look here--take it--you shall have it all--
do as I tell you."
He made an effort to stretch out the key towards her as far
as possible, and Mary again retreated.
"I will not touch your key or your money, sir. Pray don't ask me
to do it again. If you do, I must go and call your brother."
He let his hand fall, and for the first time in her life Mary
saw old Peter Featherstone begin to cry childishly. She said,
in as gentle a tone as she could command, "Pray put up your money,
sir;" and then went away to her seat by the fire, hoping this
would help to convince him that it was useless to say more.
Presently he rallied and said eagerly--
"Look here, then. Call the young chap. Call Fred Vincy."
Mary's heart began to beat more quickly. Various ideas rushed
through her mind as to what the burning of a second will might imply.
She had to make a difficult decision in a hurry.
"I will call him, if you will let me call Mr. Jonah and others
with him."
"Nobody else, I say. The young chap. I shall do as I like."
"Wait till broad daylight, sir, when every one is stirring.
Or let me call Simmons now, to go and fetch the lawyer? He can be
here in less than two hours."
"Lawyer? What do I want with the lawyer? Nobody shall know--I say,
nobody shall know. I shall do as I like."
"Let me call some one else, sir," said Mary, persuasively. She did
not like her position--alone with the old man, who seemed to show
a strange flaring of nervous energy which enabled him to speak again
and again without falling into his usual cough; yet she desired
not to push unnecessarily the contradiction which agitated him.
"Let me, pray, call some one else."
"You let me alone, I say. Look here, missy. Take the money.
You'll never have the chance again. It's pretty nigh two hundred--
there's more in the box, and nobody knows how much there was.
Take it and do as I tell you."
Mary, standing by the fire, saw its red light falling on the old man,
propped up on his pillows and bed-rest, with his bony hand holding
out the key, and the money lying on the quilt before him. She never
forgot that vision of a man wanting to do as he liked at the last.
But the way in which he had put the offer of the money urged her to
speak with harder resolution than ever.
"It is of no use, sir. I will not do it. Put up your money.
I will not touch your money. I will do anything else I can to
comfort you; but I will not touch your keys or your money."
"Anything else anything else!" said old Featherstone, with hoarse
rage, which, as if in a nightmare, tried to be loud, and yet was
only just audible. "I want nothing else. You come here--you come here."
Mary approached him cautiously, knowing him too well. She saw him
dropping his keys and trying to grasp his stick, while he looked
at her like an aged hyena, the muscles of his face getting distorted
with the effort of his hand. She paused at a safe distance.
"Let me give you some cordial," she said, quietly, "and try to
compose yourself. You will perhaps go to sleep. And to-morrow
by daylight you can do as you like."
He lifted the stick, in spite of her being beyond his reach,
and threw it with a hard effort which was but impotence.
It fell, slipping over the foot of the bed. Mary let it lie,
and retreated to her chair by the fire. By-and-by she would
go to him with the cordial. Fatigue would make him passive.
It was getting towards the chillest moment of the morning,
the fire had got low, and she could see through the chink between
the moreen window-curtains the light whitened by the blind.
Having put some wood on the fire and thrown a shawl over her,
she sat down, hoping that Mr. Featherstone might now fall asleep.
If she went near him the irritation might be kept up. He had said
nothing after throwing the stick, but she had seen him taking
his keys again and laying his right hand on the money. He did
not put it up, however, and she thought that he was dropping off
to sleep.
But Mary herself began to be more agitated by the remembrance
of what she had gone through, than she had been by the reality--
questioning those acts of hers which had come imperatively and
excluded all question in the critical moment.
Presently the dry wood sent out a flame which illuminated every crevice,
and Mary saw that the old man was lying quietly with his head turned
a little on one side. She went towards him with inaudible steps,
and thought that his face looked strangely motionless; but the next
moment the movement of the flame communicating itself to all objects
made her uncertain. The violent beating of her heart rendered
her perceptions so doubtful that even when she touched him and
listened for his breathing, she could not trust her conclusions.
She went to the window and gently propped aside the curtain and blind,
so that the still light of the sky fell on the bed.
The next moment she ran to the bell and rang it energetically.
In a very little while there was no longer any doubt that Peter
Featherstone was dead, with his right hand clasping the keys,
and his left hand lying on the heap of notes and gold.
BOOK IV.
THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
1st Gent. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws.
Carry no weight, no force.
2d Gent. But levity
Is causal too, and makes the sum of weight.
For power finds its place in lack of power;
Advance is cession, and the driven ship
May run aground because the helmsman's thought
Lacked force to balance opposites."
It was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried.
In the prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm
and sunny, and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing
the blossoms from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds
of Lowick churchyard. Swiftly moving clouds only now and then
allowed a gleam to light up any object, whether ugly or beautiful,
that happened to stand within its golden shower. In the churchyard
the objects were remarkably various, for there was a little country
crowd waiting to see the funeral. The news had spread that it
was to be a "big burying;" the old gentleman had left written
directions about everything and meant to have a funeral "beyond
his betters." This was true; for old Featherstone had not been
a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean
and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain
with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also
loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps
he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his
power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend
that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone,
I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness
is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy,
elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into
extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who
construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who
form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.
In any case, he had been bent on having a handsome funeral, and on
having persons "bid" to it who would rather have stayed at home.
He had even desired that female relatives should follow him to
the grave, and poor sister Martha had taken a difficult journey
for this purpose from the Chalky Flats. She and Jane would have
been altogether cheered (in a tearful manner) by this sign that
a brother who disliked seeing them while he was living had been
prospectively fond of their presence when he should have become
a testator, if the sign had not been made equivocal by being extended
to Mrs. Vincy, whose expense in handsome crape seemed to imply
the most presumptuous hopes, aggravated by a bloom of complexion
which told pretty plainly that she was not a blood-relation,
but of that generally objectionable class called wife's kin.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images
are the brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed
much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape
the fellowship of illusion. In writing the programme for his burial
he certainly did not make clear to himself that his pleasure in the
little drama of which it formed a part was confined to anticipation.
In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch
of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousness with that
livid stagnant presence, and so far as he was preoccupied with a
future life, it was with one of gratification inside his coffin.
Thus old Featherstone was imaginative, after his fashion.
However, the three mourning-coaches were filled according to the
written orders of the deceased. There were pall-bearers on horseback,
with the richest scarfs and hatbands, and even the under-bearers
had trappings of woe which were of a good well-priced quality.
The black procession, when dismounted, looked the larger for
the smallness of the churchyard; the heavy human faces and the
black draperies shivering in the wind seemed to tell of a world
strangely incongruous with the lightly dropping blossoms and
the gleams of sunshine on the daisies. The clergyman who met
the procession was Mr. Cadwallader--also according to the request
of Peter Featherstone, prompted as usual by peculiar reasons.
Having a contempt for curates, whom he always called understrappers,
he was resolved to be buried by a beneficed clergyman. Mr. Casaubon
was out of the question, not merely because he declined duty
of this sort, but because Featherstone had an especial dislike
to him as the rector of his own parish, who had a lien on the land
in the shape of tithe, also as the deliverer of morning sermons,
which the old man, being in his pew and not at all sleepy,
had been obliged to sit through with an inward snarl. He had an
objection to a parson stuck up above his head preaching to him.
But his relations with Mr. Cadwallader had been of a different kind:
the trout-stream which ran through Mr. Casaubon's land took its course
through Featherstone's also, so that Mr. Cadwallader was a parson
who had had to ask a favor instead of preaching. Moreover, he was
one of the high gentry living four miles away from Lowick, and was
thus exalted to an equal sky with the sheriff of the county and other
dignities vaguely regarded as necessary to the system of things.
There would be a satisfaction in being buried by Mr. Cadwallader,
whose very name offered a fine opportunity for pronouncing wrongly
if you liked.
This distinction conferred on the Rector of Tipton and Freshitt was
the reason why Mrs. Cadwallader made one of the group that watched
old Featherstone's funeral from an upper window of the manor.
She was not fond of visiting that house, but she liked, as she said,
to see collections of strange animals such as there would be at
this funeral; and she had persuaded Sir James and the young Lady
Chettam to drive the Rector and herself to Lowick in order that the
visit might be altogether pleasant.
"I will go anywhere with you, Mrs. Cadwallader," Celia had said;
"but I don't like funerals."
"Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must
accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married
Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking
the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning,
because I couldn't have the end without them."
"No, to be sure not," said the Dowager Lady Chettam,
with stately emphasis.
The upper window from which the funeral could be well seen was in the
room occupied by Mr. Casaubon when he had been forbidden to work;
but he had resumed nearly his habitual style of life now in spite
of warnings and prescriptions, and after politely welcoming
Mrs. Cadwallader had slipped again into the library to chew a cud
of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim.
But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the library,
and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone's
funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life,
always afterwards came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive
points in memory, just as the vision of St. Peter's at Rome
was inwoven with moods of despondency. Scenes which make vital
changes in our neighbors' lot are but the background of our own,
yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become
associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part
of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood
with the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense
of loneliness which was due to the very ardor of Dorothea's nature.
The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air:
dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down
with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below.
And Dorothea was not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of
that height.
"I shall not look any more," said Celia, after the train had entered
the church, placing herself a little behind her husband's elbow
so that she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek. "I dare say
Dodo likes it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people."
"I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among,"
said Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the
interest of a monk on his holiday tour. "It seems to me
we know nothing of our neighbors, unless they are cottagers.
One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead,
and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs. Cadwallader
for coming and calling me out of the library."
"Quite right to feel obliged to me," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
"Your rich Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons,
and I dare say you don't half see them at church. They are quite
different from your uncle's tenants or Sir James's--monsters--
farmers without landlords--one can't tell how to class them."
"Most of these followers are not Lowick people," said Sir James;
"I suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch.
Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well
as land."
"Think of that now! when so many younger sons can't dine at
their own expense," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Ah," turning round
at the sound of the opening door, "here is Mr. Brooke. I felt
that we were incomplete before, and here is the explanation.
You are come to see this odd funeral, of course?"
"No, I came to look after Casaubon--to see how he goes on,
you know. And to bring a little news--a little news, my dear,"
said Mr. Brooke, nodding at Dorothea as she came towards him.
"I looked into the library, and I saw Casaubon over his books.
I told him it wouldn't do: I said, `This will never do, you know:
think of your wife, Casaubon.' And he promised me to come up. I didn't
tell him my news: I said, he must come up."
"Ah, now they are coming out of church," Mrs. Cadwallader exclaimed.
"Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set! Mr. Lydgate as doctor,
I suppose. But that is really a good looking woman, and the fair
young man must be her son. Who are they, Sir James, do you know?"
"I see Vincy, the Mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife
and son," said Sir James, looking interrogatively at Mr. Brooke,
who nodded and said--
"Yes, a very decent family--a very good fellow is Vincy; a credit
to the manufacturing interest. You have seen him at my house,
you know."
"Ah, yes: one of your secret committee," said Mrs. Cadwallader,
provokingly.
"A coursing fellow, though," said Sir James, with a fox-hunter's disgust.
"And one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom
weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair
and sleek," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Those dark, purple-faced people
are an excellent foil. Dear me, they are like a set of jugs!
Do look at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering
above them in his white surplice."
"It's a solemn thing, though, a funeral," said Mr. Brooke, "if you
take it in that light, you know."
"But I am not taking it in that light. I can't wear my solemnity
too often, else it will go to rags. It was time the old man died,
and none of these people are sorry."
"How piteous!" said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most
dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning I cannot
bear to think that any one should die and leave no love behind."
She was going to say more, but she saw her husband enter and seat
himself a little in the background. The difference his presence
made to her was not always a happy one: she felt that he often
inwardly objected to her speech.
"Positively," exclaimed Mrs. Cadwallader, "there is a new face
come out from behind that broad man queerer than any of them:
a little round head with bulging eyes--a sort of frog-face--do look.
He must be of another blood, I think."
"Let me see!" said Celia, with awakened curiosity, standing behind Mrs.
Cadwallader and leaning forward over her head. "Oh, what an odd face!"
Then with a quick change to another sort of surprised expression, she
added, "Why, Dodo, you never told me that Mr. Ladislaw was come again!"
Dorothea felt a shock of alarm: every one noticed her sudden paleness
as she looked up immediately at her uncle, while Mr. Casaubon
looked at her.
"He came with me, you know; he is my guest--puts up with me at
the Grange," said Mr. Brooke, in his easiest tone, nodding at Dorothea,
as if the announcement were just what she might have expected.
"And we have brought the picture at the top of the carriage.
I knew you would be pleased with the surprise, Casaubon. There you
are to the very life--as Aquinas, you know. Quite the right sort
of thing. And you will hear young Ladislaw talk about it.
He talks uncommonly well--points out this, that, and the other--
knows art and everything of that kind--companionable, you know--is up
with you in any track--what I've been wanting a long while."
Mr. Casaubon bowed with cold politeness, mastering his irritation,
but only so far as to be silent. He remembered Will's letter
quite as well as Dorothea did; he had noticed that it was not
among the letters which had been reserved for him on his recovery,
and secretly concluding that Dorothea had sent word to Will not
to come to Lowick, he had shrunk with proud sensitiveness from ever
recurring to the subject. He now inferred that she had asked
her uncle to invite Will to the Grange; and she felt it impossible
at that moment to enter into any explanation.
Mrs. Cadwallader's eyes, diverted from the churchyard, saw a good
deal of dumb show which was not so intelligible to her as she could
have desired, and could not repress the question, "Who is Mr. Ladislaw?"
"A young relative of Mr. Casaubon's," said Sir James, promptly.
His good-nature often made him quick and clear-seeing
in personal matters, and he had divined from Dorothea's
glance at her husband that there was some alarm in her mind.
"A very nice young fellow--Casaubon has done everything for him,"
explained Mr. Brooke. "He repays your expense in him, Casaubon,"
he went on, nodding encouragingly. "I hope he will stay with me
a long while and we shall make something of my documents. I have
plenty of ideas and facts, you know, and I can see he is just the man
to put them into shape--remembers what the right quotations are,
omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing--gives subjects a kind
of turn. I invited him some time ago when you were ill, Casaubon;
Dorothea said you couldn't have anybody in the house, you know,
and she asked me to write."
Poor Dorothea felt that every word of her uncle's was about as
pleasant as a grain of sand in the eye to Mr. Casaubon. It would
be altogether unfitting now to explain that she had not wished her
uncle to invite Will Ladislaw. She could not in the least make clear
to herself the reasons for her husband's dislike to his presence--
a dislike painfully impressed on her by the scene in the library;
but she felt the unbecomingness of saying anything that might convey
a notion of it to others. Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly
represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling
with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification
than for self-knowledge. But he wished to repress outward signs,
and only Dorothea could discern the changes in her husband's face
before he observed with more of dignified bending and sing-song
than usual--
"You are exceedingly hospitable, my dear sir; and I owe you
acknowledgments for exercising your hospitality towards a relative
of mine."
The funeral was ended now, and the churchyard was being cleared.
"Now you can see him, Mrs. Cadwallader," said Celia. "He is just like
a miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt that hangs in Dorothea's boudoir--
quite nice-looking."
"A very pretty sprig," said Mrs. Cadwallader, dryly. "What
is your nephew to be, Mr. Casaubon?"
"Pardon me, he is not my nephew. He is my cousin."
"Well, you know," interposed Mr. Brooke, "he is trying his wings.
He is just the sort of young fellow to rise. I should be glad
to give him an opportunity. He would make a good secretary, now,
like Hobbes, Milton, Swift--that sort of man."
"I understand," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "One who can write speeches."
"I'll fetch him in now, eh, Casaubon?" said Mr. Brooke.
"He wouldn't come in till I had announced him, you know. And we'll
go down and look at the picture. There you are to the life:
a deep subtle sort of thinker with his fore-finger on the page,
while Saint Bonaventure or somebody else, rather fat and florid,
is looking up at the Trinity. Everything is symbolical, you know--
the higher style of art: I like that up to a certain point,
but not too far--it's rather straining to keep up with, you know.
But you are at home in that, Casaubon. And your painter's flesh
is good--solidity, transparency, everything of that sort.
I went into that a great deal at one time. However, I'll go and
fetch Ladislaw."
CHAPTER XXXV.
"Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir
Que de voir d'heritiers une troupe affligee
Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongee,
Lire un long testament ou pales, etonnes
On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez.
Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde
Je reviendrais, je crois, expres de l'autre monde."
--REGNARD: Le Legataire Universel.
When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied
species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted
to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder
were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.
(I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too
painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously
naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.)
The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed
Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds
bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of.
The long-recognized blood-relations and connections by marriage
made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities,
presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness.
Jealousy of the Vincys had created a fellowship in hostility among
all persons of the Featherstone blood, so that in the absence of any
decided indication that one of themselves was to have more than
the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy should have
the land was necessarily dominant, though it left abundant feeling
and leisure for vaguer jealousies, such as were entertained towards
Mary Garth. Solomon found time to reflect that Jonah was undeserving,
and Jonah to abuse Solomon as greedy; Jane, the elder sister,
held that Martha's children ought not to expect so much as the
young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject of primogeniture,
was sorry to think that Jane was so "having." These nearest of kin
were naturally impressed with the unreasonableness of expectations
in cousins and second cousins, and used their arithmetic in reckoning
the large sums that small legacies might mount to, if there were
too many of them. Two cousins were present to hear the will,
and a second cousin besides Mr. Trumbull. This second cousin was
a Middlemarch mercer of polite manners and superfluous aspirates.
The two cousins were elderly men from Brassing, one of them
conscious of claims on the score of inconvenient expense sustained
by him in presents of oysters and other eatables to his rich
cousin Peter; the other entirely saturnine, leaning his hands
and chin on a stick, and conscious of claims based on no narrow
performance but on merit generally: both blameless citizens
of Brassing, who wished that Jonah Featherstone did not live there.
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
"Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred--THAT
you may depend,--I shouldn't wonder if my brother promised him,"
said Solomon, musing aloud with his sisters, the evening before
the funeral.
"Dear, dear!" said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds
had been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.
But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were
disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed
among them as if from the moon. This was the stranger described
by Mrs. Cadwallader as frog-faced: a man perhaps about two or three
and thirty, whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped, downward-curved mouth,
and hair sleekly brushed away from a forehead that sank suddenly
above the ridge of the eyebrows, certainly gave his face a batrachian
unchangeableness of expression. Here, clearly, was a new legatee;
else why was he bidden as a mourner? Here were new possibilities,
raising a new uncertainty, which almost checked remark in the
mourning-coaches. We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery
of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring
at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely
without it. No one had seen this questionable stranger before
except Mary Garth, and she knew nothing more of him than that he
had twice been to Stone Court when Mr. Featherstone was down-stairs,
and had sat alone with him for several hours. She had found an
opportunity of mentioning this to her father, and perhaps Caleb's
were the only eyes, except the lawyer's, which examined the stranger
with more of inquiry than of disgust or suspicion. Caleb Garth,
having little expectation and less cupidity, was interested in the
verification of his own guesses, and the calmness with which he
half smilingly rubbed his chin and shot intelligent glances much
as if he were valuing a tree, made a fine contrast with the alarm
or scorn visible in other faces when the unknown mourner, whose name
was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlor and took
his seat near the door to make part of the audience when the will
should be read. Just then Mr. Solomon and Mr. Jonah were gone
up-stairs with the lawyer to search for the will; and Mrs. Waule,
seeing two vacant seats between herself and Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
had the spirit to move next to that great authority, who was handling
his watch-seals and trimming his outlines with a determination not to
show anything so compromising to a man of ability as wonder or surprise.
"I suppose you know everything about what my poor brother's done,
Mr. Trumbull," said Mrs. Waule, in the lowest of her woolly tones,
while she turned her crape-shadowed bonnet towards Mr. Trumbull's ear.
"My good lady, whatever was told me was told in confidence,"
said the auctioneer, putting his hand up to screen that secret.
"Them who've made sure of their good-luck may be disappointed yet,"
Mrs. Waule continued, finding some relief in this communication.
"Hopes are often delusive," said Mr. Trumbull, still in confidence.
"Ah!" said Mrs. Waule, looking across at the Vincys, and then
moving back to the side of her sister Martha.
"It's wonderful how close poor Peter was," she said, in the same
undertones. "We none of us know what he might have had on his mind.
I only hope and trust he wasn't a worse liver than we think of, Martha."
Poor Mrs. Cranch was bulky, and, breathing asthmatically,
had the additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable
and giving them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud
and liable to sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ.
"I never WAS covetious, Jane," she replied; "but I have six
children and have buried three, and I didn't marry into money.
The eldest, that sits there, is but nineteen--so I leave you to guess.
And stock always short, and land most awkward. But if ever I've
begged and prayed; it's been to God above; though where there's
one brother a bachelor and the other childless after twice marrying--
anybody might think!"
Meanwhile, Mr. Vincy had glanced at the passive face of Mr. Rigg,
and had taken out his snuff-box and tapped it, but had put it again
unopened as an indulgence which, however clarifying to the judgment,
was unsuited to the occasion. "I shouldn't wonder if Featherstone
had better feelings than any of us gave him credit for," he observed,
in the ear of his wife. "This funeral shows a thought about everybody:
it looks well when a man wants to be followed by his friends,
and if they are humble, not to be ashamed of them. I should be
all the better pleased if he'd left lots of small legacies.
They may be uncommonly useful to fellows in a small way."
"Everything is as handsome as could be, crape and silk and everything,"
said Mrs. Vincy, contentedly.
But I am sorry to say that Fred was under some difficulty in repressing
a laugh, which would have been more unsuitable than his father's
snuff-box. Fred had overheard Mr. Jonah suggesting something about a
"love-child," and with this thought in his mind, the stranger's face,
which happened to be opposite him, affected him too ludicrously.
Mary Garth, discerning his distress in the twitchings of his mouth,
and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking
him to change seats with her, so that he got into a shadowy corner.
Fred was feeling as good-naturedly as possible towards everybody,
including Rigg; and having some relenting towards all these people
who were less lucky than he was aware of being himself, he would
not for the world have behaved amiss; still, it was particularly easy
to laugh.
But the entrance of the lawyer and the two brothers drew every
one's attention. The lawyer was Mr. Standish, and he had come
to Stone Court this morning believing that he knew thoroughly well
who would be pleased and who disappointed before the day was over.
The will he expected to read was the last of three which he
had drawn up for Mr. Featherstone. Mr. Standish was not a man
who varied his manners: he behaved with the same deep-voiced,
off-hand civility to everybody, as if he saw no difference in them,
and talked chiefly of the hay-crop, which would be "very fine,
by God!" of the last bulletins concerning the King, and of the Duke
of Clarence, who was a sailor every inch of him, and just the man
to rule over an island like Britain.
Old Featherstone had often reflected as he sat looking at the fire
that Standish would be surprised some day: it is true that if he
had done as he liked at the last, and burnt the will drawn up
by another lawyer, he would not have secured that minor end;
still he had had his pleasure in ruminating on it. And certainly
Mr. Standish was surprised, but not at all sorry; on the contrary,
he rather enjoyed the zest of a little curiosity in his own mind,
which the discovery of a second will added to the prospective amazement
on the part of the Featherstone family.
As to the sentiments of Solomon and Jonah, they were held in
utter suspense: it seemed to them that the old will would have
a certain validity, and that there might be such an interlacement
of poor Peter's former and latter intentions as to create endless
"lawing" before anybody came by their own--an inconvenience which
would have at least the advantage of going all round. Hence the
brothers showed a thoroughly neutral gravity as they re-entered
with Mr. Standish; but Solomon took out his white handkerchief again
with a sense that in any case there would be affecting passages,
and crying at funerals, however dry, was customarily served up in lawn.
Perhaps the person who felt the most throbbing excitement at this
moment was Mary Garth, in the consciousness that it was she
who had virtually determined the production of this second will,
which might have momentous effects on the lot of some persons present.
No soul except herself knew what had passed on that final night.
"The will I hold in my hand," said Mr. Standish, who, seated at
the table in the middle of the room, took his time about everything,
including the coughs with which he showed a disposition to clear
his voice, "was drawn up by myself and executed by our deceased
friend on the 9th of August, 1825. But I find that there is
a subsequent instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date the
20th of July, 1826, hardly a year later than the previous one.
And there is farther, I see"--Mr. Standish was cautiously travelling
over the document with his spectacles--"a codicil to this latter will,
bearing date March 1, 1828."
"Dear, dear!" said sister Martha, not meaning to be audible,
but driven to some articulation under this pressure of dates.
"I shall begin by reading the earlier will," continued Mr. Standish,
"since such, as appears by his not having destroyed the document,
was the intention of deceased."
The preamble was felt to be rather long, and several besides
Solomon shook their heads pathetically, looking on the ground:
all eyes avoided meeting other eyes, and were chiefly fixed either
on the spots in the table-cloth or on Mr. Standish's bald head;
excepting Mary Garth's. When all the rest were trying to look
nowhere in particular, it was safe for her to look at them.
And at the sound of the first "give and bequeath" she could see all
complexions changing subtly, as if some faint vibration were passing
through them, save that of Mr. Rigg. He sat in unaltered calm, and,
in fact, the company, preoccupied with more important problems,
and with the complication of listening to bequests which might or
might not be revoked, had ceased to think of him. Fred blushed,
and Mr. Vincy found it impossible to do without his snuff-box in
his hand, though he kept it closed.
The small bequests came first, and even the recollection that there
was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it,
could not quell the rising disgust and indignation. One likes
to be done well by in every tense, past, present, and future.
And here was Peter capable five years ago of leaving only two hundred
apiece to his own brothers and sisters, and only a hundred apiece
to his own nephews and nieces: the Garths were not mentioned,
but Mrs. Vincy and Rosamond were each to have a hundred.
Mr. Trumbull was to have the gold-headed cane and fifty pounds;
the other second cousins and the cousins present were each to have
the like handsome sum, which, as the saturnine cousin observed,
was a sort of legacy that left a man nowhere; and there was much
more of such offensive dribbling in favor of persons not present--
problematical, and, it was to be feared, low connections.
Altogether, reckoning hastily, here were about three thousand
disposed of. Where then had Peter meant the rest of the money to go--
and where the land? and what was revoked and what not revoked--
and was the revocation for better or for worse? All emotion
must be conditional, and might turn out to be the wrong thing.
The men were strong enough to bear up and keep quiet under this
confused suspense; some letting their lower lip fall, others pursing
it up, according to the habit of their muscles. But Jane and Martha
sank under the rush of questions, and began to cry; poor Mrs. Cranch
being half moved with the consolation of getting any hundreds at all
without working for them, and half aware that her share was scanty;
whereas Mrs. Waule's mind was entirely flooded with the sense
of being an own sister and getting little, while somebody else
was to have much. The general expectation now was that the "much"
would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselves were surprised
when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be
bequeathed to him:--was the land coming too? Fred bit his lips:
it was difficult to help smiling, and Mrs. Vincy felt herself
the happiest of women--possible revocation shrinking out of sight
in this dazzling vision.
There was still a residue of personal property as well as the land,
but the whole was left to one person, and that person was--
O possibilities! O expectations founded on the favor of "close"
old gentlemen! O endless vocatives that would still leave
expression slipping helpless from the measurement of mortal folly!--
that residuary legatee was Joshua Rigg, who was also sole executor,
and who was to take thenceforth the name of Featherstone.
There was a rustling which seemed like a shudder running round
the room. Every one stared afresh at Mr. Rigg, who apparently
experienced no surprise.
"A most singular testamentary disposition!" exclaimed Mr. Trumbull,
preferring for once that he should be considered ignorant in the past.
"But there is a second will--there is a further document. We have
not yet heard the final wishes of the deceased."
Mary Garth was feeling that what they had yet to hear were not the
final wishes. The second will revoked everything except the legacies
to the low persons before mentioned (some alterations in these being
the occasion of the codicil), and the bequest of all the land
lying in Lowick parish with all the stock and household furniture,
to Joshua Rigg. The residue of the property was to be devoted to
the erection and endowment of almshouses for old men, to be called
Featherstone's Alms-Houses, and to be built on a piece of land
near Middlemarch already bought for the purpose by the testator,
he wishing--so the document declared--to please God Almighty.
Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane.
It took some time for the company to recover the power of expression.
Mary dared not look at Fred.
Mr. Vincy was the first to speak--after using his snuff-
box energetically--and he spoke with loud indignation.
"The most unaccountable will I ever heard! I should say
he was not in his right mind when he made it. I should
say this last will was void," added Mr. Vincy, feeling
that this expression put the thing in the true light. "Eh Standish?"
"Our deceased friend always knew what he was about, I think,"
said Mr. Standish. "Everything is quite regular. Here is a letter
from Clemmens of Brassing tied with the will. He drew it up.
A very respectable solicitor."
"I never noticed any alienation of mind--any aberration of intellect
in the late Mr. Featherstone," said Borthrop Trumbull, "but I call this
will eccentric. I was always willingly of service to the old soul;
and he intimated pretty plainly a sense of obligation which would show
itself in his will. The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as
an acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations."
"There's nothing very surprising in the matter that I can see,"
said Caleb Garth. "Anybody might have had more reason for wondering
if the will had been what you might expect from an open-minded
straightforward man. For my part, I wish there was no such thing
as a will."
"That's a strange sentiment to come from a Christian man, by God!"
said the lawyer. "I should like to know how you will back
that up, Garth!"
"Oh," said Caleb, leaning forward, adjusting his finger-tips
with nicety and looking meditatively on the ground. It always
seemed to him that words were the hardest part of "business."
But here Mr. Jonah Featherstone made himself heard. "Well,
he always was a fine hypocrite, was my brother Peter. But this
will cuts out everything. If I'd known, a wagon and six horses
shouldn't have drawn me from Brassing. I'll put a white hat
and drab coat on to-morrow."
"Dear, dear," wept Mrs. Cranch, "and we've been at the expense
of travelling, and that poor lad sitting idle here so long!
It's the first time I ever heard my brother Peter was so wishful
to please God Almighty; but if I was to be struck helpless I must
say it's hard--I can think no other."
"It'll do him no good where he's gone, that's my belief,"
said Solomon, with a bitterness which was remarkably genuine,
though his tone could not help being sly. "Peter was a bad liver,
and almshouses won't cover it, when he's had the impudence to show
it at the last."
"And all the while had got his own lawful family--brothers and sisters
and nephews and nieces--and has sat in church with 'em whenever
he thought well to come," said Mrs. Waule. "And might have left
his property so respectable, to them that's never been used to
extravagance or unsteadiness in no manner of way--and not so poor
but what they could have saved every penny and made more of it.
And me--the trouble I've been at, times and times, to come here
and be sisterly--and him with things on his mind all the while that
might make anybody's flesh creep. But if the Almighty's allowed it,
he means to punish him for it. Brother Solomon, I shall be going,
if you'll drive me."
"I've no desire to put my foot on the premises again," said Solomon.
"I've got land of my own and property of my own to will away."
"It's a poor tale how luck goes in the world," said Jonah.
"It never answers to have a bit of spirit in you. You'd better be
a dog in the manger. But those above ground might learn a lesson.
One fool's will is enough in a family."
"There's more ways than one of being a fool," said Solomon.
"I shan't leave my money to be poured down the sink, and I shan't
leave it to foundlings from Africay. I like Feather, stones that
were brewed such, and not turned Featherstones with sticking
the name on 'em."
Solomon addressed these remarks in a loud aside to Mrs. Waule
as he rose to accompany her. Brother Jonah felt himself capable
of much more stinging wit than this, but he reflected that there
was no use in offending the new proprietor of Stone Court, until you
were certain that he was quite without intentions of hospitality
towards witty men whose name he was about to bear.
Mr. Joshua Rigg, in fact, appeared to trouble himself little
about any innuendoes, but showed a notable change of manner,
walking coolly up to Mr. Standish and putting business questions
with much coolness. He had a high chirping voice and a vile accent.
Fred, whom he no longer moved to laughter, thought him the lowest
monster he had ever seen. But Fred was feeling rather sick.
The Middlemarch mercer waited for an opportunity of engaging
Mr. Rigg in conversation: there was no knowing how many pairs
of legs the new proprietor might require hose for, and profits
were more to be relied on than legacies. Also, the mercer,
as a second cousin, was dispassionate enough to feel curiosity.
Mr. Vincy, after his one outburst, had remained proudly silent,
though too much preoccupied with unpleasant feelings to think
of moving, till he observed that his wife had gone to Fred's
side and was crying silently while she held her darling's hand.
He rose immediately, and turning his back on the company while he
said to her in an undertone,--"Don't give way, Lucy; don't make
a fool of yourself, my dear, before these people," he added in his
usual loud voice--"Go and order the phaeton, Fred; I have no time
to waste."
Mary Garth had before this been getting ready to go home with her father.
She met Fred in the hall, and now for the first time had the courage
to look at him He had that withered sort of paleness which will
sometimes come on young faces, and his hand was very cold when she
shook it. Mary too was agitated; she was conscious that fatally,
without will of her own, she had perhaps made a great difference
to Fred's lot.
"Good-by," she said, with affectionate sadness. "Be brave, Fred.
I do believe you are better without the money. What was the good
of it to Mr. Featherstone?"
"That's all very fine," said Fred, pettishly. "What is a fellow
to do? I must go into the Church now." (He knew that this would
vex Mary: very well; then she must tell him what else he could do.)
"And I thought I should be able to pay your father at once and make
everything right. And you have not even a hundred pounds left you.
What shall you do now, Mary?"
"Take another situation, of course, as soon as I can get one.
My father has enough to do to keep the rest, without me. Good-by."
In a very short time Stone Court was cleared of well-brewed Featherstones
and other long-accustomed visitors. Another stranger had been
brought to settle in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, but in the case
of Mr. Rigg Featherstone there was more discontent with immediate
visible consequences than speculation as to the effect which his
presence might have in the future. No soul was prophetic enough to
have any foreboding as to what might appear on the trial of Joshua Rigg.
And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating
a low subject. Historical parallels are remarkably efficient in
this way. The chief objection to them is, that the diligent narrator
may lack space, or (what is often the same thing) may not be able
to think of them with any degree of particularity, though he may have
a philosophical confidence that if known they would be illustrative.
It seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observe that--
since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables,
where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa--
whatever has been or is to be narrated by me about low people,
may be ennobled by being considered a parable; so that if any bad
habits and ugly consequences are brought into view, the reader may have
the relief of regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel,
and may feel himself virtually in company with persons of some style.
Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader's imagination
need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords;
and the petty sums which any bankrupt of high standing would be
sorry to retire upon, may be lifted to the level of high commercial
transactions by the inexpensive addition of proportional ciphers.
As to any provincial history in which the agents are all of high
moral rank, that must be of a date long posterior to the first
Reform Bill, and Peter Featherstone, you perceive, was dead
and buried some months before Lord Grey came into office.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
"'Tis strange to see the humors of these men,
These great aspiring spirits, that should be wise:
. . . . . . . .
For being the nature of great spirits to love
To be where they may be most eminent;
They, rating of themselves so farre above
Us in conceit, with whom they do frequent,
Imagine how we wonder and esteeme
All that they do or say; which makes them strive
To make our admiration more extreme,
Which they suppose they cannot, 'less they give
Notice of their extreme and highest thoughts.
--DANIEL: Tragedy of Philotas.
Mr. Vincy went home from the reading of the will with his point
of view considerably changed in relation to many subjects. He was an
open-minded man, but given to indirect modes of expressing himself:
when he was disappointed in a market for his silk braids, he swore
at the groom; when his brother-in-law Bulstrode had vexed him,
he made cutting remarks on Methodism; and it was now apparent that
he regarded Fred's idleness with a sudden increase of severity,
by his throwing an embroidered cap out of the smoking-room on to
the hall-floor.
"Well, sir," he observed, when that young gentleman was moving off
to bed, "I hope you've made up your mind now to go up next term
and pass your examination. I've taken my resolution, so I advise
you to lose no time in taking yours."
Fred made no answer: he was too utterly depressed. Twenty-four hours
ago he had thought that instead of needing to know what he should do,
he should by this time know that he needed to do nothing: that he
should hunt in pink, have a first-rate hunter, ride to cover on a
fine hack, and be generally respected for doing so; moreover, that he
should be able at once to pay Mr. Garth, and that Mary could no longer
have any reason for not marrying him. And all this was to have come
without study or other inconvenience, purely by the favor of providence
in the shape of an old gentleman's caprice. But now, at the end
of the twenty-four hours, all those firm expectations were upset.
It was "rather hard lines" that while he was smarting under this
disappointment he should be treated as if he could have helped it.
But he went away silently and his mother pleaded for him.
"Don't be hard on the poor boy, Vincy. He'll turn out well yet,
though that wicked man has deceived him. I feel as sure as I
sit here, Fred will turn out well--else why was he brought back
from the brink of the grave? And I call it a robbery: it was
like giving him the land, to promise it; and what is promising,
if making everybody believe is not promising? And you see he did
leave him ten thousand pounds, and then took it away again."
"Took it away again!" said Mr. Vincy, pettishly. "I tell you
the lad's an unlucky lad, Lucy. And you've always spoiled him."
"Well, Vincy, he was my first, and you made a fine fuss with him
when he came. You were as proud as proud," said Mrs. Vincy,
easily recovering her cheerful smile.
"Who knows what babies will turn to? I was fool enough, I dare say,"
said the husband--more mildly, however.
"But who has handsomer, better children than ours? Fred is far
beyond other people's sons: you may hear it in his speech, that he
has kept college company. And Rosamond--where is there a girl
like her? She might stand beside any lady in the land, and only
look the better for it. You see--Mr. Lydgate has kept the highest
company and been everywhere, and he fell in love with her at once.
Not but what I could have wished Rosamond had not engaged herself.
She might have met somebody on a visit who would have been a far
better match; I mean at her schoolfellow Miss Willoughby's. There are
relations in that family quite as high as Mr. Lydgate's."
"Damn relations!" said Mr. Vincy; "I've had enough of them.
I don't want a son-in-law who has got nothing but his relations
to recommend him."
"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy, "you seemed as pleased as could
be about it. It's true, I wasn't at home; but Rosamond told me you
hadn't a word to say against the engagement. And she has begun
to buy in the best linen and cambric for her underclothing."
"Not by my will," said Mr. Vincy. "I shall have enough to do this year,
with an idle scamp of a son, without paying for wedding-clothes.
The times are as tight as can be; everybody is being ruined;
and I don't believe Lydgate has got a farthing. I shan't give
my consent to their marrying. Let 'em wait, as their elders
have done before 'em."
"Rosamond will take it hard, Vincy, and you know you never could
bear to cross her."
"Yes, I could. The sooner the engagement's off, the better.
I don't believe he'll ever make an income, the way he goes on.
He makes enemies; that's all I hear of his making."
"But he stands very high with Mr. Bulstrode, my dear. The marriage
would please HIM, I should think."
"Please the deuce!" said Mr. Vincy. "Bulstrode won't pay for
their keep. And if Lydgate thinks I'm going to give money for them
to set up housekeeping, he's mistaken, that's all. I expect I shall
have to put down my horses soon. You'd better tell Rosy what I say."
This was a not infrequent procedure with Mr. Vincy--to be rash
in jovial assent, and on becoming subsequently conscious that he had
been rash, to employ others in making the offensive retractation.
However, Mrs. Vincy, who never willingly opposed her husband,
lost no time the next morning in letting Rosamond know what he
had said. Rosamond, examining some muslin-work, listened in silence,
and at the end gave a certain turn of her graceful neck, of which
only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy.
"What do you say, my dear?" said her mother, with affectionate deference.
"Papa does not mean anything of the kind," said Rosamond, quite calmly.
"He has always said that he wished me to marry the man I loved.
And I shall marry Mr. Lydgate. It is seven weeks now since papa gave
his consent. And I hope we shall have Mrs. Bretton's house."
"Well, my dear, I shall leave you to manage your papa. You always
do manage everybody. But if we ever do go and get damask,
Sadler's is the place--far better than Hopkins's. Mrs. Bretton's
is very large, though: I should love you to have such a house;
but it will take a great deal of furniture--carpeting and everything,
besides plate and glass. And you hear, your papa says he will give
no money. Do you think Mr. Lydgate expects it?"
"You cannot imagine that I should ask him, mamma. Of course he
understands his own affairs."
"But he may have been looking for money, my dear, and we all thought
of your having a pretty legacy as well as Fred;--and now everything
is so dreadful--there's no pleasure in thinking of anything,
with that poor boy disappointed as he is."
"That has nothing to do with my marriage, mamma. Fred must leave off
being idle. I am going up-stairs to take this work to Miss Morgan:
she does the open hemming very well. Mary Garth might do some work
for me now, I should think. Her sewing is exquisite; it is the nicest
thing I know about Mary. I should so like to have all my cambric
frilling double-hemmed. And it takes a long time."
Mrs. Vincy's belief that Rosamond could manage her papa was
well founded. Apart from his dinners and his coursing, Mr. Vincy,
blustering as he was, had as little of his own way as if he had
been a prime minister: the force of circumstances was easily
too much for him, as it is for most pleasure-loving florid men;
and the circumstance called Rosamond was particularly forcible
by means of that mild persistence which, as we know, enables a white
soft living substance to make its way in spite of opposing rock.
Papa was not a rock: he had no other fixity than that fixity of
alternating impulses sometimes called habit, and this was altogether
unfavorable to his taking the only decisive line of conduct in relation
to his daughter's engagement--namely, to inquire thoroughly into
Lydgate's circumstances, declare his own inability to furnish money,
and forbid alike either a speedy marriage or an engagement which must
be too lengthy. That seems very simple and easy in the statement;
but a disagreeable resolve formed in the chill hours of the morning
had as many conditions against it as the early frost, and rarely
persisted under the warming influences of the day. The indirect
though emphatic expression of opinion to which Mr. Vincy was prone
suffered much restraint in this case: Lydgate was a proud man
towards whom innuendoes were obviously unsafe, and throwing his hat
on the floor was out of the question. Mr. Vincy was a little in awe
of him, a little vain that he wanted to marry Rosamond, a little
indisposed to raise a question of money in which his own position
was not advantageous, a little afraid of being worsted in dialogue
with a man better educated and more highly bred than himself,
and a little afraid of doing what his daughter would not like.
The part Mr. Vincy preferred playing was that of the generous host
whom nobody criticises. In the earlier half of the day there was
business to hinder any formal communication of an adverse resolve;
in the later there was dinner, wine, whist, and general satisfaction.
And in the mean while the hours were each leaving their little
deposit and gradually forming the final reason for inaction, namely,
that action was too late. The accepted lover spent most of his
evenings in Lowick Gate, and a love-making not at all dependent
on money-advances from fathers-in-law, or prospective income from
a profession, went on flourishingly under Mr. Vincy's own eyes.
Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it
clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--
are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips,
meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases,
lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself
is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one
life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self with
wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be finished
off with the drama of Laure--in spite too of medicine and biology;
for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes presented in a dish
(like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of scientific inquiry,
are observed to be less incompatible with poetic love than a native
dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose. As for Rosamond,
she was in the water-lily's expanding wonderment at its own fuller life,
and she too was spinning industriously at the mutual web. All this
went on in the corner of the drawing-room where the piano stood,
and subtle as it was, the light made it a sort of rainbow visible
to many observers besides Mr. Farebrother. The certainty that Miss
Vincy and Mr. Lydgate were engaged became general in Middlemarch
without the aid of formal announcement.
Aunt Bulstrode was again stirred to anxiety; but this time she
addressed herself to her brother, going to the warehouse expressly
to avoid Mrs. Vincy's volatility. His replies were not satisfactory.
"Walter, you never mean to tell me that you have allowed all
this to go on without inquiry into Mr. Lydgate's prospects?"
said Mrs. Bulstrode, opening her eyes with wider gravity at her brother,
who was in his peevish warehouse humor. "Think of this girl
brought up in luxury--in too worldly a way, I am sorry to say--
what will she do on a small income?"
"Oh, confound it, Harriet I what can I do when men come into
the town without any asking of mine? Did you shut your house up
against Lydgate? Bulstrode has pushed him forward more than anybody.
I never made any fuss about the young fellow. You should go
and talk to your husband about it, not me."
"Well, really, Walter, how can Mr. Bulstrode be to blame?
I am sure he did not wish for the engagement."
"Oh, if Bulstrode had not taken him by the hand, I should never
have invited him."
"But you called him in to attend on Fred, and I am sure that was
a mercy," said Mrs. Bulstrode, losing her clew in the intricacies
of the subject.
"I don't know about mercy," said Mr. Vincy, testily. "I know I
am worried more than I like with my family. I was a good brother
to you, Harriet, before you married Bulstrode, and I must say he
doesn't always show that friendly spirit towards your family that might
have been expected of him." Mr. Vincy was very little like a Jesuit,
but no accomplished Jesuit could have turned a question more adroitly.
Harriet had to defend her husband instead of blaming her brother,
and the conversation ended at a point as far from the beginning as
some recent sparring between the brothers-in-law at a vestry meeting.
Mrs. Bulstrode did not repeat her brother's complaints to her husband,
but in the evening she spoke to him of Lydgate and Rosamond.
He did not share her warm interest, however; and only spoke with
resignation of the risks attendant on the beginning of medical
practice and the desirability of prudence.
"I am sure we are bound to pray for that thoughtless girl--
brought up as she has been," said Mrs. Bulstrode, wishing to rouse
her husband's feelings.
"Truly, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, assentingly. "Those who are
not of this world can do little else to arrest the errors of the
obstinately worldly. That is what we must accustom ourselves to
recognize with regard to your brother's family. I could have wished
that Mr. Lydgate had not entered into such a union; but my relations
with him are limited to that use of his gifts for God's purposes
which is taught us by the divine government under each dispensation."
Mrs. Bulstrode said no more, attributing some dissatisfaction which she
felt to her own want of spirituality. She believed that her husband
was one of those men whose memoirs should be written when they died.
As to Lydgate himself, having been accepted, he was prepared to
accept all the consequences which he believed himself to foresee
with perfect clearness. Of course he must be married in a year--
perhaps even in half a year. This was not what he had intended;
but other schemes would not be hindered: they would simply
adjust themselves anew. Marriage, of course, must be prepared
for in the usual way. A house must be taken instead of the rooms
he at present occupied; and Lydgate, having heard Rosamond speak
with admiration of old Mrs. Bretton's house (situated in Lowick
Gate), took notice when it fell vacant after the old lady's death,
and immediately entered into treaty for it.
He did this in an episodic way, very much as he gave orders to his
tailor for every requisite of perfect dress, without any notion
of being extravagant. On the contrary, he would have despised any
ostentation of expense; his profession had familiarized him with all
grades of poverty, and he cared much for those who suffered hardships.
He would have behaved perfectly at a table where the sauce was served
in a jug with the handle off, and he would have remembered nothing
about a grand dinner except that a man was there who talked well.
But it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other
than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses
for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at
French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching.
We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture,
our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our
own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.
And Lydgate's tendency was not towards extreme opinions: he would
have liked no barefooted doctrines, being particular about his boots:
he was no radical in relation to anything but medical reform
and the prosecution of discovery. In the rest of practical life
he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride
and unreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness,
and half from that naivete which belonged to preoccupation
with favorite ideas.
Any inward debate Lydgate had as to the consequences of this
engagement which had stolen upon him, turned on the paucity of time
rather than of money. Certainly, being in love and being expected
continually by some one who always turned out to be prettier
than memory could represent her to be, did interfere with the
diligent use of spare hours which might serve some "plodding
fellow of a German" to make the great, imminent discovery.
This was really an argument for not deferring the marriage too long,
as he implied to Mr. Farebrother, one day that the Vicar came
to his room with some pond-products which he wanted to examine
under a better microscope than his own, and, finding Lydgate's
tableful of apparatus and specimens in confusion, said sarcastically--
"Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony,
and now he brings back chaos."
"Yes, at some stages," said Lydgate, lifting his brows and smiling,
while he began to arrange his microscope. "But a better order will
begin after."
"Soon?" said the Vicar.
"I hope so, really. This unsettled state of affairs uses up the time,
and when one has notions in science, every moment is an opportunity.
I feel sure that marriage must be the best thing for a man who wants
to work steadily. He has everything at home then--no teasing with
personal speculations--he can get calmness and freedom."
"You are an enviable dog," said the Vicar, "to have such a prospect--
Rosamond, calmness and freedom, all to your share. Here am
I with nothing but my pipe and pond-animalcules. Now, are you ready?"
Lydgate did not mention to the Vicar another reason he had
for wishing to shorten the period of courtship. It was rather
irritating to him, even with the wine of love in his veins, to be
obliged to mingle so often with the family party at the Vincys',
and to enter so much into Middlemarch gossip, protracted good cheer,
whist-playing, and general futility. He had to be deferential
when Mr. Vincy decided questions with trenchant ignorance,
especially as to those liquors which were the best inward pickle,
preserving you from the effects of bad air. Mrs. Vincy's openness
and simplicity were quite unstreaked with suspicion as to the subtle
offence she might give to the taste of her intended son-in-law;
and altogether Lydgate had to confess to himself that he was
descending a little in relation to Rosamond's family. But that
exquisite creature herself suffered in the same sort of way:--
it was at least one delightful thought that in marrying her,
he could give her a much-needed transplantation.
"Dear!" he said to her one evening, in his gentlest tone, as he
sat down by her and looked closely at her face--
But I must first say that he had found her alone in the drawing-room,
where the great old-fashioned window, almost as large as the side
of the room, was opened to the summer scents of the garden at the
back of the house. Her father and mother were gone to a party,
and the rest were all out with the butterflies.
"Dear! your eyelids are red."
"Are they?" said Rosamond. "I wonder why." It was not in her
nature to pour forth wishes or grievances. They only came forth
gracefully on solicitation.
"As if you could hide it from me!"? said Lydgate, laying his hand tenderly
on both of hers. "Don't I see a tiny drop on one of the lashes?
Things trouble you, and you don't tell me. That is unloving."
"Why should I tell you what you cannot alter? They are
every-day things:--perhaps they have been a little worse lately."
"Family annoyances. Don't fear speaking. I guess them."
"Papa has been more irritable lately. Fred makes him angry, and this
morning there was a fresh quarrel because Fred threatens to throw
his whole education away, and do something quite beneath him.
And besides--"
Rosamond hesitated, and her cheeks were gathering a slight flush.
Lydgate had never seen her in trouble since the morning of
their engagement, and he had never felt so passionately towards
her as at this moment. He kissed the hesitating lips gently,
as if to encourage them.
"I feel that papa is not quite pleased about our engagement,"
Rosamond continued, almost in a whisper; "and he said last night
that he should certainly speak to you and say it must be given up."
"Will you give it up?" said Lydgate, with quick energy--almost angrily.
"I never give up anything that I choose to do," said Rosamond,
recovering her calmness at the touching of this chord.
"God bless you!" said Lydgate, kissing her again. This constancy
of purpose in the right place was adorable. He went on:--
"It is too late now for your father to say that our engagement
must be given up. You are of age, and I claim you as mine.
If anything is done to make you unhappy,--that is a reason for
hastening our marriage."
An unmistakable delight shone forth from the blue eyes that met his,
and the radiance seemed to light up all his future with mild sunshine.
Ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you
are invited to step from the labor and discord of the street into
a paradise where everything is given to you and nothing claimed)
seemed to be an affair of a few weeks' waiting, more or less.
"Why should we defer it?" he said, with ardent insistence.
"I have taken the house now: everything else can soon be got ready--
can it not? You will not mind about new clothes. Those can be
bought afterwards."
"What original notions you clever men have!" said Rosamond, dimpling with
more thorough laughter than usual at this humorous incongruity.
"This is the first time I ever heard of wedding-clothes being
bought after marriage."
"But you don't mean to say you would insist on my waiting months
for the sake of clothes?" said Lydgate, half thinking that Rosamond
was tormenting him prettily, and half fearing that she really shrank
from speedy marriage. "Remember, we are looking forward to a better
sort of happiness even than this--being continually together,
independent of others, and ordering our lives as we will.
Come, dear, tell me how soon you can be altogether mine."
There was a serious pleading in Lydgate's tone, as if he felt that
she would be injuring him by any fantastic delays. Rosamond became
serious too, and slightly meditative; in fact, she was going through
many intricacies of lace-edging and hosiery and petticoat-tucking,
in order to give an answer that would at least be approximative.
"Six weeks would be ample--say so, Rosamond," insisted Lydgate,
releasing her hands to put his arm gently round her.
One little hand immediately went to pat her hair, while she gave
her neck a meditative turn, and then said seriously--
"There would be the house-linen and the furniture to be prepared.
Still, mamma could see to those while we were away."
"Yes, to be sure. We must be away a week or so."
"Oh, more than that!" said Rosamond, earnestly. She was thinking
of her evening dresses for the visit to Sir Godwin Lydgate's, which
she had long been secretly hoping for as a delightful employment
of at least one quarter of the honeymoon, even if she deferred
her introduction to the uncle who was a doctor of divinity (also
a pleasing though sober kind of rank, when sustained by blood). She
looked at her lover with some wondering remonstrance as she spoke,
and he readily understood that she might wish to lengthen the sweet
time of double solitude.
"Whatever you wish, my darling, when the day is fixed. But let
us take a decided course, and put an end to any discomfort you
may be suffering. Six weeks!--I am sure they would be ample."
"I could certainly hasten the work," said Rosamond. "Will you, then,
mention it to papa?--I think it would be better to write to him."
She blushed and looked at him as the garden flowers look at us when we
walk forth happily among them in the transcendent evening light:
is there not a soul beyond utterance, half nymph, half child,
in those delicate petals which glow and breathe about the centres
of deep color?
He touched her ear and a little bit of neck under it with his lips,
and they sat quite still for many minutes which flowed by them
like a small gurgling brook with the kisses of the sun upon it.
Rosamond thought that no one could be more in love than she was;
and Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity,
he had found perfect womanhood--felt as If already breathed upon
by exquisite wedded affection such as would be bestowed by an
accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous
labors and would never interfere with them; who would create order
in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready
to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment;
who was instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair's-
breadth beyond--docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests
which came from that limit. It was plainer now than ever that his
notion of remaining much longer a bachelor had been a mistake:
marriage would not be an obstruction but a furtherance.
And happening the next day to accompany a patient to Brassing,
he saw a dinner-service there which struck him as so exactly the right
thing that he bought it at once. It saved time to do these things
just when you thought of them, and Lydgate hated ugly crockery.
The dinner-service in question was expensive, but that might be in
the nature of dinner-services. Furnishing was necessarily expensive;
but then it had to be done only once.
"It must be lovely," said Mrs. Vincy, when Lydgate mentioned his
purchase with some descriptive touches. "Just what Rosy ought
to have. I trust in heaven it won't be broken!"
"One must hire servants who will not break things," said Lydgate.
(Certainly, this was reasoning with an imperfect vision of sequences.
But at that period there was no sort of reasoning which was not more
or less sanctioned by men of science.)
Of course it was unnecessary to defer the mention of anything
to mamma, who did not readily take views that were not cheerful,
and being a happy wife herself, had hardly any feeling but pride
in her daughter's marriage. But Rosamond had good reasons for
suggesting to Lydgate that papa should be appealed to in writing.
She prepared for the arrival of the letter by walking with her papa
to the warehouse the next morning, and telling him on the way that
Mr. Lydgate wished to be married soon.
"Nonsense, my dear!" said Mr. Vincy. "What has he got to marry on?
You'd much better give up the engagement. I've told you so pretty
plainly before this. What have you had such an education for,
if you are to go and marry a poor man? It's a cruel thing for a father
to see."
"Mr. Lydgate is not poor, papa. He bought Mr. Peacock's practice,
which, they say, is worth eight or nine hundred a-year."
"Stuff and nonsense! What's buying a practice? He might as well
buy next year's swallows. It'll all slip through his fingers."
"On the contrary, papa, he will increase the practice. See how he
has been called in by the Chettams and Casaubons."
"I hope he knows I shan't give anything--with this disappointment
about Fred, and Parliament going to be dissolved, and machine-breaking
everywhere, and an election coming on--"
"Dear papa! what can that have to do with my marriage?"
"A pretty deal to do with it! We may all be ruined for what I know--
the country's in that state! Some say it's the end of the world,
and be hanged if I don't think it looks like it! Anyhow, it's not
a time for me to be drawing money out of my business, and I should
wish Lydgate to know that."
"I am sure he expects nothing, papa. And he has such very
high connections: he is sure to rise in one way or another.
He is engaged in making scientific discoveries."
Mr. Vincy was silent.
"I cannot give up my only prospect of happiness, papa Mr. Lydgate
is a gentleman. I could never love any one who was not a
perfect gentleman. You would not like me to go into a consumption,
as Arabella Hawley did. And you know that I never change my mind."
Again papa was silent.
"Promise me, papa, that you will consent to what we wish.
We shall never give each other up; and you know that you have always
objected to long courtships and late marriages."
There was a little more urgency of this kind, till Mr. Vincy said,
"Well, well, child, he must write to me first before I car answer him,"--
and Rosamond was certain that she had gained her point.
Mr. Vincy's answer consisted chiefly in a demand that Lydgate
should insure his life--a demand immediately conceded. This was
a delightfully reassuring idea supposing that Lydgate died,
but in the mean time not a self-supporting idea. However, it
seemed to make everything comfortable about Rosamond's marriage;
and the necessary purchases went on with much spirit. Not without
prudential considerations, however. A bride (who is going to visit
at a baronet's) must have a few first-rate pocket-handkerchiefs;
but beyond the absolutely necessary half-dozen, Rosamond contented
herself without the very highest style of embroidery and Valenciennes.
Lydgate also, finding that his sum of eight hundred pounds had been
considerably reduced since he had come to Middlemarch, restrained his
inclination for some plate of an old pattern which was shown to him
when he went into Kibble's establishment at Brassing to buy forks
and spoons. He was too proud to act as if he presupposed that
Mr. Vincy would advance money to provide furniture-; and though,
since it would not be necessary to pay for everything at once,
some bills would be left standing over, he did not waste time in
conjecturing how much his father-in-law would give in the form of dowry,
to make payment easy. He was not going to do anything extravagant,
but the requisite things must be bought, and it would be bad economy
to buy them of a poor quality. All these matters were by the bye.
Lydgate foresaw that science and his profession were the objects
he should alone pursue enthusiastically; but he could not imagine
himself pursuing them in such a home as Wrench had--the doors
all open, the oil-cloth worn, the children in soiled pinafores,
and lunch lingering in the form of bones, black-handled knives,
and willow-pattern. But Wrench had a wretched lymphatic wife
who made a mummy of herself indoors in a large shawl; and he must
have altogether begun with an ill-chosen domestic apparatus.
Rosamond, however, was on her side much occupied with conjectures,
though her quick imitative perception warned her against betraying
them too crudely.
"I shall like so much to know your family," she said one day,
when the wedding journey was being discussed. "We might perhaps
take a direction that would allow us to see them as we returned.
Which of your uncles do you like best?"
"Oh,--my uncle Godwin, I think. He is a good-natured old fellow."
"You were constantly at his house at Quallingham, when you were a boy,
were you not? I should so like to see the old spot and everything
you were used to. Does he know you are going to be married?"
"No," said Lydgate, carelessly, turning in his chair and rubbing
his hair up.
"Do send him word of it, you naughty undutiful nephew. He will
perhaps ask you to take me to Quallingham; and then you could show
me about the grounds, and I could imagine you there when you were
a boy. Remember, you see me in my home, just as it has been since I
was a child. It is not fair that I should be so ignorant of yours.
But perhaps you would be a little ashamed of me. I forgot that."
Lydgate smiled at her tenderly, and really accepted the suggestion
that the proud pleasure of showing so charming a bride was worth
some trouble. And now he came to think of it, he would like to see
the old spots with Rosamond.
"I will write to him, then. But my cousins are bores."
It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly
of a baronet's family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect
of being able to estimate them contemptuously on her own account.
But mamma was near spoiling all, a day or two later, by saying--
"I hope your uncle Sir Godwin will not look down on Rosy, Mr. Lydgate.
I should think he would do something handsome. A thousand or two
can be nothing to a baronet."
"Mamma!" said Rosamond, blushing deeply; and Lydgate pitied her so
much that he remained silent and went to the other end of the room
to examine a print curiously, as if he had been absent-minded. Mamma
had a little filial lecture afterwards, and was docile as usual.
But Rosamond reflected that if any of those high-bred cousins
who were bores, should be induced to visit Middlemarch, they would
see many things in her own family which might shock them. Hence it
seemed desirable that Lydgate should by-and-by get some first-rate
position elsewhere than in Middlemarch; and this could hardly be
difficult in the case of a man who had a titled uncle and could
make discoveries. Lydgate, you perceive, had talked fervidly to Rosamond
of his hopes as to the highest uses of his life, and had found it
delightful to be listened to by a creature who would bring him the
sweet furtherance of satisfying affection--beauty--repose--such help
as our thoughts get from the summer sky and the flower-fringed meadows.
Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between
what for the sake of variety I will call goose and gander:
especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully
corresponding to the strength of the gander.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
"Thrice happy she that is so well assured
Unto herself and settled so in heart
That neither will for better be allured
Ne fears to worse with any chance to start,
But like a steddy ship doth strongly part
The raging waves and keeps her course aright;
Ne aught for tempest doth from it depart,
Ne aught for fairer weather's false delight.
Such self-assurance need not fear the spight
Of grudging foes; ne favour seek of friends;
But in the stay of her own stedfast might
Neither to one herself nor other bends.
Most happy she that most assured doth rest,
But he most happy who such one loves best."
--SPENSER.
The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general
election or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George
the Fourth was dead, Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel
generally depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble
type of the uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time.
With the glow-worm lights of country places, how could men see
which were their own thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry
passing Liberal measures, of Tory nobles and electors being anxious
to return Liberals rather than friends of the recreant Ministers,
and of outcries for remedies which seemed to have a mysteriously remote
bearing on private interest, and were made suspicious by the advocacy
of disagreeable neighbors? Buyers of the Middlemarch newspapers
found themselves in an anomalous position: during the agitation
on the Catholic Question many had given up the "Pioneer"--which had
a motto from Charles James Fox and was in the van of progress--
because it had taken Peel's side about the Papists, and had thus
blotted its Liberalism with a toleration of Jesuitry and Baal;
but they were illsatisfied with the "Trumpet," which--since its
blasts against Rome, and in the general flaccidity of the public
mind (nobody knowing who would support whom)--had become feeble
in its blowing.
It was a time, according to a noticeable article in the "Pioneer,"
when the crying needs of the country might well counteract a reluctance
to public action on the part of men whose minds had from long
experience acquired breadth as well as concentration, decision of
judgment as well as tolerance, dispassionateness as well as energy--
in fact, all those qualities which in the melancholy experience
of mankind have been the least disposed to share lodgings.
Mr. Hackbutt, whose fluent speech was at that time floating more widely
than usual, and leaving much uncertainty as to its ultimate channel,
was heard to say in Mr. Hawley's office that the article in question
"emanated" from Brooke of Tipton, and that Brooke had secretly
bought the "Pioneer" some months ago.
"That means mischief, eh?" said Mr. Hawley. "He's got the freak of
being a popular man now, after dangling about like a stray tortoise.
So much the worse for him. I've had my eye on him for some time.
He shall be prettily pumped upon. He's a damned bad landlord.
What business has an old county man to come currying favor with a low
set of dark-blue freemen? As to his paper, I only hope he may do the
writing himself. It would be worth our paying for."
"I understand he has got a very brilliant young fellow to edit it,
who can write the highest style of leading article, quite equal
to anything in the London papers. And he means to take very high
ground on Reform."
"Let Brooke reform his rent-roll. He's a cursed old screw,
and the buildings all over his estate are going to rack.
I sup pose this young fellow is some loose fish from London."
"His name is Ladislaw. He is said to be of foreign extraction."
"I know the sort," said Mr. Hawley; "some emissary. He'll begin with
flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.
That's the style."
"You must concede that there are abuses, Hawley," said Mr. Hackbutt,
foreseeing some political disagreement with his family lawyer.
"I myself should never favor immoderate views--in fact I take my
stand with Huskisson--but I cannot blind myself to the consideration
that the non-representation of large towns--"
"Large towns be damned!" said Mr. Hawley, impatient of exposition.
"I know a little too much about Middlemarch elections. Let 'em
quash every pocket borough to-morrow, and bring in every mushroom
town in the kingdom--they'll only increase the expense of getting
into Parliament. I go upon facts."
Mr. Hawley's disgust at the notion of the "Pioneer" being edited
by an emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political--
as if a tortoise of desultory pursuits should protrude its small
head ambitiously and become rampant--was hardly equal to the
annoyance felt by some members of Mr. Brooke's own family.
The result had oozed forth gradually, like the discovery that your
neighbor has set up an unpleasant kind of manufacture which will be
permanently under your nostrils without legal remedy. The "Pioneer"
had been secretly bought even before Will Ladislaw's arrival,
the expected opportunity having offered itself in the readiness
of the proprietor to part with a valuable property which did not pay;
and in the interval since Mr. Brooke had written his invitation,
those germinal ideas of making his mind tell upon the world at
large which had been present in him from his younger years, but had
hitherto lain in some obstruction, had been sprouting under cover.
The development was much furthered by a delight in his guest which
proved greater even than he had anticipated. For it seemed that Will
was not only at home in all those artistic and literary subjects
which Mr. Brooke had gone into at one time, but that he was strikingly
ready at seizing the points of the political situation, and dealing
with them in that large spirit which, aided by adequate memory,
lends itself to quotation and general effectiveness of treatment.
"He seems to me a kind of Shelley, you know," Mr. Brooke took
an opportunity of saying, for the gratification of Mr. Casaubon.
"I don't mean as to anything objectionable--laxities or atheism,
or anything of that kind, you know--Ladislaw's sentiments in every
way I am sure are good--indeed, we were talking a great deal
together last night. But he has the same sort of enthusiasm
for liberty, freedom, emancipation--a fine thing under guidance--
under guidance, you know. I think I shall be able to put him on
the right tack; and I am the more pleased because he is a relation
of yours, Casaubon."
If the right tack implied anything more precise than the rest
of Mr. Brooke's speech, Mr. Casaubon silently hoped that it
referred to some occupation at a great distance from Lowick.
He had disliked Will while he helped him, but he had begun to dislike
him still more now that Will had declined his help. That is the
way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition:
if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping
cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely
to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him
passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of
rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him--
rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing
of cheeks for him, being a superiority which he must recognize,
gives our bitterness a milder infusion. Now Mr. Casaubon had been
deprived of that superiority (as anything more than a remembrance)
in a sudden, capricious manner. His antipathy to Will did
not spring from the common jealousy of a winter-worn husband:
it was something deeper, bred by his lifelong claims and discontents;
but Dorothea, now that she was present--Dorothea, as a young
wife who herself had shown an offensive capability of criticism,
necessarily gave concentration to the uneasiness which had before
been vague.
Will Ladislaw on his side felt that his dislike was flourishing
at the expense of his gratitude, and spent much inward discourse in
justifying the dislike. Casaubon hated him--he knew that very well;
on his first entrance he could discern a bitterness in the mouth
and a venom in the glance which would almost justify declaring war
in spite of past benefits. He was much obliged to Casaubon in the past,
but really the act of marrying this wife was a set-off against
the obligation It was a question whether gratitude which refers
to what is done for one's self ought not to give way to indignation
at what is done against another. And Casaubon had done a wrong
to Dorothea in marrying her. A man was bound to know himself better
than that, and if he chose to grow gray crunching bones in a cavern,
he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship.
"It is the most horrible of virgin-sacrifices," said Will; and he
painted to himself what were Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had
been writing a choric wail. But he would never lose sight of her:
he would watch over her--if he gave up everything else in life
he would watch over her, and she should know that she had one
slave in the world, Will had--to use Sir Thomas Browne's phrase--
a "passionate prodigality" of statement both to himself and others.
The simple truth was that nothing then invited him so strongly as the
presence of Dorothea.
Invitations of the formal kind had been wanting, however, for Will
had never been asked to go to Lowick. Mr. Brooke, indeed, confident of
doing everything agreeable which Casaubon, poor fellow, was too much
absorbed to think of, had arranged to bring Ladislaw to Lowick
several times (not neglecting meanwhile to introduce him elsewhere
on every opportunity as "a young relative of Casaubon's"). And
though Will had not seen Dorothea alone, their interviews had been
enough to restore her former sense of young companionship with one
who was cleverer than herself, yet seemed ready to be swayed by her.
Poor Dorothea before her marriage had never found much room
in other minds for what she cared most to say; and she had not,
as we know, enjoyed her husband's superior instruction so much
as she had expected. If she spoke with any keenness of interest
to Mr. Casaubon, he heard her with an air of patience as if she
had given a quotation from the Delectus familiar to him from his
tender years, and sometimes mentioned curtly what ancient sects
or personages had held similar ideas, as if there were too much
of that sort in stock already; at other times he would inform
her that she was mistaken, and reassert what her remark had questioned.
But Will Ladislaw always seemed to see more in what she said than she
herself saw. Dorothea had little vanity, but she had the ardent
woman's need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.
Hence the mere chance of seeing Will occasionally was like a lunette
opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny air;
and this pleasure began to nullify her original alarm at what her husband
might think about the introduction of Will as her uncle's guest.
On this subject Mr. Casaubon had remained dumb.
But Will wanted to talk with Dorothea alone, and was impatient
of slow circumstance. However slight the terrestrial intercourse
between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes
the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have
fewer sonnets and more conversation. Necessity excused stratagem,
but stratagem was limited by the dread of offending Dorothea.
He found out at last that he wanted to take a particular sketch
at Lowick; and one morning when Mr. Brooke had to drive along
the Lowick road on his way to the county town, Will asked to be set
down with his sketch-book and camp-stool at Lowick, and without
announcing himself at the Manor settled himself to sketch in a
position where he must see Dorothea if she came out to walk--
and he knew that she usually walked an hour in the morning.
But the stratagem was defeated by the weather. Clouds gathered with
treacherous quickness, the rain came down, and Will was obliged to take
shelter in the house. He intended, on the strength of relationship,
to go into the drawing-room and wait there without being announced;
and seeing his old acquaintance the butler in the hall, he said,
"Don't mention that I am here, Pratt; I will wait till luncheon;
I know Mr. Casaubon does not like to be disturbed when he is in
the library."
"Master is out, sir; there's only Mrs. Casaubon in the library.
I'd better tell her you're here, sir," said Pratt, a red-cheeked
man given to lively converse with Tantripp, and often agreeing with
her that it must be dull for Madam.
"Oh, very well; this confounded rain has hindered me from sketching,"
said Will, feeling so happy that he affected indifference with
delightful ease.
In another minute he was in the library, and Dorothea was meeting
him with her sweet unconstrained smile.
"Mr. Casaubon has gone to the Archdeacon's," she said, at once.
"I don't know whether he will be at home again long before dinner.
He was uncertain how long he should be. Did you want to say anything
particular to him?"
"No; I came to sketch, but the rain drove me in. Else I would
not have disturbed you yet. I supposed that Mr. Casaubon was here,
and I know he dislikes interruption at this hour."
"I am indebted to the rain, then. I am so glad to see you."
Dorothea uttered these common words with the simple sincerity of an
unhappy child, visited at school.
"I really came for the chance of seeing you alone," said Will,
mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was. He could
not stay to ask himself, why not? "I wanted to talk about things,
as we did in Rome. It always makes a difference when other people
are present."
"Yes," said Dorothea, in her clear full tone of assent. "Sit down."
She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her,
looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material,
without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring,
as if she were under a vow to be different from all other women;
and Will sat down opposite her at two yards' distance, the light
falling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile,
with its defiant curves of lip and chin. Each looked at the other
as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there.
Dorothea for the moment forgot her husband's mysterious irritation
against Will: it seemed fresh water at her thirsty lips to speak
without fear to the one person whom she had found receptive; for in
looking backward through sadness she exaggerated a past solace.
"I have often thought that I should like to talk to you again,"
she said, immediately. "It seems strange to me how many things I
said to you."
"I remember them all," said Will, with the unspeakable content
in his soul of feeling that he was in the presence of a creature
worthy to be perfectly loved. I think his own feelings at that
moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments,
when love is satisfied in the completeness the beloved object.
"I have tried to learn a great deal since we were in Rome,"
said Dorothea. "I can read Latin a little, and I am beginning to
understand just a little Greek. I can help Mr. Casaubon better now.
I can find out references for him and save his eyes in many ways.
But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were
worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them
because they are too tired."
"If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake
them before he is decrepit," said Will, with irrepressible quickness.
But through certain sensibilities Dorothea was as quick as he,
and seeing her face change, he added, immediately, "But it is quite
true that the best minds have been sometimes overstrained in working
out their ideas."
"You correct me," said Dorothea. "I expressed myself ill.
I should have said that those who have great thoughts get too much
worn in working them out. I used to feel about that, even when I
was a little girl; and it always seemed to me that the use I should
like to make of my life would be to help some one who did great works,
so that his burthen might be lighter."
Dorothea was led on to this bit of autobiography without any
sense of making a revelation. But she had never before said
anything to Will which threw so strong a light on her marriage.
He did not shrug his shoulders; and for want of that muscular
outlet he thought the more irritably of beautiful lips kissing
holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined.
Also he had to take care that his speech should not betray that thought.
"But you may easily carry the help too far," he said, "and get
over-wrought yourself. Are you not too much shut up? You already
look paler. It would be better for Mr. Casaubon to have a secretary;
he could easily get a man who would do half his work for him.
It would save him more effectually, and you need only help him in
lighter ways."
"How can you think of that?" said Dorothea, in a tone of
earnest remonstrance. "I should have no happiness if I did not
help him in his work. What could I do? There is no good to be
done in Lowick. The only thing I desire is to help him more.
And he objects to a secretary: please not to mention that again."
"Certainly not, now I know your feeling. But I have heard both
Mr. Brooke and Sir James Chettam express the same wish."
"Yes?" said Dorothea, "but they don't understand--they want me
to be a great deal on horseback, and have the garden altered and
new conservatories, to fill up my days. I thought you could understand
that one's mind has other wants," she added, rather impatiently--
"besides, Mr. Casaubon cannot bear to hear of a secretary."
"My mistake is excusable," said Will. "In old days I used to hear
Mr. Casaubon speak as if he looked forward to having a secretary.
Indeed he held out the prospect of that office to me. But I turned
out to be--not good enough for it."
Dorothea was trying to extract out of this an excuse for her
husband's evident repulsion, as she said, with a playful smile,
"You were not a steady worker enough."
"No," said Will, shaking his head backward somewhat after the manner
of a-spirited horse. And then, the old irritable demon prompting him
to give another good pinch at the moth-wings of poor Mr. Casaubon's
glory, he went on, "And I have seen since that Mr. Casaubon does
not like any one to overlook his work. and know thoroughly what he
is doing. He is too doubtful--too uncertain of himself. I may
not be good for much, but he dislikes me because I disagree with him."
Will was not without his intentions to be always generous,
but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled
before general intentions can be brought to bear. And it was too
intolerable that Casaubon's dislike of him should not be fairly
accounted for to Dorothea. Yet when he had spoken he was rather
uneasy as to the effect on her.
But Dorothea was strangely quiet--not immediately indignant,
as she had been on a like occasion in Rome. And the cause lay deep.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts,
but adjusting herself to their clearest perception; and now when she
looked steadily at her husband's failure, still more at his possible
consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one
tract where duty became tenderness. Will's want of reticence
might have been met with more severity, if he had not already been
recommended to her mercy by her husband's dislike, which must seem
hard to her till she saw better reason for it.
She did not answer at once, but after looking down ruminatingly
she said, with some earnestness, "Mr. Casaubon must have overcome
his dislike of you so far as his actions were concerned:
and that is admirable."
"Yes; he has shown a sense of justice in family matters.
It was an abominable thing that my grandmother should have been
disinherited because she made what they called a mesalliance,
though there was nothing to be said against her husband except
that he was a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread."
"I wish I knew all about her!" said Dorothea. "I wonder how she
bore the change from wealth to poverty: I wonder whether she
was happy with her husband! Do you know much about them?"
"No; only that my grandfather was a patriot--a bright fellow--
could speak many languages--musical--got his bread by teaching
all sorts of things. They both died rather early. And I never
knew much of my father, beyond what my mother told me; but he
inherited the musical talents. I remember his slow walk and his
long thin hands; and one day remains with me when he was lying ill,
and I was very hungry, and had only a little bit of bread."
"Ah, what a different life from mine!" said Dorothea,
with keen interest, clasping her hands on her lap. "I have
always had too much of everything. But tell me how it was--
Mr. Casaubon could not have known about you then."
"No; but my father had made himself known to Mr. Casaubon,
and that was my last hungry day. My father died soon after,
and my mother and I were well taken care of. Mr. Casaubon always
expressly recognized it as his duty to take care of us because of
the harsh injustice which had been shown to his mother's sister.
But now I am telling you what is not new to you."
In his inmost soul Will was conscious of wishing to tell Dorothea
what was rather new even in his own construction of things--
namely, that Mr. Casaubon had never done more than pay a debt
towards him. Will was much too good a fellow to be easy under
the sense of being ungrateful. And when gratitude has become
a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.
"No," answered Dorothea; "Mr. Casaubon has always avoided dwelling
on his own honorable actions." She did not feel that her husband's
conduct was depreciated; but this notion of what justice had required
in his relations with Will Ladislaw took strong hold on her mind.
After a moment's pause, she added, "He had never told me that he
supported your mother. Is she still living?"
"No; she died by an accident--a fall--four years ago. It is curious
that my mother, too, ran away from her family, but not for the sake
of her husband. She never would tell me anything about her family,
except that she forsook them to get her own living--went on the stage,
in fact. She was a dark-eyed creature, with crisp ringlets,
and never seemed to be getting old. You see I come of rebellious
blood on both sides," Will ended, smiling brightly at Dorothea,
while she was still looking with serious intentness before her,
like a child seeing a drama for the first time.
But her face, too, broke into a smile as she said, "That is
your apology, I suppose, for having yourself been rather rebellious;
I mean, to Mr. Casaubon's wishes. You must remember that you have
not done what he thought best for you. And if he dislikes you--
you were speaking of dislike a little while ago--but I should
rather say, if he has shown any painful feelings towards you,
you must consider how sensitive he has become from the wearing effect
of study. Perhaps," she continued, getting into a pleading tone,
"my uncle has not told you how serious Mr. Casaubon's illness was.
It would be very petty of us who are well and can bear things,
to think much of small offences from those who carry a weight
of trial."
"You teach me better," said Will. "I will never grumble on that
subject again." There was a gentleness in his tone which came from
the unutterable contentment of perceiving--what Dorothea was hardly
conscious of--that she was travelling into the remoteness of pure
pity and loyalty towards her husband. Will was ready to adore
her pity and loyalty, if she would associate himself with her in
manifesting them. "I have really sometimes been a perverse fellow,"
he went on, "but I will never again, if I can help it, do or say
what you would disapprove."
"That is very good of you," said Dorothea, with another open smile.
"I shall have a little kingdom then, where I shall give laws.
But you will soon go away, out of my rule, I imagine. You will soon
be tired of staying at the Grange."
"That is a point I wanted to mention to you--one of the reasons why I
wished to speak to you alone. Mr. Brooke proposes that I should stay
in this neighborhood. He has bought one of the Middlemarch newspapers,
and he wishes me to conduct that, and also to help him in other ways."
"Would not that be a sacrifice of higher prospects for you?"
said Dorothea.
"Perhaps; but I have always been blamed for thinking of prospects,
and not settling to anything. And here is something offered to me.
If you would not like me to accept it, I will give it up.
Otherwise I would rather stay in this part of the country than go away.
I belong to nobody anywhere else."
"I should like you to stay very much," said Dorothea, at once,
as simply and readily as she had spoken at Rome. There was not
the shadow of a reason in her mind at the moment why she should
not say so.
"Then I WILL stay," said Ladislaw, shaking his head backward,
rising and going towards the window, as if to see whether the rain
had ceased.
But the next moment, Dorothea, according to a habit which was
getting continually stronger, began to reflect that her husband felt
differently from herself, and she colored deeply under the double
embarrassment of having expressed what might be in opposition to her
husband's feeling, and of having to suggest this opposition to Will.
If is face was not turned towards her, and this made it easier to say--
"But my opinion is of little consequence on such a subject.
I think you should be guided by Mr. Casaubon. I spoke without
thinking of anything else than my own feeling, which has
nothing to do with the real question. But it now occurs to me--
perhaps Mr. Casaubon might see that the proposal was not wise.
Can you not wait now and mention it to him?"
"I can't wait to-day," said Will, inwardly seared by the possibility
that Mr. Casaubon would enter. "The rain is quite over now. I told
Mr. Brooke not to call for me: I would rather walk the five miles.
I shall strike across Halsell Common, and see the gleams on the
wet grass. I like that."
He approached her to shake hands quite hurriedly, longing but not
daring to say, "Don't mention the subject to Mr. Casaubon."
No, he dared not, could not say it. To ask her to be less simple
and direct would be like breathing on the crystal that you want to
see the light through. And there was always the other great dread--
of himself becoming dimmed and forever ray-shorn in her eyes.
"I wish you could have stayed," said Dorothea, with a touch
of mournfulness, as she rose and put out her hand. She also had
her thought which she did not like to express:--Will certainly
ought to lose no time in consulting Mr. Casaubon's wishes,
but for her to urge this might seem an undue dictation.
So they only said "Good-by," and Will quitted the house,
striking across the fields so as not to run any risk of encountering
Mr. Casaubon's carriage, which, however, did not appear at the gate
until four o'clock. That was an unpropitious hour for coming home:
it was too early to gain the moral support under ennui of dressing
his person for dinner, and too late to undress his mind of the day's
frivolous ceremony and affairs, so as to be prepared for a good
plunge into the serious business of study. On such occasions he
usually threw into an easy-chair in the library, and allowed Dorothea
to read the London papers to him, closing his eyes the while.
To-day, however, he declined that relief, observing that he had
already had too many public details urged upon him; but he spoke
more cheerfully than usual, when Dorothea asked about his fatigue,
and added with that air of formal effort which never forsook
him even when he spoke without his waistcoat and cravat--
"I have had the gratification of meeting my former acquaintance,
Dr. Spanning, to-day, and of being praised by one who is himself
a worthy recipient of praise. He spoke very handsomely of my late
tractate on the Egyptian Mysteries,--using, in fact, terms which it
would not become me to repeat." In uttering the last clause,
Mr. Casaubon leaned over the elbow of his chair, and swayed his
head up and down, apparently as a muscular outlet instead of that
recapitulation which would not have been becoming.
"I am very glad you have had that pleasure," said Dorothea,
delighted to see her husband less weary than usual at this hour.
"Before you came I had been regretting that you happened to be
out to-day."
"Why so, my dear?" said Mr. Casaubon, throwing himself backward again.
"Because Mr. Ladislaw has been here; and he has mentioned a proposal
of my uncle's which I should like to know your opinion of."
Her husband she felt was really concerned in this question.
Even with her ignorance of the world she had a vague impression
that the position offered to Will was out of keeping with his family
connections, and certainly Mr. Casaubon had a claim to be consulted.
He did not speak, but merely bowed.
"Dear uncle, you know, has many projects. It appears that he
has bought one of the Middlemarch newspapers, and he has asked
Mr. Ladislaw to stay in this neighborhood and conduct the paper
for him, besides helping him in other ways."
Dorothea looked at her husband while she spoke, but he had at
first blinked and finally closed his eyes, as if to save them;
while his lips became more tense. "What is your opinion?" she added,
rather timidly, after a slight pause.
"Did Mr. Ladislaw come on purpose to ask my opinion?" said Mr. Casaubon,
opening his eyes narrowly with a knife-edged look at Dorothea.
She was really uncomfortable on the point he inquired about, but she
only became a little more serious, and her eyes did not swerve.
"No," she answered immediately, "he did not say that he came to ask
your opinion. But when he mentioned the proposal, he of course
expected me to tell you of it."
Mr. Casaubon was silent.
"I feared that you might feel some objection. But certainly
a young man with so much talent might be very useful to my uncle--
might help him to do good in a better way. And Mr. Ladislaw wishes
to have some fixed occupation. He has been blamed, he says,
for not seeking something of that kind, and he would like to stay
in this neighborhood because no one cares for him elsewhere."
Dorothea felt that this was a consideration to soften her husband.
However, he did not speak, and she presently recurred to Dr. Spanning
and the Archdeacon's breakfast. But there was no longer sunshine
on these subjects.
The next morning, without Dorothea's knowledge, Mr. Casaubon
despatched the following letter, beginning "Dear Mr. Ladislaw"
(he had always before addressed him as "Will"):--
"Mrs. Casaubon informs me that a proposal has been made to you,
and (according to an inference by no means stretched) has on your
part been in some degree entertained, which involves your residence
in this neighborhood in a capacity which I am justified in saying
touches my own position in such a way as renders it not only natural
and warrantable IN me when that effect is viewed under the
influence of legitimate feeling, but incumbent on me when the same
effect is considered in the light of my responsibilities, to state
at once that your acceptance of the proposal above indicated would
be highly offensive to me. That I have some claim to the exercise
of a veto here, would not, I believe, be denied by any reasonable
person cognizant of the relations between us: relations which,
though thrown into the past by your recent procedure, are not
thereby annulled in their character of determining antecedents.
I will not here make reflections on any person's judgment.
It is enough for me to point out to yourself that there are certain
social fitnesses and proprieties which should hinder a somewhat
near relative of mine from becoming any wise conspicuous in this
vicinity in a status not only much beneath my own, but associated
at best with the sciolism of literary or political adventurers.
At any rate, the contrary issue must exclude you from further
reception at my house.
Yours faithfully,
"EDWARD CASAUBON."
Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was innocently at work towards the further
embitterment of her husband; dwelling, with a sympathy that grew to
agitation, on what Will had told her about his parents and grandparents.
Any private hours in her day were usually spent in her blue-green
boudoir, and she had come to be very fond of its pallid quaintness.
Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the summer had
gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of elms,
the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life
which fill the air as with a cloud of good or had angels, the invisible
yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls.
She had been so used to struggle for and to find resolve in looking
along the avenue towards the arch of western light that the vision
itself had gained a communicating power. Even the pale stag seemed
to have reminding glances and to mean mutely, "Yes, we know."
And the group of delicately touched miniatures had made an audience
as of beings no longer disturbed about their own earthly lot,
but still humanly interested. Especially the mysterious "Aunt Julia"
about whom Dorothea had never found it easy to question her husband.
And now, since her conversation with Will, many fresh images
had gathered round that Aunt Julia who was Will's grandmother;
the presence of that delicate miniature, so like a living face
that she knew, helping to concentrate her feelings. What a wrong,
to cut off the girl from the family protection and inheritance only
because she had chosen a man who was poor! Dorothea, early troubling
her elders with questions about the facts around her, had wrought
herself into some independent clearness as to the historical,
political reasons why eldest sons had superior rights, and why land
should be entailed: those reasons, impressing her with a certain awe,
might be weightier than she knew, but here was a question of ties
which left them uninfringed. Here was a daughter whose child--
even according to the ordinary aping of aristocratic institutions
by people who are no more aristocratic than retired grocers,
and who have no more land to "keep together" than a lawn and a paddock--
would have a prior claim. Was inheritance a question of liking
or of responsibility? All the energy of Dorothea's nature went on
the side of responsibility--the fulfilment of claims founded on our
own deeds, such as marriage and parentage.
It was true, she said to herself, that Mr. Casaubon had a debt
to the Ladislaws--that he had to pay back what the Ladislaws had
been wronged of. And now she began to think of her husband's will,
which had been made at the time of their marriage, leaving the bulk
of his property to her, with proviso in case of her having children.
That ought to be altered; and no time ought to be lost. This very
question which had just arisen about Will Ladislaw's occupation,
was the occasion for placing things on a new, right footing.
Her husband, she felt sure, according to all his previous conduct,
would be ready to take the just view, if she proposed it--she, in whose
interest an unfair concentration of the property had been urged.
His sense of right had surmounted and would continue to surmount
anything that might be called antipathy. She suspected that her
uncle's scheme was disapproved by Mr. Casaubon, and this made it seem
all the more opportune that a fresh understanding should be begun,
so that instead of Will's starting penniless and accepting the first
function that offered itself, he should find himself in possession
of a rightful income which should be paid by her husband during
his life, and, by an immediate alteration of the will, should
be secured at his death. The vision of all this as what ought
to be done seemed to Dorothea like a sudden letting in of daylight,
waking her from her previous stupidity and incurious self-absorbed
ignorance about her husband's relation to others. Will Ladislaw
had refused Mr. Casaubon's future aid on a ground that no longer
appeared right to her; and Mr. Casaubon had never himself seen
fully what was the claim upon him. "But he will!" said Dorothea.
"The great strength of his character lies here. And what are we
doing with our money? We make no use of half of our income. My own
money buys me nothing but an uneasy conscience."
There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of
property intended for herself, and always regarded by her as excessive.
She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others--
likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her;
yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose
carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would
have been perilous with fear.
The thoughts which had gathered vividness in the solitude of her
boudoir occupied her incessantly through the day on which Mr. Casaubon
had sent his letter to Will. Everything seemed hindrance to her till
she could find an opportunity of opening her heart to her husband.
To his preoccupied mind all subjects were to be approached gently,
and she had never since his illness lost from her consciousness
the dread of agitating him. Bat when young ardor is set brooding
over the conception of a prompt deed, the deed itself seems
to start forth with independent life, mastering ideal obstacles.
The day passed in a sombre fashion, not unusual, though Mr. Casaubon
was perhaps unusually silent; but there were hours of the night which
might be counted on as opportunities of conversation; for Dorothea,
when aware of her husband's sleeplessness, had established a habit
of rising, lighting a candle, and reading him to sleep again. And this
night she was from the beginning sleepless, excited by resolves.
He slept as usual for a few hours, but she had risen softly and had
sat in the darkness for nearly an hour before he said--
"Dorothea, since you are up, will you light a candle?"
"Do you feel ill, dear?" was her first question, as she obeyed him.
"No, not at all; but I shall be obliged, since you are up, if you
will read me a few pages of Lowth."
"May I talk to you a little instead?" said Dorothea.
"Certainly."
"I have been thinking about money all day--that I have always
had too much, and especially the prospect of too much."
"These, my dear Dorothea, are providential arrangements."
"But if one has too much in consequence of others being wronged,
it seems to me that the divine voice which tells us to set that wrong
right must be obeyed."
"What, my love, is the bearing of your remark?"
"That you have been too liberal in arrangements for me--I mean,
with regard to property; and that makes me unhappy."
"How so? I have none but comparatively distant connections."
"I have been led to think about your aunt Julia, and how she was left
in poverty only because she married a poor man, an act which was
not disgraceful, since he was not unworthy. It was on that ground,
I know, that you educated Mr. Ladislaw and provided for his mother."
Dorothea waited a few moments for some answer that would help her onward.
None came, and her next words seemed the more forcible to her,
falling clear upon the dark silence.
"But surely we should regard his claim as a much greater one, even to
the half of that property which I know that you have destined for me.
And I think he ought at once to be provided for on that understanding.
It is not right that he should be in the dependence of poverty
while we are rich. And if there is any objection to the proposal
he mentioned, the giving him his true place and his true share
would set aside any motive for his accepting it."
"Mr. Ladislaw has probably been speaking to you on this subject?"
said Mr. Casaubon, with a certain biting quickness not habitual
to him.
"Indeed, no!" said Dorothea, earnestly. "How can you imagine it,
since he has so lately declined everything from you? I fear you
think too hardly of him, dear. He only told me a little about his
parents and grandparents, and almost all in answer to my questions.
You are so good, so just--you have done everything you thought
to be right. But it seems to me clear that more than that is right;
and I must speak about it, since I am the person who would get what is
called benefit by that `more' not being done."
There was a perceptible pause before Mr. Casaubon replied,
not quickly as before, but with a still more biting emphasis.
"Dorothea, my love, this is not the first occasion, but it were well
that it should be the last, on which you have assumed a judgment
on subjects beyond your scope. Into the question how far conduct,
especially in the matter of alliances, constitutes a forfeiture
of family claims, I do not now enter. Suffice it, that you
are not here qualified to discriminate. What I now wish you to
understand is, that I accept no revision, still less dictation within
that range of affairs which I have deliberated upon as distinctly
and properly mine. It is not for you to interfere between me
and Mr. Ladislaw, and still less to encourage communications
from him to you which constitute a criticism on my procedure."
Poor Dorothea, shrouded in the darkness, was in a tumult of
conflicting emotions. Alarm at the possible effect on himself of her
husband's strongly manifested anger, would have checked any expression
of her own resentment, even if she had been quite free from doubt
and compunction under the consciousness that there might be some
justice in his last insinuation. Hearing him breathe quickly after
he had spoken, she sat listening, frightened, wretched--with a dumb
inward cry for help to bear this nightmare of a life in which every
energy was arrested by dread. But nothing else happened, except
that they both remained a long while sleepless, without speaking again.
The next day, Mr. Casaubon received the following answer from
Will Ladislaw:--
"DEAR MR. CASAUBON,--I have given all due consideration to your letter
of yesterday, but I am unable to take precisely your view of our
mutual position. With the fullest acknowledgment of your generous
conduct to me in the past, I must still maintain that an obligation
of this kind cannot fairly fetter me as you appear to expect that
it should. Granted that a benefactor's wishes may constitute a claim;
there must always be a reservation as to the quality of those wishes.
They may possibly clash with more imperative considerations.
Or a benefactor's veto might impose such a negation on a man's life
that the consequent blank might be more cruel than the benefaction
was generous. I am merely using strong illustrations. In the present
case I am unable to take your view of the bearing which my acceptance
of occupation--not enriching certainly, but not dishonorable--
will have on your own position which seems to me too substantial
to be affected in that shadowy manner. And though I do not believe
that any change in our relations will occur (certainly none has
yet occurred) which can nullify the obligations imposed on me
by the past, pardon me for not seeing that those obligations should
restrain me from using the ordinary freedom of living where I choose,
and maintaining myself by any lawful occupation I may choose.
Regretting that there exists this difference between us as to a relation
in which the conferring of benefits has been entirely on your side--
I remain, yours with persistent obligation,
WILL LADISLAW."
Poor Mr. Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him
a little?) that no man had juster cause for disgust and suspicion
than he. Young Ladislaw, he was sure, meant to defy and annoy him,
meant to win Dorothea's confidence and sow her mind with disrespect,
and perhaps aversion, towards her husband. Some motive beneath
the surface had been needed to account for Will's sudden change
of in rejecting Mr. Casaubon's aid and quitting his travels;
and this defiant determination to fix himself in the neighborhood
by taking up something so much at variance with his former choice
as Mr. Brooke's Middlemarch projects, revealed clearly enough that
the undeclared motive had relation to Dorothea. Not for one moment
did Mr. Casaubon suspect Dorothea of any doubleness: he had no
suspicions of her, but he had (what was little less uncomfortable)
the positive knowledge that her tendency to form opinions about
her husband's conduct was accompanied with a disposition to regard
Will Ladislaw favorably and be influenced by what he said.
His own proud reticence had prevented him from ever being undeceived
in the supposition that Dorothea had originally asked her uncle
to invite Will to his house.
And now, on receiving Will's letter, Mr. Casaubon had to consider
his duty. He would never have been easy to call his action anything
else than duty; but in this case, contending motives thrust him
back into negations.
Should he apply directly to Mr. Brooke, and demand of that troublesome
gentleman to revoke his proposal? Or should he consult Sir James Chettam,
and get him to concur in remonstrance against a step which touched
the whole family? In either case Mr. Casaubon was aware that failure
was just as probable as success. It was impossible for him to mention
Dorothea's name in the matter, and without some alarming urgency
Mr. Brooke was as likely as not, after meeting all representations
with apparent assent, to wind up by saying, "Never fear, Casaubon!
Depend upon it, young Ladislaw will do you credit. Depend upon it,
I have put my finger on the right thing." And Mr. Casaubon shrank
nervously from communicating on the subject with Sir James Chettam,
between whom and himself there had never been any cordiality,
and who would immediately think of Dorothea without any mention of her.
Poor Mr. Casaubon was distrustful of everybody's feeling towards him,
especially as a husband. To let any one suppose that he was jealous
would be to admit their (suspected) view of his disadvantages:
to let them know that he did not find marriage particularly blissful
would imply his conversion to their (probably) earlier disapproval.
It would be as bad as letting Carp, and Brasenose generally,
know how backward he was in organizing the matter for his
"Key to all Mythologies." All through his life Mr. Casaubon had been
trying not to admit even to himself the inward sores of self-doubt
and jealousy. And on the most delicate of all personal subjects,
the habit of proud suspicious reticence told doubly.
Thus Mr. Casaubon remained proudly, bitterly silent. But he
had forbidden Will to come to Lowick Manor, and he was mentally
preparing other measures of frustration.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
"C'est beaucoup que le jugement des hommes sur les actions humaines;
tot ou tard il devient efficace."--GUIZOT.
Sir James Chettam could not look with any satisfaction on Mr. Brooke's
new courses; but it was easier to object than to hinder.
Sir James accounted for his having come in alone one day to lunch
with the Cadwalladers by saying--
"I can't talk to you as I want, before Celia: it might hurt her.
Indeed, it would not be right."
"I know what you mean--the `Pioneer' at the Grange!" darted in
Mrs. Cadwallader, almost before the last word was off her friend's
tongue. "It is frightful--this taking to buying whistles and blowing
them in everybody's hearing. Lying in bed all day and playing
at dominoes, like poor Lord Plessy, would be more private and bearable."
"I see they are beginning to attack our friend Brooke in the `Trumpet,'"
said the Rector, lounging back and smiling easily, as he would
have done if he had been attacked himself. "There are tremendous
sarcasms against a landlord not a hundred miles from Middlemarch,
who receives his own rents, and makes no returns."
"I do wish Brooke would leave that off," said Sir James, with his
little frown of annoyance.
"Is he really going to be put in nomination, though?"
said Mr. Cadwallader. "I saw Farebrother yesterday--
he's Whiggish himself, hoists Brougham and Useful Knowledge;
that's the worst I know of him;--and he says that Brooke is
getting up a pretty strong party. Bulstrode, the banker, is his
foremost man. But he thinks Brooke would come off badly at a nomination."
"Exactly," said Sir James, with earnestness. "I have been inquiring
into the thing, for I've never known anything about Middlemarch
politics before--the county being my business. What Brooke trusts to,
is that they are going to turn out Oliver because he is a Peelite.
But Hawley tells me that if they send up a Whig at all it is sure to
be Bagster, one of those candidates who come from heaven knows where,
but dead against Ministers, and an experienced Parliamentary man.
Hawley's rather rough: he forgot that he was speaking to me.
He said if Brooke wanted a pelting, he could get it cheaper than
by going to the hustings."
"I warned you all of it," said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her
hands outward. "I said to Humphrey long ago, Mr. Brooke is going
to make a splash in the mud. And now he has done it."
"Well, he might have taken it into his head to marry," said the Rector.
"That would have been a graver mess than a little flirtation
with politics."
"He may do that afterwards," said Mrs. Cadwallader--"when he has
come out on the other side of the mud with an ague."
"What I care for most is his own dignity," said Sir James.
"Of course I care the more because of the family. But he's getting
on in life now, and I don't like to think of his exposing himself.
They will be raking up everything against him."
"I suppose it's no use trying any persuasion," said the Rector.
"There's such an odd mixture of obstinacy and changeableness in Brooke.
Have you tried him on the subject?"
"Well, no," said Sir James; "I feel a delicacy in appearing to dictate.
But I have been talking to this young Ladislaw that Brooke is
making a factotum of. Ladislaw seems clever enough for anything.
I thought it as well to hear what he had to say; and he is against
Brooke's standing this time. I think he'll turn him round:
I think the nomination may be staved off."
"I know," said Mrs. Cadwallader, nodding. "The independent member
hasn't got his speeches well enough by heart."
"But this Ladislaw--there again is a vexatious business,"
said Sir James. "We have had him two or three times to dine at
the Hall (you have met him, by the bye) as Brooke's guest and a
relation of Casaubon's, thinking he was only on a flying visit.
And now I find he's in everybody's mouth in Middlemarch as the editor
of the `Pioneer.' There are stories going about him as a quill-driving
alien, a foreign emissary, and what not."
"Casaubon won't like that," said the Rector.
"There IS some foreign blood in Ladislaw," returned Sir James.
"I hope he won't go into extreme opinions and carry Brooke on."
"Oh, he's a dangerous young sprig, that Mr. Ladislaw,"
said Mrs. Cadwallader, "with his opera songs and his ready tongue.
A sort of Byronic hero--an amorous conspirator, it strikes me.
And Thomas Aquinas is not fond of him. I could see that, the day
the picture was brought."
"I don't like to begin on the subject with Casaubon," said Sir James.
"He has more right to interfere than I. But it's a disagreeable
affair all round. What a character for anybody with decent
connections to show himself in!--one of those newspaper fellows!
You have only to look at Keck, who manages the `Trumpet.'
I saw him the other day with Hawley. His writing is sound enough,
I believe, but he's such a low fellow, that I wished he had been on
the wrong side."
"What can you expect with these peddling Middlemarch papers?"
said the Rector. "I don't suppose you could get a high style of man
anywhere to be writing up interests he doesn't really care about,
and for pay that hardly keeps him in at elbows."
"Exactly: that makes it so annoying that Brooke should have put
a man who has a sort of connection with the family in a position
of that kind. For my part, I think Ladislaw is rather a fool
for accepting."
"It is Aquinas's fault," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Why didn't he use
his interest to get Ladislaw made an attache or sent to India?
That is how families get rid of troublesome sprigs."
"There is no knowing to what lengths the mischief may go,"
said Sir James, anxiously. "But if Casaubon says nothing, what can
I do?"
"Oh my dear Sir James," said the Rector, "don't let us make too
much of all this. It is likely enough to end in mere smoke.
After a month or two Brooke and this Master Ladislaw will get
tired of each other; Ladislaw will take wing; Brooke will sell
the `Pioneer,' and everything will settle down again as usual."
"There is one good chance--that he will not like to feel his money
oozing away," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "If I knew the items of election
expenses I could scare him. It's no use plying him with wide words
like Expenditure: I wouldn't talk of phlebotomy, I would empty
a pot of leeches upon him. What we good stingy people don't like,
is having our sixpences sucked away from us."
"And he will not like having things raked up against him,"
said Sir James. "There is the management of his estate. they have
begun upon that already. And it really is painful for me to see.
It is a nuisance under one's very nose. I do think one is bound
to do the best for one's land and tenants, especially in these
hard times."
"Perhaps the `Trumpet' may rouse him to make a change, and some good
may come of it all," said the Rector. "I know I should be glad.
I should hear less grumbling when my tithe is paid. I don't know
what I should do if there were not a modus in Tipton."
"I want him to have a proper man to look after things--I want him
to take on Garth again," said Sir James. "He got rid of Garth
twelve years ago, and everything has been going wrong since.
I think of getting Garth to manage for me--he has made such a capital
plan for my buildings; and Lovegood is hardly up to the mark.
But Garth would not undertake the Tipton estate again unless Brooke
left it entirely to him."
"In the right of it too," said the Rector. "Garth is an
independent fellow: an original, simple-minded fellow. One day,
when he was doing some valuation for me, he told me point-blank
that clergymen seldom understood anything about business, and did
mischief when they meddled; but he said it as quietly and respectfully
as if he had been talking to me about sailors. He would make
a different parish of Tipton, if Brooke would let him manage.
I wish, by the help of the `Trumpet,' you could bring that round."
"If Dorothea had kept near her uncle, there would have been
some chance," said Sir James. "She might have got some power
over him in time, and she was always uneasy about the estate.
She had wonderfully good notions about such things. But now
Casaubon takes her up entirely. Celia complains a good deal.
We can hardly get her to dine with us, since he had that fit."
Sir James ended with a look of pitying disgust, and Mrs. Cadwallader
shrugged her shoulders as much as to say that SHE was not likely
to see anything new in that direction.
"Poor Casaubon!" the Rector said. "That was a nasty attack.
I thought he looked shattered the other day at the Archdeacon's."
"In point of fact," resumed Sir James, not choosing to dwell on
"fits," "Brooke doesn't mean badly by his tenants or any one else,
but he has got that way of paring and clipping at expenses."
"Come, that's a blessing," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "That helps him
to find himself in a morning. He may not know his own opinions,
but he does know his own pocket."
"I don't believe a man is in pocket by stinginess on his land,"
said Sir James.
"Oh, stinginess may be abused like other virtues: it will not do
to keep one's own pigs lean," said Mrs. Cadwallader, who had risen
to look out of the window. "But talk of an independent politician
and he will appear."
"What! Brooke?" said her husband.
"Yes. Now, you ply him with the `Trumpet,' Humphrey; and I will
put the leeches on him. What will you do, Sir James?"
"The fact is, I don't like to begin about it with Brooke, in our
mutual position; the whole thing is so unpleasant. I do wish people
would behave like gentlemen," said the good baronet, feeling that
this was a simple and comprehensive programme for social well-being.
"Here you all are, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, shuffling round and
shaking hands. "I was going up to the Hall by-and-by, Chettam.
But it's pleasant to find everybody, you know. Well, what do
you think of things?--going on a little fast! It was true enough,
what Lafitte said--`Since yesterday, a century has passed away:'--
they're in the next century, you know, on the other side of the water.
Going on faster than we are."
"Why, yes," said the Rector, taking up the newspaper. "Here is
the `Trumpet' accusing you of lagging behind--did you see?"
"Eh? no," said Mr. Brooke, dropping his gloves into his hat
and hastily adjusting his eye-glass. But Mr. Cadwallader kept
the paper in his hand, saying, with a smile in his eyes--
"Look here! all this is about a landlord not a hundred
miles from Middlemarch, who receives his own rents.
They say he is the most retrogressive man in the county.
I think you must have taught them that word in the `Pioneer.'"
"Oh, that is Keek--an illiterate fellow, you know. Retrogressive, now!
Come, that's capital. He thinks it means destructive: they want
to make me out a destructive, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with
that cheerfulness which is usually sustained by an adversary's ignorance.
"I think he knows the meaning of the word. Here is a sharp stroke
or two. If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the
most evil sense of the word--we should say, he is one who would
dub himself a reformer of our constitution, while every interest
for which he is immediately responsible is going to decay:
a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, but does
not mind five honest tenants being half-starved: a man who shrieks
at corruption, and keeps his farms at rack-rent: who roars himself
red at rotten boroughs, and does not mind if every field on his farms
has a rotten gate: a man very open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester,
no doubt; he would give any number of representatives who will pay
for their seats out of their own pockets: what he objects to giving,
is a little return on rent-days to help a tenant to buy stock,
or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather out at a tenant's barn-door
or make his house look a little less like an Irish cottier's. But
we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose
charity increases directly as the square of the distance. And so on.
All the rest is to show what sort of legislator a philanthropist
is likely to make," ended the Rector, throwing down the paper,
and clasping his hands at the back of his head, while he looked at
Mr. Brooke with an air of amused neutrality.
"Come, that's rather good, you know," said Mr. Brooke, taking up
the paper and trying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did,
but coloring and smiling rather nervously; "that about roaring himself
red at rotten boroughs--I never made a speech about rotten boroughs
in my life. And as to roaring myself red and that kind of thing--
these men never understand what is good satire. Satire, you know,
should be true up to a certain point. I recollect they said that in
`The Edinburgh' somewhere--it must be true up to a certain point."
"Well, that is really a hit about the gates," said Sir James,
anxious to tread carefully. "Dagley complained to me the other day
that he hadn't got a decent gate on his farm. Garth has invented
a new pattern of gate--I wish you would try it. One ought to use
some of one's timber in that way."
"You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke,
appearing to glance over the columns of the "Trumpet."
"That's your hobby, and you don't mind the expense."
"I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing
for Parliament," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "They said the last
unsuccessful candidate at Middlemarch--Giles, wasn't his name?--
spent ten thousand pounds and failed because he did not bribe enough.
What a bitter reflection for a man!"
"Somebody was saying," said the Rector, laughingly, "that East
Retford was nothing to Middlemarch, for bribery."
"Nothing of the kind," said Mr. Brooke. "The Tories bribe,
you know: Hawley and his set bribe with treating, hot codlings,
and that sort of thing; and they bring the voters drunk to the poll.
But they are not going to have it their own way in future--
not in future, you know. Middlemarch is a little backward, I admit--
the freemen are a little backward. But we shall educate them--
we shall bring them on, you know. The best people there are on
our side."
"Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm,"
remarked Sir James. "He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm."
"And that if you got pelted," interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, "half the
rotten eggs would mean hatred of your committee-man. Good heavens!
Think what it must be to be pelted for wrong opinions. And I seem
to remember a story of a man they pretended to chair and let him
fall into a dust-heap on purpose!"
"Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one's coat,"
said the Rector. "I confess that's what I should be afraid of,
if we parsons had to stand at the hustings for preferment.
I should be afraid of their reckoning up all my fishing days.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be
pelted with."
"The fact is," said Sir James, "if a man goes into public life he
must be prepared for the consequences. He must make himself proof
against calumny."
"My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know," said Mr. Brooke.
"But how will you make yourself proof against calumny? You should
read history--look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that
kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
But what is that in Horace?--'fiat justitia, ruat . . .
something or other."
"Exactly," said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual.
"What I mean by being proof against calumny is being able to point
to the fact as a contradiction."
"And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one's self,"
said Mrs. Cadwallader.
But it was Sir James's evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke.
"Well, you know, Chettam," he said, rising, taking up his hat
and leaning on his stick, "you and I have a different system.
You are all for outlay with your farms. I don't want to make out that
my system is good under all circumstances--under all circumstances,
you know."
"There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,"
said Sir James. "Returns are very well occasionally, but I
like a fair valuation. What do you say, Cadwallader?"
"I agree with you. If I were Brooke, I would choke the `Trumpet'
at once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms,
and giving him carte blanche about gates and repairs:
that's my view of the political situation," said the Rector,
broadening himself by sticking his thumbs in his armholes,
and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.
"That's a showy sort of thing to do, you know," said Mr. Brooke.
"But I should like you to tell me of another landlord who has
distressed his tenants for arrears as little as I have. I let
the old tenants stay on. I'm uncommonly easy, let me tell you,
uncommonly easy. I have my own ideas, and I take my stand on them,
you know. A man who does that is always charged with eccentricity,
inconsistency, and that kind of thing. When I change my line of action,
I shall follow my own ideas."
After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he
had omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody
hurriedly good-by.
"I didn't want to take a liberty with Brooke," said Sir James;
"I see he is nettled. But as to what he says about old tenants,
in point of fact no new tenant would take the farms on the
present terms."
"I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,"
said the Rector. "But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we
were pulling another. You wanted to frighten him away from expense,
and we want to frighten him into it. Better let him try to be
popular and see that his character as a landlord stands in his way.
I don't think it signifies two straws about the `Pioneer,'
or Ladislaw, or Brooke's speechifying to the Middlemarchers.
But it does signify about the parishioners in Tipton being comfortable."
"Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack,"
said Mrs. Cadwallader. "You should have proved to him that he loses
money by bad management, and then we should all have pulled together.
If you put him a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences.
It was all very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas."
CHAPTER XXXIX.
"If, as I have, you also doe,
Vertue attired in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From prophane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they doe, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid."
--DR. DONNE.
Sir James Chettam's mind was not fruitful ill devices, but his growing
anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant
belief in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative,
and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition
as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to
leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making
her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of the estate.
In this way it happened that one day near four o'clock, when
Mr. Brooke and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door
opened and Mrs. Casaubon was announced.
Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and,
obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging "documents" about hanging
sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding
several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting
a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant
residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier
images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with
Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started
up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends.
Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion,
in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance,
which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his
body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had.
For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure
the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul
as well as body, and make a man's passion for one woman differ from
his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and
river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns
and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff.
The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke
change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted--
as easily as his mood. Dorothea's entrance was the freshness of morning.
"Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now," said Mr. Brooke, meeting and
kissing her. "You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose.
That's right. We must not have you getting too learned for a woman,
you know."
"There is no fear of that, uncle," said Dorothea, turning to Will
and shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form
of greeting, but went on answering her uncle. "I am very slow.
When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among
my thoughts. I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages."
She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently
preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him.
He was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her
coming had anything to do with him.
"Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans.
But it was good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt
to ran away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with.
We must keep the reins. I have never let myself be run away with;
I always pulled up. That is what I tell Ladislaw. He and I
are alike, you know: he likes to go into everything. We are
working at capital punishment. We shall do a great deal together,
Ladislaw and I."
"Yes," said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, "Sir James has
been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon
in your management of the estate--that you are thinking of having
the farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved,
so that Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!"--
she went on, clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike
impetuous manner, which had been subdued since her marriage.
"If I were at home still, I should take to riding again, that I might
go about with you and see all that! And you are going to engage
Mr. Garth, who praised my cottages, Sir James says."
"Chettam is a little hasty, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, coloring slightly;
"a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything
of the kind. I never said I should NOT do it, you know."
"He only feels confident that you will do it," said Dorothea,
in a voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister
chanting a credo, "because you mean to enter Parliament as a member
who cares for the improvement of the people, and one of the first
things to be made better is the state of the land and the laborers.
Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children
in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than
this table!--and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse,
where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to
the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here,
dear uncle--which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the
village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me,
and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a
wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't
mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls.
I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes
for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under
our own hands."
Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten
everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked:
an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since
her marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear.
For the moment, Will's admiration was accompanied with a chilling
sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he
cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her:
nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes
made sad oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case
of good Mr. Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment
in rather a stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece.
He could not immediately find any other mode of expressing himself
than that of rising, fixing his eye-glass, and fingering the papers
before him. At last he said--
"There is something in what you say, my dear, something in
what you say--but not everything--eh, Ladislaw? You and I
don't like our pictures and statues being found fault with.
Young ladies are a little ardent, you know--a little one-sided,
my dear. Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation--
emollit mores--you understand a little Latin now. But--eh? what?"
These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had
come in to say that the keeper had found one of Dagley's
boys with a leveret in his hand just killed.
"I'll come, I'll come. I shall let him off easily, you know,"
said Mr. Brooke aside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.
"I hope you feel how right this change is that I--that Sir James
wishes for," said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.
"I do, now I have heard you speak about it. I shall not forget what
you have said. But can you think of something else at this moment?
I may not have another opportunity of speaking to you about what
has occurred," said Will, rising with a movement of impatience,
and holding the back of his chair with both hands.
"Pray tell me what it is," said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising
and going to the open window, where Monk was looking in,
panting and wagging his tail. She leaned her back against the
window-frame, and laid her hand on the dog's head; for though,
as we know, she was not fond of pets that must be held in the hands
or trodden on, she was always attentive to the feelings of dogs,
and very polite if she had to decline their advances.
Will followed her only with his eyes and said, "I presume you know
that Mr. Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house."
"No, I did not," said Dorothea, after a moment's pause. She was
evidently much moved. "I am very, very sorry," she added, mournfully.
She was thinking of what Will had no knowledge of--the conversation
between her and her husband in the darkness; and she was anew smitten
with hopelessness that she could influence Mr. Casaubon's action.
But the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Will that it
was not all given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not been
visited by the idea that Mr. Casaubon's dislike and jealousy of him
turned upon herself. He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation:
of delight that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in
a pure home, without suspicion and without stint--of vexation because
he was of too little account with her, was not formidable enough,
was treated with an unhesitating benevolence which did not flatter him.
But his dread of any change in Dorothea was stronger than his discontent,
and he began to speak again in a tone of mere explanation.
"Mr. Casaubon's reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position
here which he considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin.
I have told him that I cannot give way on this point. It is a little
too hard on me to expect that my course in life is to be hampered
by prejudices which I think ridiculous. Obligation may be stretched
till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we
were too young to know its meaning. I would not have accepted
the position if I had not meant to make it useful and honorable.
I am not bound to regard family dignity in any other light."
Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether
in the wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.
"It is better for us not to speak on the subject," she said,
with a tremulousness not common in her voice, "since you and
Mr. Casaubon disagree. You intend to remain?" She was looking
out on the lawn, with melancholy meditation.
"Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now," said Will, in a tone
of almost boyish complaint.
"No," said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, "hardly ever.
But I shall hear of you. I shall know what you are doing for
my uncle."
"I shall know hardly anything about you," said Will. "No one
will tell me anything."
"Oh, my life is very simple," said Dorothea, her lips curling
with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy.
"I am always at Lowick."
"That is a dreadful imprisonment," said Will, impetuously.
"No, don't think that," said Dorothea. "I have no longings."
He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression.
"I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much
more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have
a belief of my own, and it comforts me."
"What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't
quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part
of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light
and making the struggle with darkness narrower."
"That is a beautiful mysticism--it is a--"
"Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out
her hands entreatingly. "You will say it is Persian, or something
else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot
part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I
was a little girl. I used to pray so much--now I hardly ever pray.
I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not
be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you,
that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick."
"God bless you for telling me!" said Will, ardently, and rather
wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two
fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.
"What is YOUR religion?" said Dorothea. "I mean--not what you
know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?"
"To love what is good and beautiful when I see it," said Will.
"But I am a rebel: I don't feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I
don't like."
"But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,"
said Dorothea, smiling.
"Now you are subtle," said Will.
"Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don't feel as if I
were subtle," said Dorothea, playfully. "But how long my uncle is!
I must go and look for him. I must really go on to the Hall.
Celia is expecting me."
Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said
that he would step into the carriage and go with Dorothea as far
as Dagley's, to speak about the small delinquent who had been caught
with the Ieveret. Dorothea renewed the subject of the estate
as they drove along, but Mr. Brooke, not being taken unawares,
got the talk under his own control.
"Chettam, now," he replied; "he finds fault with me, my dear;
but I should not preserve my game if it were not for Chettam,
and he can't say that that expense is for the sake of the tenants,
you know. It's a little against my feeling:--poaching, now, if you
come to look into it--I have often thought of getting up the subject.
Not long ago, Flavell, the Methodist preacher, was brought up for
knocking down a hare that came across his path when he and his wife
were walking out together. He was pretty quick, and knocked it on
the neck."
"That was very brutal, I think," said Dorothea
"Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a
Methodist preacher, you know. And Johnson said, `You may judge
what a hypoCRITE he is.' And upon my word, I thought
Flavell looked very little like `the highest style of man'--
as somebody calls the Christian--Young, the poet Young, I think--
you know Young? Well, now, Flavell in his shabby black gaiters,
pleading that he thought the Lord had sent him and his wife a good dinner,
and he had a right to knock it down, though not a mighty hunter
before the Lord, as Nimrod was--I assure you it was rather comic:
Fielding would have made something of it--or Scott, now--Scott might
have worked it up. But really, when I came to think of it,
I couldn't help liking that the fellow should have a bit of hare
to say grace over. It's all a matter of prejudice--prejudice with
the law on its side, you know--about the stick and the gaiters,
and so on. However, it doesn't do to reason about things; and law
is law. But I got Johnson to be quiet, and I hushed the matter up.
I doubt whether Chettam would not have been more severe, and yet
he comes down on me as if I were the hardest man in the county.
But here we are at Dagley's."
Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on.
It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect
that we are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass
are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank
remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it
is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments
on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them.
Dagley's homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it
did today, with his mind thus sore about the fault-finding of the
"Trumpet," echoed by Sir James.
It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of
the fine arts which makes other people's hardships picturesque,
might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman's End:
the old house had dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of
the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked
up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed
with gray worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew
in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks
peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled subdued color,
and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on interesting
superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen door.
The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors,
the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished
unloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing;
the scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving
one half of the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white
ducks seeming to wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in
low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings,--
all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high
clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused
over as a "charming bit," touching other sensibilities than those
which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest,
with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the
newspapers of that time. But these troublesome associations were
just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, and spoiled the scene
for him. Mr. Dagley himself made a figure in the landscape,
carrying a pitchfork and wearing his milking-hat--a very old beaver
flattened in front. His coat and breeches were the best he had,
and he would not have been wearing them on this weekday occasion
if he had not been to market and returned later than usual,
having given himself the rare treat of dining at the public table
of the Blue Bull. How he came to fall into this extravagance
would perhaps be matter of wonderment to himself on the morrow;
but before dinner something in the state of the country, a slight
pause in the harvest before the Far Dips were cut, the stories about
the new King and the numerous handbills on the walls, had seemed
to warrant a little recklessness. It was a maxim about Middlemarch,
and regarded as self-evident, that good meat should have good drink,
which last Dagley interpreted as plenty of table ale well followed
up by rum-and-water. These liquors have so far truth in them
that they were not false enough to make poor Dagley seem merry:
they only made his discontent less tongue-tied than usual.
He had also taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk,
a stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism,
which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change
is likely to be worse. He was flushed, and his eyes had a decidedly
quarrelsome stare as he stood still grasping his pitchfork,
while the landlord approached with his easy shuffling walk,
one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other swinging round a thin
walking-stick.
"Dagley, my good fellow," began Mr. Brooke, conscious that he
was going to be very friendly about the boy.
"Oh, ay, I'm a good feller, am I? Thank ye, sir, thank ye,"
said Dagley, with a loud snarling irony which made Fag the sheep-dog
stir from his seat and prick his ears; but seeing Monk enter
the yard after some outside loitering, Fag seated himself again
in an attitude of observation. "I'm glad to hear I'm a good feller."
Mr. Brooke reflected that it was market-day, and that his worthy
tenant had probably been dining, but saw no reason why he should
not go on, since he could take the precaution of repeating what he
had to say to Mrs. Dagley.
"Your little lad Jacob has been caught killing a leveret, Dagley:
I have told Johnson to lock him up in the empty stable an hour
or two, just to frighten him, you know. But he will be brought
home by-and-by, before night: and you'll just look after him,
will you, and give him a reprimand, you know?"
"No, I woon't: I'll be dee'd if I'll leather my boy to please
you or anybody else, not if you was twenty landlords istid o'
one, and that a bad un."
Dagley's words were loud enough to summon his wife to the
back-kitchen door--the only entrance ever used, and one always
open except in bad weather--and Mr. Brooke, saying soothingly,
"Well, well, I'll speak to your wife--I didn't mean beating, you know,"
turned to walk to the house. But Dagley, only the more inclined
to "have his say" with a gentleman who walked away from him,
followed at once, with Fag slouching at his heels and sullenly
evading some small and probably charitable advances on the part of Monk.
"How do you do, Mrs. Dagley?" said Mr. Brooke, making some haste.
"I came to tell you about your boy: I don't want you to give
him the stick, you know." He was careful to speak quite plainly
this time.
Overworked Mrs. Dagley--a thin, worn woman, from whose life
pleasure had so entirely vanished that she had not even any Sunday
clothes which could give her satisfaction in preparing for church--
had already had a misunderstanding with her husband since he
had come home, and was in low spirits, expecting the worst.
But her husband was beforehand in answering.
"No, nor he woon't hev the stick, whether you want it or no,"
pursued Dagley, throwing out his voice, as if he wanted it to hit hard.
"You've got no call to come an' talk about sticks o' these primises,
as you woon't give a stick tow'rt mending. Go to Middlemarch to ax
for YOUR charrickter."
"You'd far better hold your tongue, Dagley," said the wife,
"and not kick your own trough over. When a man as is father
of a family has been an' spent money at market and made himself
the worse for liquor, he's done enough mischief for one day.
But I should like to know what my boy's done, sir."
"Niver do you mind what he's done," said Dagley, more fiercely,
"it's my business to speak, an' not yourn. An' I wull speak, too.
I'll hev my say--supper or no. An' what I say is, as I've lived upo'
your ground from my father and grandfather afore me, an' hev dropped
our money into't, an' me an' my children might lie an' rot on
the ground for top-dressin' as we can't find the money to buy,
if the King wasn't to put a stop."
"My good fellow, you're drunk, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
confidentially but not judiciously. "Another day, another day,"
he added, turning as if to go.
But Dagley immediately fronted him, and Fag at his heels growled low,
as his master's voice grew louder and more insulting, while Monk
also drew close in silent dignified watch. The laborers on the wagon
were pausing to listen, and it seemed wiser to be quite passive
than to attempt a ridiculous flight pursued by a bawling man.
"I'm no more drunk nor you are, nor so much," said Dagley.
"I can carry my liquor, an' I know what I meean. An' I meean
as the King 'ull put a stop to 't, for them say it as knows it,
as there's to be a Rinform, and them landlords as never done
the right thing by their tenants 'ull be treated i' that way as
they'll hev to scuttle off. An' there's them i' Middlemarch knows
what the Rinform is--an' as knows who'll hev to scuttle. Says they,
`I know who YOUR landlord is.' An' says I, `I hope you're
the better for knowin' him, I arn't.' Says they, `He's a close-fisted un.'
`Ay ay,' says I. `He's a man for the Rinform,' says they.
That's what they says. An' I made out what the Rinform were--
an' it were to send you an' your likes a-scuttlin'
an' wi' pretty strong-smellin' things too. An' you may do as you
like now, for I'm none afeard on you. An' you'd better let
my boy aloan, an' look to yoursen, afore the Rinform has got upo'
your back. That's what I'n got to say," concluded Mr. Dagley,
striking his fork into the ground with a firmness which proved
inconvenient as he tried to draw it up again.
At this last action Monk began to bark loudly, and it was a moment
for Mr. Brooke to escape. He walked out of the yard as quickly
as he could, in some amazement at the novelty of his situation.
He had never been insulted on his own land before, and had been inclined
to regard himself as a general favorite (we are all apt to do so,
when we think of our own amiability more than of what other people
are likely to want of us). When he had quarrelled with Caleb Garth
twelve years before he had thought that the tenants would be pleased
at the landlord's taking everything into his own hands.
Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the
midnight darkness of Mr. Dagley; but nothing was easier in those
times than for an hereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant,
in spite somehow of having a rector in the twin parish who was a
gentleman to the backbone, a curate nearer at hand who preached more
learnedly than the rector, a landlord who had gone into everything,
especially fine art and social improvement, and all the lights
of Middlemarch only three miles off. As to the facility with
which mortals escape knowledge, try an average acquaintance in
the intellectual blaze of London, and consider what that eligible
person for a dinner-party would have been if he had learned scant
skill in "summing" from the parish-clerk of Tipton, and read
a chapter in the Bible with immense difficulty, because such names
as Isaiah or Apollos remained unmanageable after twice spelling.
Poor Dagley read a few verses sometimes on a Sunday evening,
and the world was at least not darker to him than it had been before.
Some things he knew thoroughly, namely, the slovenly habits of farming,
and the awkwardness of weather, stock and crops, at Freeman's End--
so called apparently by way of sarcasm, to imply that a man was free
to quit it if he chose, but that there was no earthly "beyond"
open to him.
CHAPTER XL.
Wise in his daily work was he:
To fruits of diligence,
And not to faiths or polity,
He plied his utmost sense.
These perfect in their little parts,
Whose work is all their prize--
Without them how could laws, or arts,
Or towered cities rise?
In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often
necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture
or group at some distance from the point where the movement we
are interested in was set up. The group I am moving towards is
at Caleb Garth's breakfast-table in the large parlor where the
maps and desk were: father, mother, and five of the children.
Mary was just now at home waiting for a situation, while Christy,
the boy next to her, was getting cheap learning and cheap fare
in Scotland, having to his father's disappointment taken to books
instead of that sacred calling "business."
The letters had come--nine costly letters, for which the postman had
been paid three and twopence, and Mr. Garth was forgetting his tea
and toast while he read his letters and laid them open one above
the other, sometimes swaying his head slowly, sometimes screwing up
his mouth in inward debate, but not forgetting to cut off a large
red seal unbroken, which Letty snatched up like an eager terrier.
The talk among the rest went on unrestrainedly, for nothing disturbed
Caleb's absorption except shaking the table when he was writing.
Two letters of the nine had been for Mary. After reading them,
she had passed them to her mother, and sat playing with her
tea-spoon absently, till with a sudden recollection she returned
to her sewing, which she had kept on her lap during breakfast.
"Oh, don't sew, Mary!" said Ben, pulling her arm down. "Make me
a peacock with this bread-crumb." He had been kneading a small mass
for the purpose.
"No, no, Mischief!" said Mary, good-humoredly, while she pricked
his hand lightly with her needle. "Try and mould it yourself:
you have seen me do it often enough. I must get this sewing done.
It is for Rosamond Vincy: she is to be married next week, and she
can't be married without this handkerchief." Mary ended merrily,
amused with the last notion.
"Why can't she, Mary?" said Letty, seriously interested in this mystery,
and pushing her head so close to her sister that Mary now turned
the threatening needle towards Letty's nose.
"Because this is one of a dozen, and without it there would
only be eleven," said Mary, with a grave air of explanation,
so that Letty sank back with a sense of knowledge.
"Have you made up your mind, my dear?" said Mrs. Garth, laying the
letters down.
"I shall go to the school at York," said Mary. "I am less unfit
to teach in a school than in a family. I like to teach classes best.
And, you see, I must teach: there is nothing else to be done."
"Teaching seems to me the most delightful work in the world,"
said Mrs. Garth, with a touch of rebuke in her tone. "I could
understand your objection to it if you had not knowledge enough,
Mary, or if you disliked children."
"I suppose we never quite understand why another dislikes
what we like, mother," said Mary, rather curtly. "I am
not fond of a schoolroom: I like the outside world better.
It is a very inconvenient fault of mine."
"It must be very stupid to be always in a girls' school," said Alfred.
"Such a set of nincompoops, like Mrs. Ballard's pupils walking two
and two."
"And they have no games worth playing at," said Jim. "They can
neither throw nor leap. I don't wonder at Mary's not liking it."
"What is that Mary doesn't like, eh?" said the father, looking over
his spectacles and pausing before he opened his next letter.
"Being among a lot of nincompoop girls," said Alfred.
"Is it the situation you had heard of, Mary?" said Caleb, gently,
looking at his daughter.
"Yes, father: the school at York. I have determined to take it.
It is quite the best. Thirty-five pounds a-year, and extra pay for
teaching the smallest strummers at the piano."
"Poor child! I wish she could stay at home with us, Susan," said Caleb,
looking plaintively at his wife.
"Mary would not be happy without doing her duty," said Mrs. Garth,
magisterially, conscious of having done her own.
"It wouldn't make me happy to do such a nasty duty as that,"
said Alfred--at which Mary and her father laughed silently,
but Mrs. Garth said, gravely--
"Do find a fitter word than nasty, my dear Alfred, for everything
that you think disagreeable. And suppose that Mary could help you
to go to Mr. Hanmer's with the money she gets?"
"That seems to me a great shame. But she's an old brick," said Alfred,
rising from his chair, and pulling Mary's head backward to kiss her.
Mary colored and laughed, but could not conceal that the tears
were coming. Caleb, looking on over his spectacles, with the
angles of his eyebrows falling, had an expression of mingled
delight and sorrow as he returned to the opening of his letter;
and even Mrs. Garth, her lips curling with a calm contentment,
allowed that inappropriate language to pass without correction,
although Ben immediately took it up, and sang, "She's an old brick,
old brick, old brick!" to a cantering measure, which he beat out
with his fist on Mary's arm.
But Mrs. Garth's eyes were now drawn towards her husband,
who was already deep in the letter he was reading. His face
had an expression of grave surprise, which alarmed her a little,
but he did not like to be questioned while he was reading, and she
remained anxiously watching till she saw him suddenly shaken by a
little joyous laugh as he turned back to the beginning of the letter,
and looking at her above his spectacles, said, in a low tone,
"What do you think, Susan?"
She went and stood behind him, putting her hand on his shoulder,
while they read the letter together. It was from Sir James Chettam,
offering to Mr. Garth the management of the family estates at Freshitt
and elsewhere, and adding that Sir James had been requested by
Mr. Brooke of Tipton to ascertain whether Mr. Garth would be disposed
at the same time to resume the agency of the Tipton property.
The Baronet added in very obliging words that he himself was
particularly desirous of seeing the Freshitt and Tipton estates under
the same management, and he hoped to be able to show that the double
agency might be held on terms agreeable to Mr. Garth, whom he would
be glad to see at the Hall at twelve o'clock on the following day.
"He writes handsomely, doesn't he, Susan?" said Caleb, turning his
eyes upward to his wife, who raised her hand from his shoulder
to his ear, while she rested her chin on his head. "Brooke didn't
like to ask me himself, I can see," he continued, laughing silently.
"Here is an honor to your father, children," said Mrs. Garth,
looking round at the five pair of eyes, all fixed on the parents.
"He is asked to take a post again by those who dismissed him long ago.
That shows that he did his work well, so that they feel the want
of him."
"Like Cincinnatus--hooray!" said Ben, riding on his chair,
with a pleasant confidence that discipline was relaxed.
"Will they come to fetch him, mother?" said Letty, thinking of
the Mayor and Corporation in their robes.
Mrs. Garth patted Letty's head and smiled, but seeing that her
husband was gathering up his letters and likely soon to be out
of reach in that sanctuary "business," she pressed his shoulder
and said emphatically--
"Now, mind you ask fair pay, Caleb."
"Oh yes," said Caleb, in a deep voice of assent, as if it would be
unreasonable to suppose anything else of him. "It'll come to between
four and five hundred, the two together." Then with a little start
of remembrance he said, "Mary, write and give up that school.
Stay and help your mother. I'm as pleased as Punch, now I've
thought of that."
No manner could have been less like that of Punch triumphant
than Caleb's, but his talents did not lie in finding phrases,
though he was very particular about his letter-writing, and regarded
his wife as a treasury of correct language.
There was almost an uproar among the children now, and Mary held
up the cambric embroidery towards her mother entreatingly, that it
might be put out of reach while the boys dragged her into a dance.
Mrs. Garth, in placid joy, began to put the cups and plates together,
while Caleb pushing his chair from the table, as if he were going
to move to the desk, still sat holding his letters in his hand
and looking on the ground meditatively, stretching out the fingers
of his left hand, according to a mute language of his own. At last
he said--
"It's a thousand pities Christy didn't take to business, Susan.
I shall want help by-and-by. And Alfred must go off to the engineering--
I've made up my mind to that." He fell into meditation and
finger-rhetoric again for a little while, and then continued:
"I shall make Brooke have new agreements with the tenants, and I shall
draw up a rotation of crops. And I'll lay a wager we can get fine
bricks out of the clay at Bott's corner. I must look into that:
it would cheapen the repairs. It's a fine bit of work, Susan!
A man without a family would be glad to do it for nothing."
"Mind you don't, though," said his wife, lifting up her finger.
"No, no; but it's a fine thing to come to a man when he's seen
into the nature of business: to have the chance of getting a bit
of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into
the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving
and solid building done--that those who are living and those who come
after will be the better for. I'd sooner have it than a fortune.
I hold it the most honorable work that is." Here Caleb laid down
his letters, thrust his fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat,
and sat upright, but presently proceeded with some awe in his voice
and moving his head slowly aside--"It's a great gift of God, Susan."
"That it is, Caleb," said his wife, with answering fervor.
"And it will be a blessing to your children to have had a father
who did such work: a father whose good work remains though his name
may be forgotten." She could not say any more to him then about
the pay.
In the evening, when Caleb, rather tired with his day's work,
was seated in silence with his pocket-book open on his knee,
while Mrs. Garth and Mary were at their sewing, and Letty in a corner
was whispering a dialogue with her doll, Mr. Farebrother came up
the orchard walk, dividing the bright August lights and shadows
with the tufted grass and the apple-tree boughs. We know that he
was fond of his parishioners the Garths, and had thought Mary worth
mentioning to Lydgate. He used to the full the clergyman's privilege
of disregarding the Middlemarch discrimination of ranks, and always
told his mother that Mrs. Garth was more of a lady than any matron
in the town. Still, you see, he spent his evenings at the Vincys',
where the matron, though less of a lady, presided over a well-lit
drawing-room and whist. In those days human intercourse was not
determined solely by respect. But the Vicar did heartily respect
the Garths, and a visit from him was no surprise to that family.
Nevertheless he accounted for it even while he was shaking hands,
by saying, "I come as an envoy, Mrs. Garth: I have something
to say to you and Garth on behalf of Fred Vincy. The fact is,
poor fellow," he continued, as he seated himself and looked round
with his bright glance at the three who were listening to him,
"he has taken me into his confidence."
Mary's heart beat rather quickly: she wondered how far Fred's
confidence had gone.
"We haven't seen the lad for months," said Caleb. "I couldn't
think what was become of him."
"He has been away on a visit," said the Vicar, "because home was
a little too hot for him, and Lydgate told his mother that the poor
fellow must not begin to study yet. But yesterday he came and poured
himself out to me. I am very glad he did, because I have seen him
grow up from a youngster of fourteen, and I am so much at home
in the house that the children are like nephews and nieces to me.
But it is a difficult case to advise upon. However, he has
asked me to come and tell you that he is going away, and that he
is so miserable about his debt to you, and his inability to pay,
that he can't bear to come himself even to bid you good by."
"Tell him it doesn't signify a farthing," said Caleb, waving his hand.
"We've had the pinch and have got over it. And now I'm going to be
as rich as a Jew."
"Which means," said Mrs. Garth, smiling at the Vicar, "that we
are going to have enough to bring up the boys well and to keep
Mary at home."
"What is the treasure-trove?" said Mr. Farebrother.
"I'm going to be agent for two estates, Freshitt and Tipton;
and perhaps for a pretty little bit of land in Lowick besides:
it's all the same family connection, and employment spreads like water
if it's once set going. It makes me very happy, Mr. Farebrother"--
here Caleb threw back his head a little, and spread his arms on the elbows
of his chair--"that I've got an opportunity again with the letting
of the land, and carrying out a notion or two with improvements.
It's a most uncommonly cramping thing, as I've often told Susan,
to sit on horseback and look over the hedges at the wrong thing,
and not be able to put your hand to it to make it right. What people
do who go into politics I can't think: it drives me almost mad
to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres."
It was seldom that Caleb volunteered so long a speech, but his
happiness had the effect of mountain air: his eyes were bright,
and the words came without effort.
"I congratulate you heartily, Garth," said the Vicar. "This is
the best sort of news I could have had to carry to Fred Vincy,
for he dwelt a good deal on the injury he had done you in causing
you to part with money--robbing you of it, he said--which you wanted
for other purposes. I wish Fred were not such an idle dog; he has
some very good points, and his father is a little hard upon him."
"Where is he going?" said Mrs. Garth, rather coldly.
"He means to try again for his degree, and he is going up to study
before term. I have advised him to do that. I don't urge him to
enter the Church--on the contrary. But if he will go and work so as
to pass, that will be some guarantee that he has energy and a will;
and he is quite at sea; he doesn't know what else to do. So far he
will please his father, and I have promised in the mean time to try
and reconcile Vincy to his son's adopting some other line of life.
Fred says frankly he is not fit for a clergyman, and I would do
anything I could to hinder a man from the fatal step of choosing
the wrong profession. He quoted to me what you said, Miss Garth--
do you remember it?" (Mr. Farebrother used to say "Mary" instead
of "Miss Garth," but it was part of his delicacy to treat her
with the more deference because, according to Mrs. Vincy's phrase,
she worked for her bread.)
Mary felt uncomfortable, but, determined to take the matter lightly,
answered at once, "I have said so many impertinent things to Fred--
we are such old playfellows."
"You said, according to him, that he would be one of those
ridiculous clergymen who help to make the whole clergy ridiculous.
Really, that was so cutting that I felt a little cut myself."
Caleb laughed. "She gets her tongue from you, Susan," he said,
with some enjoyment.
"Not its flippancy, father," said Mary, quickly, fearing that her
mother would be displeased. "It is rather too bad of Fred to repeat
my flippant speeches to Mr. Farebrother."
"It was certainly a hasty speech, my dear," said Mrs. Garth,
with whom speaking evil of dignities was a high misdemeanor.
"We should not value our Vicar the less because there was a ridiculous
curate in the next parish."
"There's something in what she says, though," said Caleb, not disposed
to have Mary's sharpness undervalued. "A bad workman of any sort
makes his fellows mistrusted. Things hang together," he added,
looking on the floor and moving his feet uneasily with a sense
that words were scantier than thoughts.
"Clearly," said the Vicar, amused. "By being contemptible we set
men's minds, to the tune of contempt. I certainly agree with Miss
Garth's view of the matter, whether I am condemned by it or not.
But as to Fred Vincy, it is only fair he should be excused a little:
old Featherstone's delusive behavior did help to spoil him.
There was something quite diabolical in not leaving him a farthing
after all. But Fred has the good taste not to dwell on that.
And what he cares most about is having offended you, Mrs. Garth;
he supposes you will never think well of him again."
"I have been disappointed in Fred," said Mrs. Garth, with decision.
"But I shall be ready to think well of him again when he gives me
good reason to do so."
At this point Mary went out of the room, taking Letty with her.
"Oh, we must forgive young people when they're sorry," said Caleb,
watching Mary close the door. "And as you say, Mr. Farebrother,
there was the very devil in that old man."
Now Mary's gone out, I must tell you a thing--it's only known
to Susan and me, and you'll not tell it again. The old scoundrel
wanted Mary to burn one of the wills the very night he died,
when she was sitting up with him by herself, and he offered her
a sum of money that he had in the box by him if she would do it.
But Mary, you understand, could do no such thing--would not be handling
his iron chest, and so on. Now, you see, the will he wanted burnt
was this last, so that if Mary had done what he wanted, Fred Vincy
would have had ten thousand pounds. The old man did turn to him
at the last. That touches poor Mary close; she couldn't help it--
she was in the right to do what she did, but she feels, as she says,
much as if she had knocked down somebody's property and broken it
against her will, when she was rightfully defending herself. I feel
with her, somehow, and if I could make any amends to the poor lad,
instead of bearing him a grudge for the harm he did us, I should
be glad to do it. Now, what is your opinion, sir? Susan doesn't
agree with me. She says--tell what you say, Susan."
"Mary could not have acted otherwise, even if she had known what would
be the effect on Fred," said Mrs. Garth, pausing from her work,
and looking at Mr. Farebrother.
"And she was quite ignorant of it. It seems to me, a loss which falls
on another because we have done right is not to lie upon our conscience."
The Vicar did not answer immediately, and Caleb said, "It's the feeling.
The child feels in that way, and I feel with her. You don't mean
your horse to tread on a dog when you're backing out of the way;
but it goes through you, when it's done."
"I am sure Mrs. Garth would agree with you there," said Mr. Farebrother,
who for some reason seemed more inclined to ruminate than to speak.
"One could hardly say that the feeling you mention about Fred
is wrong--or rather, mistaken--though no man ought to make a claim
on such feeling."
"Well, well," said Caleb, "it's a secret. You will not tell Fred."
"Certainly not. But I shall carry the other good news--that you
can afford the loss he caused you."
Mr. Farebrother left the house soon after, and seeing Mary in the
orchard with Letty, went to say good-by to her. They made a pretty
picture in the western light which brought out the brightness of the
apples on the old scant-leaved boughs--Mary in her lavender gingham
and black ribbons holding a basket, while Letty in her well-worn
nankin picked up the fallen apples. If you want to know more
particularly how Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face like hers
in the crowded street to-morrow, if you are there on the watch:
she will not be among those daughters of Zion who are haughty,
and walk with stretched-out necks and wanton eyes, mincing as they go:
let all those pass, and fix your eyes on some small plump brownish
person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does
not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad
face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair,
a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps
the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignificant--
take that ordinary but not disagreeable person for a portrait
of Mary Garth. If you made her smile, she would show you perfect
little teeth; if you made her angry, she would not raise her voice,
but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have ever tasted
the flavor of; if you did her a kindness, she would never forget it.
Mary admired the keen-faced handsome little Vicar in his well-brushed
threadbare clothes more than any man she had had the opportunity
of knowing. She had never heard him say a foolish thing, though she
knew that he did unwise ones; and perhaps foolish sayings were more
objectionable to her than any of Mr. Farebrother's unwise doings.
At least, it was remarkable that the actual imperfections of the
Vicar's clerical character never seemed to call forth the same
scorn and dislike which she showed beforehand for the predicted
imperfections of the clerical character sustained by Fred Vincy.
These irregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper
minds than Mary Garth's: our impartiality is kept for abstract
merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw. Will any one guess
towards which of those widely different men Mary had the peculiar
woman's tenderness?--the one she was most inclined to be severe on,
or the contrary?
"Have you any message for your old playfellow, Miss Garth?"
said the Vicar, as he took a fragrant apple from the basket which she
held towards him, and put it in his pocket. "Something to soften
down that harsh judgment? I am going straight to see him."
"No," said Mary, shaking her head, and smiling. "If I were to say
that he would not be ridiculous as a clergyman, I must say that he
would be something worse than ridiculous. But I am very glad
to hear that he is going away to work."
"On the other hand, I am very glad to hear that YOU are not
going away to work. My mother, I am sure, will be all the happier
if you will come to see her at the vicarage: you know she is fond
of having young people to talk to, and she has a great deal to tell
about old times. You will really be doing a kindness."
"I should like it very much, if I may," said Mary. "Everything
seems too happy for me all at once. I thought it would always
be part of my life to long for home, and losing that grievance
makes me feel rather empty: I suppose it served instead of sense
to fill up my mind?"
"May I go with you, Mary?" whispered Letty--a most inconvenient child,
who listened to everything. But she was made exultant by having
her chin pinched and her cheek kissed by Mr. Farebrother--
an incident which she narrated to her mother and father.
As the Vicar walked to Lowick, any one watching him closely might
have seen him twice shrug his shoulders. I think that the rare
Englishmen who have this gesture are never of the heavy type--
for fear of any lumbering instance to the contrary, I will say,
hardly ever; they have usually a fine temperament and much tolerance
towards the smaller errors of men (themselves inclusive). The Vicar
was holding an inward dialogue in which he told himself that there
was probably something more between Fred and Mary Garth than the
regard of old playfellows, and replied with a question whether
that bit of womanhood were not a great deal too choice for that
crude young gentleman. The rejoinder to this was the first shrug.
Then he laughed at himself for being likely to have felt jealous,
as if he had been a man able to marry, which, added he, it is
as clear as any balance-sheet that I am not. Whereupon followed
the second shrug.
What could two men, so different from each other, see in this
"brown patch," as Mary called herself? It was certainly not her
plainness that attracted them (and let all plain young ladies be
warned against the dangerous encouragement given them by Society
to confide in their want of beauty). A human being in this aged
nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long
interchanging influences: and charm is a result of two such wholes,
the one loving and the one loved.
When Mr. and Mrs. Garth were sitting alone, Caleb said, "Susan, guess
what I'm thinking of."
"The rotation of crops," said Mrs. Garth, smiling at him,
above her knitting, "or else the back-doors of the Tipton cottages."
"No," said Caleb, gravely; "I am thinking that I could do a great
turn for Fred Vincy. Christy's gone, Alfred will be gone soon,
and it will be five years before Jim is ready to take to business.
I shall want help, and Fred might come in and learn the nature
of things and act under me, and it might be the making of him into
a useful man, if he gives up being a parson. What do you think?"
"I think, there is hardly anything honest that his family would
object to more," said Mrs. Garth, decidedly.
"What care I about their objecting?" said Caleb, with a sturdiness
which he was apt to show when he had an opinion. "The lad is of age
and must get his bread. He has sense enough and quickness enough;
he likes being on the land, and it's my belief that he could learn
business well if he gave his mind to it."
"But would he? His father and mother wanted him to be a fine
gentleman, and I think he has the same sort of feeling himself.
They all think us beneath them. And if the proposal came from you,
I am sure Mrs. Vincy would say that we wanted Fred for Mary."
"Life is a poor tale, if it is to be settled by nonsense of that sort,"
said Caleb, with disgust.
"Yes, but there is a certain pride which is proper, Caleb."
"I call it improper pride to let fools' notions hinder you from doing
a good action. There's no sort of work," said Caleb, with fervor,
putting out his hand and moving it up and down to mark his emphasis,
"that could ever be done well, if you minded what fools say.
You must have it inside you that your plan is right, and that plan you
must follow."
"I will not oppose any plan you have set your mind on, Caleb,"
said Mrs. Garth, who was a firm woman, but knew that there
were some points on which her mild husband was yet firmer.
"Still, it seems to be fixed that Fred is to go back to college:
will it not be better to wait and see what he will choose to do
after that? It is not easy to keep people against their will.
And you are not yet quite sure enough of your own position,
or what you will want."
"Well, it may be better to wait a bit. But as to my getting
plenty of work for two, I'm pretty sure of that. I've always had
my hands full with scattered things, and there's always something
fresh turning up. Why, only yesterday--bless me, I don't think I
told you!--it was rather odd that two men should have been at me
on different sides to do the same bit of valuing. And who do you
think they were?" said Caleb, taking a pinch of snuff and holding
it up between his fingers, as if it were a part of his exposition.
He was fond of a pinch when it occurred to him, but he usually
forgot that this indulgence was at his command.
His wife held down her knitting and looked attentive.
"Why, that Rigg, or Rigg Featherstone, was one. But Bulstrode
was before him, so I'm going to do it for Bulstrode. Whether it's
mortgage or purchase they're going for, I can't tell yet."
"Can that man be going to sell the land just left him--which he
has taken the name for?" said Mrs. Garth.
"Deuce knows," said Caleb, who never referred the knowledge
of discreditable doings to any higher power than the deuce.
"But Bulstrode has long been wanting to get a handsome bit of land
under his fingers--that I know. And it's a difficult matter to get,
in this part of the country."
Caleb scattered his snuff carefully instead of taking it,
and then added, "The ins and outs of things are curious.
Here is the land they've been all along expecting for Fred,
which it seems the old man never meant to leave him a foot of,
but left it to this side-slip of a son that he kept in the dark,
and thought of his sticking there and vexing everybody as well as he
could have vexed 'em himself if he could have kept alive. I say,
it would be curious if it got into Bulstrode's hands after all.
The old man hated him, and never would bank with him."
"What reason could the miserable creature have for hating a man
whom he had nothing to do with?" said Mrs. Garth.
"Pooh! where's the use of asking for such fellows' reasons? The soul
of man," said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head
which always came when he used this phrase--"The soul of man,
when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous
toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof."
It was one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding
speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction
which he associated with various points of view or states of mind;
and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense
of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given
a strict quotation.
CHAPTER XLI.
"By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
--Twelfth Night
The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward
between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning
the land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange
of a letter or two between these personages.
Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens
to have been cut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages
on a forsaken beach, or "rest quietly under the drums and tramplings
of many conquests," it may end by letting us into the secret of
usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago:--
this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions
are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone
which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious
little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose
labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions,
so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping
or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which
have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.
To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the sun,
the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.
Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling
attention to the existence of low people by whose interference,
however little we may like it, the course of the world is very
much determined. It would be well, certainly, if we could help
to reduce their number, and something might perhaps be done by not
lightly giving occasion to their existence. Socially speaking,
Joshua Rigg would have been generally pronounced a superfluity.
But those who like Peter Featherstone never had a copy of
themselves demanded, are the very last to wait for such a request
either in prose or verse. The copy in this case bore more of
outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features,
accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded figure,
are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.
The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely,
to no order of intelligent beings. Especially when he is suddenly
brought into evidence to frustrate other people's expectations--
the very lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.
But Mr. Rigg Featherstone's low characteristics were all of the sober,
water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day
he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled,
and old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more
calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself. I will add
that his finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he
meant to marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified)
whose person was good, and whose connections, in a solid middle-class
way, were undeniable. Thus his nails and modesty were comparable
to those of most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated
only by the opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller
commercial houses of a seaport. He thought the rural Featherstones
very simple absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his
"bringing up" in a seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity
that their brother Peter, and still more Peter's property, should
have had such belongings.
The garden and gravel approach, as seen from the two windows of the
wainscoted parlor at Stone Court, were never in better trim than now,
when Mr. Rigg Featherstone stood, with his hands behind him,
looking out on these grounds as their master. But it seemed doubtful
whether he looked out for the sake of contemplation or of turning his
back to a person who stood in the middle of the room, with his legs
considerably apart and his hands in his trouser-pockets: a person
in all respects a contrast to the sleek and cool Rigg. He was a man
obviously on the way towards sixty, very florid and hairy, with much
gray in his bushy whiskers and thick curly hair, a stoutish body
which showed to disadvantage the somewhat worn joinings of his clothes,
and the air of a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at
a show of fireworks, regarding his own remarks on any other person's
performance as likely to be more interesting than the performance itself.
His name was John Raffles, and he sometimes wrote jocosely W.A.G.
after his signature, observing when he did so, that he was once
taught by Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A. after his name,
and that he, Raffles, originated the witticism of calling that
celebrated principal Ba-Lamb. Such were the appearance and mental
flavor of Mr. Raffles, both of which seemed to have a stale odor
of travellers' rooms in the commercial hotels of that period.
"Come, now, Josh," he was saying, in a full rumbling tone, "look at it
in this light: here is your poor mother going into the vale of years,
and you could afford something handsome now to make her comfortable."
"Not while you live. Nothing would make her comfortable while
you live," returned Rigg, in his cool high voice. "What I give her,
you'll take."
"You bear me a grudge, Josh, that I know. But come, now--as between
man and man--without humbug--a little capital might enable me to make
a first-rate thing of the shop. The tobacco trade is growing.
I should cut my own nose off in not doing the best I could at it.
I should stick to it like a flea to a fleece for my own sake.
I should always be on the spot. And nothing would make your
poor mother so happy. I've pretty well done with my wild oats--
turned fifty-five. I want to settle down in my chimney-corner. And
if I once buckled to the tobacco trade, I could bring an amount
of brains and experience to bear on it that would not be found
elsewhere in a hurry. I don't want to be bothering you one time
after another, but to get things once for all into the right channel.
Consider that, Josh--as between man and man--and with your poor mother
to be made easy for her life. I was always fond of the old woman,
by Jove!"
"Have you done?" said Mr. Rigg, quietly, without looking away
from the window.
"Yes, I've done," said Raffles, taking hold of his hat which stood
before him on the table, and giving it a sort of oratorical push.
"Then just listen to me. The more you say anything, the less I shall
believe it. The more you want me to do a thing, the more reason I
shall have for never doing it. Do you think I mean to forget your
kicking me when I was a lad, and eating all the best victual away
from me and my mother? Do you think I forget your always coming
home to sell and pocket everything, and going off again leaving us
in the lurch? I should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail.
My mother was a fool to you: she'd no right to give me a father-in-law,
and she's been punished for it. She shall have her weekly allowance
paid and no more: and that shall be stopped if you dare to come
on to these premises again, or to come into this country after
me again. The next time you show yourself inside the gates here,
you shall be driven off with the dogs and the wagoner's whip."
As Rigg pronounced the last words he turned round and looked
at Raffles with his prominent frozen eyes. The contrast
was as striking as it could have been eighteen years before,
when Rigg was a most unengaging kickable boy, and Raffles was
the rather thick-set Adonis of bar-rooms and back-parlors. But
the advantage now was on the side of Rigg, and auditors of this
conversation might probably have expected that Raffles would retire
with the air of a defeated dog. Not at all. He made a grimace
which was habitual with him whenever he was "out" in a game;
then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from his pocket.
"Come, Josh," he said, in a cajoling tone, "give us a spoonful of brandy,
and a sovereign to pay the way back, and I'll go. Honor bright!
I'll go like a bullet, BY Jove!"
"Mind," said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, "if I ever see you again,
I shan't speak to you. I don't own you any more than if I saw a crow;
and if you want to own me you'll get nothing by it but a character
for being what you are--a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue."
"That's a pity, now, Josh," said Raffles, affecting to scratch
his head and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed.
"I'm very fond of you; BY Jove, I am! There's nothing I like
better than plaguing you--you're so like your mother, and I must
do without it. But the brandy and the sovereign's a bargain."
He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken
bureau with his keys. But Raffles had reminded himself by his
movement with the flask that it had become dangerously loose
from its leather covering, and catching sight of a folded paper
which had fallen within the fender, he took it up and shoved
it under the leather so as to make the glass firm.
By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled
the flask, and handed Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him
nor speaking to him. After locking up the bureau again, he walked
to the window and gazed out as impassibly as he had done at the
beginning of the interview, while Raffles took a small allowance
from the flask, screwed it up, and deposited it in his side-pocket,
with provoking slowness, making a grimace at his stepson's back.
"Farewell, Josh--and if forever!" said Raffles, turning back his
head as he opened the door.
Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane. The gray day
had turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows
and the grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers
who were loading the last shocks of corn. Raffles, walking with
the uneasy gait of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country
journeying on foot, looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet
and industry as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie.
But there were none to stare at him except the long-weaned calves,
and none to show dislike of his appearance except the little
water-rats which rustled away at his approach.
He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken
by the stage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took
the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he
considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson.
Mr. Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been
educated at an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass
well everywhere; indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom
he did not feel himself in a position to ridicule and torment,
confident of the entertainment which he thus gave to all the rest
of the company.
He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been
entirely successful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask.
The paper with which he had wedged it was a letter signed
Nicholas Bulstrode, but Raffles was not likely to disturb it
from its present useful position.
CHAPTER XLII.
"How much, methinks, I could despise this man
Were I not bound in charity against it!
--SHAKESPEARE: Henry VIII.
One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return
from his wedding-journey was to Lowick Manor, in consequence
of a letter which had requested him to fix a time for his visit.
Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature
of his illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed
any anxiety as to how far it might be likely to cut short his
labors or his life. On this point, as on all others, he shrank
from pity; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anything
in his lot surmised or known in spite of himself was embittering,
the idea of calling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting
an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable to him.
Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and perhaps
it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough
to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting.
But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the
question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more
harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness
of his authorship. It is true that this last might be called his
central ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which
by far the largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated
in the consciousness of the author one knows of the river by a
few streaks amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud.
That was the way with Mr. Casaubon's hard intellectual labors.
Their most characteristic result was not the "Key to all Mythologies,"
but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place
which he had not demonstrably merited--a perpetual suspicious
conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage--
a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a
passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have
absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds,
least of all against those which came from Dorothea. And he had
begun now to frame possibilities for the future which were somehow
more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before.
Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw's
existence his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his
flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic,
well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea's nature, always taking on
some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence
covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of:
against certain notions and likings which had taken possession of
her mind in relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss
with her. "There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous
and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife;
but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he
had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated
his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had
entered into the husband's mind the certainty that she judged him,
and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation
of unbelieving thoughts--was accompanied with a power of comparison
by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part
of things in general. His discontent passed vapor-like through all
her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that inappreciative
world which she had only brought nearer to him.
Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it
seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped
him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife;
and early instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression
which no tenderness and submission afterwards could remove.
To his suspicious interpretation Dorothea's silence now was
a suppressed rebellion; a remark from her which he had not in
any way anticipated was an assertion of conscious superiority;
her gentle answers had an irritating cautiousness in them;
and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort of forbearance.
The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama made it
the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we
wish others not to hear.
Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon,
I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our
vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin
by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--
his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism--
could have denied that they were founded on good reasons?
On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he
had not himself taken explicitly into account--namely, that he was
not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected
other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us,
felt how soothing it would have been to have a co pan ion who would
never find it out.
This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly
prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had
occurred since then had brought Mr. Casaubon's power of suspicious
construction into exasperated activity. To all the facts which he knew,
he added imaginary facts both present and future which become more
real to him than those because they called up a stronger dislike,
a more predominating bitterness. Suspicion and jealousy of Will
Ladislaw's intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea's impressions,
were constantly at their weaving work. It would be quite unjust
to him to suppose that he could have entered into any coarse
misinterpretation of Dorothea: his own habits of mind and conduct,
quite as much as the open elevation of her nature, saved him
from any such mistake. What he was jealous of was her opinion,
the sway that might be given to her ardent mind in its judgments,
and the future possibilities to which these might lead her.
As to Will, though until his last defiant letter he had nothing definite
which he would choose formally to allege against him, he felt himself
warranted in believing that he was capable of any design which could
fascinate a rebellious temper and an undisciplined impulsiveness.
He was quite sure that Dorothea was the cause of Will's return
from Rome, and his determination to settle in the neighborhood;
and he was penetrating enough to imagine that Dorothea had innocently
encouraged this course. It was as clear as possible that she was
ready to be attached to Will and to be pliant to his suggestions:
they had never had a tete-a-tete without her bringing away from
it some new troublesome impression, and the last interview that
Mr. Casaubon was aware of (Dorothea, on returning from Freshitt Hall,
had for the first time been silent about having seen Will) had led
to a scene which roused an angrier feeling against them both than
he had ever known before. Dorothea's outpouring of her notions
about money, in the darkness of the night, had done nothing but bring
a mixture of more odious foreboding into her husband's mind.
And there was the shock lately given to his health always sadly
present with him. He was certainly much revived; he had recovered
all his usual power of work: the illness might have been mere fatigue,
and there might still be twenty years of achievement before him,
which would justify the thirty years of preparation. That prospect
was made the sweeter by a flavor of vengeance against the hasty
sneers of Carp & Company; for even when Mr. Casaubon was carrying
his taper among the tombs of the past, those modern figures came
athwart the dim light, and interrupted his diligent exploration.
To convince Carp of his mistake, so that he would have to eat his
own words with a good deal of indigestion, would be an agreeable
accident of triumphant authorship, which the prospect of living to
future ages on earth and to all eternity in heaven could not exclude
from contemplation. Since, thus, the prevision of his own unending
bliss could not nullify the bitter savors of irritated jealousy
and vindictiveness, it is the less surprising that the probability
of a transient earthly bliss for other persons, when he himself
should have entered into glory, had not a potently sweetening effect.
If the truth should be that some undermining disease was at work
within him, there might be large opportunity for some people to be
the happier when he was gone; and if one of those people should be
Will Ladislaw, Mr. Casaubon objected so strongly that it seemed
as if the annoyance would make part of his disembodied existence.
This is a very bare and therefore a very incomplete way of putting
the case. The human soul moves in many channels, and Mr. Casaubon,
we know, had a sense of rectitude and an honorable pride in satisfying
the requirements of honor, which compelled him to find other
reasons for his conduct than those of jealousy and vindictiveness.
The way in which Mr. Casaubon put the case was this:--"In marrying
Dorothea Brooke I had to care for her well-being in case of my death.
But well-being is not to be secured by ample, independent possession
of property; on the contrary, occasions might arise in which such
possession might expose her to the more danger. She is ready prey
to any man who knows how to play adroitly either on her affectionate
ardor or her Quixotic enthusiasm; and a man stands by with that
very intention in his mind--a man with no other principle than
transient caprice, and who has a personal animosity towards me--
I am sure of it--an animosity which is fed by the consciousness
of his ingratitude, and which he has constantly vented in ridicule
of which I am as well assured as if I had heard it. Even if I
live I shall not be without uneasiness as to what he may attempt
through indirect influence. This man has gained Dorothea's ear:
he has fascinated her attention; he has evidently tried to impress
her mind with the notion that he has claims beyond anything I have done
for him. If I die--and he is waiting here on the watch for that--
he will persuade her to marry him. That would be calamity for
her and success for him. SHE would not think it calamity:
he would make her believe anything; she has a tendency to
immoderate attachment which she inwardly reproaches me for not
responding to, and already her mind is occupied with his fortunes.
He thinks of an easy conquest and of entering into my nest.
That I will hinder! Such a marriage would be fatal to Dorothea.
Has he ever persisted in anything except from contradiction?
In knowledge he has always tried to be showy at small cost.
In religion he could be, as long as it suited him, the facile echo of
Dorothea's vagaries. When was sciolism ever dissociated from laxity?
I utterly distrust his morals, and it is my duty to hinder to the
utmost the fulfilment of his designs."
The arrangements made by Mr. Casaubon on his marriage left strong
measures open to him, but in ruminating on them his mind inevitably
dwelt so much on the probabilities of his own life that the longing
to get the nearest possible calculation had at last overcome his
proud reticence, and had determined him to ask Lydgate's opinion
as to the nature of his illness.
He had mentioned to Dorothea that Lydgate was coming by appointment
at half-past three, and in answer to her anxious question, whether he
had felt ill, replied,--"No, I merely wish to have his opinion
concerning some habitual symptoms. You need not see him, my dear.
I shall give orders that he may be sent to me in the Yew-tree Walk,
where I shall be taking my usual exercise."
When Lydgate entered the Yew-tree Walk he saw Mr. Casaubon slowly
receding with his hands behind him according to his habit,
and his head bent forward. It was a lovely afternoon; the leaves
from the lofty limes were falling silently across the sombre
evergreens, while the lights and shadows slept side by side:
there was no sound but the cawing of the rooks, which to the
accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge.
Lydgate, conscious of an energetic frame in its prime, felt some
compassion when the figure which he was likely soon to overtake
turned round, and in advancing towards him showed more markedly
than ever the signs of premature age--the student's bent shoulders,
the emaciated limbs, and the melancholy lines of the mouth.
"Poor fellow," he thought, "some men with his years are like lions;
one can tell nothing of their age except that they are full grown."
"Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, with his invariably po lite air,
"I am exceedingly obliged to you for your punctuality. We will,
if you please, carry on our conversation in walking to and fro."
"I hope your wish to see me is not due to the return
of unpleasant symptoms," said Lydgate, filling up a pause.
"Not immediately--no. In order to account for that wish I must mention--
what it were otherwise needless to refer to--that my life,
on all collateral accounts insignificant, derives a possible
importance from the incompleteness of labors which have extended
through all its best years. In short, I have long had on hand
a work which I would fain leave behind me in such a state, at least,
that it might be committed to the press by--others. Were I assured
that this is the utmost I can reasonably expect, that assurance
would be a useful circumscription of my attempts, and a guide
in both the positive and negative determination of my course."
Here Mr. Casaubon paused, removed one hand from his back and thrust
it between the buttons of his single-breasted coat. To a mind
largely instructed in the human destiny hardly anything could be
more interesting than the inward conflict implied in his formal
measured address, delivered with the usual sing-song and motion
of the head. Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic
than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work
which has been all the significance of its life--a significance
which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has
need of them? But there was nothing to strike others as sublime
about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some contempt at hand for
futile scholarship, felt a little amusement mingling with his pity.
He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into
the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy
except the passionate egoism of the sufferer.
"You refer to the possible hindrances from want of health?" he said,
wishing to help forward Mr. Casaubon's purpose, which seemed to be
clogged by some hesitation.
"I do. You have not implied to me that the symptoms which--
I am bound to testify--you watched with scrupulous care,
were those of a fatal disease. But were it so, Mr. Lydgate,
I should desire to know the truth without reservation, and I
appeal to you for an exact statement of your conclusions:
I request it as a friendly service. If you can tell me that my
life is not threatened by anything else than ordinary casualties,
I shall rejoice, on grounds which I have already indicated.
If not, knowledge of the truth is even more important to me."
"Then I can no longer hesitate as to my course," said Lydgate;
"but the first thing I must impress on you is that my conclusions
are doubly uncertain--uncertain not only because of my fallibility,
but because diseases of the heart are eminently difficult to found
predictions on. In any ease, one can hardly increase appreciably
the tremendous uncertainty of life."
Mr. Casaubon winced perceptibly, but bowed.
"I believe that you are suffering from what is called fatty
degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined
and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope,
not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience--a more
lengthened observation--is wanting on the subject. But after
what you have said, it is my duty to tell you that death from this
disease is often sudden. At the same time, no such result can
be predicted. Your condition may be consistent with a tolerably
comfortable life for another fifteen years, or even more. I could
add no information to this beyond anatomical or medical details,
which would leave expectation at precisely the same point."
Lydgate's instinct was fine enough to tell him that plain speech,
quite free from ostentatious caution, would be felt by Mr. Casaubon
as a tribute of respect.
"I thank you, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, after a moment's pause.
"One thing more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you
have now told me to Mrs. Casaubon?"
"Partly--I mean, as to the possible issues." Lydgate was going
to explain why he had told Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon, with an
unmistakable desire to end the conversation, waved his hand slightly,
and said again, "I thank you," proceeding to remark on the rare
beauty of the day.
Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him;
and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward
continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him
a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird
or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along
in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now
for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--
who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience
when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from
what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is
different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had
to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace "We must all die"
transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die--
and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel;
afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did,
and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.
To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on
the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar,
not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an
hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it
onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward--
perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty
anxieties of self-assertion. What was Mr. Casaubon's bias his acts
will give us a clew to. He held himself to be, with some private
scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of
the present and hopes of the future. But what we strive to gratify,
though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire:
the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already
in their imagination and love. And Mr. Casaubon's immediate desire
was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions;
his passionate longings, poor man, clung low and mist-like in very
shady places.
Dorothea had been aware when Lydgate had ridden away, and she had
stepped into the garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband.
But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself;
for her ardor, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory,
to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder;
and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until
she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him, and might have
represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the
short hours remaining should yet be filled with that faithful
love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief. His glance
in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increased;
yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm.
Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm
to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.
There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this
unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word,
but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that
the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round
with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made,
and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their
denial knowledge. You may ask why, in the name of manliness,
Mr. Casaubon should have behaved in that way. Consider that his
was a mind which shrank from pity: have you ever watched in such
a mind the effect of a suspicion that what is pressing it as a grief
may be really a source of contentment, either actual or future,
to the being who already offends by pitying? Besides, he knew
little of Dorothea's sensations, and had not reflected that on
such an occasion as the present they were comparable in strength
to his own sensibilities about Carp's criticisms.
Dorothea did not withdraw her arm, but she could not venture to speak.
Mr. Casaubon did not say, "I wish to be alone," but he directed his
steps in silence towards the house, and as they entered by the glass
door on this eastern side, Dorothea withdrew her arm and lingered
on the matting, that she might leave her husband quite free.
He entered the library and shut himself in, alone with his sorrow.
She went up to her boudoir. The open bow-window let in the serene
glory of the afternoon lying in the avenue, where the lime-trees
east long shadows. But Dorothea knew nothing of the scene.
She threw herself on a chair, not heeding that she was in the
dazzling sun-rays: if there were discomfort in that, how could
she tell that it was not part of her inward misery?
She was in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she
had felt since her marriage. Instead of tears there came words:--
"What have I done--what am I--that he should treat me so?
He never knows what is in my mind--he never cares. What is the use
of anything I do? He wishes he had never married me."
She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness. Like one
who has lost his way and is weary, she sat and saw as in one glance
all the paths of her young hope which she should never find again.
And just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her
husband's solitude--how they walked apart so that she was obliged
to survey him. If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have
surveyed him--never have said, "Is he worth living for?" but would
have felt him simply a part of her own life. Now she said bitterly,
"It is his fault, not mine." In the jar of her whole being,
Pity was overthrown. Was it her fault that she had believed in him--
had believed in his worthiness?--And what, exactly, was he?--
She was able enough to estimate him--she who waited on his glances
with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only
hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him.
In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.
The sun was low when Dorothea was thinking that she would not go
down again, but would send a message to her husband saying that she
was not well and preferred remaining up-stairs. She had never
deliberately allowed her resentment to govern her in this way before,
but she believed now that she could not see him again without
telling him the truth about her feeling, and she must wait till
she could do it without interruption. He might wonder and be hurt
at her message. It was good that he should wonder and be hurt.
Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her--
that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them,
must be on her side. She had determined to ring her bell, when there
came a rap at the door.
Mr. Casaubon had sent to say that he would have his dinner
in the library. He wished to be quite alone this evening,
being much occupied.
"I shall not dine, then, Tantripp."
"Oh, madam, let me bring you a little something?"
"No; I am not well. Get everything ready in my dressing room,
but pray do not disturb me again."
Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle,
while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle
changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement
towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike.
The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted
to inspire a resolved, submission, when the noble habit of the soul
reasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone
out to meet her husband--her conviction that he had been asking
about the possible arrest of all his work, and that the answer
must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside
the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger
with sad remonstrance. It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows
and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows--
but the resolved submission did come; and when the house was still,
and she knew that it was near the time when Mr. Casaubon habitually
went to rest, she opened her door gently and stood outside in the
darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs with a light in his hand.
If he did not come soon she thought that she would go down and even risk
incurring another pang. She would never again expect anything else.
But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced
up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet.
When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was
more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up
at him beseechingly, without speaking.
"Dorothea!" he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. "Were you
waiting for me?"
"Yes, I did not like to disturb you."
"Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your
life by watching."
When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea's ears,
she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up
in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature.
She put her hand into her husband's, and they went along the broad
corridor together.
BOOK V.
THE DEAD HAND.
CHAPTER XLIII.
This figure hath high price: 't was wrought with love
Ages ago in finest ivory;
Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines
Of generous womanhood that fits all time
That too is costly ware; majolica
Of deft design, to please a lordly eye:
The smile, you see, is perfect--wonderful
As mere Faience! a table ornament
To suit the richest mounting."
Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally
drive into Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity
such as occur to every lady of any wealth when she lives within three
miles of a town. Two days after that scene in the Yew-tree Walk,
she determined to use such an opportunity in order if possible to
see Lydgate, and learn from him whether her husband had really felt
any depressing change of symptoms which he was concealing from her,
and whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost about himself.
She felt almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another,
but the dread of being without it--the dread of that ignorance
which would make her unjust or hard--overcame every scruple.
That there had been some crisis in her husband's mind she was certain:
he had the very next day begun a new method of arranging his notes,
and had associated her quite newly in carrying out his plan.
Poor Dorothea needed to lay up stores of patience.
It was about four o'clock when she drove to Lydgate's house in
Lowick Gate, wishing, in her immediate doubt of finding him at home,
that she had written beforehand. And he was not at home.
"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea, who had never, that she
knew of, seen Rosamond, but now remembered the fact of the marriage.
Yes, Mrs. Lydgate was at home.
"I will go in and speak to her, if she will allow me. Will you
ask her if she can see me--see Mrs. Casaubon, for a few minutes?"
When the servant had gone to deliver that message, Dorothea could
hear sounds of music through an open window--a few notes
from a man's voice and then a piano bursting into roulades.
But the roulades broke off suddenly, and then the servant came
back saying that Mrs. Lydgate would be happy to see Mrs. Casaubon.
When the drawing-room door opened and Dorothea entered, there was
a sort of contrast not infrequent in country life when the habits
of the different ranks were less blent than now. Let those who know,
tell us exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days
of mild autumn--that thin white woollen stuff soft to the touch
and soft to the eye. It always seemed to have been lately washed,
and to smell of the sweet hedges--was always in the shape of a
pelisse with sleeves hanging all out of the fashion. Yet if she
had entered before a still audience as Imogene or Cato's daughter,
the dress might have seemed right enough: the grace and dignity were
in her limbs and neck; and about her simply parted hair and candid
eyes the large round poke which was then in the fate of women,
seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold trencher we call
a halo. By the present audience of two persons, no dramatic heroine
could have been expected with more interest than Mrs. Casaubon.
To Rosamond she was one of those county divinities not mixing with
Middlemarch mortality, whose slightest marks of manner or appearance
were worthy of her study; moreover, Rosamond was not without satisfaction
that Mrs. Casaubon should have an opportunity of studying HER.
What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen by the best
judges? and since Rosamond had received the highest compliments
at Sir Godwin Lydgate's, she felt quite confident of the impression
she must make on people of good birth. Dorothea put out her hand
with her usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate's
lovely bride--aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance,
but seeing him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle.
The gentleman was too much occupied with the presence of the one woman
to reflect on the contrast between the two--a contrast that would
certainly have been striking to a calm observer. They were both tall,
and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond's infantine
blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue
dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look
at it without emotion, a large embroidered collar which it was
to be hoped all beholders would know the price of, her small hands
duly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness
of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
"Thank you very much for allowing me to interrupt you,"
said Dorothea, immediately. "I am anxious to see Mr. Lydgate,
if possible, before I go home, and I hoped that you might possibly
tell me where I could find him, or even allow me to wait for him,
if you expect him soon."
"He is at the New Hospital," said Rosamond; "I am not sure how soon
he will come home. But I can send for him,"
"Will you let me go and fetch him?" said Will Ladislaw, coming forward.
He had already taken up his hat before Dorothea entered.
She colored with surprise, but put out her hand with a smile
of unmistakable pleasure, saying--
"I did not know it was you: I had no thought of seeing you here."
"May I go to the Hospital and tell Mr. Lydgate that you wish
to see him?" said Will.
"It would be quicker to send the carriage for him," said Dorothea,
"if you will be kind enough to give the message to the coachman."
Will was moving to the door when Dorothea, whose mind had flashed
in an instant over many connected memories, turned quickly and said,
"I will go myself, thank you. I wish to lose no time before getting
home again. I will drive to the Hospital and see Mr. Lydgate there.
Pray excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate. I am very much obliged to you."
Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she
left the room hardly conscious of what was immediately around her--
hardly conscious that Will opened the door for her and offered her his
arm to lead her to the carriage. She took the arm but said nothing.
Will was feeling rather vexed and miserable, and found nothing
to say on his side. He handed her into the carriage in silence,
they said good-by, and Dorothea drove away.
In the five minutes' drive to the Hospital she had time for some
reflections that were quite new to her. Her decision to go, and her
preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense
that there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing
any further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable
to mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate
was a matter of concealment. That was all that had been explicitly
in her mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort.
Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man's
voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much
at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself
thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time
with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband's absence. And then she could
not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under
like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact?
But Will was Mr. Casaubon's relative, and one towards whom she was
bound to show kindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps
she ought to have understood as implying that Mr. Casaubon did
not like his cousin's visits during his own absence. "Perhaps I
have been mistaken in many things," said poor Dorothea to herself,
while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.
She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been
so clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled. But the carriage
stopped at the gate of the Hospital. She was soon walking round
the grass plots with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong
bent which had made her seek for this interview.
Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason
of it clearly enough. His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare;
and here for the first time there had come a chance which had set
him at a disadvantage. It was not only, as it had been hitherto,
that she was not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen
him under circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely
occupied with her. He felt thrust to a new distance from her,
amongst the circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life.
But that was not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings
in the town, he had been making as many acquaintances as he could,
his position requiring that he should know everybody and everything.
Lydgate was really better worth knowing than any one else in
the neighborhood, and he happened to have a wife who was musical
and altogether worth calling upon. Here was the whole history
of the situation in which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on
her worshipper. It was mortifying. Will was conscious that he should
not have been at Middlemarch but for Dorothea; and yet his position
there was threatening to divide him from her with those barriers
of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to the persistence
of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome and Britain.
Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy in the
form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,
like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--
solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo,
or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.
And Will was of a temperament to feel keenly the presence
of subtleties: a man of clumsier perceptions would not have felt,
as he did, that for the first time some sense of unfitness
in perfect freedom with him had sprung up in Dorothea's mind,
and that their silence, as he conducted her to the carriage,
had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and jealousy,
had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her socially.
Confound Casaubon!
Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking
irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated
herself at her work-table, said--
"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May I
come another day and just finish about the rendering of `Lungi dal
caro bene'?"
"I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond. "But I am sure
you admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite
envy your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever?
She looks as if she were."
"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.
"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him
if she were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking
of when you are with Mrs. Casaubon?"
"Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming
Mrs. Lydgate. "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks
of her attributes--one is conscious of her presence."
"I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond,
dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness. "He will come back
and think nothing of me."
"That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto.
Mrs. Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared
with her."
"You are a devout worshipper, I perceive. You often see her,
I suppose."
"No," said Will, almost pettishly. "Worship is usually a matter
of theory rather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess
just at this moment--I must really tear myself away.
"Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear
the music, and I cannot enjoy it so well without him."
When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in
front of him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands,
"Mr. Ladislaw was here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in.
He seemed vexed. Do you think he disliked her seeing him at our house?
Surely your position is more than equal to his--whatever may be his
relation to the Casaubons."
"No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed,
Ladislaw is a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella."
"Music apart, he is not always very agreeable. Do you like him?"
"Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
bric-a-brac, but likable."
"Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon."
"Poor devil!" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears.
Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world,
especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood
had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes--
that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men.
At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at
Mrs. Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine,
and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination
over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with a woman's whole
mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints,
especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests.
How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a
husband as crown-prince by your side--himself in fact a subject--
while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably,
and if their appetite too, so much the better! But Rosamond's romance
turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and it was enough
to enjoy his assured subjection. When he said, "Poor devil I"
she asked, with playful curiosity--
"Why so?"
"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
He only neglects his work and runs up bills."
"I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital,
or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's quarrel;
and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope
and phials. Confess you like those things better than me."
"Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should
be something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate,
letting his hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking
at her with affectionate gravity. "I shall make you learn
my favorite bit from an old poet--
`Why should our pride make such a stir to be
And be forgot? What good is like to this,
To do worthy the writing, and to write
Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?'
What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,--and to write out
myself what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet."
"Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish
you to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch.
You cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working.
But we cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented
with me, Tertius?"
"No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented."
"But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?"
"Merely to ask about her husband's health. But I think she is
going to be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give
us two hundred a-year."
CHAPTER XLIV.
I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New
Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs
of change in Mr. Casaubon's bodily condition beyond the mental
sign of anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was
silent for a few moments, wondering whether she had said or done
anything to rouse this new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to let
slip an opportunity of furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say--
"I don't know whether your or Mr.--Casaubon's attention has been drawn
to the needs of our New Hospital. Circumstances have made it seem
rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault:
it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other
medical men. I think you are generally interested in such things,
for I remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you
at Tipton Grange before your marriage, you were asking me some
questions about the way in which the health of the poor was affected
by their miserable housing."
"Yes, indeed," said Dorothea, brightening. "I shall be quite
grateful to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things
a little better. Everything of that sort has slipped away from me
since I have been married. I mean," she said, after a moment's
hesitation, "that the people in our village are tolerably comfortable,
and my mind has been too much taken up for me to inquire further.
But here--in such a place as Middlemarch--there must be a great
deal to be done."
"There is everything to be done," said Lydgate, with abrupt energy.
"And this Hospital is a capital piece of work, due entirely to
Mr. Bulstrode's exertions, and in a great degree to his money.
But one man can't do everything in a scheme of this sort. Of course
he looked forward to help. And now there's a mean, petty feud
set up against the thing in the town, by certain persons who want
to make it a failure."
"What can be their reasons?" said Dorothea, with naive surprise.
"Chiefly Mr. Bulstrode's unpopularity, to begin with. Half the
town would almost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him.
In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good
to be done unless it is done by their own set. I had no connection
with Bulstrode before I came here. I look at him quite impartially,
and I see that he has some notions--that he has set things on foot--
which I can turn to good public purpose. If a fair number of the better
educated men went to work with the belief that their observations
might contribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice,
we should soon see a change for the better. That's my point of view.
I hold that by refusing to work with Mr. Bulstrode I should be
turning my back on an opportunity of making my profession more
generally serviceable."
"I quite agree with you," said Dorothea, at once fascinated by
the situation sketched in Lydgate's words. "But what is there
against Mr. Bulstrode? I know that my uncle is friendly with him."
"People don't like his religious tone," said Lydgate, breaking off there.
"That is all the stronger reason for despising such an opposition,"
said Dorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light
of the great persecutions.
"To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:--
he is masterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade,
which has complaints of its own that I know nothing about.
But what has that to do with the question whether it would not be
a fine thing to establish here a more valuable hospital than any
they have in the county? The immediate motive to the opposition,
however, is the fact that Bulstrode has put the medical direction
into my hands. Of course I am glad of that. It gives me an
opportunity of doing some good work,--and I am aware that I have
to justify his choice of me. But the consequence is, that the
whole profession in Middlemarch have set themselves tooth and nail
against the Hospital, and not only refuse to cooperate themselves,
but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder subscriptions."
"How very petty!" exclaimed Dorothea, indignantly.
"I suppose one must expect to fight one's way: there is hardly
anything to be done without it. And the ignorance of people about
here is stupendous. I don't lay claim to anything else than having
used some opportunities which have not come within everybody's reach;
but there is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer,
and happening to know something more than the old inhabitants.
Still, if I believe that I can set going a better method of treatment--
if I believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries
which may be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be
a base truckler if I allowed any consideration of personal comfort
to hinder me. And the course is all the clearer from there being
no salary in question to put my persistence in an equivocal light."
"I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate," said Dorothea, cordially.
"I feel sure I can help a little. I have some money, and don't know
what to do with it--that is often an uncomfortable thought to me.
I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose like this.
How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do
great good! I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning.
There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly see
the good of!"
There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea's voice as she spoke
these last words. But she presently added, more cheerfully,
"Pray come to Lowick and tell us more of this. I will mention
the subject to Mr. Casaubon. I must hasten home now."
She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to
subscribe two hundred a-year--she had seven hundred a-year as the
equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage.
Mr. Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the
sum might be disproportionate in relation to other good objects,
but when Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion,
he acquiesced. He did not care himself about spending money,
and was not reluctant to give it. If he ever felt keenly any question
of money it was through the medium of another passion than the love
of material property.
Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist
of her conversation with him about the Hospital. Mr. Casaubon did
not question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know
what had passed between Lydgate and himself "She knows that I know,"
said the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit
knowledge only thrust further off any confidence between them.
He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely
than distrust?
CHAPTER XLV.
It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers,
and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which
notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help
and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times,
by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot
but argue the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal,
and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate
and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched
to Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many
different lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and
dunderheaded prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical
jealousy but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly
by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had striven to be
an effectual lay representative--a hatred which certainly found
pretexts apart from religion such as were only too easy to find
in the entanglements of human action. These might be called the
ministerial views. But oppositions have the illimitable range of
objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary
of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.
What the opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital
and its administration had certainly a great deal of echo in it,
for heaven has taken care that everybody shall not be an originator;
but there were differences which represented every social shade
between the polished moderation of Dr. Minchin and the trenchant
assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital,
if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without
saying by your leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac"
that he had wanted to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman
as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage--
a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know
what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry
into your inside after you were gone. If that was not reason,
Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was; but there was a prevalent feeling
in her audience that her opinion was a bulwark, and that if it were
overthrown there would be no limits to the cutting-up of bodies,
as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters--
such a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch!
And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter
Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic
public-house--the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop's--
was the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put
to the vote whether its long-standing medical man, "Doctor Gambit,"
should not be cashiered in favor of "this Doctor Lydgate," who was
capable of performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people
altogether given up by other practitioners. But the balance had been
turned against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons
held that this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an
equivocal recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors.
In the course of the year, however, there had been a change
in the public sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop's was an index
A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of
Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,
depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit
of the stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts,
but not the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence.
Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been
worn threadbare, like old Featherstone's, had been at once inclined
to try him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor's bills,
thought agreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and
sending for him without stint if the children's temper wanted
a dose, occasions when the old practitioners were often crusty;
and all persons thus inclined to employ Lydgate held it likely
that he was clever. Some considered that he might do more than
others "where there was liver;"--at least there would be no harm
in getting a few bottles of "stuff" from him, since if these proved
useless it would still be possible to return to the Purifying Pills,
which kept you alive if they did not remove the yellowness.
But these were people of minor importance. Good Middlemarch families
were of course not going to change their doctor without reason shown;
and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did not feel obliged
to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor,
objecting that he was "not likely to be equal to Peacock."
But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were
particulars enough reported of him to breed much more specific
expectations and to intensify differences into partisanship;
some of the particulars being of that impressive order of which the
significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amount without
a standard of comparison, but with a note of exclamation at the end.
The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man--
what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles!
"Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be--is it any wonder the cholera
has got to Dantzic? And yet there are people who say quarantine is
no good!"
One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs.
This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction
seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he
ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have counted
on having the law on their side against a man who without calling
himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge
on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee
that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity;
and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who,
though not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner
on the subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular
explanation of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it
must lower the character of practitioners, and be a constant injury
to the public, if their only mode of getting paid for their work
was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.
"It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost
as mischievous as quacks," said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly.
"To get their own bread they must overdose the king's lieges;
and that's a bad sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey--undermines the
constitution in a fatal way."
Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of
outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was
also asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical
point of view, as well as from his own, he was an important man;
indeed, an exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a
flame-like pyramid, and whose retail deference was of the cordial,
encouraging kind--jocosely complimentary, and with a certain
considerate abstinence from letting out the full force of his mind.
It was Mr. Mawmsey's friendly jocoseness in questioning him which
had set the tone of Lydgate's reply. But let the wise be warned
against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the
sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into
the stirrup, and Mr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have
done if he had known who the king's lieges were, giving his
"Good morning, sir, good-morning, sir," with the air of one who saw
everything clearly enough. But in truth his views were perturbed.
For years he had been paying bills with strictly made items,
so that for every half-crown and eighteen-pence he was certain
something measurable had been delivered. He had done this with
satisfaction, including it among his responsibilities as a husband
and father, and regarding a longer bill than usual as a dignity
worth mentioning. Moreover, in addition to the massive benefit
of the drugs to "self and family," he had enjoyed the pleasure
of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so as
to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit--
a practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller,
and especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey
had the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring,
he was wont to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them.
Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man,
which appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop,
when they were recited to Mrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be
made much of as a fertile mother,--generally under attendance more
or less frequent from Mr. Gambit, and occasionally having attacks
which required Dr. Minchin.
"Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?"
said Mrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. "I should
like him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn't
take strengthening medicine for a month beforehand. Think of what I
have to provide for calling customers, my dear!"--here Mrs. Mawmsey
turned to an intimate female friend who sat by--"a large veal pie--
a stuffed fillet--a round of beef--ham, tongue, et cetera,
et cetera! But what keeps me up best is the pink mixture,
not the brown. I wonder, Mr. Mawmsey, with your experience,
you could have patience to listen. I should have told him at once
that I knew a little better than that."
"No, no, no," said Mr. Mawmsey; "I was not going to tell him
my opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto.
But he didn't know who he was talking to. I was not to be turned
on HIS finger. People often pretend to tell me things, when they
might as well say, `Mawmsey, you're a fool.' But I smile at it:
I humor everybody's weak place. If physic had done harm to self
and family, I should have found it out by this time."
The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying
physic was of no use.
"Indeed!" said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise.
(He was a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.)
"How will he cure his patients, then?"
"That is what I say," returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave
weight to her speech by loading her pronouns. "Does HE suppose
that people will pay him only to come and sit with them and go
away again?"
Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit,
including very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs;
but of course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his
spare time and personal narrative had never been charged for.
So he replied, humorously--
"Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know."
"Not one that I would employ," said Mrs. Mawmsey. "OTHERS
may do as they please."
Hence Mr. Gambit could go away from the chief grocer's without
fear of rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one
of those hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising
their own honesty, and that it might be worth some people's while
to show him up. Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice,
much pervaded by the smells of retail trading which suggested
the reduction of cash payments to a balance. And he did not
think it worth his while to show Lydgate up until he knew how.
He had not indeed great resources of education, and had had to work
his own way against a good deal of professional contempt; but he made
none the worse accoucheur for calling the breathing apparatus "longs."
Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr. Toller shared the
highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family:
there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line
of retail trade. Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the
easiest way in the world of taking things which might be supposed
to annoy him, being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept
a good house, was very fond of a little sporting when he could get it,
very friendly with Mr. Hawley, and hostile to Mr. Bulstrode.
It may seem odd that with such pleasant habits he should hare been
given to the heroic treatment, bleeding and blistering and starving
his patients, with a dispassionate disregard to his personal example;
but the incongruity favored the opinion of his ability among
his patients, who commonly observed that Mr. Toller had lazy manners,
but his treatment was as active as you could desire: no man,
said they, carried more seriousness into his profession: he was
a little slow in coming, but when he came, he DID something.
He was a great favorite in his own circle, and whatever he implied
to any one's disadvantage told doubly from his careless ironical tone.
He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, "Ah!" when he was told
that Mr. Peacock's successor did not mean to dispense medicines;
and Mr. Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party,
Mr. Toller said, laughingly, "Dibbitts will get rid of his
stale drugs, then. I'm fond of little Dibbitts--I'm glad he's in luck."
"I see your meaning, Toller," said Mr. Hackbutt, "and I am entirely
of your opinion. I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself
to that effect. A medical man should be responsible for the
quality of the drugs consumed by his patients. That is the rationale
of the system of charging which has hitherto obtained;
and nothing is more offensive than this ostentation of reform,
where there is no real amelioration."
"Ostentation, Hackbutt?" said Mr. Toller, ironically. "I don't
see that. A man can't very well be ostentatious of what nobody
believes in. There's no reform in the matter: the question is,
whether the profit on the drugs is paid to the medical man by the
druggist or by the patient, and whether there shall be extra pay
under the name of attendance."
"Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug,"
said Mr. Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.
Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely
at a party, getting the more irritable in consequence.
"As to humbug, Hawley," he said, "that's a word easy to fling about.
But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their
own nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general
practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn't be a gentleman. I throw
back the imputation with scorn. I say, the most ungentlemanly trick
a man can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession
with innovations which are a libel on their time-honored procedure.
That is my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who
contradicts me." Mr. Wrench's voice had become exceedingly sharp.
"I can't oblige you there, Wrench," said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his
hands into his trouser-pockets.
"My dear fellow," said Mr. Toller, striking in pacifically! and
looking at Mr. Wrench, "the physicians have their toes trodden
on more than we have. If you come to dignity it is a question
for Minchin and Sprague."
"Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these infringements?"
said Mr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer his lights.
"How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?"
"Nothing to be done there," said Mr. Hawley. "I looked into
it for Sprague. You'd only break your nose against a damned
judge's decision."
"Pooh! no need of law," said Mr. Toller. "So far as practice is
concerned the attempt is an absurdity. No patient will like it--
certainly not Peacock's, who have been used to depletion.
Pass the wine."
Mr. Toller's prediction was partly verified. If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey,
who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed
declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called
him in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did "use
all the means he might use" in the case. Even good Mr. Powderell,
who in his constant charity of interpretation was inclined to
esteem Lydgate the more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit
of a better plan, had his mind disturbed with doubts during his
wife's attack of erysipelas, and could not abstain from mentioning
to Lydgate that Mr. Peacock on a similar occasion had administered
a series of boluses which were not otherwise definable than by their
remarkable effect in bringing Mrs. Powderell round before Michaelmas
from an illness which had begun in a remarkably hot August.
At last, indeed, in the conflict between his desire not to hurt
Lydgate and his anxiety that no "means" should be lacking,
he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon's Purifying Bills,
an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease
at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood.
This co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate,
and Mr. Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it,
only hoping that it might be attended with a blessing.
But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped
by what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever
came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody--
cures which may be called fortune's testimonials, and deserve as
much credit as the ten or printed kind. Various patients got well
while Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses;
and it was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at
least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death.
The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate,
because it gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent
and unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him
by the simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement
on his own part of ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness
was checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight
against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog;
and "good fortune" insisted on using those interpretations.
Mrs. Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming
symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr. Minchin called, asked him to see
her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary;
whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one
of tumor, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy,
calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the stay maker
and his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr. Minchin's paper,
and by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation
in the neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with
a tumor at first declared to be as large and hard as a duck's egg,
but later in the day to be about the size of "your fist."
Most hearers agreed that it would have to be cut out, but one had
known of oil and another of "squitchineal" as adequate to soften
and reduce any lump in the body when taken enough of into the inside--
the oil by gradually "soopling," the squitchineal by eating away.
Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened
to be one of Lydgate's days there. After questioning and examining her,
Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, "It's not tumor:
it's cramp." He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture,
and told her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note
to Mrs. Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify
that she was in need of good food.
But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse,
the supposed tumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only
wandered to another region with angrier pain. The staymaker's wife
went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy
in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went
to work again. But the case continued to be described as one of tumor
in Churchyard Lane and other streets--nay, by Mrs. Larcher also;
for when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin,
he naturally did not like to say, "The case was not one of tumor,
and I was mistaken in describing it as such," but answered,
"Indeed! ah! I saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind."
He had been inwardly annoyed, however, when he had asked at the
Infirmary about the woman he had recommended two days before,
to hear from the house-surgeon, a youngster who was not sorry
to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what had occurred:
he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general practitioner
to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner,
and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably
inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate did not make the affair a ground
for valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin,
such rectification of misjudgments often happening among men
of equal qualifications. But report took up this amazing case
of tumor, not clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered
the more awful for being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice
against Lydgate's method as to drugs was overcome by the proof
of his marvellous skill in the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash
after she had been rolling and rolling in agonies from the presence
of a tumor both hard and obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.
How could Lydgate help himself? It is offensive to tell a lady
when she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is
altogether mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement. And to have
entered into the nature of diseases would only have added to his
breaches of medical propriety. Thus he had to wince under a promise
of success given by that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.
In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than
an every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage
that he won. The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia,
and having been a patient of Mr. Peacock's, sent for Lydgate,
whom he had expressed his intention to patronize. Mr Trumbull was
a robust man, a good subject for trying the expectant theory upon--
watching the course of an interesting disease when left as much
as possible to itself, so that the stages might be noted for future
guidance; and from the air with which he described his sensations
Lydgate surmised that he would like to be taken into his medical
man's confidence, and be represented as a partner in his own cure.
The auctioneer heard, without much surprise, that his was a
constitution which (always with due watching) might be left to itself,
so as to offer a beautiful example of a disease with all its phases
seen in clear delineation, and that he probably had the rare strength
of mind voluntarily to become the test of a rational procedure,
and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary functions a general
benefit to society.
Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view
that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.
"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether ignorant
of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority
of expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing.
And he went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs,
much sustained by application of the thermometer which implied
the importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished
objects for the microscope, and by learning many new words which
seemed suited to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate
was acute enough to indulge him with a little technical talk.
It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a
disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the
strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward
in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of
patient he had to deal with. The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,
and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it.
He had caught the words "expectant method," and rang chimes on this
and other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew
a thing or two more than the rest of the doctors--was far better versed
in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers."
This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy's illness had given
to Mr. Wrench's enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground.
The new-comer already threatened to be a nuisance in the shape
of rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical
criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had
something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions.
His practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the
first the report of his high family had led to his being pretty
generally invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him
at dinner in the best houses; and having to meet a man whom you
dislike is not observed always to end in a mutual attachment.
There was hardly ever so much unanimity among them as in the opinion
that Lydgate was an arrogant young fellow, and yet ready for the
sake of ultimately predominating to show a crawling subservience
to Bulstrode. That Mr. Farebrother, whose name was a chief flag of the
anti-Bulstrode party, always defended Lydgate and made a friend of him,
was referred to Farebrother's unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.
Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional
disgust at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying
down for the direction of the New Hospital, which were the more
exasperating because there was no present possibility of interfering
with his will and pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote
having refused help towards the building, on the ground that they
preferred giving to the Old Infirmary. Mr. Bulstrode met all
the expenses, and had ceased to be sorry that he was purchasing
the right to carry out his notions of improvement without hindrance
from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had had to spend large sums,
and the building had lingered. Caleb Garth had undertaken it,
had failed during its progress, and before the interior fittings
were begun had retired from the management of the business;
and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however
Bulstrode might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry
and masonry, and had a notion both of drains and chimneys. In fact,
the Hospital had become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode,
and he would willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sum that
he might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another
favorite object which also required money for its accomplishment:
he wished to bay some land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch,
and therefore he wished to get considerable contributions towards
maintaining the Hospital. Meanwhile he framed his plan of management.
The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in all its forms;
Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free
authority to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies,
particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other
medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to
contravene Lydgate's ultimate decisions; and the general management
was to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors associated
with Mr. Bulstrode, who were to have votes in the ratio of their
contributions, the Board itself filling up any vacancy in its numbers,
and no mob of small contributors being admitted to a share of government.
There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man
in the town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital.
"Very well," said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, "we have a capital
house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow;
we'll get Webbe from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner
as any of them, to come over twice a-week, and in case of any
exceptional operation, Protheroe will come from Brassing.
I must work the harder, that's all, and I have given up my post
at the Infirmary. The plan will flourish in spite of them,
and then they'll be glad to come in. Things can't last as they are:
there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then young fellows may
be glad to come and study here." Lydgate was in high spirits.
"I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate,"
said Mr. Bulstrode. "While I see you carrying out high intentions
with vigor, you shall have my unfailing support. And I have humble
confidence that the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts
against the spirit of evil in this town will not be withdrawn.
Suitable directors to assist me I have no doubt of securing.
Mr. Brooke of Tipton has already given me his concurrence,
and a pledge to contribute yearly: he has not specified the sum--
probably not a great one. But he will be a useful member of
the board."
A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would
originate nothing, and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.
The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now. Neither
Dr. Sprague nor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate's knowledge,
or his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was
his arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable. They implied
that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation
for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan.
The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop.
In those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of
Mr. St. John Long, "noblemen and gentlemen" attesting his extraction
of a fluid like mercury from the temples of a patient.
Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that "Bulstrode
had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion
is sure to like other sorts of charlatans."
"Yes, indeed, I can imagine," said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number
of thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; "there are
so many of that sort. I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons,
trying to make people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked."
"No, no," said Mr. Toller, "Cheshire was all right--all fair
and above board. But there's St. John Long--that's the kind of
fellow we call a charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows
anything about: a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending
to go deeper than other people. The other day he was pretending
to tap a man's brain and get quicksilver out of it."
"Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions!"
said Mrs. Taft.
After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate
played even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes,
and how much more likely that in his flighty experimenting he
should make sixes and sevens of hospital patients. Especially it
was to be expected, as the landlady of the Tankard had said,
that he would recklessly cut up their dead bodies. For Lydgate
having attended Mrs. Goby, who died apparently of a heart-disease
not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too daringly asked
leave of her relatives to open the body, and thus gave an offence
quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where that lady had long
resided on an income such as made this association of her body
with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her memory.
Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
Hospital to Dorothea. We see that be was bearing enmity and silly
misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created
by his good share of success.
"They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially
in Mr. Farebrother's study. "I have got a good opportunity here,
for the ends I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get
income enough for our wants. By-and-by I shall go on as quietly
as possible: I have no seductions now away from home and work.
And I am more and more convinced that it will be possible to
demonstrate the homogeneous origin of all the tissues. Raspail and
others are on the same track, and I have been losing time."
"I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr. Farebrother,
who had been puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked;
"but as to the hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you
are prudent."
"How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes
before me to do. I can't help people's ignorance and spite,
any more than Vesalius could. It isn't possible to square one's
conduct to silly conclusions which nobody can foresee."
"Quite true; I didn't mean that. I meant only two things. One is,
keep yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course,
you can go on doing good work of your own by his help; but don't
get tied. Perhaps it seems like personal feeling in me to say so--
and there's a good deal of that, I own--but personal feeling is not
always in the wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make
it simply an opinion."
"Bulstrode is nothing to me," said Lydgate, carelessly, "except on
public grounds. As to getting very closely united to him, I am not
fond enough of him for that. But what was the other thing you meant?"
said Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible,
and feeling in no great need of advice.
"Why, this. Take care--experto crede--take care not to get
hampered about money matters. I know, by a word you let fall one day,
that you don't like my playing at cards so much for money. You are
right enough there. But try and keep clear of wanting small sums
that you haven't got. I am perhaps talking rather superfluously;
but a man likes to assume superiority over himself, by holding up
his bad example and sermonizing on it."
Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother's hints very cordially, though he
would hardly have borne them from another man. He could not help
remembering that he had lately made some debts, but these had
seemed inevitable, and he had no intention now to do more than
keep house in a simple way. The furniture for which he owed
would not want renewing; nor even the stock of wine for a long while.
Many thoughts cheered him at that time--and justly. A man
conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty
hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their
way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints,
invisibly helping. At home, that same evening when he had been
chatting with Mr. Farebrother, he had his long legs stretched
on the sofa, his head thrown back, and his hands clasped behind
it according to his favorite ruminating attitude, while Rosamond
sat at the piano, and played one tune after another, of which her
husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he was!) that they
fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious sea-breezes.
There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then,
and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.
In his dark eyes and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity
which comes from the fulness of contemplative thought--the mind
not searching, but beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled
with what is behind it.
Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair
close to the sofa and opposite her husband's face.
"Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands
before her and putting on a little air of meekness.
"Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his
eyes and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving.
Rosamond's presence at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful
brought to the lake, and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull.
"What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing
her face nearer to his.
He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.
"I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am
three hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy."
"I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head. "We used to play
at guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon's, but not anatomists."
"I'll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get
to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night,
from graveyards and places of execution."
"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face,
"I am very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he
might find some less horrible way than that."
"No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take
much notice of her answer. "He could only get a complete skeleton
by snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows,
and burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the
dead of night."
"I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond,
half playfully, half anxiously, "else I shall have you getting up
in the night to go to St. Peter's churchyard. You know how angry
you told me the people were about Mrs. Goby. You have enemies
enough already."
"So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch
are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce
upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed
that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster.
But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got
the better of them."
"And what happened to him afterwards?" said Rosamond, with some interest.
"Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did
exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal
of his work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from
Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably."
There was a moment's pause before Rosamond said, "Do you know,
Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man."
"Nay, Rosy, don't say that," said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.
"That is like saying you wish you had married another man."
"Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily
have been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think
that you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession."
"The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!" said Lydgate,
with scorn. "It was like their impudence if they said anything
of the sort to you."
"Still," said Rosamond, "I do NOT think it is a nice profession,
dear." We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.
"It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond," said Lydgate,
gravely. "And to say that you love me without loving the medical man
in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach
but don't like its flavor. Don't say that again, dear, it pains me."
"Very well, Doctor Grave-face," said Rosy, dimpling, "I will declare
in future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits
of things in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your
dying miserably."
"No, no, not so bad as that," said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance
and petting her resignedly.
CHAPTER XLVI.
Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos aquello
que podremos.
Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.
--Spanish Proverb.
While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command,
felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch,
Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national
struggle for another kind of Reform.
By the time that Lord John Russell's measure was being debated
in the House of Commons, there was a new political animation
in Middlemarch, and a new definition of parties which might show
a decided change of balance if a new election came. And there
were some who already predicted this event, declaring that a
Reform Bill would never be carried by the actual Parliament.
This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on to Mr. Brooke as a reason
for congratulation that he had not yet tried his strength at the hustings.
"Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year," said Will.
"The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question
of Reform has set in. There is likely to be another election before long,
and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its head.
What we have to work at now is the `Pioneer' and political meetings."
"Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here,"
said Mr. Brooke. "Only I want to keep myself independent
about Reform, you know; I don't want to go too far. I want
to take up. Wilberforce's and Romilly's line, you know,
and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal Law--that kind of thing.
But of course I should support Grey."
"If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared
to take what the situation offers," said Will. "If everybody
pulled for his own bit against everybody else, the whole question
would go to tatters."
"Yes, yes, I agree with you--I quite take that point of view.
I should put it in that light. I should support Grey, you know.
But I don't want to change the balance of the constitution, and I don't
think Grey would."
"But that is what the country wants,"-said Will. "Else there would
be no meaning in political unions or any other movement that knows
what it's about. It wants to have a House of Commons which is not
weighted with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives
of the other interests. And as to contending for a reform short
of that, it is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has
already begun to thunder."
"That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it. Write that
down, now. We must begin to get documents about the feeling
of the country, as well as the machine-breaking and general distress."
"As to documents," said Will, "a two-inch card will hold plenty.
A few rows of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few
more will show the rate at which the political determination of the
people is growing."
"Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw. That is
an idea, now: write it out in the `Pioneer.' Put the figures and
deduce the misery, you know; and put the other figures and deduce--
and so on. You have a way of putting things. Burke, now:--when I
think of Burke, I can't help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough
to give you, Ladislaw. You'd never get elected, you know.
And we shall always want talent in the House: reform as we will,
we shall always want talent. That avalanche and the thunder, now,
was really a little like Burke. I want that sort of thing--not ideas,
you know, but a way of putting them."
"Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing," said Ladislaw, "if they
were always in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke
at hand."
Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison,
even from Mr. Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh
to be conscious of expressing one's self better than others and
never to have it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration
for the right thing, even a chance bray of applause falling
exactly in time is rather fortifying. Will felt that his literary
refinements were usually beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception;
nevertheless, he was beginning thoroughly to like the work
of which when he began he had said to himself rather languidly,
"Why not?"--and he studied the political situation with as ardent
an interest as he had ever given to poetic metres or mediaevalism.
It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was,
and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not
at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English
people or criticising English statesmanship: he would probably
have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas,
trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding
it too artificial, beginning to copy "bits" from old pictures,
leaving off because they were "no good," and observing that, after all,
self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would
have been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general.
Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take
the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality
of our action is not a matter of indifference.
Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone
worthy of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence
of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the
easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit.
In spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was
rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid
way and for practical purposes, and making the "Pioneer" celebrated
as far as Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing
was not worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was
relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange
and retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety
to his life.
"Shift the pegs a little," he said to himself, "and Mr. Brooke
might be in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is
the common order of things: the little waves make the large ones
and are of the same pattern. I am better here than in the sort
of life Mr. Casaubon would have trained me for, where the doing would
be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon.
I don't care for prestige or high pay."
As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying
the sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance
in his position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little
surprise wherever he went. That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed
when he had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea
in their accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his irritation had gone
out towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will
would lose caste. "I never had any caste," he would have said,
if that prophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood
would have come and gone like breath in his transparent skin.
But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like
its consequences.
Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the "Pioneer"
was tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon's view. Will's relationship in
that distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate's high connections,
serve as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumored that young
Ladislaw was Mr. Casaubon's nephew or cousin, it was also rumored
that "Mr. Casaubon would have nothing to do with him."
"Brooke has taken him up," said Mr. Hawley, "because that is what
no man in his senses could have expected. Casaubon has devilish
good reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on
a young fellow whose bringing-up he paid for. Just like Brooke--
one of those fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse."
And some oddities of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support
Mr. Keck, the editor of the "Trumpet," in asserting that Ladislaw,
if the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained,
which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his
speech when he got on to a platform--as he did whenever he had
an opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on
solid Englishmen generally. It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip
of a fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify
by the hour against institutions "which had existed when he was
in his cradle." And in a leading article of the "Trumpet," Keck
characterized Ladislaw's speech at a Reform meeting as "the violence
of an energumen--a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy
of fireworks the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty
of a knowledge which was of the cheapest and most recent description."
"That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck," said Dr. Sprague,
with sarcastic intentions. "But what is an energumen?"
"Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution," said Keck.
This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with
other habits which became matter of remark. He had a fondness,
half artistic, half affectionate, for little children--the smaller
they were on tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing,
the better Will liked to surprise and please them. We know
that in Rome he was given to ramble about among the poor people,
and the taste did not quit him in Middlemarch.
He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless
boys with their galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out,
little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him,
and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven. This troop he
had led out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time,
and since the cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear
day to gather sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside,
where he drew out a small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised
a Punch-and-Judy drama with some private home-made puppets.
Here was one oddity. Another was, that in houses where he
got friendly, he was given to stretch himself at full length on the
rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude
by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely
to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity.
But Will's articles and speeches naturally recommended him in
families which the new strictness of party division had marked
off on the side of Reform. He was invited to Mr. Bulstrode's;
but here he could not lie down on the rug, and Mrs. Bulstrode felt
that his mode of talking about Catholic countries, as if there
were any truce with Antichrist, illustrated the usual tendency
to unsoundness in intellectual men.
At Mr. Farebrother's, however, whom the irony of events had brought
on the same side with Bulstrode in the national movement, Will became
a favorite with the ladies; especially with little Miss Noble,
whom it was one of his oddities to escort when he met her in the
street with her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of
the town, and insisting on going with her to pay some call where she
distributed her small filchings from her own share of sweet things.
But the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug
was Lydgate's. The two men were not at all alike, but they
agreed none the worse. Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable,
taking little notice of megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw
did not usually throw away his susceptibilities on those who took
no notice of them. With Rosamond, on the other hand, he pouted and
was wayward--nay, often uncomplimentary, much to her inward surprise;
nevertheless he was gradually becoming necessary to her entertainment
by his companionship in her music, his varied talk, and his
freedom from the grave preoccupation which, with all her husband's
tenderness and indulgence, often made his manners unsatisfactory
to her, and confirmed her dislike of the medical profession.
Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the people
in the efficacy of "the bill," while nobody cared about the low state
of pathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions.
One evening in March, Rosamond in her cherry-colored dress with
swansdown trimming about the throat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate,
lately come in tired from his outdoor work, was seated sideways
on an easy-chair by the fire with one leg over the elbow, his brow
looking a little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columns of
the "Pioneer," while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed,
avoided looking at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself
had not a moody disposition. Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug
contemplating the curtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low
the notes of "When first I saw thy face;" while the house spaniel,
also stretched out with small choice of room, looked from between
his paws at the usurper of the rug with silent but strong objection.
Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper,
and said to Will, who had started up and gone to the table--
"It's no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw:
they only pick the more holes in his coat in the `Trumpet.'"
"No matter; those who read the `Pioneer' don't read the `Trumpet,'"
said Will, swallowing his tea and walking about. "Do you suppose the
public reads with a view to its own conversion? We should have a witches'
brewing with a vengeance then--`Mingle, mingle, mingle, mingle, You
that mingle may'--and nobody would know which side he was going to take."
"Farebrother says, he doesn't believe Brooke would get elected
if the opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him
would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment."
"There's no harm in trying. It's good to have resident members."
"Why?" said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient
word in a curt tone.
"They represent the local stupidity better," said Will,
laughing, and shaking his curls; "and they are kept
on their best behavior in the neighborhood. Brooke is
not a bad fellow, but he has done some good things on
his estate that he never would have done but for this Parliamentary bite."
"He's not fitted to be a public man," said Lydgate,
with contemptuous decision. "He would disappoint everybody
who counted on him: I can see that at the Hospital.
Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives him."
"That depends on how you fix your standard of public men," said Will.
"He's good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up
their mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man--
they only want a vote."
"That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw--crying up
a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men
who are a part of the very disease that wants curing."
"Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land
without knowing it," said Will, who could find reasons impromptu,
when he had not thought of a question beforehand.
"That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration
of hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow
it whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing
but to carry it. You go against rottenness, and there is nothing
more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can
be cured by a political hocus-pocus."
"That's very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere,
and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can
never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with.
Look what Stanley said the other day--that the House had been
tinkering long enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether
this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the
seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience
in public agents--fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust
to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom
that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text--
which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims;
not the virtuous upholder of the wrong."
"That general talk about a particular case is mere question
begging, Ladislaw. When I say, I go in for the dose that cures,
it doesn't follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout."
"I am not begging the question we are upon--whether we are
to try for nothing till we find immaculate men to work with.
Should you go on that plan? If there were one man who would carry
you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you
inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?"
"Oh, of course," said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move
which he had often used himself, "if one did not work with such men
as are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst
opinion in the town about Bulstrode were a true one, that would
not make it less true that he has the sense and the resolution
to do what I think ought to be done in the matters I know and care
most about; but that is the only ground on which I go with him,"
Lydgate added rather proudly, bearing in mind Mr. Farebrother's remarks.
"He is nothing to me otherwise; I would not cry him up on any
personal ground--I would keep clear of that."
"Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?" said Will
Ladislaw, nettled, and turning sharp round. For the first time he felt
offended with Lydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have
declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr. Brooke.
"Not at all," said Lydgate, "I was simply explaining my own action.
I meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose
motives and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure
of his personal independence, and that he is not working for his
private interest--either place or money."
"Then, why don't you extend your liberality to others?" said Will,
still nettled. "My personal independence is as important to me as yours
is to you. You have no more reason to imagine that I have personal
expectations from Brooke, than I have to imagine that you have personal
expectations from Bulstrode. Motives are points of honor, I suppose--
nobody can prove them. But as to money and place in the world."
Will ended, tossing back his head, "I think it is pretty clear
that I am not determined by considerations of that sort."
"You quite mistake me, Ladislaw," said Lydgate, surprised. He had
been preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind
to what Ladislaw might infer on his own account. "I beg your
pardon for unintentionally annoying you. In fact, I should rather
attribute to you a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests.
On the political question, I referred simply to intellectual bias."
"How very unpleasant you both are this evening!" said Rosamond.
"I cannot conceive why money should have been referred to.
Polities and Medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon.
You can both of you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each
other on those two topics."
Rosamond looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring
the bell, and then crossing to her work-table.
"Poor Rosy!" said Lydgate, putting out his hand to her as she
was passing him. "Disputation is not amusing to cherubs.
Have some music. Ask Ladislaw to sing with you."
When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, "What put you
out of temper this evening, Tertius?"
"Me? It was Ladislaw who was out of temper. He is like a bit
of tinder."
"But I mean, before that. Something had vexed you before you came in,
you looked cross. And that made you begin to dispute with Mr. Ladislaw.
You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius."
"Do I? Then I am a brute," said Lydgate, caressing her penitently.
"What vexed you?"
"Oh, outdoor things--business." It was really a letter insisting
on the payment of a bill for furniture. But Rosamond was expecting
to have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Was never true love loved in vain,
For truest love is highest gain.
No art can make it: it must spring
Where elements are fostering.
So in heaven's spot and hour
Springs the little native flower,
Downward root and upward eye,
Shapen by the earth and sky.
It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own
rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again,
under a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having
settled in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke.
Hesitations before he had taken the step had since turned into
susceptibility to every hint that he would have been wiser not
to take it; and hence came his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which
still kept him restless. Was he not making a fool of himself?--
and at a time when he was more than ever conscious of being something
better than a fool? And for what end?
Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities:
there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does
not think in consequence of his passions--does not find images rising
in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.
But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with a wide difference;
and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the roadway:"
he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own choosing,
such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have thought
rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness for
himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this.
It may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar
vision of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea
might become a widow, and that the interest he had established
in her mind might turn into acceptance of him as a husband--
had no tempting, arresting power over him; he did not live
in the scenery of such an event, and follow it out, as we all do
with that imagined "otherwise" which is our practical heaven.
It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain thoughts which
could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in the sense
that he had to justify himself from the charge of ingratitude--
the latent consciousness of many other barriers between himself
and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall
Mr. Casaubon. And there were yet other reasons. Will, we know,
could not bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal:
he was at once exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom
with which Dorothea looked at him and spoke to him, and there
was something so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was,
that he could not long for a change which must somehow change her.
Do we not shun the street version of a fine melody?--or shrink from
the news that the rarity--some bit of chiselling or engraving perhaps--
which we have dwelt on even with exultation in the trouble it has
cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommon thing,
and may be obtained as an every-day possession? Our good depends
on the quality and breadth of our emotion; and to Will, a creature
who cared little for what are called the solid things of life and
greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling
as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune.
What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an
additional delight for his imagination: he was conscious of a
generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher
love-poetry which had charmed his fancy. Dorothea, he said to himself,
was forever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher
than her footstool; and if he could have written out in immortal
syllables the effect she wrought within him, he might have boasted
after the example of old Drayton, that,--
"Queens hereafter might be glad to live
Upon the alms of her superfluous praise."
But this result was questionable. And what else could he do
for Dorothea? What was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible
to tell. He would not go out of her reach. He saw no creature among
her friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple
confidence as to him. She had once said that she would like him to stay;
and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her.
This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations.
But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards
his own resolve. He had often got irritated, as he was on this
particular night, by some outside demonstration that his public
exertions with Mr. Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic
as he would like them to be, and this was always associated with
the other ground of irritation--that notwithstanding his sacrifice
of dignity for Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her.
Whereupon, not being able to contradict these unpleasant facts,
he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, "I am a fool."
Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,
he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense
of what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that
the morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church
and see her. He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing
in the rational morning light, Objection said--
"That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon's prohibition
to visit Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased."
"Nonsense!" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous
for him to hinder me from going out to a pretty country church
on a spring morning. And Dorothea will be glad."
"It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy
him or to see Dorothea."
"It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go
to see Dorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be
always comfortable? Let him smart a little, as other people are
obliged to do. I have always liked the quaintness of the church and
congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew."
Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to
Lowick as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell
Common and skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under
the budding boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen,
and fresh green growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know
that it was Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church.
Will easily felt happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this
time the thought of vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing
to him, making his face break into its merry smile, pleasant to see
as the breaking of sunshine on the water--though the occasion was
not exemplary. But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves
that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind
causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites
in ourselves. Will went along with a small book under his arm and
a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little,
as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out.
He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his own,
sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising.
The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his
Sunday experience:--
"O me, O me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon!
A touch, a ray, that is not here,
A shadow that is gone:
"A dream of breath that might be near,
An inly-echoed tone,
The thought that one may think me dear,
The place where one was known,
"The tremor of a banished fear,
An ill that was not done--
O me, O me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon!"
Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward,
and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation
of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature,
abundant in uncertain promises.
The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into
the curate's pew before any one else arrived there. But he was still
left alone in it when the congregation had assembled. The curate's
pew was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel,
and Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he
looked round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation
from year to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews,
hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree
which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots.
Mr. Rigg's frog-face was something alien and unaccountable,
but notwithstanding this shock to the order of things, there were
still the Waules and the rural stock of the Powderells in their
pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had the same purple
round as ever, and the three generations of decent cottagers
came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters generally--
the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the black gown
and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all betters,
and the one most awful if offended. Even in 1831 Lowick was
at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor
of the Sunday sermon. The congregation had been used to seeing
Will at church in former days, and no one took much note of him
except the choir, who expected him to make a figure in the singing.
Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up
the short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same
she had worn in the Vatican. Her face being, from her entrance,
towards the chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will,
but there was no outward show of her feeling except a slight
paleness and a grave bow as she passed him. To his own surprise
Will felt suddenly uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after
they had bowed to each other. Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon
came out of the vestry, and, entering the pew, seated himself
in face of Dorothea, Will felt his paralysis more complete.
He could look nowhere except at the choir in the little gallery
over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps pained, and he had made
a wretched blunder. It was no longer amusing to vex Mr. Casaubon,
who had the advantage probably of watching him and seeing that he
dared not turn his head. Why had he not imagined this beforehand?--
but he could not expect that he should sit in that square
pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed
from Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk.
Still he called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would
be impossible for him to look towards Dorothea--nay, that she
might feel his coming an impertinence. There was no delivering
himself from his cage, however; and Will found his places and looked
at his book as if he had been a school-mistress, feeling that
the morning service had never been so immeasurably long before,
that he was utterly ridiculous, out of temper, and miserable.
This was what a man got by worshipping the sight of a woman!
The clerk observed with surprise that Mr. Ladislaw did not join in
the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he might have a cold.
Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change
in Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and
every one rose. It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters"
to go out first. With a sudden determination to break the spell
that was upon him, Will looked straight at Mr. Casaubon. But that
gentleman's eyes were on the button of the pew-door, which he opened,
allowing Dorothea to pass, and following her immediately without
raising his eyelids. Will's glance had caught Dorothea's as she
turned out of the pew, and again she bowed, but this time with a
look of agitation, as if she were repressing tears. Will walked
out after them, but they went on towards the little gate leading
out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never looking round.
It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk
back sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden
hopefully in the morning. The lights were all changed for him
both without and within.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Surely the golden hours are turning gray
And dance no more, and vainly strive to run:
I see their white locks streaming in the wind--
Each face is haggard as it looks at me,
Slow turning in the constant clasping round
Storm-driven.
Dorothea's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly
from the perception that Mr. Casaubon was determined not to speak
to his cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served
to mark more strongly the alienation between them. Will's coming
seemed to her quite excusable, nay, she thought it an amiable
movement in him towards a reconciliation which she herself had been
constantly wishing for. He had probably imagined, as she had,
that if Mr. Casaubon and he could meet easily, they would shake
hands and friendly intercourse might return. But now Dorothea felt
quite robbed of that hope. Will was banished further than ever,
for Mr. Casaubon must have been newly embittered by this thrusting
upon him of a presence which he refused to recognize.
He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some
difficulty in breathing, and had not preached in consequence;
she was not surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent
at luncheon, still less that he made no allusion to Will Ladislaw.
For her own part she felt that she could never again introduce
that subject. They usually spent apart the hours between luncheon
and dinner on a Sunday; Mr. Casaubon in the library dozing chiefly,
and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy
herself with some of her favorite books. There was a little
heap of them on the table in the bow-window--of various sorts,
from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon,
to her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year."
But to-day opened one after another, and could read none of them.
Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus--
Jewish antiquities--oh dear!--devout epigrams--the sacred chime
of favorite hymns--all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood:
even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them
under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the
sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them
the weariness of long future days in which she would still live
with them for her sole companions. It was another or rather a
fuller sort of companionship that poor Dorothea was hungering for,
and the hunger had grown from the perpetual effort demanded by her
married life. She was always trying to be what her husband wished,
and never able to repose on his delight in what she was. The thing
that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have, seemed to be
always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted and not
shared by her husband it might as well have been denied. About Will
Ladislaw there had been a difference between them from the first,
and it had ended, since Mr. Casaubon had so severely repulsed
Dorothea's strong feeling about his claims on the family property,
by her being convinced that she was in the right and her husband
in the wrong, but that she was helpless. This afternoon the
helplessness was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed
for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear.
She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the
sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live
more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus
of a ghastly labor producing what would never see the light.
Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw
receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship--
turning his face towards her as he went.
Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use. It was Sunday, and she
could not have the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby.
There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent,
and Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne
a headache.
After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud,
Mr. Casaubon proposed that they should go into the library, where,
he said, he had ordered a fire and lights. He seemed to have revived,
and to be thinking intently.
In the library Dorothea observed that he had newly arranged a row
of his note-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand
a well-known volume, which was a table of contents to all the others.
"You will oblige me, my dear," he said, seating himself, "if instead
of other reading this evening, you will go through this aloud,
pencil in hand, and at each point where I say `mark,' will make a
cross with your pencil. This is the first step in a sifting process
which I have long had in view, and as we go on I shall be able
to indicate to you certain principles of selection whereby you will,
I trust, have an intelligent participation in my purpose."
This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his
memorable interview with Lydgate, that Mr. Casaubon's original
reluctance to let Dorothea work with him had given place to the
contrary disposition, namely, to demand much interest and labor from her.
After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, "We will
take the volume up-stairs--and the pencil, if you please--
and in case of reading in the night, we can pursue this task.
It is not wearisome to you, I trust, Dorothea?"
"I prefer always reading what you like best to hear," said Dorothea,
who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself
in reading or anything else which left him as joyless as ever.
It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics
in Dorothea impressed those around her, that her husband,
with all his jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust
in the integrity of her promises, and her power of devoting herself
to her idea of the right and best. Of late he had begun to feel
that these qualities were a peculiar possession for himself,
and he wanted to engross them.
The reading in the night did come. Dorothea in her young weariness
had slept soon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light,
which seemed to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after
she had climbed a steep hill: she opened her eyes and saw her
husband wrapped in his warm gown seating himself in the arm-chair
near the fire-place where the embers were still glowing.
He had lit two candles, expecting that Dorothea would awake,
but not liking to rouse her by more direct means.
"Are you ill, Edward?" she said, rising immediately.
"I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture. I will sit here
for a time." She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up,
and said, "You would like me to read to you?"
"You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon,
with a shade more meekness than usual in his polite manner.
"I am wakeful: my mind is remarkably lucid."
"I fear that the excitement may be too great for you," said Dorothea,
remembering Lydgate's cautions.
"No, I am not conscious of undue excitement. Thought is easy."
Dorothea dared not insist, and she read for an hour or more on
the same plan as she had done in the evening, but getting over
the pages with more quickness. Mr. Casaubon's mind was more alert,
and he seemed to anticipate what was coming after a very slight
verbal indication, saying, "That will do--mark that"--or "Pass
on to the next head--I omit the second excursus on Crete."
Dorothea was amazed to think of the bird-like speed with which his
mind was surveying the ground where it had been creeping for years.
At last he said--
"Close the book now, my dear. We will resume our work to-morrow.
I have deferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed.
But you observe that the principle on which my selection is made,
is to give adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each
of the theses enumerated in my introduction, as at present sketched.
You have perceived that distinctly, Dorothea?"
"Yes," said Dorothea, rather tremulously. She felt sick at heart.
"And now I think that I can take some repose," said Mr. Casaubon.
He laid down again and begged her to put out the lights. When she
had lain down too, and there was a darkness only broken by a dull
glow on the hearth, he said--
"Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea."
"What is it?" said Dorothea, with dread in her mind.
"It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case
of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid
doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I
should desire."
Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading
her to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part
which might make a new yoke for her. She did not answer immediately.
"You refuse?" said Mr. Casaubon, with more edge in his tone.
"No, I do not yet refuse," said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need
of freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn--
I think it is not right--to make a promise when I am ignorant
what it will bind me to. Whatever affection prompted I would do
without promising."
"But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine;
you refuse."
"No, dear, no!" said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears.
"But may I wait and reflect a little while? I desire with my whole soul
to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge suddenly--
still less a pledge to do I know not what."
"You cannot then confide in the nature of my wishes?"
"Grant me till to-morrow," said Dorothea, beseechingly.
"Till to-morrow then," said Mr. Casaubon.
Soon she could hear that he was sleeping, but there was no more
sleep for her. While she constrained herself to lie still lest she
should disturb him, her mind was carrying on a conflict in which
imagination ranged its forces first on one side and then on the other.
She had no presentiment that the power which her husband wished
to establish over her future action had relation to anything else
than his work. But it was clear enough to her that he would expect
her to devote herself to sifting those mixed heaps of material,
which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still
more doubtful. The poor child had become altogether unbelieving
as to the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition
and the labor of her husband's life. It was not wonderful that,
in spite of her small instruction, her judgment in this matter was
truer than his: for she looked with unbiassed comparison and
healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked all his egoism.
And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which
she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies,
and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from
crushed ruins--sorting them as food for a theory which was already
withered in the birth like an elfin child. Doubtless a vigorous
error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing:
the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances,
the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born.
But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all
tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries:
it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those
etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until
it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was
a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity
of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate
notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a
plan for threading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often
had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable
riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the
fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier!
She could understand well enough now why her husband had come
to cling to her, as possibly the only hope left that his labors
would ever take a shape in which they could be given to the world.
At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even her aloof from
any close knowledge of what he was doing; but gradually the terrible
stringency of human need--the prospect of a too speedy death--
And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her
husband's past--nay, to his present hard struggle with a lot which had
grown out of that past: the lonely labor, the ambition breathing
hardly under the pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding,
and the heavier limbs; and now at last the sword visibly trembling
above him! And had she not wished to marry him that she might help
him in his life's labor?--But she had thought the work was to be
something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake.
Was it right, even to soothe his grief--would it be possible,
even if she promised--to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly?
And yet, could she deny him? Could she say, "I refuse to content
this pining hunger?" It would be refusing to do for him dead,
what she was almost sure to do for him living. If he lived
as Lydgate had said he might, for fifteen years or more, her life
would certainly be spent in helping him and obeying him.
Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the
living and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead.
While he lived, he could claim nothing that she would not still
be free to remonstrate against, and even to refuse. But--
the thought passed through her mind more than once, though she
could not believe in it--might he not mean to demand something
more from her than she had been able to imagine, since he wanted
her pledge to carry out his wishes without telling her exactly
what they were? No; his heart was bound up in his work only:
that was the end for which his failing life was to be eked out by hers.
And now, if she were to say, "No! if you die, I will put no finger
to your work"--it seemed as if she would be crushing that bruised heart.
For four hours Dorothea lay in this conflict, till she felt ill
and bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely. Helpless as a
child which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late
morning sleep, and when she waked Mr. Casaubon was already up.
Tantripp told her that he had read prayers, breakfasted, and was
in the library.
"I never saw you look so pale, madam," said Tantripp, a solid-figured
woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne.
"Was I ever high-colored, Tantripp?" said Dorothea, smiling faintly.
"Well, not to say high-colored, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose.
But always smelling those leather books, what can be expected?
Do rest a little this morning, madam. Let me say you are ill and not
able to go into that close library."
"Oh no, no! let me make haste," said Dorothea. "Mr. Casaubon wants
me particularly."
When she went down she felt sure that she should promise to fulfil
his wishes; but that would be later in the day--not yet.
As Dorothea entered the library, Mr. Casaubon turned round from
the table where he had been placing some books, and said--
"I was waiting for your appearance, my dear. I had hoped
to set to work at once this morning, but I find myself under
some indisposition, probably from too much excitement yesterday.
I am going now to take a turn in the shrubbery, since the air is milder."
"I am glad to hear that," said Dorothea. "Your mind, I feared,
was too active last night."
"I would fain have it set at rest on the point
I last spoke of, Dorothea. You can now, I hope, give me an answer."
"May I come out to you in the garden presently?" said Dorothea,
winning a little breathing space in that way.
"I shall be in the Yew-tree Walk for the next half-hour,"
said Mr. Casaubon, and then he left her.
Dorothea, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring
her some wraps. She had been sitting still for a few minutes,
but not in any renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt
that she was going to say "Yes" to her own doom: she was too weak,
too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow
on her husband, to do anything but submit completely. She sat still
and let Tantripp put on her bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was
unusual with her, for she liked to wait on herself.
"God bless you, madam!" said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement
of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt
unable to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.
This was too much for Dorothea's highly-strung feeling, and she
burst into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm. But soon she
checked herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door
into the shrubbery.
"I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for
your master," said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the
breakfast-room. She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities,
as we know; and she always declined to call Mr. Casaubon anything
but "your master," when speaking to the other servants.
Pratt laughed. He liked his master very well, but he liked
Tantripp better.
When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the
nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before,
though from a different cause. Then she had feared lest her effort
at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot
where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from
which she shrank. Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled
her to this--only her husband's nature and her own compassion,
only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage. She saw clearly
enough the whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not
smite the stricken soul that entreated hers. If that were weakness,
Dorothea was weak. But the half-hour was passing, and she must not
delay longer. When she entered the Yew-tree Walk she could not see
her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch
sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm
velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden.
It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house,
towards which the path diverged a little. Turning the angle,
she could see him seated on the bench, close to a stone table.
His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was bowed down on them,
the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening his face on
each side.
"He exhausted himself last night," Dorothea said to herself,
thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was
too damp a place to rest in. But then she remembered that of late
she had seen him take that attitude when she was reading to him,
as if he found it easier than any other; and that he would
sometimes speak, as well as listen, with his face down in that way.
She went into the summerhouse and said, "I am come, Edward; I am ready."
He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep.
She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready!"
Still he was motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned
down to him, took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to
his head, crying in a distressed tone--
"Wake, dear, wake! Listen to me. I am come to answer."
But Dorothea never gave her answer.
Later in the day, Lydgate was seated by her bedside, and she was
talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone
through her mind the night before. She knew him, and called him
by his name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain
everything to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain
everything to her husband.
"Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise.
Only, thinking about it was so dreadful--it has made me ill.
Not very ill. I shall soon be better. Go and tell him."
But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.
CHAPTER XLIX.
A task too strong for wizard spells
This squire had brought about;
'T is easy dropping stones in wells,
But who shall get them out?"
"I wish to God we could hinder Dorothea from knowing this," said Sir
James Chettam, with a little frown on his brow, and an expression
of intense disgust about his mouth.
He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Grange,
and speaking to Mr. Brooke. It was the day after Mr. Casaubon had
been buried, and Dorothea was not yet able to leave her room.
"That would be difficult, you know, Chettam, as she is an executrix,
and she likes to go into these things--property, land, that kind
of thing. She has her notions, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
sticking his eye-glasses on nervously, and exploring the edges of a
folded paper which he held in his hand; "and she would like to act--
depend upon it, as an executrix Dorothea would want to act. And she
was twenty-one last December, you know. I can hinder nothing."
Sir James looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then
lifting his eyes suddenly fixed them on Mr. Brooke, saying, "I will
tell you what we can do. Until Dorothea is well, all business must
be kept from her, and as soon as she is able to be moved she must
come to us. Being with Celia and the baby will be the best thing
in the world for her, and will pass away the time. And meanwhile you
must get rid of Ladislaw: you must send him out of the country."
Here Sir James's look of disgust returned in all its intensity.
Mr. Brooke put his hands behind him, walked to the window
and straightened his back with a little shake before he replied.
"That is easily said, Chettam, easily said, you know."
"My dear sir," persisted Sir James, restraining his indignation
within respectful forms, "it was you who brought him here, and you
who keep him here--I mean by the occupation you give him."
"Yes, but I can't dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons,
my dear Chettam. Ladislaw has been invaluable, most satisfactory.
I consider that I have done this part of the country a service by
bringing him--by bringing him, you know." Mr. Brooke ended with a nod,
turning round to give it.
"It's a pity this part of the country didn't do without him,
that's all I have to say about it. At any rate, as Dorothea's
brother-in-law, I feel warranted in objecting strongly to his being
kept here by any action on the part of her friends. You admit,
I hope, that I have a right to speak about what concerns the dignity
of my wife's sister?"
Sir James was getting warm.
"Of course, my dear Chettam, of course. But you and I have
different ideas--different--"
"Not about this action of Casaubon's, I should hope," interrupted
Sir James. "I say that he has most unfairly compromised Dorothea.
I say that there never was a meaner, more ungentlemanly action
than this--a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time
of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family--
a positive insult to Dorothea!"
"Well, you know, Casaubon was a little twisted about Ladislaw.
Ladislaw has told me the reason--dislike of the bent he took, you know--
Ladislaw didn't think much of Casaubon's notions, Thoth and Dagon--
that sort of thing: and I fancy that Casaubon didn't like the
independent position Ladislaw had taken up. I saw the letters
between them, you know. Poor Casaubon was a little buried in books--
he didn't know the world."
"It's all very well for Ladislaw to put that color on it,"
said Sir James. "But I believe Casaubon was only jealous of him
on Dorothea's account, and the world will suppose that she
gave him some reason; and that is what makes it so abominable--
coupling her name with this young fellow's."
"My dear Chettam, it won't lead to anything, you know,"
said Mr. Brooke, seating himself and sticking on his eye-
glass again. "It's all of a piece with Casaubon's oddity.
This paper, now, `Synoptical Tabulation' and so on, `for the use
of Mrs. Casaubon,' it was locked up in the desk with the will.
I suppose he meant Dorothea to publish his researches, eh? and
she'll do it, you know; she has gone into his studies uncommonly."
"My dear sir," said Sir James, impatiently, "that is neither
here nor there. The question is, whether you don't see with me
the propriety of sending young Ladislaw away?"
"Well, no, not the urgency of the thing. By-and-by, perhaps,
it may come round. As to gossip, you know, sending him away won't
hinder gossip. People say what they like to say, not what they
have chapter and verse for," said Mr Brooke, becoming acute about
the truths that lay on the side of his own wishes. "I might get rid
of Ladislaw up to a certain point--take away the `Pioneer' from him,
and that sort of thing; but I couldn't send him out of the country
if he didn't choose to go--didn't choose, you know."
Mr. Brooke, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing
the nature of last year's weather, and nodding at the end with his
usual amenity, was an exasperating form of obstinacy.
"Good God!" said Sir James, with as much passion as he ever showed,
"let us get him a post; let us spend money on him. If he could go
in the suite of some Colonial Governor! Grampus might take him--
and I could write to Fulke about it."
"But Ladislaw won't be shipped off like a head of cattle, my dear fellow;
Ladislaw has his ideas. It's my opinion that if he were to part
from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country.
With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are
few men who could come up to him as an agitator--an agitator,
you know."
"Agitator!" said Sir James, with bitter emphasis, feeling that
the syllables of this word properly repeated were a sufficient
exposure of its hatefulness.
"But be reasonable, Chettam. Dorothea, now. As you say,
she had better go to Celia as soon as possible. She can stay under
your roof, and in the mean time things may come round quietly.
Don't let us be firing off our guns in a hurry, you know.
Standish will keep our counsel, and the news will be old before
it's known. Twenty things may happen to carry off Ladislaw--
without my doing anything, you know."
"Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?"
"Decline, Chettam?--no--I didn't say decline. But I really don't
see what I could do. Ladislaw is a gentleman."
"I am glad to hear It!" said Sir James, his irritation making him
forget himself a little. "I am sure Casaubon was not."
"Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder
her from marrying again at all, you know."
"I don't know that," said Sir James. "It would have been
less indelicate."
"One of poor Casaubon's freaks! That attack upset his brain a little.
It all goes for nothing. She doesn't WANT to marry Ladislaw."
"But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she did.
I don't believe anything of the sort about Dorothea," said Sir James--
then frowningly, "but I suspect Ladislaw. I tell you frankly,
I suspect Ladislaw."
"I couldn't take any immediate action on that ground, Chettam. In fact,
if it were possible to pack him off--send him to Norfolk Island--
that sort of thing--it would look all the worse for Dorothea to
those who knew about it. It would seem as if we distrusted her--
distrusted her, you know."
That Mr. Brooke had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend
to soothe Sir James. He put out his hand to reach his hat,
implying that he did not mean to contend further, and said,
still with some heat--
"Well, I can only say that I think Dorothea was sacrificed once,
because her friends were too careless. I shall do what I can,
as her brother, to protect her now."
"You can't do better than get her to Freshitt as soon as possible,
Chettam. I approve that plan altogether," said Mr. Brooke, well pleased
that he had won the argument. It would have been highly inconvenient
to him to part with Ladislaw at that time, when a dissolution might
happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of the course by
which the interests of the country would be best served. Mr. Brooke
sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own return
to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the nation.
CHAPTER L.
"`This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.'
`Nay by my father's soule! that schal he nat,'
Sayde the Schipman, `here schal he not preche,
We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche.
We leven all in the gret God,' quod he.
He wolden sowen some diffcultee."
Canterbury Tales.
Dorothea had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had asked
any dangerous questions. Every morning now she sat with Celia in the
prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small conservatory--
Celia all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets,
watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so dubious
to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted
by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse.
Dorothea sat by in her widow's dress, with an expression which rather
provoked Celia, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite well,
but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while
he lived, and besides that had--well, well! Sir James, of course,
had told Celia everything, with a strong representation how important
it was that Dorothea should not know it sooner than was inevitable.
But Mr. Brooke had been right in predicting that Dorothea would not
long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew
the purport of her husband's will made at the time of their marriage,
and her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position,
was silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner
of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.
One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual
alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it
was now pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith,
Dorothea said--
"Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have
the living at Lowick. After Mr. Tucker had been provided for,
I never heard my husband say that he had any clergyman in his
mind as a successor to himself. I think I ought to have the
keys now and go to Lowick to examine all my husband's papers.
There may be something that would throw light on his wishes."
"No hurry, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, quietly. "By-and-by, you know,
you can go, if you like. But I cast my eyes over things in the
desks and drawers--there was nothing--nothing but deep subjects,
you know--besides the will. Everything can be done by-and-by. As
to the living, I have had an application for interest already--
I should say rather good. Mr. Tyke has been strongly recommended
to me--I had something to do with getting him an appointment before.
An apostolic man, I believe--the sort of thing that would suit you,
my dear."
"I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge
for myself, if Mr. Casaubon has not left any expression of his wishes.
He has perhaps made some addition to his will--there may be some
instructions for me," said Dorothea, who had all the while had this
conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband's work.
"Nothing about the rectory, my dear--nothing," said Mr. Brooke,
rising to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces:
"nor about his researches, you know. Nothing in the will."
Dorothea's lip quivered.
"Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear.
By-and-by, you know."
"I am quite well now, uncle; I wish to exert myself."
"Well, well, we shall see. But I must run away now--I have no end
of work now--it's a crisis--a political crisis, you know. And here
is Celia and her little man--you are an aunt, you know, now, and I
am a sort of grandfather," said Mr. Brooke, with placid hurry,
anxious to get away and tell Chettam that it would not be his
(Mr. Brooke's) fault if Dorothea insisted on looking into everything.
Dorothea sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room,
and cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.
"Look, Dodo! look at him! Did you ever see anything like that?"
said Celia, in her comfortable staccato.
"What, Kitty?" said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently.
"What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down,
as if he meant to make a face. Isn't it wonderful! He may have
his little thoughts. I wish nurse were here. Do look at him."
A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down
Dorothea's cheek as she looked up and tried to smile.
"Don't be sad, Dodo; kiss baby. What are you brooding over so?
I am sure you did everything, and a great deal too much. You should
be happy now."
"I wonder if Sir James would drive me to Lowick. I want to look
over everything--to see if there were any words written for me."
"You are not to go till Mr. Lydgate says you may go. And he
has not said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk
up and down the gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion
in your head as usual, Dodo--I can see that: it vexes me."
"Where am I wrong, Kitty?" said Dorothea, quite meekly. She was
almost ready now to think Celia wiser than herself, and was really
wondering with some fear what her wrong notion was. Celia felt
her advantage, and was determined to use it. None of them knew Dodo
as well as she did, or knew how to manage her. Since Celia's
baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity
and calm wisdom. It seemed clear that where there was a baby,
things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere
lack of that central poising force.
"I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo,"
said Celia. "You are wanting to find out if there is anything
uncomfortable for you to do now, only because Mr. Casaubon wished it.
As if you had not been uncomfortable enough before. And he doesn't
deserve it, and you will find that out. He has behaved very badly.
James is as angry with him as can be. And I had better tell you,
to prepare you."
"Celia," said Dorothea, entreatingly, "you distress me.
Tell me at once what you mean." It glanced through her mind that'
Mr. Casaubon had left the property away from her--which would not
be so very distressing.
"Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was
all to go away from you if you married--I mean--"
"That is of no consequence," said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously.
"But if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else," Celia went
on with persevering quietude. "Of course that is of no consequence
in one way--you never WOULD marry Mr. Ladislaw; but that only
makes it worse of Mr. Casaubon."
The blood rushed to Dorothea's face and neck painfully. But Celia
was administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact.
It was taking up notions that had done Dodo's health so much harm.
So she went on in her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on
baby's robes.
"James says so. He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman.
And there never was a better judge than James. It is as if
Mr. Casaubon wanted to make people believe that you would wish
to marry Mr. Ladislaw--which is ridiculous. Only James says it
was to hinder Mr. Ladislaw from wanting to marry you for your money--
just as if he ever would think of making you an offer. Mrs. Cadwallader
said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice! But I
must just go and look at baby," Celia added, without the least
change of tone, throwing a light shawl over her, and tripping away.
Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself
back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience
at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life
was taking on a new form that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in
which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs.
Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct,
her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them--
and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world
was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say
distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.
One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a
violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had
hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did.
Then again she was conscious of another change which also made
her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards
Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could,
under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the
sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light--
that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,--
and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions,
and questions not soon to be solved.
It seemed a long while--she did not know how long--before she heard
Celia saying, "That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now.
You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room."
"What I think, Dodo," Celia went on, observing nothing more than that
Dorothea was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive,
"is that Mr. Casaubon was spiteful. I never did like him, and James
never did. I think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful.
And now he has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not
require you to make yourself uncomfortable about him. If he has
been taken away, that is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful.
We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially
to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most
remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough,
really, when you took his cap off, to make--you didn't know what:--
in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.
At this crisis Lydgate was announced, and one of the first things he
said was, "I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Casaubon;
have you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse." Dorothea's hand
was of a marble coldness.
"She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers," said Celia.
"She ought not, ought she?"
Lydgate did not speak for a few moments. Then he said,
looking at Dorothea. "I hardly know. In my opinion Mrs. Casaubon
should do what would give her the most repose of mind.
That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act."
"Thank you;" said Dorothea, exerting herself, "I am sure that is wise.
There are so many things which I ought to attend to. Why should I sit
here idle?" Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with
her agitation, she added, abruptly, "You know every one in Middlemarch,
I think, Mr. Lydgate. I shall ask you to tell me a great deal.
I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away.
You know Mr. Tyke and all the--" But Dorothea's effort was too much
for her; she broke off and burst into sobs. Lydgate made her drink
a dose of sal volatile.
"Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes," he said to Sir James, whom he
asked to see before quitting the house. "She wants perfect freedom,
I think, more than any other prescription."
His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled
him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life.
He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and
conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel
herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she
had been released.
Lydgate's advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow
when he found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant
fact about the will. There was no help for it now--no reason
for any further delay in the execution of necessary business.
And the next day Sir James complied at once with her request
that he would drive her to Lowick.
"I have no wish to stay there at present," said Dorothea;
"I could hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia.
I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick
by looking at it from a distance. And I should like to be at the
Grange a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old
walks and among the people in the village."
"Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company,
and you are better out of the way of such doings," said Sir James,
who at that moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt
of young Ladislaw's. But no word passed between him and Dorothea
about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them
felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible.
Sir James was shy, even with men, about disagreeable subjects;
and the one thing that Dorothea would have chosen to say, if she
had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present
because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband's injustice.
Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what had passed between her
and her husband about Will Ladislaw's moral claim on the property:
it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her,
that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged
by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and not merely
by personal feelings more difficult to talk about. Also, it must
be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will's sake,
since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of
Mr. Casaubon's charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian
carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed
like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.
At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer--searched all her
husband's places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper
addressed especially to her, except that "Synoptical Tabulation,"
which was probably only the beginning of many intended directions
for her guidance. In carrying out this bequest of labor to Dorothea,
as in all else, Mr. Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in
the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it,
by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium:
distrust of Dorothea's competence to arrange what he had prepared
was subdued only by distrust of any other redactor. But he had come
at last to create a trust for himself out of Dorothea's nature:
she could do what she resolved to do: and he willingly imagined her
toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tomb with his name
upon it. (Not that Mr. Casaubon called the future volumes a tomb;
he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But the months gained
on him and left his plans belated: he had only had time to ask
for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp on
Dorothea's life.
The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the
depths of her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking
a toil which her judgment whispered was vain for all uses except
that consecration of faithfulness which is a supreme use. But now
her judgment, instead of being controlled by duteous devotion,
was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past union
there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion.
The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken
her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection
to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed,
whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded his scrupulous
care for his own character, and made him defeat his own pride by
shocking men of ordinary honor. As for the property which was the
sign of that broken tie, she would have been glad to be free from
it and have nothing more than her original fortune which had been
settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to ownership,
which she ought not to flinch from. About this property many
troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right
in thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?--
but was it not impossible now for her to do that act of justice?
Mr. Casaubon had taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her:
even with indignation against him in her heart, any act that seemed a
triumphant eluding of his purpose revolted her.
After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine,
she locked up again the desks and drawers--all empty of personal
words for her--empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely
brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation;
and she went back to Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard
demand and his last injurious assertion of his power, the silence
was unbroken.
Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties,
and one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind
her of. Lydgate's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living,
and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a
possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given
with an ill-satisfied conscience. "Instead of telling you anything
about Mr. Tyke," he said, "I should like to speak of another man--
Mr. Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph's. His living is a poor one,
and gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family.
His mother, aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him.
I believe he has never married because of them. I never heard
such good preaching as his--such plain, easy eloquence. He would
have done to preach at St. Paul's Cross after old Latimer. His talk
is just as good about all subjects: original, simple, clear.
I think him a remarkable fellow: he ought to have done more than he
has done."
"Why has he not done more?" said Dorothea, interested now in all
who had slipped below their own intention.
"That's a hard question," said Lydgate. "I find myself that it's
uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many
strings pulling at once. Farebrother often hints that he has got
into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a
poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.
He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters,
and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.
He has no money to spare--hardly enough to use; and that has led
him into card-playing--Middlemarch is a great place for whist.
He does play for money, and he wins a good deal. Of course that
takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack
about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole,
I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew. He has
neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more
correct outside."
"I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,"
said Dorothea; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off."
"I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted
into plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things."
"My uncle says that Mr. Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man,"
said Dorothea, meditatively. She was wishing it were possible to restore
the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother
with a strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.
"I don't pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic," said Lydgate.
"His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a
parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.
Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now,
is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut
the principal figure. I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at
the Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard
to make people uncomfortably--aware of him. Besides, an apostolic
man at Lowick!--he ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it
is needful to preach to the birds."
"True," said Dorothea. "It is hard to imagine what sort of notions
our farmers and laborers get from their teaching. I have been
looking into a volume of sermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would
be of no use at Lowick--I mean, about imputed righteousness and
the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have always been thinking
of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever
I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other,
I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most
good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.
It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear him preach."
"Do," said Lydgate; "I trust to the effect of that. He is very
much beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always
people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.
And that money-winning business is really a blot. You don't,
of course, see many Middlemarch people: but Mr. Ladislaw, who is
constantly seeing Mr. Brooke, is a great friend of Mr. Farebrother's
old ladies, and would be glad to sing the Vicar's praises.
One of the old ladies--Miss Noble, the aunt--is a wonderfully
quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Ladislaw gallants
her about sometimes. I met them one day in a back street:
you know Ladislaw's look--a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat;
and this little old maid reaching up to his arm--they looked
like a couple dropped out of a romantic comedy. But the best
evidence about Farebrother is to see him and hear him."
Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this
conversation occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate's
innocent introduction of Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual
with him in matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten
Rosamond's remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Casaubon.
At that moment he was only caring for what would recommend the
Farebrother family; and he had purposely given emphasis to the worst
that could be said about the Vicar, in order to forestall objections.
In the weeks. since Mr. Casaubon's death he had hardly seen
Ladislaw, and he had heard no rumor to warn him that Mr. Brooke's
confidential secretary was a dangerous subject with Mrs. Casaubon.
When he was gone, his picture of Ladislaw lingered in her mind
and disputed the ground with that question of the Lowick living.
What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her? Would he hear of
that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do?
And how would he feel when he heard it?--But she could see
as well as possible how he smiled down at the little old maid.
An Italian with white mice!--on the contrary, he was a creature
who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure
of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.
CHAPTER LI.
Party is Nature too, and you shall see
By force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
Genus holds species, both are great or small;
One genus highest, one not high at all;
Each species has its differentia too,
This is not That, and He was never You,
Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
Are like as one to one, or three to three.
No gossip about Mr. Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw:
the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament
and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled
with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises
were taken little notice of. The famous "dry election" was at hand,
in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low
flood-mark of drink. Will Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time;
and though Dorothea's widowhood was continually in his thought,
he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject,
that when Lydgate sought him out to tell him what had passed about
the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly--
"Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs. Casaubon,
and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.
I never go there. It is Tory ground, where I and the `Pioneer'
are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun."
The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by
observing that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before,
to come to the Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself,
seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible.
This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke's to Sir James
Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest
hint in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from
the Grange on Dorothea's account. Her friends, then, regarded him
with some suspicion? Their fears were quite superfluous: they were
very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself
forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favor of a rich woman.
Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself
and Dorothea--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw
her on the other side. He began, not without some inward rage,
to think of going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible
for him to show any further interest in Dorothea without subjecting
himself to disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind,
which others might try to poison.
"We are forever divided," said Will. "I might as well be at Rome;
she would be no farther from me." But what we call our despair
is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. There were
plenty of reasons why he should not go--public reasons why he
should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr. Brooke in the
lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there
was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on.
Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game;
and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow
had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing,
might help to turn a majority. To coach Mr. Brooke and keep him
steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual
Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power
of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Farebrother's
prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled,
neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power
on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus
for interference while there was a second reforming candidate
like Mr. Brooke, who might be returned at his own expense;
and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member,
Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke
the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this
occasion only. Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their
forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr. Brooke's success must
depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear,
or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes.
The latter means, of course, would be preferable.
This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to
Mr. Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured
by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick
afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory,
gave Will Ladislaw much trouble.
"You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr. Brooke;
"meeting people half-way--tempering your ideas--saying, `Well now,
there's something in that,' and so on. I agree with you that this
is a peculiar occasion--the country with a will of its own--
political unions--that sort of thing--but we sometimes cut with rather
too sharp a knife, Ladislaw. These ten-pound householders, now:
why ten? Draw the line somewhere--yes: but why just at ten?
That's a difficult question, now, if you go into it."
"Of course it is," said Will, impatiently. "But if you are to wait
till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as
a revolutionist, and then Middlemarch would not elect you, I fancy.
As for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."
Mr. Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still
appeared to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after
an interval the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself,
and he was again drawn into using them with much hopefulness.
At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even
supported him under large advances of money; for his powers
of convincing and persuading had not yet been, tested by anything
more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing other orators,
or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he came away
with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it
was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.
He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey,
a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power,
the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters
in the borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality
of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree
impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that
this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town;
for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all
parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last
of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books.
He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr. Brooke of Tipton;
but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions
had a great weight of grocery on their side. Mr. Mawmsey thinking
that Mr. Brooke, as not too "clever in his intellects," was the more
likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure,
had become confidential in his back parlor.
"As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the
small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably. "Will it support
Mrs. Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more?
I put the question FICTIOUSLY, knowing what must be the answer.
Very well, sir. I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am
to do when gentlemen come to me and say, `Do as you like, Mawmsey;
but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere:
when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country
by maintaining tradesmen of the right color.' Those very words have
been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting.
I don't mean by your honorable self, Mr. Brooke."
"No, no, no--that's narrow, you know. Until my butler complains
to me of your goods, Mr. Mawmsey," said Mr. Brooke, soothingly,
"until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices--that sort of thing--
I shall never order him to go elsewhere."
"Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr. Mawmsey,
feeling that politics were clearing up a little. "There would be some
pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner."
"Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put
yourself on our side. This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by--
a thoroughly popular measure--a sort of A, B, C, you know,
that must come first before the rest can follow. I quite agree
with you that you've got to look at the thing in a family light:
but public spirit, now. We're all one family, you know--
it's all one cupboard. Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may
help to make men's fortunes at the Cape--there's no knowing
what may be the effect of a vote," Mr. Brooke ended, with a sense
of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable.
But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that. When I give a vote
I must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects
on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully. Prices, I'll admit,
are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after
you've bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep--
I've never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke
to human pride. But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor,
I hope; they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote
for things staying as they are. Few men have less need to cry
for change than I have, personally speaking--that is, for self
and family. I am not one of those who have nothing to lose:
I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business,
and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which you
was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote,
while the article sent in was satisfactory."
After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife
that he had been rather too many for Brooke of Tipton, and that he
didn't mind so much now about going to the poll.
Mr. Brooke on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics
to Ladislaw, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself
that he had no concern with any canvassing except the purely
argumentative sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.
Mr. Brooke, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature
of the Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance
on the side of the Bill--which were remarkably similar to the means
of enlisting it on the side against the Bill. Will stopped his ears.
Occasionally Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our
eating and apparel, could hardly go on if our imaginations were
too active about processes. There were plenty of dirty-handed men
in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself
that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would be quite innocent.
But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing
to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.
He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches,
but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Brooke's mind, if it had
the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop,
run away in search of it, and not easily come back again. To collect
documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember
the contents of a document is another. No! the only way in which
Mr. Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments
at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took
up all the room in his brain. But here there was the difficulty
of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand.
Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way
when he was speaking.
However, Ladislaw's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test,
for before the day of nomination Mr. Brooke was to explain himself to
the worthy electors of Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart,
which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place,
commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.
It was a fine May morning, and everything seemed hopeful:
there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster's
committee and Brooke's, to which Mr. Bulstrode, Mr. Standish
as a Liberal lawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr. Plymdale and
Mr. Vincy, gave a solidity which almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley
and his associates who sat for Pinkerton at the Green Dragon.
Mr. Brooke, conscious of having weakened the blasts of the "Trumpet"
against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the last half year,
and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town,
felt his heart tolerably light under his buff-colored waistcoat.
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments
seem comfortably remote until the last.
"This looks well, eh?" said Mr. Brooke as the crowd gathered.
"I shall have a good audience, at any rate. I like this, now--
this kind of public made up of one's own neighbors, you know."
The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never
thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbor, and were not more attached
to him than if he had been sent in a box from London. But they
listened without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced
the candidate, one of them--a political personage from Brassing,
who came to tell Middlemarch its duty--spoke so fully, that it was
alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him.
Meanwhile the crowd became denser, and as the political personage
neared the end of his speech, Mr. Brooke felt a remarkable change
in his sensations while he still handled his eye-glass, trifled
with documents before him, and exchanged remarks with his committee,
as a man to whom the moment of summons was indifferent.
"I'll take another glass of sherry, Ladislaw," he said, with an
easy air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed
him the supposed fortifier. It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Brooke
was an abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry
quickly at no great interval from the first was a surprise
to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of
collecting them Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make
themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds!
whereas Mr. Brooke wished to serve his country by standing
for Parliament--which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds,
but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.
It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at
all anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have
it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope.
Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might
come after was alarming. "And questions, now," hinted the demon
just waking up in his stomach, "somebody may put questions
about the schedules.--Ladislaw," he continued, aloud, "just hand
me the memorandum of the schedules."
When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were
quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings,
and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that
Mr. Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him,
"This looks dangerous, by God! Hawley has got some deeper plan
than this." Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate
could look more amiable than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum
in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony,
and his right trifling with his eye-glass. The striking points
in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair,
and neutral physiognomy. He began with some confidence.
"Gentlemen--Electors of Middlemarch!"
This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it
seemed natural.
"I'm uncommonly glad to be here--I was never so proud and happy
in my life--never so happy, you know."
This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing;
for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away--even couplets
from Pope may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear
clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among
our ideas. Ladislaw, who stood at the window behind the speaker,
thought, "it's all up now. The only chance is that, since the best
thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once." Mr. Brooke,
meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his
qualifications--always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.
"I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends--you've known
me on the bench a good while--I've always gone a good deal into
public questions--machinery, now, and machine-breaking--you're many
of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately.
It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on--
trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples--that kind
of thing--since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over
the globe:--`Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere,
`from China to Peru,' as somebody says--Johnson, I think, `The Rambler,'
you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point--not as far
as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home--I saw it wouldn't do.
I've been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go--
and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now."
Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have
got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the
remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set
up by the enemy. At one and the same moment there had risen above
the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within
ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat,
eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there
had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo,
a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked
up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles
of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled
by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish mockery
in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo
was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision
of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook.
By the time it said, "The Baltic, now," the laugh which had been
running through the audience became a general shout, and but for
the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which
the entanglement of things had identified with "Brooke of Tipton,"
the laugh might have caught his committee. Mr. Bulstrode asked,
reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not
well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would
have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.
Mr. Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious
of anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself:
he had even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person
who had not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the
image of himself. Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly
captive than anxiety about what we have got to say. Mr. Brooke heard
the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance,
and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling,
stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him
from the Baltic.
"That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket,
with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know--but we never want
a precedent for the right thing--but there is Chatham, now; I can't
say I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt--
he was not a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know."
"Blast your ideas! we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice
from the crowd below.
Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed
Mr. Brooke, repeated, "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill."
The laugh was louder than ever, and for the first time Mr. Brooke
being himself silent, heard distinctly the mocking echo. But it
seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light was encouraging;
so he replied with amenity--
"There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we
meet for but to speak our minds--freedom of opinion, freedom of
the press, liberty--that kind of thing? The Bill, now--you shall have
the Bill"--here Mr. Brooke paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass
and take the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being
practical and coming to particulars. The invisible Punch followed:--
"You shall have the Bill, Mr. Brooke, per electioneering contest,
and a seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds,
seven shillings, and fourpence."
Mr. Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass
fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself,
which had come nearer. The next moment he saw it dolorously
bespattered with eggs. His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.
"Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth--all that is very
well"--here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Brooke's shoulder,
as the echo said, "All that is very well;" then came a hail of eggs,
chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original,
as if by chance. There was a stream of new men pushing among
the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater
hubbub because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.
No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar,
and Mr. Brooke, disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer.
The frustration would have been less exasperating if it had been
less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper
reporter "can aver that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs,"
or can respectfully bear witness to "the soles of that gentleman's boots
having been visible above the railing," has perhaps more consolations
attached to it.
Mr. Brooke re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly
as he could, "This is a little too bad, you know. I should have got
the ear of the people by-and-by--but they didn't give me time.
I should have gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know," he added,
glancing at Ladislaw. "However, things will come all right at
the nomination."
But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right;
on the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political
personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing
new devices.
"It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr. Standish, evasively. "I know
it as well as if he had been advertised. He's uncommonly good
at ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God! Hawley has
been having him to dinner lately: there's a fund of talent in Bowyer."
"Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I
would have invited him to dine," said poor Mr. Brooke, who had gone
through a great deal of inviting for the good of his country.
"There's not a more paltry fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer,"
said Ladislaw, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows
were always to turn the scale."
Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his
"principal," and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed
resolve to throw up the "Pioneer" and Mr. Brooke together.
Why should he stay? If the impassable gulf between himself and
Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going
away and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying
here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of
Brooke's. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do--
in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking,
would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and
more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would
not seem to be asking Dorothea to step down to him. Five years:--
if he could only be sure that she cared for him more than for others;
if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he could
tell his love without lowering himself--then he could go away easily,
and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough
in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame
everything else which is delightful. He could speak and he could write;
he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take
the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardor.
Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of the crowd,
and feel that he had won that eminence well? Without doubt he would
leave Middlemarch, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity
by "eating his dinners."
But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between
him and Dorothea. He could not be satisfied until she knew why,
even if he were the man she would choose to marry, he would not
marry her. Hence he must keep his post and bear with Mr. Brooke
a little longer.
But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Brooke had
anticipated him in the wish to break up their connection.
Deputations without and voices within had concurred in inducing
that philanthropist to take a stronger measure than usual for the
good of mankind; namely, to withdraw in favor of another candidate,
to whom he left the advantages of his canvassing machinery.
He himself called this a strong measure, but observed that
his health was less capable of sustaining excitement than he had imagined.
"I have felt uneasy about the chest--it won't do to carry that too far,"
he said to Ladislaw in explaining the affair. "I must pull up.
Poor Casaubon was a warning, you know. I've made some heavy advances,
but I've dug a channel. It's rather coarse work--this electioneering,
eh, Ladislaw? dare say you are tired of it. However, we have dug
a channel with the `Pioneer'--put things in a track, and so on.
A more ordinary man than you might carry it on now--more ordinary,
you know."
"Do you wish me to give it up?" said Will, the quick color coming
in his face, as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn
of three steps with his hands in his pockets. "I am ready to do
so whenever you wish it."
"As to wishing, my dear Ladislaw, I have the highest opinion of
your powers, you know. But about the `Pioneer,' I have been consulting
a little with some of the men on our side, and they are inclined to take
it into their hands--indemnify me to a certain extent--carry it on,
in fact. And under the circumstances, you might like to give up--
might find a better field. These people might not take that high view
of you which I have always taken, as an alter ego, a right hand--
though I always looked forward to your doing something else.
I think of having a run into France. But I'll write you any letters,
you know--to Althorpe and people of that kind. I've met Althorpe."
"I am exceedingly obliged to you," said Ladislaw, proudly. "Since you
are going to part with the `Pioneer,' I need not trouble you about
the steps I shall take. I may choose to continue here for the present."
After Mr. Brooke had left him Will said to himself, "The rest
of the family have been urging him to get rid of me, and he
doesn't care now about my going. I shall stay as long as I like.
I shall go of my own movements and not because they are afraid
of me."
CHAPTER LII.
"His heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay."
--WORDSWORTH.
On that June evening when Mr. Farebrother knew that he was to have
the Lowick living, there was joy in the old fashioned parlor,
and even the portraits of the great lawyers seemed to look on
with satisfaction. His mother left her tea and toast untouched,
but sat with her usual pretty primness, only showing her emotion by
that flush in the cheeks and brightness in the eyes which give an old
woman a touching momentary identity with her far-off youthful self,
and saying decisively--
"The greatest comfort, Camden, is that you have deserved it."
"When a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must
come after," said the son, brimful of pleasure, and not trying
to conceal it. The gladness in his face was of that active kind
which seems to have energy enough not only to flash outwardly,
but to light up busy vision within: one seemed to see thoughts,
as well as delight, in his glances.
"Now, aunt," he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Noble,
who was making tender little beaver-like noises, "There shall
be sugar-candy always on the table for you to steal and give
to the children, and you shall have a great many new stockings
to make presents of, and you shall darn your own more than ever!"
Miss Noble nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh,
conscious of having already dropped an additional lump of sugar
into her basket on the strength of the new preferment.
"As for you, Winny"--the Vicar went on--"I shall make no difficulty
about your marrying any Lowick bachelor--Mr. Solomon Featherstone,
for example, as soon as I find you are in love with him."
Miss Winifred, who had been looking at her brother all the while
and crying heartily, which was her way of rejoicing, smiled through
her tears and said, "You must set me the example, Cam: YOU
must marry now."
"With all my heart. But who is in love with me? I am a seedy
old fellow," said the Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away
and looking down at himself. "What do you say, mother?"
"You are a handsome man, Camden: though not so fine a figure
of a man as your father," said the old lady.
"I wish you would marry Miss Garth, brother," said Miss Winifred.
"She would make us so lively at Lowick."
"Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen,
like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would
have me," said the Vicar, not caring to specify.
"We don't want everybody," said Miss Winifred. "But YOU would
like Miss Garth, mother, shouldn't you?"
"My son's choice shall be mine," said Mrs. Farebrother,
with majestic discretion, "and a wife would be most welcome,
Camden. You will want your whist at home when we go to Lowick,
and Henrietta Noble never was a whist-player." (Mrs. Farebrother
always called her tiny old sister by that magnificent name.)
"I shall do without whist now, mother."
"Why so, Camden? In my time whist was thought an undeniable
amusement for a good churchman," said Mrs. Farebrother, innocent of
the meaning that whist had for her son, and speaking rather sharply,
as at some dangerous countenancing of new doctrine.
"I shall be too busy for whist; I shall have two parishes,"
said the Vicar, preferring not to discuss the virtues of that game.
He had already said to Dorothea, "I don't feel bound to give
up St. Botolph's. It is protest enough against the pluralism
they want to reform if I give somebody else most of the money.
The stronger thing is not to give up power, but to use it well."
"I have thought of that," said Dorothea. "So far as self is concerned,
I think it would be easier to give up power and money than to keep them.
It seems very unfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I
felt that I ought not to let it be used by some one else instead
of me."
"It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power,"
said Mr. Farebrother.
His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active
when the yoke of life ceases to gall them. He made no display
of humility on the subject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed
that his conduct had shown laches which others who did not get
benefices were free from.
"I used often to wish I had been something else than a clergyman,"
he said to Lydgate, "but perhaps it will be better to try and
make as good a clergyman out of myself as I can. That is the
well-beneficed point of view, you perceive, from which difficulties
are much simplified," he ended, smiling.
The Vicar did feel then as if his share of duties would be easy.
But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly--something like a heavy
friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg
within our gates.
Hardly a week later, Duty presented itself in his study under
the disguise of Fred Vincy, now returned from Omnibus College
with his bachelor's degree.
"I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr. Farebrother," said Fred,
whose fair open face was propitiating, "but you are the only
friend I can consult. I told you everything once before,
and you were so good that I can't help coming to you again."
"Sit down, Fred, I'm ready to hear and do anything I can,"
said the Vicar, who was busy packing some small objects for removal,
and went on with his work.
"I wanted to tell you--" Fred hesitated an instant and then went
on plungingly, "I might go into the Church now; and really,
look where I may, I can't see anything else to do. I don't
like it, but I know it's uncommonly hard on my father to say so,
after he has spent a good deal of money in educating me for it."
Fred paused again an instant, and then repeated, "and I can't see
anything else to do."
"I did talk to your father about it, Fred, but I made little way
with him. He said it was too late. But you have got over one
bridge now: what are your other difficulties?"
"Merely that I don't like it. I don't like divinity, and preaching,
and feeling obliged to look serious. I like riding across country,
and doing as other men do. I don't mean that I want to be a bad
fellow in any way; but I've no taste for the sort of thing
people expect of a clergyman. And yet what else am I to do?
My father can't spare me any capital, else I might go into farming.
And he has no room for me in his trade. And of course I can't
begin to study for law or physic now, when my father wants me
to earn something. It's all very well to say I'm wrong to go into
the Church; but those who say so might as well tell me to go into
the backwoods."
Fred's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance,
and Mr. Farebrother might have been inclined to smile
if his mind had not been too busy in imagining more than Fred told him.
"Have you any difficulties about doctrines--about the Articles?"
he said, trying hard to think of the question simply for Fred's sake.
"No; I suppose the Articles are right. I am not prepared with any
arguments to disprove them, and much better, cleverer fellows than I
am go in for them entirely. I think it would be rather ridiculous
in me to urge scruples of that sort, as if I were a judge,"
said Fred, quite simply.
"I suppose, then, it has occurred to you that you might be a fair
parish priest without being much of a divine?"
"Of course, if I am obliged to be a clergyman, I shall try and do
my duty, though I mayn't like it. Do you think any body ought
to blame me?"
"For going into the Church under the circumstances? That depends
on your conscience, Fred--how far you have counted the cost,
and seen what your position will require of you. I can only tell
you about myself, that I have always been too lax, and have been
uneasy in consequence."
"But there is another hindrance," said Fred, coloring. "I did
not tell you before, though perhaps I may have said things
that made you guess it. There is somebody I am very fond of:
I have loved her ever since we were children."
"Miss Garth, I suppose?" said the Vicar, examining some labels
very closely.
"Yes. I shouldn't mind anything if she would have me. And I know
I could be a good fellow then."
"And you think she returns the feeling?"
"She never will say so; and a good while ago she made me promise not
to speak to her about it again. And she has set her mind especially
against my being a clergyman; I know that. But I can't give her up.
I do think she cares about me. I saw Mrs. Garth last night, and she
said that Mary was staying at Lowick Rectory with Miss Farebrother."
"Yes, she is very kindly helping my sister. Do you wish to go there?"
"No, I want to ask a great favor of you. I am ashamed to bother
you in this way; but Mary might listen to what you said, if you
mentioned the subject to her--I mean about my going into the Church."
"That is rather a delicate task, my dear Fred. I shall have to
presuppose your attachment to her; and to enter on the subject as you
wish me to do, will be asking her to tell me whether she returns it."
"That is what I want her to tell you," said Fred, bluntly. "I don't
know what to do, unless I can get at her feeling."
"You mean that you would be guided by that as to your going into
the Church?"
"If Mary said she would never have me I might as well go wrong
in one way as another."
"That is nonsense, Fred. Men outlive their love, but they don't
outlive the consequences of their recklessness."
"Not my sort of love: I have never been without loving Mary.
If I had to give her up, it would be like beginning to live on
wooden legs."
"Will she not be hurt at my intrusion?"
"No, I feel sure she will not. She respects you more than any one,
and she would not put you off with fun as she does me. Of course I
could not have told any one else, or asked any one else to speak to her,
but you. There is no one else who could be such a friend to both
of us." Fred paused a moment, and then said, rather complainingly,
"And she ought to acknowledge that I have worked in order to pass.
She ought to believe that I would exert myself for her sake."
There was a moment's silence before Mr. Farebrother laid down his work,
and putting out his hand to Fred said--
"Very well, my boy. I will do what you wish."
That very day Mr. Farebrother went to Lowick parsonage on the nag
which he had just set up. "Decidedly I am an old stalk," he thought,
"the young growths are pushing me aside."
He found Mary in the garden gathering roses and sprinkling the petals
on a sheet. The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across
the grassy walks where Mary was moving without bonnet or parasol.
She did not observe Mr. Farebrother's approach along the grass,
and had just stooped down to lecture a small black-and-tan terrier,
which would persist in walking on the sheet and smelling at the
rose-leaves as Mary sprinkled them. She took his fore-paws in one hand,
and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled
his brows and looked embarrassed. "Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you,"
Mary was saying in a grave contralto. "This is not becoming in a
sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman."
"You are unmerciful to young gentlemen, Miss Garth," said the Vicar,
within two yards of her.
Mary started up and blushed. "It always answers to reason with Fly,"
she said, laughingly.
"But not with young gentlemen?"
"Oh, with some, I suppose; since some of them turn into excellent men."
"I am glad of that admission, because I want at this very moment
to interest you in a young gentleman."
"Not a silly one, I hope," said Mary, beginning to pluck
the roses again, and feeling her heart beat uncomfortably.
"No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point,
but rather affection and sincerity. However, wisdom lies
more in those two qualities than people are apt to imagine.
I hope you know by those marks what young gentleman I mean."
"Yes, I think I do," said Mary, bravely, her face getting more serious,
and her hands cold; "it must be Fred Vincy."
"He has asked me to consult you about his going into the Church.
I hope you will not think that I consented to take a liberty in
promising to do so."
"On the contrary, Mr. Farebrother," said Mary, giving up the roses,
and folding her arms, but unable to look up, "whenever you have
anything to say to me I feel honored."
"But before I enter on that question, let me just touch a point on
which your father took me into confidence; by the way, it was that
very evening on which I once before fulfilled a mission from Fred,
just after he had gone to college. Mr. Garth told me what happened
on the night of Featherstone's death--how you refused to burn the will;
and he said that you had some heart-prickings on that subject,
because you had been the innocent means of hindering Fred from
getting his ten thousand pounds. I have kept that in mind,
and I have heard something that may relieve you on that score--
may show you that no sin-offering is demanded from you there.".
Mr. Farebrother paused a moment and looked at Mary. He meant
to give Fred his full advantage, but it would be well, he thought,
to clear her mind of any superstitions, such as women sometimes follow
when they do a man the wrong of marrying him as an act of atonement.
Mary's cheeks had begun to burn a little, and she was mute.
"I mean, that your action made no real difference to Fred's lot.
I find that the first will would not have been legally good after the
burning of the last; it would not have stood if it had been disputed,
and you may be sure it would have been disputed. So, on that score,
you may feel your mind free."
"Thank you, Mr. Farebrother," said Mary, earnestly. "I am grateful
to you for remembering my feelings."
"Well, now I may go on. Fred, you know, has taken his degree.
He has worked his way so far, and now the question is, what is
he to do? That question is so difficult that he is inclined to
follow his father's wishes and enter the Church, though you know
better than I do that he was quite set against that formerly.
I have questioned him on the subject, and I confess I see no
insuperable objection to his being a clergyman, as things go.
He says that he could turn his mind to doing his best in that vocation,
on one condition. If that condition were fulfilled I would do my
utmost in helping Fred on. After a time--not, of course, at first--
he might be with me as my curate, and he would have so much to do
that his stipend would be nearly what I used to get as vicar.
But I repeat that there is a condition without which all this good
cannot come to pass. He has opened his heart to me, Miss Garth,
and asked me to plead for him. The condition lies entirely in
your feeling."
Mary looked so much moved, that he said after a moment, "Let us
walk a little;" and when they were walking he added, "To speak
quite plainly, Fred will not take any course which would lessen the
chance that you would consent to be his wife; but with that prospect,
he will try his best at anything you approve."
"I cannot possibly say that I will ever be his wife, Mr. Farebrother:
but I certainly never will be his wife if he becomes a clergyman.
What you say is most generous and kind; I don't mean for a moment
to correct your judgment. It is only that I have my girlish,
mocking way of looking at things," said Mary, with a returning
sparkle of playfulness in her answer which only made its modesty
more charming.
"He wishes me to report exactly what you think," said Mr. Farebrother.
"I could not love a man who is ridiculous," said Mary, not choosing to
go deeper. "Fred has sense and knowledge enough to make him respectable,
if he likes, in some good worldly business, but I can never imagine
him preaching and exhorting, and pronouncing blessings, and praying
by the sick, without feeling as if I were looking at a caricature.
His being a clergyman would be only for gentility's sake, and I think
there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility.
I used to think that of Mr. Crowse, with his empty face and neat
umbrella, and mincing little speeches. What right have such men
to represent Christianity--as if it were an institution for getting up
idiots genteelly--as if--" Mary checked herself. She had been carried
along as if she had been speaking to Fred instead of Mr. Farebrother.
"Young women are severe: they don't feel the stress of action
as men do, though perhaps I ought to make you an exception there.
But you don't put Fred Vincy on so low a level as that?"
"No, indeed, he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show
it as a clergyman. He would be a piece of professional affectation."
"Then the answer is quite decided. As a clergyman he could have
no hope?"
Mary shook her head.
"But if he braved all the difficulties of getting his bread
in some other way--will you give him the support of hope?
May he count on winning you?"
"I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already
said to him," Mary answered, with a slight resentment in her manner.
"I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done
something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it."
Mr. Farebrother was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they
turned and paused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy
walk, said, "I understand that you resist any attempt to fetter you,
but either your feeling for Fred Vincy excludes your entertaining
another attachment, or it does not: either he may count on your
remaining single until he shall have earned your hand, or he may in any
case be disappointed. Pardon me, Mary--you know I used to catechise
you under that name--but when the state of a woman's affections
touches the happiness of another life--of more lives than one--I think
it would be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open."
Mary in her turn was silent, wondering not at Mr. Farebrother's
manner but at his tone, which had a grave restrained emotion in it.
When the strange idea flashed across her that his words had reference
to himself, she was incredulous, and ashamed of entertaining it.
She had never thought that any man could love her except Fred,
who had espoused her with the umbrella ring, when she wore socks
and little strapped shoes; still less that she could be of any
importance to Mr. Farebrother, the cleverest man in her narrow circle.
She had only time to feel that all this was hazy and perhaps illusory;
but one thing was clear and determined--her answer.
"Since you think it my duty, Mr. Farebrother, I will tell you
that I have too strong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any
one else. I should never be quite happy if I thought he was
unhappy for the loss of me. It has taken such deep root in me--
my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much
if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot
imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker. I should like
better than anything to see him worthy of every one's respect.
But please tell him I will not promise to marry him till then:
I should shame and grieve my father and mother. He is free to choose
some one else."
"Then I have fulfilled my commission thoroughly,"
said Mr. Farebrother, putting out his hand to Mary,
"and I shall ride back to Middlemarch forthwith. With this
prospect before him, we shall get Fred into the right niche
somehow, and I hope I shall live to join your hands. God bless you!"
"Oh, please stay, and let me give you some tea," said Mary.
Her eyes filled with tears, for something indefinable, something like
the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr. Farebrother's manner,
made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw
her father's hands trembling in a moment of trouble.
"No, my dear, no. I must get back."
In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone
magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation
of whist, or even than the writing of penitential meditations.
CHAPTER LIII.
It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what
outsiders call inconsistency--putting a dead mechanism of "ifs"
and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden suckers whereby
the belief and the conduct are wrought into mutual sustainment.
Mr. Bulstrode, when he was hoping to acquire a new interest in Lowick,
had naturally had an especial wish that the new clergyman should be one
whom he thoroughly approved; and he believed it to be a chastisement
and admonition directed to his own shortcomings and those of the nation
at large, that just about the time when he came in possession of the
deeds which made him the proprietor of Stone Court, Mr. Farebrother
"read himself" into the quaint little church and preached his first
sermon to the congregation of farmers, laborers, and village artisans.
It was not that Mr. Bulstrode intended to frequent Lowick Church
or to reside at Stone Court for a good while to come: he had
bought the excellent farm and fine homestead simply as a retreat
which he might gradually enlarge as to the land and beautify as
to the dwelling, until it should be conducive to the divine glory
that he should enter on it as a residence, partially withdrawing
from his present exertions in the administration of business,
and throwing more conspicuously on the side of Gospel truth the weight
of local landed proprietorship, which Providence might increase by
unforeseen occasions of purchase. A strong leading in this direction
seemed to have been given in the surprising facility of getting
Stone Court, when every one had expected that Mr. Rigg Featherstone
would have clung to it as the Garden of Eden. That was what poor
old Peter himself had expected; having often, in imagination,
looked up through the sods above him, and, unobstructed by.
perspective, seen his frog-faced legatee enjoying the fine
old place to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors!
We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves
are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
The cool and judicious Joshua Rigg had not allowed his parent
to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than the chief good
in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own.
But as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford,
so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold.
He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good,
the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form
by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a moneychanger.
From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport,
he had looked through the windows of the moneychangers as other
boys look through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination
had wrought itself gradually into a deep special passion; he meant,
when he had property, to do many things, one of them being to marry
a genteel young person; but these were all accidents and joys that
imagination could dispense with. The one joy after which his soul
thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a much-frequented quay,
to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look
sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations,
while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side
of an iron lattice. The strength of that passion had been a power
enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it.
And when others were thinking that he had settled at Stone Court for life,
Joshua himself was thinking that the moment now was not far off when he
should settle on the North Quay with the best appointments in safes
and locks.
Enough. We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg's sale of his
land from Mr. Bulstrode's point of view, and he interpreted it
as a cheering dispensation conveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose
which he had for some time entertained without external encouragement;
he interpreted it thus, but not too confidently, offering up his
thanksgiving in guarded phraseology. His doubts did not arise from the
possible relations of the event to Joshua Rigg's destiny, which belonged
to the unmapped regions not taken under the providential government,
except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but they arose from
reflecting that this dispensation too might be a chastisement
for himself, as Mr. Farebrother's induction to the living clearly was.
This was not what Mr. Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of
deceiving him: it was what he said to himself--it was as genuinely
his mode of explaining events as any theory of yours may be,
if you happen to disagree with him. For the egoism which enters
into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more
our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
However, whether for sanction or for chastisement, Mr. Bulstrode,
hardly fifteen months after the death of Peter Featherstone,
had become the proprietor of Stone Court, and what Peter would
say "if he were worthy to know," had become an inexhaustible and
consolatory subject of conversation to his disappointed relatives.
The tables were now turned on that dear brother departed,
and to contemplate the frustration of his cunning by the superior
cunning of things in general was a cud of delight to Solomon.
Mrs. Waule had a melancholy triumph in the proof that it did
not answer to make false Featherstones and cut off the genuine;
and Sister Martha receiving the news in the Chalky Flats said,
"Dear, dear! then the Almighty could have been none so pleased
with the almshouses after all."
Affectionate Mrs. Bulstrode was particularly glad of the advantage
which her husband's health was likely to get from the purchase of
Stone Court. Few days passed without his riding thither and looking
over some part of the farm with the bailiff, and the evenings were
delicious in that quiet spot, when the new hay-ricks lately set up were
sending forth odors to mingle with the breath of the rich old garden.
One evening, while the sun was still above the horizon and burning
in golden lamps among the great walnut boughs, Mr. Bulstrode was
pausing on horseback outside the front gate waiting for Caleb Garth,
who had met him by appointment to give an opinion on a question
of stable drainage, and was now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard.
Mr. Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more
than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation.
He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit
in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain
when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory
and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may
be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning
is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching
proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention.
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery
like a diorama. At this moment Mr. Bulstrode felt as if the
sunshine were all one with that of far-off evenings when he was
a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury.
And he would willingly have had that service of exhortation
in prospect now. The texts were there still, and so was his own
facility in expounding them. His brief reverie was interrupted
by the return of Caleb Garth, who also was on horseback,
and was just shaking his bridle before starting, when he exclaimed--
"Bless my heart! what's this fellow in black coming along the lane?
He's like one of those men one sees about after the races."
Mr. Bulstrode turned his horse and looked along the lane, but made
no reply. The comer was our slight acquaintance Mr. Raffles,
whose appearance presented no other change than such as was due
to a suit of black and a crape hat-band. He was within three yards
of the horseman now, and they could see the flash of recognition
in his face as he whirled his stick upward, looking all the while
at Mr. Bulstrode, and at last exclaiming:--
"By Jove, Nick, it's you! I couldn't be mistaken, though the
five-and-twenty years have played old Boguy with us both! How are you,
eh? you didn't expect to see ME here. Come, shake us by the hand."
To say that Mr. Raffles' manner was rather excited would be only
one mode of saying that it was evening. Caleb Garth could see
that there was a moment of struggle and hesitation in Mr. Bulstrode,
but it ended in his putting out his hand coldly to Raffles and saying--
"I did not indeed expect to see you in this remote country place."
"Well, it belongs to a stepson of mine," said Raffles, adjusting himself
in a swaggering attitude. "I came to see him here before. I'm not
so surprised at seeing you, old fellow, because I picked up a letter--
what you may call a providential thing. It's uncommonly fortunate
I met you, though; for I don't care about seeing my stepson:
he's not affectionate, and his poor mother's gone now. To tell
the truth, I came out of love to you, Nick: I came to get your
address, for--look here!" Raffles drew a crumpled paper from his pocket.
Almost any other man than Caleb Garth might have been tempted to
linger on the spot for the sake of hearing all he could about a man
whose acquaintance with Bulstrode seemed to imply passages in the
banker's life so unlike anything that was known of him in Middlemarch
that they must have the nature of a secret to pique curiosity.
But Caleb was peculiar: certain human tendencies which are commonly
strong were almost absent from his mind; and one of these was
curiosity about personal affairs. Especially if there was anything
discreditable to be found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred
not to know it; and if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil
doings were discovered, he was more embarrassed than the culprit.
He now spurred his horse, and saying, "I wish you good evening,
Mr. Bulstrode; I must be getting home," set off at a trot.
"You didn't put your full address to this letter," Raffles continued.
"That was not like the first-rate man of business you used to be.
`The Shrubs,'--they may be anywhere: you live near at hand, eh?--
have cut the London concern altogether--perhaps turned country squire--
have a rural mansion to invite me to. Lord, how many years it is ago!
The old lady must have been dead a pretty long while--gone to glory
without the pain of knowing how poor her daughter was, eh? But, by Jove!
you're very pale and pasty, Nick. Come, if you're going home,
I'll walk by your side."
Mr. Bulstrode's usual paleness had in fact taken an almost deathly hue.
Five minutes before, the expanse of his life had been submerged in its
evening sunshine which shone backward to its remembered morning:
sin seemed to be a question of doctrine and inward penitence,
humiliation an exercise of the closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter
of private vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and conceptions
of the divine purposes. And now, as if by some hideous magic,
this loud red figure had risen before him in unmanageable solidity--
an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination
of chastisements. But Mr. Bulstrode's thought was busy, and he
was not a man to act or speak rashly.
"I was going home," he said, "but I can defer my ride a little.
And you can, if you please, rest here."
"Thank you," said Raffles, making a grimace. "I don't care now
about seeing my stepson. I'd rather go home with you."
"Your stepson, if Mr. Rigg Featherstone was he, is here no longer.
I am master here now."
Raffles opened wide eyes, and gave a long whistle of surprise,
before he said, "Well then, I've no objection. I've had enough walking
from the coach-road. I never was much of a walker, or rider either.
What I like is a smart vehicle and a spirited cob. I was always
a little heavy in the saddle. What a pleasant surprise it must be
to you to see me, old fellow!" he continued, as they turned towards
the house. "You don't say so; but you never took your luck heartily--
you were always thinking of improving the occasion--you'd such a gift
for improving your luck."
Mr. Raffles seemed greatly to enjoy his own wit, and Swung his leg
in a swaggering manner which was rather too much for his companion's
judicious patience.
"If I remember rightly," Mr. Bulstrode observed, with chill anger,
"our acquaintance many years ago had not the sort of intimacy
which you are now assuming, Mr. Raffles. Any services you desire
of me will be the more readily rendered if you will avoid a tone
of familiarity which did not lie in our former intercourse, and can
hardly be warranted by more than twenty years of separation."
"You don't like being called Nick? Why, I always called you
Nick in my heart, and though lost to sight, to memory dear.
By Jove! my feelings have ripened for you like fine old cognac.
I hope you've got some in the house now. Josh filled my flask well
the last time."
Mr. Bulstrode had not yet fully learned that even the desire
for cognac was not stronger in Raffles than the desire to torment,
and that a hint of annoyance always served him as a fresh cue.
But it was at least clear that further objection was useless,
and Mr. Bulstrode, in giving orders to the housekeeper for the
accommodation of the guest, had a resolute air of quietude.
There was the comfort of thinking that this housekeeper had been in
the service of Rigg also, and might accept the idea that Mr. Bulstrode
entertained Raffles merely as a friend of her former master.
When there was food and drink spread before his visitor in the
wainscoted parlor, and no witness in the room, Mr. Bulstrode said--
"Your habits and mine are so different, Mr. Raffles, that we can
hardly enjoy each other's society. The wisest plan for both of us
will therefore be to part as soon as possible. Since you say
that you wished to meet me, you probably considered that you had
some business to transact with me. But under the circumstances I
will invite you to remain here for the night, and I will myself
ride over here early to-morrow morning--before breakfast, in fact,
when I can receive any Communication you have to make to me."
"With all my heart," said Raffles; "this is a comfortable place--
a little dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for
a night, with this good liquor and the prospect of seeing you again
in the morning. You're a much better host than my stepson was;
but Josh owed me a bit of a grudge for marrying his mother;
and between you and me there was never anything but kindness."
Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality
and sneering in Raffles' manner was a good deal the effect
of drink, had determined to wait till he was quite sober before
he spent more words upon him. But he rode home with a terribly
lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging
any result that could be permanently counted on with this man.
It was inevitable that he should wish to get rid of John Raffles,
though his reappearance could not be regarded as lying outside
the divine plan. The spirit of evil might have sent him to threaten
Mr. Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument of good; but the threat
must have been permitted, and was a chastisement of a new kind.
It was an hour of anguish for him very different from the hours
in which his struggle had been securely private, and which had
ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were pardoned and his
services accepted. Those misdeeds even when committed--had they
not been half sanctified by the singleness of his desire to devote
himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divine scheme?
And was he after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a
rock of offence? For who would understand the work within him?
Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting disgrace
upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had espoused,
in one heap of obloquy?
In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's
mind clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references
to superhuman ends. But even while we are talking and meditating
about the earth's orbit and the solar system, what we feel and
adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.
And now within all the automatic succession of theoretic phrases--
distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever
when we are discussing abstract pain, was the forecast of disgrace
in the presence of his neighbors and of his own wife. For the pain,
as well as the public estimate of disgrace, depends on the amount
of previous profession. To men who only aim at escaping felony,
nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace. But Mr. Bulstrode
had aimed at being an eminent Christian.
It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again
reached Stone Court. The fine old place never looked more like a
delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were
in flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew,
were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all
around had a heart of peace within them. But everything was spoiled
for the owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited
the descent of Mr. Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.
It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscoted
parlor over their tea and toast, which was as much as Raffles cared
to take at that early hour. The difference between his morning
and evening self was not so great as his companion had imagined
that it might be; the delight in tormenting was perhaps even the
stronger because his spirits were rather less highly pitched.
Certainly his manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light.
"As I have little time to spare, Mr. Raffles," said the banker,
who could hardly do more than sip his tea and break his toast
without eating it, "I shall be obliged if you will mention at once
the ground on which you wished to meet with me. I presume that you
have a home elsewhere and will be glad to return to it."
"Why, if a man has got any heart, doesn't he want to see an
old friend, Nick?--I must call you Nick--we always did call you
young Nick when we knew you meant to marry the old widow. Some said
you had a handsome family likeness to old Nick, but that was your
mother's fault, calling you Nicholas. Aren't you glad to see me again?
I expected an invite to stay with you at some pretty place. My own
establishment is broken up now my wife's dead. I've no particular
attachment to any spot; I would as soon settle hereabout as anywhere."
"May I ask why you returned from America? I considered that the strong
wish you expressed to go there, when an adequate sum was furnished,
was tantamount to an engagement that you would remain there for life."
"Never knew that a wish to go to a place was the same thing as a
wish to stay. But I did stay a matter of ten years; it didn't
suit me to stay any longer. And I'm not going again, Nick."
Here Mr. Raffles winked slowly as he looked at Mr. Bulstrode.
"Do you wish to be settled in any business? What is your calling now?"
"Thank you, my calling is to enjoy myself as much as I can.
I don't care about working any more. If I did anything it would be
a little travelling in the tobacco line--or something of that sort,
which takes a man into agreeable company. But not without
an independence to fall back upon. That's what I want: I'm not
so strong as I was, Nick, though I've got more color than you.
I want an independence."
"That could be supplied to you, if you would engage to keep at
a distance," said Mr. Bulstrode, perhaps with a little too much
eagerness in his undertone.
"That must be as it suits my convenience," said Raffles coolly. "I see
no reason why I shouldn't make a few acquaintances hereabout. I'm not
ashamed of myself as company for anybody. I dropped my portmanteau at
the turnpike when I got down--change of linen--genuine--honor bright--
more than fronts and wristbands; and with this suit of mourning,
straps and everything, I should do you credit among the nobs here."
Mr. Raffles had pushed away hit chair and looked down at himself,
particularly at his straps His chief intention was to annoy Bulstrode,
but he really thought that his appearance now would produce
a good effect, and that he was not only handsome and witty,
but clad in a mourning style which implied solid connections.
"If you intend to rely on me in any way, Mr. Raffles," said Bulstrode,
after a moment's pause, "you will expect to meet my wishes."
"Ah, to be sure," said Raffles, with a mocking cordiality.
"Didn't I always do it? Lord, you made a pretty thing out of me,
and I got but little. I've often thought since, I might have done
better by telling the old woman that I'd found her daughter and
her grandchild: it would have suited my feelings better; I've got
a soft place in my heart. But you've buried the old lady by this time,
I suppose--it's all one to her now. And you've got your fortune
out of that profitable business which had such a blessing on it.
You've taken to being a nob, buying land, being a country bashaw.
Still in the Dissenting line, eh? Still godly? Or taken to the Church
as more genteel?"
This time Mr. Raffles' slow wink and slight protrusion of his
tongue was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude
that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery. Mr. Bulstrode
felt a shuddering nausea, and did not speak, but was considering
diligently whether he should not leave Raffles to do as he would,
and simply defy him as a slanderer. The man would soon show
himself disreputable enough to make people disbelieve him.
"But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about YOU,"
said discerning consciousness. And again: it seemed no wrong to keep
Raffles at a distance, but Mr. Bulstrode shrank from the direct
falsehood of denying true statements. It was one thing to look back on
forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax customs,
and another to enter deliberately on the necessity of falsehood.
But since Bulstrode did not speak, Raffles ran on, by way of using
time to the utmost.
"I've not had such fine luck as you, by Jove! Things went
confoundedly with me in New York; those Yankees are cool hands,
and a man of gentlemanly feelings has no chance with them. I married
when I came back--a nice woman in the tobacco trade--very fond of me--
but the trade was restricted, as we say. She had been settled
there a good many years by a friend; but there was a son too much
in the case. Josh and I never hit it off. However, I made the most
of the position, and I've always taken my glass in good company.
It's been all on the square with me; I'm as open as the day.
You won't take it ill of me that I didn't look you up before.
I've got a complaint that makes me a little dilatory. I thought you were
trading and praying away in London still, and didn't find you there.
But you see I was sent to you, Nick--perhaps for a blessing to both
of us."
Mr. Raffles ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect
more superior to religious cant. And if the cunning which calculates
on the meanest feelings in men could be, called intellect, he had
his share, for under the blurting rallying tone with which he
spoke to Bulstrode, there was an evident selection of statements,
as if they had been so many moves at chess. Meanwhile Bulstrode
had determined on his move, and he said, with gathered resolution--
"You will do well to reflect, Mr. Raffles, that it is possible for a
man to overreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage.
Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply
you with a regular annuity--in quarterly payments--so long as you
fulfil a promise to remain at a distance from this neighborhood.
It is in your power to choose. If you insist on remaining here,
even for a short time, you will get nothing from me. I shall decline
to know you."
"Ha, ha!" said Raffles, with an affected explosion, "that reminds
me of a droll dog of a thief who declined to know the constable."
"Your allusions are lost on me sir," said Bulstrode, with white heat;
"the law has no hold on me either through your agency or any other."
"You can't understand a joke, my good fellow. I only meant
that I should never decline to know you. But let us be serious.
Your quarterly payment won't quite suit me. I like my freedom."
Here Raffles rose and stalked once or twice up and down the room,
swinging his leg, and assuming an air of masterly meditation.
At last he stopped opposite Bulstrode, and said, "I'll tell
you what! Give us a couple of hundreds--come, that's modest--
and I'll go away--honor bright!--pick up my portmanteau and go away.
But I shall not give up my Liberty for a dirty annuity. I shall
come and go where I like. Perhaps it may suit me to stay away,
and correspond with a friend; perhaps not. Have you the money
with you?"
"No, I have one hundred," said Bulstrode, feeling the immediate riddance
too great a relief to be rejected on the ground of future uncertainties.
"I will forward you the other if you will mention an address."
"No, I'll wait here till you bring it," said Raffles. "I'll take
a stroll and have a snack, and you'll be back by that time."
Mr. Bulstrode's sickly body, shattered by the agitations he
had gone through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly
in the power of this loud invulnerable man. At that moment
he snatched at a temporary repose to be won on any terms.
He was rising to do what Raffles suggested, when the latter said,
lifting up his finger as if with a sudden recollection--
"I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't
tell you; I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman.
I didn't find her, but I found out her husband's name, and I made
a note of it. But hang it, I lost my pocketbook. However, if I
heard it, I should know it again. I've got my faculties as if I
was in my prime, but names wear out, by Jove! Sometimes I'm no
better than a confounded tax-paper before the names are filled in.
However, if I hear of her and her family, you shall know, Nick.
You'd like to do something for her, now she's your step-daughter."
"Doubtless," said Mr. Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his
light-gray eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you."
As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back,
and then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away--
virtually at his command. His lips first curled with a smile and then
opened with a short triumphant laugh.
"But what the deuce was the name?" he presently said, half aloud,
scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally. He had
not really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until
it occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Bulstrode.
"It began with L; it was almost all l's I fancy," he went on,
with a sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name.
But the hold was too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase;
for few men were more impatient of private occupation or more
in need of making themselves continually heard than Mr. Raffles.
He preferred using his time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff
and the housekeeper, from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to
know about Mr. Bulstrode's position in Middlemarch.
After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed relieving
with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone with these
resources in the wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his knee,
and exclaimed, "Ladislaw!" That action of memory which he had tried
to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly completed
itself without conscious effort--a common experience, agreeable as
a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value.
Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down the name,
not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of not
being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it. He was not going
to tell Bulstrode: there was no actual good in telling, and to
a mind like that of Mr. Raffles there is always probable good in a secret.
He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that day
he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the coach,
relieving Mr. Bulstrode's eyes of an ugly black spot on the landscape
at Stone Court, but not relieving him of the dread that the black spot
might reappear and become inseparable even from the vision of his hearth.
BOOK VI.
THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.
CHAPTER LIV.
"Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;
Per che si fa gentil eio ch'ella mira:
Ov'ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,
E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.
Sicche, bassando il viso, tutto smore,
E d'ogni suo difetto allor sospira:
Fuggon dinanzi a lei Superbia ed Ira:
Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore.
Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile
Nasee nel core a chi parlar la sente;
Ond' e beato chi prima la vide.
Quel ch'ella par quand' un poco sorride,
Non si pub dicer, ne tener a mente,
Si e nuovo miracolo gentile."
--DANTE: la Vita Nuova.
By that delightful morning when the hay-ricks at Stone Court were
scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr. Raffles had been
a guest worthy of finest incense, Dorothea had again taken up
her abode at Lowick Manor. After three months Freshitt had become
rather oppressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking
rapturously at Celia's baby would not do for many hours in the day,
and to remain in that momentous babe's presence with persistent
disregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a
childless sister. Dorothea would have been capable of carrying
baby joyfully for a mile if there had been need, and of loving
it the more tenderly for that labor; but to an aunt who does not
recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but
to admire, his behavior is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest
of watching him exhaustible. This possibility was quite hidden
from Celia, who felt that Dorothea's childless widowhood fell in quite
prettily with the birth of little Arthur (baby was named after Mr. Brooke).
"Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of her own--
children or anything!" said Celia to her husband. "And if she
had had a baby, it never could have been such a dear as Arthur.
Could it, James?
"Not if it had been like Casaubon," said Sir James, conscious of
some indirectness in his answer, and of holding a strictly private
opinion as to the perfections of his first-born.
"No! just imagine! Really it was a mercy," said Celia; "and I think
it is very nice for Dodo to be a widow. She can be just as fond
of our baby as if it were her own, and she can have as many notions
of her own as she likes."
"It is a pity she was not a queen," said the devout Sir James.
"But what should we have been then? We must have been something else,"
said Celia, objecting to so laborious a flight of imagination.
"I like her better as she is."
Hence, when she found that Dorothea was making arrangements for her final
departure to Lowick, Celia raised her eyebrows with disappointment,
and in her quiet unemphatic way shot a needle-arrow of sarcasm.
"What will you do at Lowick, Dodo? You say yourself there is
nothing to be done there: everybody is so clean and well off,
it makes you quite melancholy. And here you have been so happy
going all about Tipton with Mr. Garth into the worst backyards.
And now uncle is abroad, you and Mr. Garth can have it all your own way;
and I am sure James does everything you tell him."
"I shall often come here, and I shall see how baby grows all
the better," said Dorothea.
"But you will never see him washed," said Celia; "and that is quite
the best part of the day." She was almost pouting: it did seem
to her very hard in Dodo to go away from the baby when she might stay.
"Dear Kitty, I will come and stay all night on purpose,"
said Dorothea; "but I want to be alone now, and in my own home.
I wish to know the Farebrothers better, and to talk to Mr. Farebrother
about what there is to be done in Middlemarch."
Dorothea's native strength of will was no longer all converted into
resolute submission. She had a great yearning to be at Lowick,
and was simply determined to go, not feeling bound to tell all
her reasons. But every one around her disapproved. Sir James was
much pained, and offered that they should all migrate to Cheltenham
for a few months with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle:
at that period a man could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenham
were rejected.
The Dowager Lady Chettam, just returned from a visit to her daughter
in town, wished, at least, that Mrs. Vigo should be written to,
and invited to accept the office of companion to Mrs. Casaubon:
it was not credible that Dorothea as a young widow would think
of living alone in the house at Lowick. Mrs. Vigo had been reader
and secretary to royal personages, and in point of knowledge and
sentiments even Dorothea could have nothing to object to her.
Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, "You will certainly go mad in
that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got
to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same
names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons
and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad:
they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that.
I dare say you are a little bored here with our good dowager;
but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures
if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely.
Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself
ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn't
believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine."
"I never called everything by the same name that all the people
about me did," said Dorothea, stoutly.
"But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear,"
said Mrs. Cadwallader, "and that is a proof of sanity."
Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her.
"No," she said, "I still think that the greater part of the world
is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet
think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come
round from its opinion."
Mrs. Cadwallader said no more on that point to Dorothea, but to her
husband she remarked, "It will be well for her to marry again as soon
as it is proper, if one could get her among the right people.
Of course the Chettams would not wish it. But I see clearly
a husband is the best thing to keep her in order. If we were not
so poor I would invite Lord Triton. He will be marquis some day,
and there is no denying that she would make a good marchioness:
she looks handsomer than ever in her mourning."
"My dear Elinor, do let the poor woman alone. Such contrivances
are of no use," said the easy Rector.
"No use? How are matches made, except by bringing men and
women together? And it is a shame that her uncle should have run
away and shut up the Grange just now. There ought to be plenty
of eligible matches invited to Freshitt and the Grange. Lord Triton
is precisely the man: full of plans for making the people happy
in a soft-headed sort of way. That would just suit Mrs. Casaubon."
"Let Mrs. Casaubon choose for herself, Elinor."
"That is the nonsense you wise men talk! How can she choose
if she has no variety to choose from? A woman's choice usually
means taking the only man she can get. Mark my words, Humphrey.
If her friends don't exert themselves, there will be a worse
business than the Casaubon business yet."
"For heaven's sake don't touch on that topic, Elinor! It is a
very sore point with Sir James He would be deeply offended if you
entered on it to him unnecessarily."
"I have never entered on it," said Mrs Cadwallader, opening her hands.
"Celia told me all about the will at the beginning, without any
asking of mine."
"Yes, yes; but they want the thing hushed up, and I understand
that the young fellow is going out of the neighborhood."
Mrs. Cadwallader said nothing, but gave her husband three
significant nods, with a very sarcastic expression in her dark eyes.
Dorothea quietly persisted in spite of remonstrance and persuasion.
So by the end of June the shutters were all opened at Lowick Manor,
and the morning gazed calmly into the library, shining on the rows
of note-books as it shines on the weary waste planted with huge
stones, the mute memorial of a forgotten faith; and the evening
laden with roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoir
where Dorothea chose oftenest to sit. At first she walked into
every room, questioning the eighteen months of her married life,
and carrying on her thoughts as if they were a speech to be heard
by her husband. Then, she lingered in the library and could not
be at rest till she had carefully ranged all the note-books as she
imagined that he would wish to see them, in orderly sequence.
The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her life
with him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated
with him in indignant thought and told him that he was unjust.
One little act of hers may perhaps be smiled at as superstitious.
The Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Casaubon, she
carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope,
"I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit
my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief
in--Dorothea?" Then she deposited the paper in her own desk.
That silent colloquy was perhaps only the more earnest because underneath
and through it all there was always the deep longing which had really
determined her to come to Lowick. The longing was to see Will Ladislaw.
She did not know any good that could come of their meeting:
she was helpless; her hands had been tied from making up to him
for any unfairness in his lot. But her soul thirsted to see him.
How could it be otherwise? If a princess in the days of enchantment
had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds
come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her
with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying,
what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for
the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.
Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight
rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues
of longing and constancy. It was true that Dorothea wanted to know
the Farebrothers better, and especially to talk to the new rector,
but also true that remembering what Lydgate had told her about
Will Ladislaw and little Miss Noble, she counted on Will's coming
to Lowick to see the Farebrother family. The very first Sunday,
BEFORE she entered the church, she saw him as she had seen
him the last time she was there, alone in the clergyman's pew;
but WHEN she entered his figure was gone.
In the week-days when she went to see the ladies at the Rectory,
she listened in vain for some word that they might let fall about Will;
but it seemed to her that Mrs. Farebrother talked of every one else
in the neighborhood and out of it.
"Probably some of Mr. Farebrother's Middlemarch hearers may follow
him to Lowick sometimes. Do you not think so?" said Dorothea,
rather despising herself for having a secret motive in asking
the question.
"If they are wise they will, Mrs. Casaubon," said the old lady.
"I see that you set a right value on my son's preaching. His grandfather
on my side was an excellent clergyman, but his father was in the law:--
most exemplary and honest nevertheless, which is a reason for our
never being rich. They say Fortune is a woman and capricious.
But sometimes she is a good woman and gives to those who merit,
which has been the case with you, Mrs. Casaubon, who have given a
living to my son."
Mrs. Farebrother recurred to her knitting with a dignified satisfaction
in her neat little effort at oratory, but this was not what Dorothea
wanted to hear. Poor thing! she did not even know whether Will Ladislaw
was still at Middlemarch, and there was no one whom she dared to ask,
unless it were Lydgate. But just now she could not see Lydgate
without sending for him or going to seek him. Perhaps Will Ladislaw,
having heard of that strange ban against him left by Mr. Casaubon,
had felt it better that he and she should not meet again, and perhaps
she was wrong to wish for a meeting that others might find many good
reasons against. Still "I do wish it" came at the end of those
wise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath.
And the meeting did happen, but in a formal way quite unexpected by her.
One morning, about eleven, Dorothea was seated in her boudoir with a
map of the land attached to the manor and other papers before her,
which were to help her in making an exact statement for herself
of her income and affairs. She had not yet applied herself
to her work, but was seated with her hands folded on her lap,
looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields.
Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene
was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life,
full of motiveless ease--motiveless, if her own energy could not
seek out reasons for ardent action. The widow's cap of those times
made an oval frame for the face, and had a crown standing up;
the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape;
but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger,
with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.
Her reverie was broken by Tantripp, who came to say that Mr. Ladislaw
was below, and begged permission to see Madam if it were not too early.
"I will see him," said Dorothea, rising immediately. "Let him
be shown into the drawing-room."
The drawing-room was the most neutral room in the house to her--
the one least associated with the trials of her married life:
the damask matched the wood-work, which was all white and gold;
there were two tall mirrors and tables with nothing on them--
in brief, it was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one
place rather than in another. It was below the boudoir, and had
also a bow-window looking out on the avenue. But when Pratt showed
Will Ladislaw into it the window was open; and a winged visitor,
buzzing in and out now and then without minding the furniture,
made the room look less formal and uninhabited.
"Glad to see you here again, sir," said Pratt, lingering to adjust
a blind.
"I am only come to say good-by, Pratt," said Will, who wished even
the butler to know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs. Casaubon
now she was a rich widow.
"Very sorry to hear it, sir," said Pratt, retiring. Of course,
as a servant who was to be told nothing, he knew the fact of
which Ladislaw was still ignorant, and had drawn his inferences;
indeed, had not differed from his betrothed Tantripp when she said,
"Your master was as jealous as a fiend--and no reason.
Madam would look higher than Mr. Ladislaw, else I don't know her.
Mrs. Cadwallader's maid says there's a lord coming who is to marry
her when the mourning's over."
There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat
in his hand before Dorothea entered. The meeting was very different
from that first meeting in Rome when Will had been embarrassed
and Dorothea calm. This time he felt miserable but determined,
while she was in a state of agitation which could not be hidden.
Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting was
after all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her,
the deep blush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness.
Neither of them knew how it was, but neither of them spoke.
She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit down
near the window, she on one settee and he on another opposite.
Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like Dorothea
that the mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a change
in her manner of receiving him; and he knew of no other condition
which could have affected their previous relation to each other--
except that, as his imagination at once told him, her friends
might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicions
of him.
"I hope I have not presumed too much in calling," said Will;
"I could not bear to leave the neighborhood and begin a new life
without seeing you to say good-by."
"Presumed? Surely not. I should have thought it unkind if you
had not wished to see me," said Dorothea, her habit of speaking
with perfect genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty
and agitation. "Are you going away immediately?"
"Very soon, I think. I intend to go to town and eat my dinners
as a barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all
public business. There will be a great deal of political work
to be done by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it.
Other men have managed to win an honorable position for themselves
without family or money."
"And that will make it all the more honorable," said Dorothea,
ardently. "Besides, you have so many talents. I have heard from
my uncle how well you speak in public, so that every one is sorry
when you leave off, and how clearly you can explain things.
And you care that justice should be done to every one. I am so glad.
When we were in Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art,
and the things that adorn life for us who are well off.
But now I know you think about the rest of the world."
While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment,
and had become like her former self. She looked at Will with a
direct glance, full of delighted confidence.
"You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming
here again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?"
said Will, trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost
effort to get an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea.
She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had
turned her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes,
which seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will
would be away. This was not judicious behavior. But Dorothea never
thought of studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad
necessity which divided her from Will. Those first words of his
about his intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her:
he knew, she supposed, all about Mr. Casaubon's final conduct in
relation to him, and it had come to him with the same sort of shock
as to herself. He had never felt more than friendship for her--
had never had anything in his mind to justify what she felt to be
her husband's outrage on the feelings of both: and that friendship
he still felt. Something which may be called an inward silent
sob had gone on in Dorothea before she said with a pure voice,
just trembling in the last words as if only from its liquid flexibility--
"Yes, it must be right for you to do as you say. I shall be
very happy when I hear that you have made your value felt.
But you must have patience. It will perhaps be a long while."
Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling
down at her feet, when the "long while" came forth with its
gentle tremor. He used to say that the horrible hue and surface
of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.
He sat still, however, and only said--
"I shall never hear from you. And you will forget all about me."
"No," said Dorothea, "I shall never forget you. I have never
forgotten any one whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded,
and seems not likely to be so. And I have a great deal of space
for memory at Lowick, haven't I?" She smiled.
"Good God!" Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still
in his hand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly
turned and leaned his back against it. The blood had mounted to his
face and neck, and he looked almost angry. It had seemed to him
as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each
other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes
were yearning. But there was no help for it. It should never be true
of him that in this meeting to which he had come with bitter resolution
he had ended by a confession which might be interpreted into asking
for her fortune. Moreover, it was actually true that he was fearful
of the effect which such confessions might have on Dorothea herself.
She looked at him from that distance in some trouble, imagining that
there might hate been an offence in her words. But all the while
there was a current of thought in her about his probable want
of money, and the impossibility of her helping him. If her uncle
had been at home, something might have been done through him!
It was this preoccupation with the hardship of Will's wanting money,
while she had what ought to have been his share, which led her to say,
seeing that he remained silent and looked away from her--
"I wonder whether you would like to have that miniature
which hangs up-stairs--I mean that beautiful miniature OF
your grandmother. I think it is not right for me to keep it,
if you would wish to have it. It is wonderfully like you."
"You are very good," said Will, irritably. "No; I don't mind
about it. It is not very consoling to have one's own likeness.
It would be more consoling if others wanted to have it."
"I thought you would like to cherish her memory--I thought--
"Dorothea broke off an instant, her imagination suddenly warning
her away from Aunt Julia's history--"you would surely like to have
the miniature as a family memorial."
"Why should I have that, when I have nothing else! A man with only
a portmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head."
Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance;
it was a little too exasperating to have his grandmother's portrait
offered him at that moment. But to Dorothea's feeling his words
had a peculiar sting. She rose and said with a touch of indignation
as well as hauteur--
"You are much the happier of us two, Mr. Ladislaw, to have nothing."
Will was startled. Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed
like a dismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked
a little way towards her. Their eyes met, but with a strange
questioning gravity. Something was keeping their minds aloof,
and each was left to conjecture what was in the other. Will had
really never thought of himself as having a claim of inheritance
on the property which was held by Dorothea, and would have required
a narrative to make him understand her present feeling.
"I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now," he said.
"But poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we
most care for."
The words cut Dorothea to the heart, and made her relent.
She answered in a tone of sad fellowship.
"Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that--
I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands,
and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women
a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things.
I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,"
she ended, smiling playfully.
"I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it,"
said Will. He was standing two yards from her with his mind full
of contradictory desires and resolves--desiring some unmistakable
proof that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which
such a proof might bring him. "The thing one most longs for may
be surrounded with conditions that would be intolerable."
At this moment Pratt entered and said, "Sir James Chettam
is in the library, madam."
"Ask Sir James to come in here," said Dorothea, immediately. It was
as if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will.
Each of them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other,
while they awaited Sir James's entrance.
After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible
to Ladislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going
towards Dorothea, said--
"I must say good-by, Mrs. Casaubon; and probably for a long while."
Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-by cordially. The sense
that Sir James was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him,
roused her resolution and dignity-there was no touch of confusion
in her manner. And when Will had left the room, she looked with
such calm self-possession at Sir James, saying, "How is Celia?"
that he was obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him.
And what would be the use of behaving otherwise? Indeed, Sir James
shrank with so much dislike from the association even in thought
of Dorothea with Ladislaw as her possible lover, that he would himself
have wished to avoid an outward show of displeasure which would
have recognized the disagreeable possibility. If any one had asked
him why he shrank in that way, I am not sure that he would at first
have said anything fuller or more precise than "THAT Ladislaw!"--
though on reflection he might have urged that Mr. Casaubon's codicil,
barring Dorothea's marriage with Will, except under a penalty,
was enough to cast unfitness over any relation at all between them.
His aversion was all the stronger because he felt himself unable
to interfere.
But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering
at that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons
through which Will's pride became a repellent force, keeping him
asunder from Dorothea
CHAPTER LV.
Hath she her faults? I would you had them too.
They are the fruity must of soundest wine;
Or say, they are regenerating fire
Such as hath turned the dense black element
Into a crystal pathway for the sun.
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense
that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth
to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of
their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.
We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be
agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock,
and reflect that there are plenty more to come.
To Dorothea, still in that time of youth when the eyes with their long
full lashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied
as a freshly opened passion-flower, that morning's parting with Will
Ladislaw seemed to be the close of their personal relations.
He was going away into the distance of unknown years, and if ever he
came back he would be another man. The actual state of his mind--
his proud resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion
that he would play the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman--
lay quite out of her imagination, and she had interpreted all his
behavior easily enough by her supposition that Mr. Casaubon's codicil
seemed to him, as it did to her, a gross and cruel interdict on
any active friendship between them. Their young delight in speaking
to each other, and saying what no one else would care to hear,
was forever ended, and become a treasure of the past. For this
very reason she dwelt on it without inward check. That unique
happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent chamber she
might vent the passionate grief which she herself wondered at.
For the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and kept
it before her, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly
judged with the grandson whom her own heart and judgment defended.
Can any one who has rejoiced in woman's tenderness think it a reproach
to her that she took the little oval picture in her palm and made
a bed for it there, and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would
soothe the creatures who had suffered unjust condemnation?
She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly,
as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings--
that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image
was banished by the blameless rigor of irresistible day. She only
felt that there was something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot,
and her thoughts about the future were the more readily shapen
into resolve. Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming lives,
are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their own visions.
One day that she went to Freshitt to fulfil her promise of staying
all night and seeing baby washed, Mrs. Cadwallader came to dine,
the Rector being gone on a fishing excursion. It was a warm evening,
and even in the delightful drawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped
from the open window towards a lilied pool and well-planted mounds,
the heat was enough to make Celia in her white muslin and light curls
reflect with pity on what Dodo must feel in her black dress and
close cap. But this was not until some episodes with baby were over,
and had left her mind at leisure. She had seated herself and taken
up a fan for some time before she said, in her quiet guttural--
"Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap. I am sure your dress must make
you feel ill."
"I am so used to the cap--it has become a sort of shell,"
said Dorothea, smiling. "I feel rather bare and exposed when it
is off."
"I must see you without it; it makes us all warm," said Celia,
throwing down her fan, and going to Dorothea. It was a pretty picture
to see this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow's
cap from her more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair.
Just as the coils and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free,
Sir James entered the room. He looked at the released head, and said,
"Ah!" in a tone of satisfaction.
"It was I who did it, James," said Celia. "Dodo need not make
such a slavery of her mourning; she need not wear that cap any
more among her friends."
"My dear Celia," said Lady Chettam, "a widow must wear her
mourning at least a year."
"Not if she marries again before the end of it," said Mrs. Cadwallader,
who had some pleasure in startling her good friend the Dowager.
Sir James was annoyed, and leaned forward to play with Celia's
Maltese dog.
"That is very rare, I hope," said Lady Chettam, in a tone intended
to guard against such events. "No friend of ours ever committed
herself in that way except Mrs. Beevor, and it was very painful to
Lord Grinsell when she did so. Her first husband was objectionable,
which made it the greater wonder. And severely she was punished
for it. They said Captain Beevor dragged her about by the hair,
and held up loaded pistols at her."
"Oh, if she took the wrong man!" said Mrs. Cadwallader, who was in a
decidedly wicked mood. "Marriage is always bad then, first or second.
Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he has got no other.
I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first."
"My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you," said Lady Chettam.
"I am sure you would be the last woman to marry again prematurely,
if our dear Rector were taken away."
"Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy. It is
lawful to marry again, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos
instead of Christians. Of course if a woman accepts the wrong man,
she must take the consequences, and one who does it twice over
deserves her fate. But if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery--
the sooner the better."
"I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen,"
said Sir James, with a look of disgust. "Suppose we change it."
"Not on my account, Sir James," said Dorothea, determined not to lose
the opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references
to excellent matches. "If you are speaking on my behalf, I can
assure you that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal
to me than second marriage. It is no more to me than if you talked
of women going fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not,
I shall not follow them. Pray let Mrs. Cadwallader amuse herself
on that subject as much as on any other."
"My dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Lady Chettam, in her stateliest way,
"you do not, I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my
mentioning Mrs. Beevor. It was only an instance that occurred to me.
She was step-daughter to Lord Grinsell: he married Mrs. Teveroy
for his second wife. There could be no possible allusion to you."
"Oh no," said Celia. "Nobody chose the subject; it all came out
of Dodo's cap. Mrs. Cadwallader only said what was quite true.
A woman could not be married in a widow's cap, James."
"Hush, my dear!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "I will not offend again.
I will not even refer to Dido or Zenobia. Only what are we to
talk about? I, for my part, object to the discussion of Human Nature,
because that is the nature of rectors' wives."
Later in the evening, after Mrs. Cadwallader was gone, Celia said
privately to Dorothea, "Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made
you like yourself again in more ways than one. You spoke up just
as you used to do, when anything was said to displease you. But I
could hardly make out whether it was James that you thought wrong,
or Mrs. Cadwallader."
"Neither," said Dorothea. "James spoke out of delicacy to me, but he
was mistaken in supposing that I minded what Mrs. Cadwallader said.
I should only mind if there were a law obliging me to take any piece
of blood and beauty that she or anybody else recommended."
"But you know, Dodo, if you ever did marry, it would be all the better
to have blood and beauty," said Celia, reflecting that Mr. Casaubon
had not been richly endowed with those gifts, and that it would
be well to caution Dorothea in time.
"Don't be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life.
I shall never marry again," said Dorothea, touching her sister's chin,
and looking at her with indulgent affection. Celia was nursing
her baby, and Dorothea had come to say good-night to her.
"Really--quite?" said Celia. "Not anybody at all--if he were
very wonderful indeed?"
Dorothea shook her head slowly. "Not anybody at all. I have
delightful plans. I should like to take a great deal of land,
and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work,
and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the
people and be their friend. I am going to have great consultations
with Mr. Garth: he can tell me almost everything I want to know."
"Then you WILL be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo?" said Celia.
"Perhaps little Arthur will like plans when he grows up, and then he
can help you."
Sir James was informed that same night that Dorothea was really
quite set against marrying anybody at all, and was going to take
to "all sorts of plans," just like what she used to have.
Sir James made no remark. To his secret feeling there was something
repulsive in a woman's second marriage, and no match would prevent
him from feeling it a sort of desecration for Dorothea. He was
aware that the world would regard such a sentiment as preposterous,
especially in relation to a woman of one-and-twenty; the practice
of "the world" being to treat of a young widow's second marriage
as certain and probably near, and to smile with meaning if the widow
acts accordingly. But if Dorothea did choose to espouse her solitude,
he felt that the resolution would well become her.
CHAPTER LVI.
"How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armor is his honest thought,
And simple truth his only skill!
. . . . . . .
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself though not of lands;
And having nothing yet hath all."
--SIR HENRY WOTTON.
Dorothea's confidence in Caleb Garth's knowledge, which had begun
on her hearing that he approved of her cottages, had grown fast
during her stay at Freshitt, Sir James having induced her to take
rides over the two estates in company with himself and Caleb,
who quite returned her admiration, and told his wife that Mrs. Casaubon
had a head for business most uncommon in a woman. It must be
remembered that by "business" Caleb never meant money transactions,
but the skilful application of labor.
"Most uncommon!" repeated Caleb. "She said a thing I often used
to think myself when I was a lad:--`Mr. Garth, I should like
to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece
of land and built a great many good cottages, because the work
is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done,
men are the better for it.' Those were the very words: she sees
into things in that way."
"But womanly, I hope," said Mrs. Garth, half suspecting that
Mrs. Casaubon might not hold the true principle of subordination.
"Oh, you can't think!" said Caleb, shaking his head. "You would
like to hear her speak, Susan. She speaks in such plain words,
and a voice like music. Bless me! it reminds me of bits in the
`Messiah'--`and straightway there appeared a multitude of the
heavenly host, praising God and saying;' it has a tone with it
that satisfies your ear."
Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went
to hear an oratorio that came within his reach, returning from it
with a profound reverence for this mighty structure of tones,
which made him sit meditatively, looking on the floor and throwing
much unutterable language into his outstretched hands.
With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Dorothea
asked Mr. Garth to undertake any business connected with the three
farms and the numerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed,
his expectation of getting work for two was being fast fulfilled.
As he said, "Business breeds." And one form of business which was
beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways.
A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the
cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment;
and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system
entered into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course
of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him.
The submarine railway may have its difficulties; but the bed of the
sea is not divided among various landed proprietors with claims
for damages not only measurable but sentimental. In the hundred
to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the
Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held
the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders.
Women both old and young regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous
and dangerous, and argued against it by saying that nothing should
induce them to get into a railway carriage; while proprietors,
differing from each other in their arguments as much as Mr. Solomon
Featherstone differed from Lord Medlicote, were yet unanimous in the
opinion that in selling land, whether to the Enemy of mankind or to a
company obliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made
to pay a very high price to landowners for permission to injure mankind.
But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule,
who both occupied land of their own, took a long time to
arrive at this conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid
conception of what it would be to cut the Big Pasture in two,
and turn it into three-cornered bits, which would be "nohow;"
while accommodation-bridges and high payments were remote and incredible.
"The cows will all cast their calves, brother," said Mrs. Waule, in a
tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close;
and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal.
It's a poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away,
and the law say nothing to it. What's to hinder 'em from cutting
right and left if they begin? It's well known, _I_ can't fight."
"The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em
away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring,"
said Solomon. "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can understand.
It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their being
forced to take one way. Let 'em go cutting in another parish.
And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot
of ruffians to trample your crops. Where's a company's pocket?"
"Brother Peter, God forgive him, got money out of a company,"
said Mrs. Waule. "But that was for the manganese. That wasn't
for railways to blow you to pieces right and left."
"Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr. Solomon concluded,
lowering his voice in a cautious manner--"the more spokes we put
in their wheel, the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they
must come whether or not."
This reasoning of Mr. Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than
he imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course
of railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general
chill or catarrh of the solar system. But he set about acting on his
views in a thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion.
His side of Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the
houses of the laboring people were either lone cottages or were
collected in a hamlet called Frick, where a water-mill and some
stone-pits made a little centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.
In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were,
public opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that
grassy corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown,
holding rather that it was likely to be against the poor man,
and that suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it.
Even the rumor of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations
in Frick, there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous
grains to fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights
and Scales" who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the
part of the three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter.
And without distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed
on a footing with the bragging of pedlers, which was a hint for
distrust to every knowing person. The men of Frick were not ill-fed,
and were less given to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion;
less inclined to believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven,
than to regard heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in--
a disposition observable in the weather.
Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr. Solomon
Featherstone to work upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the
same order, with a suspicion of heaven and earth which was better
fed and more entirely at leisure. Solomon was overseer of the
roads at that time, and on his slow-paced cob often took his
rounds by Frick to look at the workmen getting the stones there,
pausing with a mysterious deliberation, which might have misled
you into supposing that he had some other reason for staying
than the mere want of impulse to move. After looking for a long
while at any work that was going on, he would raise his eyes a
little and look at the horizon; finally he would shake his bridle,
touch his horse with the whip, and get it to move slowly onward.
The hour-hand of a clock was quick by comparison with Mr. Solomon,
who had an agreeable sense that he could afford to be slow.
He was in the habit of pausing for a cautious, vaguely designing chat
with every hedger or ditcher on his way, and was especially willing
to listen even to news which he had heard before, feeling himself
at an advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them.
One day, however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a wagoner,
in which he himself contributed information. He wished to know whether
Hiram had seen fellows with staves and instruments spying about:
they called themselves railroad people, but there was no telling
what they were or what they meant to do. The least they pretended
was that they were going to cut Lowick Parish into sixes and sevens.
"Why, there'll be no stirrin' from one pla-ace to another,"
said Hiram, thinking of his wagon and horses.
"Not a bit," said Mr. Solomon. "And cutting up fine land such as
this parish! Let 'em go into Tipton, say I. But there's no knowing
what there is at the bottom of it. Traffic is what they put for'ard;
but it's to do harm to the land and the poor man in the long-run."
"Why, they're Lunnon chaps, I reckon," said Hiram, who had a dim
notion of London as a centre of hostility to the country.
"Ay, to be sure. And in some parts against Brassing, by what I've
heard say, the folks fell on 'em when they were spying, and broke
their peep-holes as they carry, and drove 'em away, so as they knew
better than come again."
"It war good foon, I'd be bound," said Hiram, whose fun was much
restricted by circumstances.
"Well, I wouldn't meddle with 'em myself," said Solomon.
"But some say this country's seen its best days, and the sign is,
as it's being overrun with these fellows trampling right and left,
and wanting to cut it up into railways; and all for the big traffic
to swallow up the little, so as there shan't be a team left on the land,
nor a whip to crack."
"I'll crack MY whip about their ear'n, afore they bring it
to that, though," said Hiram, while Mr. Solomon, shaking his bridle,
moved onward.
Nettle-seed needs no digging. The ruin of this countryside by
railroads was discussed, not only at the "Weights and Scales,"
but in the hay-field, where the muster of working hands gave
opportunities for talk such as were rarely had through the rural year.
One morning, not long after that interview between Mr. Farebrother
and Mary Garth, in which she confessed to him her feeling for
Fred Vincy, it happened that her father had some business which took
him to Yoddrell's farm in the direction of Frick: it was to measure
and value an outlying piece of land belonging to Lowick Manor,
which Caleb expected to dispose of advantageously for Dorothea (it
must be confessed that his bias was towards getting the best possible
terms from railroad companies). He put up his gig at Yoddrell's, and in
walking with his assistant and measuring-chain to the scene of his work,
he encountered the party of the company's agents, who were adjusting
their spirit-level. After a little chat he left them, observing that
by-and-by they would reach him again where he was going to measure.
It was one of those gray mornings after light rains, which become
delicious about twelve o'clock, when the clouds part a little,
and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the hedgerows.
The scent would have been sweeter to Fred Vincy, who was coming
along the lanes on horseback, if his mind had not been worried
by unsuccessful efforts to imagine what he was to do, with his
father on one side expecting him straightway to enter the Church,
with Mary on the other threatening to forsake him if he did enter it,
and with the working-day world showing no eager need whatever
of a young gentleman without capital and generally unskilled.
It was the harder to Fred's disposition because his father,
satisfied that he was no longer rebellious, was in good humor with him,
and had sent him on this pleasant ride to see after some greyhounds.
Even when he had fixed on what he should do, there would be the task
of telling his father. But it must be admitted that the fixing,
which had to come first, was the more difficult task:--what secular
avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could
not get him an "appointment") which was at once gentlemanly,
lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?
Riding along the lanes by Frick in this mood, and slackening
his pace while he reflected whether he should venture to go round
by Lowick Parsonage to call on Mary, he could see over the hedges
from one field to another. Suddenly a noise roused his attention,
and on the far side of a field on his left hand he could see six
or seven men in smock-frocks with hay-forks in their hands making
an offensive approach towards the four railway agents who were
facing them, while Caleb Garth and his assistant were hastening
across the field to join the threatened group. Fred, delayed a few
moments by having to find the gate, could not gallop up to the spot
before the party in smock-frocks, whose work of turning the hay
had not been too pressing after swallowing their mid-day beer,
were driving the men in coats before them with their hay-forks;
while Caleb Garth's assistant, a lad of seventeen, who had snatched
up the spirit-level at Caleb's order, had been knocked down and
seemed to be lying helpless. The coated men had the advantage
as runners, and Fred covered their retreat by getting in front
of the smock-frocks and charging them suddenly enough to throw
their chase into confusion. "What do you confounded fools mean?"
shouted Fred, pursuing the divided group in a zigzag, and cutting
right and left with his whip. "I'll swear to every one of you
before the magistrate. You've knocked the lad down and killed him,
for what I know. You'll every one of you be hanged at the next assizes,
if you don't mind," said Fred, who afterwards laughed heartily as he
remembered his own phrases.
The laborers had been driven through the gate-way into their
hay-field, and Fred had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford,
observing himself at a safe challenging distance, turned back
and shouted a defiance which he did not know to be Homeric.
"Yo're a coward, yo are. Yo git off your horse, young measter,
and I'll have a round wi' ye, I wull. Yo daredn't come on wi'out
your hoss an' whip. I'd soon knock the breath out on ye, I would."
"Wait a minute, and I'll come back presently, and have a round
with you all in turn, if you like," said Fred, who felt confidence
in his power of boxing with his dearly beloved brethren. But just
now he wanted to hasten back to Caleb and the prostrate youth.
The lad's ankle was strained, and he was in much pain from it,
but he was no further hurt, and Fred placed him on the horse that he
might ride to Yoddrell's and be taken care of there.
"Let them put the horse in the stable, and tell the surveyors they
can come back for their traps," said Fred. "The ground is clear now."
"No, no," said Caleb, "here's a breakage. They'll have to give up
for to-day, and it will be as well. Here, take the things before you
on the horse, Tom. They'll see you coming, and they'll turn back."
"I'm glad I happened to be here at the right moment, Mr. Garth,"
said Fred, as Tom rode away. "No knowing what might have happened
if the cavalry had not come up in time."
"Ay, ay, it was lucky," said Caleb, speaking rather absently,
and looking towards the spot where he had been at work at the moment
of interruption. "But--deuce take it--this is what comes of men
being fools--I'm hindered of my day's work. I can't get along
without somebody to help me with the measuring-chain. However!"
He was beginning to move towards the spot with a look of vexation,
as if he had forgotten Fred's presence, but suddenly he turned round
and said quickly, "What have you got to do to-day, young fellow?"
"Nothing, Mr. Garth. I'll help you with pleasure--can I?" said Fred,
with a sense that he should be courting Mary when he was helping
her father.
"Well, you mustn't mind stooping and getting hot."
"I don't mind anything. Only I want to go first and have a round
with that hulky fellow who turned to challenge me. It would
be a good lesson for him. I shall not be five minutes."
"Nonsense!" said Caleb, with his most peremptory intonation.
"I shall go and speak to the men myself. It's all ignorance.
Somebody has been telling them lies. The poor fools don't know
any better."
"I shall go with you, then," said Fred.
"No, no; stay where you are. I don't want your young blood.
I can take care of myself."
Caleb was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear
of hurting others and the fear of having to speechify. But he felt
it his duty at this moment to try and give a little harangue.
There was a striking mixture in him--which came from his having
always been a hard-working man himself--of rigorous notions about
workmen and practical indulgence towards them. To do a good day's
work and to do it well, he held to be part of their welfare, as it
was the chief part of his own happiness; but he had a strong sense
of fellowship with them. When he advanced towards the laborers
they had not gone to work again, but were standing in that form
of rural grouping which consists in each turning a shoulder towards
the other, at a distance of two or three yards. They looked
rather sulkily at Caleb, who walked quickly with one hand in his
pocket and the other thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat,
and had his every-day mild air when he paused among them.
"Why, my lads, how's this?" he began, taking as usual to brief phrases,
which seemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts lying
under them, like the abundant roots of a plant that just manages to
peep above the water. "How came you to make such a mistake as this?
Somebody has been telling you lies. You thought those men up there
wanted to do mischief."
"Aw!" was the answer, dropped at intervals by each according
to his degree of unreadiness.
"Nonsense! No such thing! They're looking out to see which way the
railroad is to take. Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad:
it will be made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting
against it, you'll get yourselves into trouble. The law gives
those men leave to come here on the land. The owner has nothing
to say against it, and if you meddle with them you'll have to do
with the constable and Justice Blakesley, and with the handcuffs
and Middlemarch jail. And you might be in for it now, if anybody
informed against you."
Caleb paused here, and perhaps the greatest orator could not have
chosen either his pause or his images better for the occasion.
"But come, you didn't mean any harm. Somebody told you the railroad
was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here
and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven.
But the railway's a good thing."
"Aw! good for the big folks to make money out on," said old
Timothy Cooper, who had stayed behind turning his hay while
the others had been gone on their spree;--"I'n seen lots o'
things turn up sin' I war a young un--the war an' the peace,
and the canells, an' the oald King George, an' the Regen', an'
the new King George, an' the new un as has got a new ne-ame--an'
it's been all aloike to the poor mon. What's the canells been t' him?
They'n brought him neyther me-at nor be-acon, nor wage to lay by,
if he didn't save it wi' clemmin' his own inside. Times ha'
got wusser for him sin' I war a young un. An' so it'll be wi'
the railroads. They'll on'y leave the poor mon furder behind.
But them are fools as meddle, and so I told the chaps here.
This is the big folks's world, this is. But yo're for the big folks,
Muster Garth, yo are."
Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times--
who had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage,
and was not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of
the feudal spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been
totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the Rights of Man.
Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark
times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in
possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard
process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your
neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.
Caleb had no cant at command, even if he could have chosen to use it;
and he had been accustomed to meet all such difficulties in no other
way than by doing his "business" faithfully. He answered--
"If you don't think well of me, Tim, never mind; that's neither here
nor there now. Things may be bad for the poor man--bad they are;
but I want the lads here not to do what will make things worse
for themselves. The cattle may have a heavy load, but it won't
help 'em to throw it over into the roadside pit, when it's partly
their own fodder."
"We war on'y for a bit o' foon," said Hiram, who was beginning
to see consequences. "That war all we war arter."
"Well, promise me not to meddle again, and I'll see that nobody
informs against you."
"I'n ne'er meddled, an' I'n no call to promise," said Timothy.
"No, but the rest. Come, I'm as hard at work as any of you
to-day, and I can't spare much time. Say you'll be quiet without
the constable."
"Aw, we wooant meddle--they may do as they loike for oos"--
were the forms in which Caleb got his pledges; and then he hastened
back to Fred, who had followed him, and watched him in the gateway.
They went to work, and Fred helped vigorously. His spirits had risen,
and he heartily enjoyed a good slip in the moist earth under
the hedgerow, which soiled his perfect summer trousers. Was it his
successful onset which had elated him, or the satisfaction of helping
Mary's father? Something more. The accidents of the morning had
helped his frustrated imagination to shape an employment for himself
which had several attractions. I am not sure that certain fibres
in Mr. Garth's mind had not resumed their old vibration towards
the very end which now revealed itself to Fred. For the effective
accident is but the touch of fire where there is oil and tow; and it
al ways appeared to Fred that the railway brought the needed touch.
But they went on in silence except when their business demanded speech.
At last, when they had finished and were walking away, Mr. Garth said--
"A young fellow needn't be a B. A. to do this sort of work, eh, Fred?"
"I wish I had taken to it before I had thought of being a B. A.,"
said Fred. He paused a moment, and then added, more hesitatingly,
"Do you think I am too old to learn your business, Mr. Garth?"
"My business is of many sorts, my boy," said Mr. Garth, smiling.
"A good deal of what I know can only come from experience:
you can't learn it off as you learn things out of a book.
But you are young enough to lay a foundation yet." Caleb pronounced
the last sentence emphatically, but paused in some uncertainty.
He had been under the impression lately that Fred had made up his mind
to enter the Church.
"You do think I could do some good at it, if I were to try?"
said Fred, more eagerly.
"That depends," said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering
his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying
something deeply religious. "You must be sure of two things:
you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge
of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not
be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you
to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work
and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this
and there's that--if I had this or that to do, I might make something
of it. No matter what a man is--I wouldn't give twopence for him"--
here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers--
"whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he
didn't do well what he undertook to do."
"I can never feel that I should do that in being a clergyman,"
said Fred, meaning to take a step in argument.
"Then let it alone, my boy," said Caleb, abruptly, "else you'll
never be easy. Or, if you ARE easy, you'll be a poor stick."
"That is very nearly what Mary thinks about it," said Fred, coloring.
"I think you must know what I feel for Mary, Mr. Garth: I hope
it does not displease you that I have always loved her better
than any one else, and that I shall never love any one as I love her."
The expression of Caleb's face was visibly softening while Fred spoke.
But he swung his head with a solemn slowness, and said--
"That makes things more serious, Fred, if you want to take Mary's
happiness into your keeping."
"I know that, Mr. Garth," said Fred, eagerly, "and I would do anything
for HER. She says she will never have me if I go into the Church;
and I shall be the most miserable devil in the world if I lose all hope
of Mary. Really, if I could get some other profession, business--
anything that I am at all fit for, I would work hard, I would deserve
your good opinion. I should like to have to do with outdoor things.
I know a good deal about land and cattle already. I used to believe,
you know--though you will think me rather foolish for it--that I
should have land of my own. I am sure knowledge of that sort would
come easily to me, especially if I could be under you in any way."
"Softly, my boy," said Caleb, having the image of "Susan" before
his eyes. "What have you said to your father about all this?"
"Nothing, yet; but I must tell him. I am only waiting to know
what I can do instead of entering the Church. I am very sorry to
disappoint him, but a man ought to be allowed to judge for himself
when he is four-and-twenty. How could I know when I was fifteen,
what it would be right for me to do now? My education was a mistake."
"But hearken to this, Fred," said Caleb. "Are you sure Mary
is fond of you, or would ever have you?"
"I asked Mr. Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden me--
I didn't know what else to do," said Fred, apologetically. "And he
says that I have every reason to hope, if I can put myself in an
honorable position--I mean, out of the Church I dare say you think it
unwarrantable in me, Mr. Garth, to be troubling you and obtruding my
own wishes about Mary, before I have done anything at all for myself.
Of course I have not the least claim--indeed, I have already a debt
to you which will never be discharged, even when I have been,
able to pay it in the shape of money."
"Yes, my boy, you have a claim," said Caleb, with much feeling
in his voice. "The young ones have always a claim on the old to
help them forward. I was young myself once and had to do without
much help; but help would have been welcome to me, if it had been
only for the fellow-feeling's sake. But I must consider. Come to
me to-morrow at the office, at nine o'clock. At the office, mind."
Mr. Garth would take no important step without consulting Susan,
but it must be confessed that before he reached home he had
taken his resolution. With regard to a large number of matters
about which other men are decided or obstinate, he was the most
easily manageable man in the world. He never knew what meat
he would choose, and if Susan had said that they ought to live
in a four-roomed cottage, in order to save, he would have said,
"Let us go," without inquiring into details. But where Caleb's
feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, he was a ruler;
and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every one
about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose,
he was absolute. He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on
some one else's behalf. On ninety-nine points Mrs. Garth decided,
but on the hundredth she was often aware that she would have to perform
the singularly difficult task of carrying out her own principle,
and to make herself subordinate.
"It is come round as I thought, Susan," said Caleb, when they were
seated alone in the evening. He had already narrated the adventure
which had brought about Fred's sharing in his work, but had kept
back the further result. "The children ARE fond of each other--
I mean, Fred and Mary."
Mrs. Garth laid her work on her knee, and fixed her penetrating
eyes anxiously on her husband.
"After we'd done our work, Fred poured it all out to me. He can't
bear to be a clergyman, and Mary says she won't have him if he is one;
and the lad would like to be under me and give his mind to business.
And I've determined to take him and make a man of him."
"Caleb!" said Mrs. Garth, in a deep contralto, expressive of
resigned astonishment.
"It's a fine thing to do," said Mr. Garth, settling himself
firmly against the back of his chair, and grasping the elbows.
"I shall have trouble with him, but I think I shall carry
it through. The lad loves Mary, and a true love for a good
woman is a great thing, Susan. It shapes many a rough fellow."
"Has Mary spoken to you on the subject?" said Mrs Garth, secretly a
little hurt that she had to be informed on it herself.
"Not a word. I asked her about Fred once; I gave her a bit of a warning.
But she assured me she would never marry an idle self-indulgent man--
nothing since. But it seems Fred set on Mr. Farebrother to talk to her,
because she had forbidden him to speak himself, and Mr. Farebrother
has found out that she is fond of Fred, but says he must not be
a clergyman. Fred's heart is fixed on Mary, that I can see:
it gives me a good opinion of the lad--and we always liked him, Susan."
"It is a pity for Mary, I think," said Mrs. Garth.
"Why--a pity?"
"Because, Caleb, she might have had a man who is worth twenty
Fred Vincy's."
"Ah?" said Caleb, with surprise.
"I firmly believe that Mr. Farebrother is attached to her,
and meant to make her an offer; but of course, now that Fred has
used him as an envoy, there is an end to that better prospect."
There was a severe precision in Mrs. Garth's utterance. She was vexed
and disappointed, but she was bent on abstaining from useless words.
Caleb was silent a few moments under a conflict of feelings.
He looked at the floor and moved his head and hands in accompaniment
to some inward argumentation. At last he said--
"That would have made me very proud and happy, Susan, and I
should have been glad for your sake. I've always felt that your
belongings have never been on a level with you. But you took me,
though I was a plain man."
"I took the best and cleverest man I had ever known," said Mrs. Garth,
convinced that SHE would never have loved any one who came
short of that mark.
"Well, perhaps others thought you might have done better.
But it would have been worse for me. And that is what touches me
close about Fred. The lad is good at bottom, and clever enough
to do, if he's put in the right way; and he loves and honors my
daughter beyond anything, and she has given him a sort of promise
according to what he turns out. I say, that young man's soul is
in my hand; and I'll do the best I can for him, so help me God!
It's my duty, Susan."
Mrs. Garth was not given to tears, but there was a large one
rolling down her face before her husband had finished. It came
from the pressure of various feelings, in which there was much
affection and some vexation. She wiped it away quickly, saying--
"Few men besides you would think it a duty to add to their anxieties
in that way, Caleb."
"That signifies nothing--what other men would think. I've got
a clear feeling inside me, and that I shall follow; and I hope
your heart will go with me, Susan, in making everything as light
as can be to Mary, poor child."
Caleb, leaning back in his chair, looked with anxious appeal towards
his wife. She rose and kissed him, saying, "God bless you, Caleb!
Our children have a good father."
But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression
of her words. She felt sure that her husband's conduct would
be misunderstood, and about Fred she was rational and unhopeful.
Which would turn out to have the more foresight in it--her rationality
or Caleb's ardent generosity?
When Fred went to the office the next morning, there was a test
to be gone through which he was not prepared for.
"Now Fred," said Caleb, "you will have some desk-work. I have always
done a good deal of writing myself, but I can't do without help,
and as I want you to understand the accounts and get the values into
your head, I mean to do without another clerk. So you must buckle to.
How are you at writing and arithmetic?"
Fred felt an awkward movement of the heart; he had not thought
of desk-work; but he was in a resolute mood, and not going to shrink.
"I'm not afraid of arithmetic, Mr. Garth: it always came easily to me.
I think you know my writing."
"Let us see," said Caleb, taking up a pen, examining it carefully
and handing it, well dipped, to Fred with a sheet of ruled paper.
"Copy me a line or two of that valuation, with the figures at
the end."
At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman
to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk.
Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any
viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the
consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes
had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line--
in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret
when you know beforehand what the writer means.
As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression,
but when Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl,
and rapped the paper passionately with the back of his hand.
Bad work like this dispelled all Caleb's mildness.
"The deuce!" he exclaimed, snarlingly. "To think that this is
a country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds,
and it turns you out this!" Then in a more pathetic tone,
pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe,
"The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can't put up with this!"
"What can I do, Mr. Garth?" said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low,
not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision
of himself as liable to be ranked with office clerks.
"Do? Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line.
What's the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?"
asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality
of the work. "Is there so little business in the world that you must
be sending puzzles over the country? But that's the way people are
brought up. I should lose no end of time with the letters some people
send me, if Susan did not make them out for me. It's disgusting."
Here Caleb tossed the paper from him.
Any stranger peeping into the office at that moment might have
wondered what was the drama between the indignant man of business,
and the fine-looking young fellow whose blond complexion was getting
rather patchy as he bit his lip with mortification. Fred was struggling
with many thoughts. Mr. Garth had been so kind and encouraging at
the beginning of their interview, that gratitude and hopefulness had
been at a high pitch, and the downfall was proportionate. He had not
thought of desk-work--in fact, like the majority of young gentlemen,
he wanted an occupation which should be free from disagreeables.
I cannot tell what might have been the consequences if he had not
distinctly promised himself that he would go to Lowick to see
Mary and tell her that he was engaged to work under her father.
He did not like to disappoint himself there.
"I am very sorry," were all the words that he could muster.
But Mr. Garth was already relenting.
"We must make the best of it, Fred," he began, with a return to his
usual quiet tone. "Every man can learn to write. I taught myself.
Go at it with a will, and sit up at night if the day-time isn't enough.
We'll be patient, my boy. Callum shall go on with the books
for a bit, while you are learning. But now I must be off,"
said Caleb, rising. "You must let your father know our agreement.
You'll save me Callum's salary, you know, when you can write;
and I can afford to give you eighty pounds for the first year,
and more after."
When Fred made the necessary disclosure to his parents, the relative
effect on the two was a surprise which entered very deeply into
his memory. He went straight from Mr. Garth's office to the warehouse,
rightly feeling that the most respectful way in which he could behave to
his father was to make the painful communication as gravely and formally
as possible. Moreover, the decision would be more certainly understood
to be final, if the interview took place in his father's gravest
hours, which were always those spent in his private room at the warehouse.
Fred entered on the subject directly, and declared briefly what he
had done and was resolved to do, expressing at the end his regret
that he should be the cause of disappointment to his father,
and taking the blame on his own deficiencies. The regret was genuine,
and inspired Fred with strong, simple words.
Mr. Vincy listened in profound surprise without uttering even
an exclamation, a silence which in his impatient temperament was a sign
of unusual emotion. He had not been in good spirits about trade
that morning, and the slight bitterness in his lips grew intense
as he listened. When Fred had ended, there was a pause of nearly
a minute, during which Mr. Vincy replaced a book in his desk and turned
the key emphatically. Then he looked at his son steadily, and said--
"So you've made up your mind at last, sir?"
"Yes, father."
"Very well; stick to it. I've no more to say. You've thrown away
your education, and gone down a step in life, when I had given you
the means of rising, that's all."
"I am very sorry that we differ, father. I think I can be quite
as much of a gentleman at the work I have undertaken, as if I had
been a curate. But I am grateful to you for wishing to do the best
for me."
"Very well; I have no more to say. I wash my hands of you.
I only hope, when you have a son of your own he will make a better
return for the pains you spend on him."
This was very cutting to Fred. His father was using that unfair
advantage possessed by us all when we are in a pathetic situation
and see our own past as if it were simply part of the pathos.
In reality, Mr. Vincy's wishes about his son had had a great deal
of pride, inconsiderateness, and egoistic folly in them. But still
the disappointed father held a strong lever; and Fred felt as if he
were being banished with a malediction.
"I hope you will not object to my remaining at home, sir?" he said,
after rising to go; "I shall have a sufficient salary to pay for
my board, as of course I should wish to do."
"Board be hanged!" said Mr. Vincy, recovering himself in his disgust
at the notion that Fred's keep would be missed at his table.
"Of course your mother will want you to stay. But I shall keep no
horse for you, you understand; and you will pay your own tailor.
You will do with a suit or two less, I fancy, when you have to pay
for 'em."
Fred lingered; there was still something to be said. At last it came.
"I hope you will shake hands with me, father, and forgive me
the vexation I have caused you."
Mr. Vincy from his chair threw a quick glance upward at his son,
who had advanced near to him, and then gave his hand, saying hurriedly,
"Yes, yes, let us say no more."
Fred went through much more narrative and explanation with his mother,
but she was inconsolable, having before her eyes what perhaps her husband
had never thought of, the certainty that Fred would marry Mary Garth,
that her life would henceforth be spoiled by a perpetual infusion
of Garths and their ways, and that her darling boy, with his beautiful
face and stylish air "beyond anybody else's son in Middlemarch,"
would be sure to get like that family in plainness of appearance
and carelessness about his clothes. To her it seemed that there
was a Garth conspiracy to get possession of the desirable Fred,
but she dared not enlarge on this opinion, because a slight hint
of it had made him "fly out" at her as he had never done before.
Her temper was too sweet for her to show any anger, but she felt
that her happiness had received a bruise, and for several days merely
to look at Fred made her cry a little as if he were the subject
of some baleful prophecy. Perhaps she was the slower to recover
her usual cheerfulness because Fred had warned her that she must
not reopen the sore question with his father, who had accepted
his decision and forgiven him. If her husband had been vehement
against Fred, she would have been urged into defence of her darling.
It was the end of the fourth day when Mr. Vincy said to her--
"Come, Lucy, my dear, don't be so down-hearted. You always have
spoiled the boy, and you must go on spoiling him."
"Nothing ever did cut me so before, Vincy," said the wife, her fair
throat and chin beginning to tremble again, "only his illness."
"Pooh, pooh, never mind! We must expect to have trouble with
our children. Don't make it worse by letting me see you out of spirits."
"Well, I won't," said Mrs. Vincy, roused by this appeal and
adjusting herself with a little shake as of a bird which lays
down its ruffled plumage.
"It won't do to begin making a fuss about one," said Mr. Vincy,
wishing to combine a little grumbling with domestic cheerfulness.
"There's Rosamond as well as Fred."
"Yes, poor thing. I'm sure I felt for her being disappointed
of her baby; but she got over it nicely."
"Baby, pooh! I can see Lydgate is making a mess of his practice,
and getting into debt too, by what I hear. I shall have Rosamond
coming to me with a pretty tale one of these days. But they'll
get no money from me, I know. Let HIS family help him.
I never did like that marriage. But it's no use talking. Ring the
bell for lemons, and don't look dull any more, Lucy. I'll drive you
and Louisa to Riverston to-morrow."
CHAPTER LVII.
They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
At penetration of the quickening air:
His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
Making the little world their childhood knew
Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur,
And larger yet with wonder love belief
Toward Walter Scott who living far away
Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
The book and they must part, but day by day,
In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran
They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.
The evening that Fred Vincy walked to Lowick parsonage (he
had begun to see that this was a world in which even a spirited
young man must sometimes walk for want of a horse to carry him)
he set out at five o'clock and called on Mrs. Garth by the way,
wishing to assure himself that she accepted their new relations willingly.
He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great
apple-tree in the orchard. It was a festival with Mrs. Garth,
for her eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come
home for a short holiday--Christy, who held it the most desirable
thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a
regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred,
a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother.
Christy himself, a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition
of his mother not much higher than Fred's shoulder--which made it
the harder that he should be held superior--was always as simple
as possible, and thought no more of Fred's disinclination to scholarship
than of a giraffe's, wishing that he himself were more of the
same height. He was lying on the ground now by his mother's chair,
with his straw hat laid flat over his eyes, while Jim on the other
side was reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made
a chief part in the happiness of many young lives. The volume was
"Ivanhoe," and Jim was in the great archery scene at the tournament,
but suffered much interruption from Ben, who had fetched his own
old bow and arrows, and was making himself dreadfully disagreeable,
Letty thought, by begging all present to observe his random shots,
which no one wished to do except Brownie, the active-minded but
probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled Newfoundland lying in
the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality of extreme old age.
Letty herself, showing as to her mouth and pinafore some slight
signs that she had been assisting at the gathering of the cherries
which stood in a coral-heap on the tea-table, was now seated
on the grass, listening open-eyed to the reading.
But the centre of interest was changed for all by the arrival
of Fred Vincy. When, seating himself on a garden-stool, he said
that he was on his way to Lowick Parsonage, Ben, who had thrown
down his bow, and snatched up a reluctant half-grown kitten instead,
strode across Fred's outstretched leg, and said "Take me!"
"Oh, and me too," said Letty.
"You can't keep up with Fred and me," said Ben.
"Yes, I can. Mother, please say that I am to go," urged Letty,
whose life was much checkered by resistance to her depreciation
as a girl.
"I shall stay with Christy," observed Jim; as much as to say
that he had the advantage of those simpletons; whereupon Letty
put her hand up to her head and looked with jealous indecision
from the one to the other.
"Let us all go and see Mary," said Christy, opening his arms.
"No, my dear child, we must not go in a swarm to the parsonage.
And that old Glasgow suit of yours would never do. Besides, your
father will come home. We must let Fred go alone. He can tell
Mary that you are here, and she will come back to-morrow."
Christy glanced at his own threadbare knees, and then at Fred's
beautiful white trousers. Certainly Fred's tailoring suggested
the advantages of an English university, and he had a graceful way
even of looking warm and of pushing his hair back with his handkerchief.
"Children, run away," said Mrs. Garth; "it is too warm to hang
about your friends. Take your brother and show him the rabbits."
The eldest understood, and led off the children immediately.
Fred felt that Mrs. Garth wished to give him an opportunity of saying
anything he had to say, but he could only begin by observing--
"How glad you must be to have Christy here!"
"Yes; he has come sooner than I expected. He got down from the coach
at nine o'clock, just after his father went out. I am longing for
Caleb to come and hear what wonderful progress Christy is making.
He has paid his expenses for the last year by giving lessons,
carrying on hard study at the same time. He hopes soon to get
a private tutorship and go abroad."
"He is a great fellow," said Fred, to whom these cheerful
truths had a medicinal taste, "and no trouble to anybody."
After a slight pause, he added, "But I fear you will think
that I am going to be a great deal of trouble to Mr. Garth."
"Caleb likes taking trouble: he is one of those men who always
do more than any one would have thought of asking them to do,"
answered Mrs. Garth. She was knitting, and could either look at
Fred or not, as she chose--always an advantage when one is bent
on loading speech with salutary meaning; and though Mrs. Garth
intended to be duly reserved, she did wish to say something
that Fred might be the better for.
"I know you think me very undeserving, Mrs. Garth, and with good reason,"
said Fred, his spirit rising a little at the perception of something
like a disposition to lecture him. "I happen to have behaved just
the worst to the people I can't help wishing for the most from.
But while two men like Mr. Garth and Mr. Farebrother have not given
me up, I don't see why I should give myself up." Fred thought it
might be well to suggest these masculine examples to Mrs. Garth.
"Assuredly," said she, with gathering emphasis. "A young man
for whom two such elders had devoted themselves would indeed be
culpable if he threw himself away and made their sacrifices vain."
Fred wondered a little at this strong language, but only said,
"I hope it will not be so with me, Mrs. Garth, since I have some
encouragement to believe that I may win Mary. Mr. Garth has told
you about that? You were not surprised, I dare say?" Fred ended,
innocently referring only to his own love as probably evident enough.
"Not surprised that Mary has given you encouragement?"
returned Mrs. Garth, who thought it would be well for Fred to be
more alive to the fact that Mary's friends could not possibly
have wished this beforehand, whatever the Vincys might suppose.
"Yes, I confess I was surprised."
"She never did give me any--not the least in the world, when I
talked to her myself," said Fred, eager to vindicate Mary.
"But when I asked Mr. Farebrother to speak for me, she allowed him
to tell me there was a hope."
The power of admonition which had begun to stir in Mrs. Garth had
not yet discharged itself. It was a little too provoking even for
HER self-control that this blooming youngster should flourish
on the disappointments of sadder and wiser people--making a meal
of a nightingale and never knowing it--and that all the while his
family should suppose that hers was in eager need of this sprig;
and her vexation had fermented the more actively because of its total
repression towards her husband. Exemplary wives will sometimes
find scapegoats in this way. She now said with energetic decision,
"You made a great mistake, Fred, in asking Mr. Farebrother to speak
for you."
"Did I?" said Fred, reddening instantaneously. He was alarmed,
but at a loss to know what Mrs. Garth meant, and added,
in an apologetic tone, "Mr. Farebrother has always been such
a friend of ours; and Mary, I knew, would listen to him gravely;
and he took it on himself quite readily."
"Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes,
and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others," said Mrs. Garth
She did not mean to go beyond this salutary general doctrine,
and threw her indignation into a needless unwinding of her worsted,
knitting her brow at it with a grand air.
"I cannot conceive how it could be any pain to Mr. Farebrother,"
said Fred, who nevertheless felt that surprising conceptions were
beginning to form themselves.
"Precisely; you cannot conceive," said Mrs. Garth, cutting her words
as neatly as possible.
For a moment Fred looked at the horizon with a dismayed anxiety,
and then turning with a quick movement said almost sharply--
"Do you mean to say, Mrs. Garth, that Mr. Farebrother is in love
with Mary?"
"And if it were so, Fred, I think you are the last person who
ought to be surprised," returned Mrs. Garth, laying her knitting
down beside her and folding her arms. It was an unwonted sign
of emotion in her that she should put her work out of her hands.
In fact her feelings were divided between the satisfaction of giving
Fred his discipline and the sense of having gone a little too far.
Fred took his hat and stick and rose quickly.
"Then you think I am standing in his way, and in Mary's too?"
he said, in a tone which seemed to demand an answer.
Mrs. Garth could not speak immediately. She had brought herself into
the unpleasant position of being called on to say what she really felt,
yet what she knew there were strong reasons for concealing.
And to her the consciousness of having exceeded in words was
peculiarly mortifying. Besides, Fred had given out unexpected
electricity, and he now added, "Mr. Garth seemed pleased that
Mary should be attached to me. He could not have known anything of this."
Mrs. Garth felt a severe twinge at this mention of her husband, the fear
that Caleb might think her in the wrong not being easily endurable.
She answered, wanting to check unintended consequences--
"I spoke from inference only. I am not aware that Mary knows
anything of the matter."
But she hesitated to beg that he would keep entire silence on a
subject which she had herself unnecessarily mentioned, not being
used to stoop in that way; and while she was hesitating there
was already a rush of unintended consequences under the apple-tree
where the tea-things stood. Ben, bouncing across the grass with
Brownie at his heels, and seeing the kitten dragging the knitting
by a lengthening line of wool, shouted and clapped his hands;
Brownie barked, the kitten, desperate, jumped on the tea-table and
upset the milk, then jumped down again and swept half the cherries
with it; and Ben, snatching up the half-knitted sock-top, fitted
it over the kitten's head as a new source of madness, while Letty
arriving cried out to her mother against this cruelty--it was a
history as full of sensation as "This is the house that Jack built."
Mrs. Garth was obliged to interfere, the other young ones came up
and the tete-a-tete with Fred was ended. He got away as soon
as he could, and Mrs. Garth could only imply some retractation
of her severity by saying "God bless you" when she shook hands with him.
She was unpleasantly conscious that she had been on the verge
of speaking as "one of the foolish women speaketh"--telling first
and entreating silence after. But she had not entreated silence,
and to prevent Caleb's blame she determined to blame herself and
confess all to him that very night. It was curious what an awful
tribunal the mild Caleb's was to her, whenever he set it up.
But she meant to point out to him that the revelation might do Fred
Vincy a great deal of good.
No doubt it was having a strong effect on him as he walked to Lowick.
Fred's light hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a
bruise as from this suggestion that if he had been out of the way
Mary might have made a thoroughly good match. Also he was piqued
that he had been what he called such a stupid lout as to ask that
intervention from Mr. Farebrother. But it was not in a lover's nature--
it was not in Fred's, that the new anxiety raised about Mary's
feeling should not surmount every other. Notwithstanding his
trust in Mr. Farebrother's generosity, notwithstanding what Mary
had said to him, Fred could not help feeling that he had a rival:
it was a new consciousness, and he objected to it extremely,
not being in the least ready to give up Mary for her good, being ready
rather to fight for her with any man whatsoever. But the fighting
with Mr. Farebrother must be of a metaphorical kind, which was much
more difficult to Fred than the muscular. Certainly this experience
was a discipline for Fred hardly less sharp than his disappointment
about his uncle's will. The iron had not entered into his soul,
but he had begun to imagine what the sharp edge would be.
It did not once occur to Fred that Mrs. Garth might be mistaken
about Mr. Farebrother, but he suspected that she might be wrong
about Mary. Mary had been staying at the parsonage lately, and her
mother might know very little of what had been passing in her mind.
He did not feel easier when he found her looking cheerful with the
three ladies in the drawing-room. They were in animated discussion
on some subject which was dropped when he entered, and Mary
was copying the labels from a heap of shallow cabinet drawers,
in a minute handwriting which she was skilled in. Mr. Farebrother
was somewhere in the village, and the three ladies knew nothing
of Fred's peculiar relation to Mary: it was impossible for either
of them to propose that they should walk round the garden,
and Fred predicted to himself that he should have to go away without
saying a word to her in private. He told her first of Christy's
arrival and then of his own engagement with her father; and he
was comforted by seeing that this latter news touched her keenly.
She said hurriedly, "I am so glad," and then bent over her writing
to hinder any one from noticing her face. But here was a subject
which Mrs. Farebrother could not let pass.
"You don't mean, my dear Miss Garth, that you are glad to hear
of a young man giving up the Church for which he was educated:
you only mean that things being so, you are glad that he should be
under an excellent man like your father."
"No, really, Mrs. Farebrother, I am glad of both, I fear,"
said Mary, cleverly getting rid of one rebellious tear.
"I have a dreadfully secular mind. I never liked any clergyman
except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr. Farebrother."
"Now why, my dear?" said Mrs. Farebrother, pausing on her large
wooden knitting-needles and looking at Mary. "You have always
a good reason for your opinions, but this astonishes me.
Of course I put out of the question those who preach new doctrine.
But why should you dislike clergymen?"
"Oh dear," said Mary, her face breaking into merriment as she
seemed to consider a moment, "I don't like their neckcloths."
"Why, you don't like Camden's, then," said Miss Winifred,
in some anxiety.
"Yes, I do," said Mary. "I don't like the other clergymen's neckcloths,
because it is they who wear them."
"How very puzzling!" said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect
was probably deficient.
"My dear, you are joking. You would have better reasons
than these for slighting so respectable a class of men,"
said Mrs. Farebrother, majestically.
"Miss Garth has such severe notions of what people should be that it
is difficult to satisfy her," said Fred.
"Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favor
of my son," said the old lady.
Mary was wondering at Fred's piqued tone, when Mr. Farebrother came
in and had to hear the news about the engagement under Mr. Garth.
At the end he said with quiet satisfaction, "THAT is right;"
and then bent to look at Mary's labels and praise her handwriting.
Fred felt horribly jealous--was glad, of course, that Mr. Farebrother
was so estimable, but wished that he had been ugly and fat as men
at forty sometimes are. It was clear what the end would be,
since Mary openly placed Farebrother above everybody, and these
women were all evidently encouraging the affair. He, was feeling
sure that he should have no chance of speaking to Mary,
when Mr. Farebrother said--
"Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study--
you have never seen my fine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth.
I want you to see a stupendous spider I found this morning."
Mary at once saw the Vicar's intention. He had never since the
memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her,
and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep.
Mary was accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable,
and if a belief flattered her vanity she felt warned to dismiss it
as ridiculous, having early had much exercise in such dismissals.
It was as she had foreseen: when Fred had been asked to admire the
fittings of the study, and she had been asked to admire the spider,
Mr. Farebrother said--
"Wait here a minute or two. I am going to look out an engraving
which Fred is tall enough to hang for me. I shall be back in a
few minutes." And then he went out. Nevertheless, the first
word Fred said to Mary was--
"It is of no use, whatever I do, Mary. You are sure to marry
Farebrother at last." There was some rage in his tone.
"What do you mean, Fred?" Mary exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply,
and surprised out of all her readiness in reply.
"It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough--
you who see everything."
"I only see that you are behaving very ill, Fred, in speaking so
of Mr. Farebrother after he has pleaded your cause in every way.
How can you have taken up such an idea?"
Fred was rather deep, in spite of his irritation. If Mary
had really been unsuspicious, there was no good in telling
her what Mrs. Garth-had said.
"It follows as a matter of course," he replied. "When you are
continually seeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom
you set up above everybody, I can have no fair chance."
"You are very ungrateful, Fred," said Mary. "I wish I had never
told Mr. Farebrother that I cared for you in the least."
"No, I am not ungrateful; I should be the happiest fellow in the
world if it were not for this. I told your father everything,
and he was very kind; he treated me as if I were his son.
I could go at the work with a will, writing and everything, if it
were not for this."
"For this? for what?" said Mary, imagining now that something
specific must have been said or done.
"This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Farebrother."
Mary was appeased by her inclination to laugh.
"Fred," she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were
sulkily turned away from her, "you are too delightfully ridiculous.
If you were not such a charming simpleton, what a temptation
this would be to play the wicked coquette, and let you suppose
that somebody besides you has made love to me."
"Do you really like me best, Mary?" said Fred, turning eyes full
of affection on her, and trying to take her hand.
"I don't like you at all at this moment," said Mary, retreating,
and putting her hands behind her. "I only said that no mortal
ever made love to me besides you. And that is no argument
that a very wise man ever will," she ended, merrily.
"I wish you would tell me that you could not possibly ever think
of him," said Fred.
"Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fred," said Mary,
getting serious again. "I don't know whether it is more stupid
or ungenerous in you not to see that Mr: Farebrother has left us
together on purpose that we might speak freely. I am disappointed
that you should be so blind to his delicate feeling."
There was no time to say any more before Mr. Farebrother came back
with the engraving; and Fred had to return to the drawing-room still
with a jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments
from Mary's words and manner. The result of the conversation was on
the whole more painful to Mary: inevitably her attention had taken
a new attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations.
She was in a position in which she seemed to herself to be slighting
Mr. Farebrother, and this, in relation to a man who is much honored,
is always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman.
To have a reason for going home the next day was a relief, for Mary
earnestly desired to be always clear that she loved Fred best.
When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many
of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it
seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over
our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.
"Fred has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this,"
Mary said to herself, with a smile curling her lips. It was
impossible to help fleeting visions of another kind--new dignities
and an acknowledged value of which she had often felt the absence.
But these things with Fred outside them, Fred forsaken and looking
sad for the want of her, could never tempt her deliberate thought.
CHAPTER LVIII.
"For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change:
In many's looks the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
But Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell:
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell."
--SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
At the time when Mr. Vincy uttered that presentiment about Rosamond,
she herself had never had the idea that she should be driven to make
the sort of appeal which he foresaw. She had not yet had any
anxiety about ways and means, although her domestic life had been
expensive as well as eventful. Her baby had been born prematurely,
and all the embroidered robes and caps had to be laid by in darkness.
This misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted
in going out on horseback one day when her husband had desired her
not to do so; but it must not be supposed that she had shown temper
on the occasion, or rudely told him that she would do as she liked.
What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from
Captain Lydgate, the baronet's third son, who, I am sorry to say,
was detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop "parting
his hair from brow to nape in a despicable fashion" (not followed
by Tertius himself), and showing an ignorant security that he knew
the proper thing to say on every topic. Lydgate inwardly cursed his
own folly that he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go to his
uncle's on the wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable
to Rosamond by saying so in private. For to Rosamond this visit
was a source of unprecedented but gracefully concealed exultation.
She was so intensely conscious of having a cousin who was a baronet's
son staying in the house, that she imagined the knowledge of what
was implied by his presence to be diffused through all other minds;
and when she introduced Captain Lydgate to her guests, she had
a placid sense that his rank penetrated them as if it had been
an odor. The satisfaction was enough for the time to melt away
some disappointment in the conditions of marriage with a medical man
even of good birth: it seemed now that her marriage was visibly
as well as ideally floating her above the Middlemarch level, and the
future looked bright with letters and visits to and from Quallingham,
and vague advancement in consequence for Tertius. Especially as,
probably at the Captain's suggestion, his married sister, Mrs. Mengan,
had come with her maid, and stayed two nights on her way from town.
Hence it was clearly worth while for Rosamond to take pains with
her music and the careful selection of her lace.
As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose
bent on one side, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been
disadvantageous in any young gentleman who had not a military bearing
and mustache to give him what is doted on by some flower-like blond
heads as "style." He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding
which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of
middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms.
Rosamond delighted in his admiration now even more than she had
done at Quallingham, and he found it easy to spend several hours
of the day in flirting with her. The visit altogether was one
of the pleasantest larks he had ever had, not the less so perhaps
because he suspected that his queer cousin Tertius wished him away:
though Lydgate, who would rather (hyperbolically speaking) have died
than have failed in polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike,
and only pretended generally not to hear what the gallant officer said,
consigning the task of answering him to Rosamond. For he was not
at all a jealous husband, and preferred leaving a feather-headed
young gentleman alone with his wife to bearing him company.
"I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius,"
said Rosamond, one evening when the important guest was gone
to Loamford to see some brother officers stationed there.
"You really look so absent sometimes--you seem to be seeing
through his head into something behind it, instead of looking at him."
"My dear Rosy, you don't expect me to talk much to such a conceited
ass as that, I hope," said Lydgate, brusquely. "If he got his
head broken, I might look at it with interest, not before."
"I cannot conceive why you should speak of your cousin so contemptuously,"
said Rosamond, her fingers moving at her work while she spoke
with a mild gravity which had a touch of disdain in it.
"Ask Ladislaw if he doesn't think your Captain the greatest bore he
ever met with. Ladislaw has almost forsaken the house since he came."
Rosamond thought she knew perfectly well why Mr. Ladislaw disliked
the Captain: he was jealous, and she liked his being jealous.
"It is impossible to say what will suit eccentric persons,"
she answered, "but in my opinion Captain Lydgate is a thorough
gentleman, and I think you ought not, out of respect to Sir Godwin,
to treat him with neglect."
"No, dear; but we have had dinners for him. And he comes in and
goes out as he likes. He doesn't want me"
"Still, when he is in the room, you might show him more attention.
He may not be a phoenix of cleverness in your sense; his profession
is different; but it would be all the better for you to talk a little
on his subjects. _I_ think his conversation is quite agreeable.
And he is anything but an unprincipled man."
"The fact is, you would wish me to be a little more like him,
Rosy," said Lydgate, in a sort of resigned murmur, with a
smile which was not exactly tender, and certainly not merry.
Rosamond was silent and did not smile again; but the lovely
curves of her face looked good-tempered enough without smiling.
Those words of Lydgate's were like a sad milestone marking how far
he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy
appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence
her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid,
using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the
relaxation of his adored wisdom alone. He had begun to distinguish
between that imagined adoration and the attraction towards a man's
talent because it gives him prestige, and is like an order in his
button-hole or an Honorable before his name.
It might have been supposed that Rosamond had travelled too,
since she had found the pointless conversation of Mr. Ned Plymdale
perfectly wearisome; but to most mortals there is a stupidity
which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable--
else, indeed, what would become of social bonds? Captain Lydgate's
stupidity was delicately scented, carried itself with "style,"
talked with a good accent, and was closely related to Sir Godwin.
Rosamond found it quite agreeable and caught many of its phrases.
Therefore since Rosamond, as we know, was fond of horseback,
there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume
her riding when Captain Lydgate, who had ordered his man with
two horses to follow him and put up at the "Green Dragon,"
begged her to go out on the gray which he warranted to be gentle
and trained to carry a lady--indeed, he had bought it for his sister,
and was taking it to Quallingham. Rosamond went out the first time
without telling her husband, and came back before his return;
but the ride had been so thorough a success, and she declared
herself so much the better in consequence, that he was informed
of it with full reliance on his consent that she should go riding again.
On the contrary Lydgate was more than hurt--he was utterly
confounded that she had risked herself on a strange horse without
referring the matter to his wish. After the first almost
thundering exclamations of astonishment, which sufficiently
warned Rosamond of what was coming, he was silent for some moments.
"However, you have come back safely," he said, at last, in a
decisive tone. "You will not go again, Rosy; that is understood.
If it were the quietest, most familiar horse in the world,
there would always be the chance of accident. And you know very
well that I wished you to give up riding the roan on that account."
"But there is the chance of accident indoors, Tertius."
"My darling, don't talk nonsense," said Lydgate, in an imploring tone;
"surely I am the person to judge for you. I think it is enough
that I say you are not to go again."
Rosamond was arranging her hair before dinner, and the reflection
of her head in the glass showed no change in its loveliness except
a little turning aside of the long neck. Lydgate had been moving
about with his hands in his pockets, and now paused near her,
as if he awaited some assurance.
"I wish you would fasten up my plaits, dear," said Rosamond, letting her
arms fall with a little sigh, so as to make a husband ashamed of standing
there like a brute. Lydgate had often fastened the plaits before,
being among the deftest of men with his large finely formed fingers.
He swept up the soft festoons of plaits and fastened in the tall
comb (to such uses do men come!); and what could he do then but kiss
the exquisite nape which was shown in all its delicate curves?
But when we do what we have done before, it is often with a difference.
Lydgate was still angry, and had not forgotten his point.
"I shall tell the Captain that he ought to have known better than
offer you his horse," he said, as he moved away.
"I beg you will not do anything of the kind, Tertius," said Rosamond,
looking at him with something more marked than usual in her speech.
"It will be treating me as if I were a child. Promise that you will
leave the subject to me."
There did seem to be some truth in her objection. Lydgate said,
"Very well," with a surly obedience, and thus the discussion ended
with his promising Rosamond, and not with her promising him.
In fact, she had been determined not to promise. Rosamond had
that victorious obstinacy which never wastes its energy in
impetuous resistance. What she liked to do was to her the right thing,
and all her cleverness was directed to getting the means of doing it.
She meant to go out riding again on the gray, and she did go on
the next opportunity of her husband's absence, not intending that
he should know until it was late enough not to signify to her.
The temptation was certainly great: she was very fond of the exercise,
and the gratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate,
Sir Godwin's son, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met
in this position by any one but her husband, was something as good as
her dreams before marriage: moreover she was riveting the connection
with the family at Quallingham, which must be a wise thing to do.
But the gentle gray, unprepared for the crash of a tree that was
being felled on the edge of Halsell wood, took fright, and caused
a worse fright to Rosamond, leading finally to the loss of her baby.
Lydgate could not show his anger towards her, but he was rather
bearish to the Captain, whose visit naturally soon came to an end.
In all future conversations on the subject, Rosamond was mildly
certain that the ride had made no difference, and that if she had
stayed at home the same symptoms would have come on and would have
ended in the same way, because she had felt something like them before.
Lydgate could only say, "Poor, poor darling!"--but he secretly wondered
over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering
within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond.
His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he
had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set
aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond's
cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind which became a woman.
He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was--what was
the shape into which it had run as into a close network aloof
and independent. No one quicker than Rosamond to see causes and
effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests:
she had seen clearly Lydgate's preeminence in Middlemarch society,
and could go on imaginatively tracing still more agreeable social
effects when his talent should have advanced him; but for her,
his professional and scientific ambition had no other relation
to these desirable effects than if they had been the fortunate
discovery of an ill-smelling oil. And that oil apart,
with which she had nothing to do, of course she believed in her own
opinion more than she did in his. Lydgate was astounded to find
in numberless trifling matters, as well as in this last serious
case of the riding, that affection did not make her compliant.
He had no doubt that the affection was there, and had no presentiment
that he had done anything to repel it. For his own part he said
to himself that he loved her as tenderly as ever, and could make up
his mind-to her negations; but--well! Lydgate was much worried,
and conscious of new elements in his life as noxious to him as an
inlet of mud to a creature that has been used to breathe and bathe
and dart after its illuminated prey in the clearest of waters.
Rosamond was soon looking lovelier than ever at her worktable,
enjoying drives in her father's phaeton and thinking it likely
that she might be invited to Quallingham. She knew that she
was a much more exquisite ornament to the drawing-room there than
any daughter of the family, and in reflecting that the gentlemen
were aware of that, did not perhaps sufficiently consider whether
the ladies would be eager to see themselves surpassed.
Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she
inwardly called his moodiness--a name which to her covered
his thoughtful preoccupation with other subjects than herself,
as well as that uneasy look of the brow and distaste for all ordinary
things as if they were mixed with bitter herbs, which really
made a sort of weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding.
These latter states of mind had one cause amongst others, which he
had generously but mistakenly avoided mentioning to Rosamond,
lest it should affect her health and spirits. Between him and her
indeed there was that total missing of each other's mental track,
which is too evidently possible even between persons who are
continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he
had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half
of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamond;
bearing her little claims and interruptions without impatience, and,
above all, bearing without betrayal of bitterness to look through
less and less of interfering illusion at the blank unreflecting
surface her mind presented to his ardor for the more impersonal
ends of his profession and his scientific study, an ardor which he
had fancied that the ideal wife must somehow worship as sublime,
though not in the least knowing why. But his endurance was mingled
with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we shall
confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances,
wife or husband included. It always remains true that if we had
been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.
Lydgate was aware that his concessions to Rosamond were often
little more than the lapse of slackening resolution, the creeping
paralysis apt to seize an enthusiasm which is out of adjustment
to a constant portion of our lives. And on Lydgate's enthusiasm
there was constantly pressing not a simple weight of sorrow,
but the biting presence of a petty degrading care, such as casts
the blight of irony over all higher effort.
This was the care which he had hitherto abstained from mentioning
to Rosamond; and he believed, with some wonder, that it had never entered
her mind, though certainly no difficulty could be less mysterious.
It was an inference with a conspicuous handle to it, and had been
easily drawn by indifferent observers, that Lydgate was in debt;
and he could not succeed in keeping out of his mind for long together
that he was every day getting deeper into that swamp, which tempts
men towards it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure.
It is wonderful how soon a man gets up to his chin there--in a condition
in which, spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release,
though he had a scheme of the universe in his soul.
Eighteen months ago Lydgate was poor, but had never known the eager
want of small sums, and felt rather a burning contempt for any one
who descended a step in order to gain them. He was now experiencing
something worse than a simple deficit: he was assailed by the
vulgar hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great
many things which might have been done without, and which he
is unable to pay for, though the demand for payment has become pressing.
How this came about may be easily seen without much arithmetic or
knowledge of prices. When a man in setting up a house and preparing
for marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses
come to between four and five hundred pounds more than he has
capital to pay for; when at the end of a year it appears that his
household expenses, horses and et caeteras, amount to nearly a thousand,
while the proceeds of the practice reckoned from the old books
to be worth eight hundred per annum have sunk like a summer pond
and make hardly five hundred, chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain
inference is that, whether he minds it or not, he is in debt.
Those were less expensive times than our own, and provincial life
was comparatively modest; but the ease with which a medical man
who had lately bought a practice, who thought that he was obliged
to keep two horses, whose table was supplied without stint, and who
paid an insurance on his life and a high rent for house and garden,
might find his expenses doubling his receipts, can be conceived by
any one who does not think these details beneath his consideration.
Rosamond, accustomed from her to an extravagant household,
thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the
best of everything--nothing else "answered;" and Lydgate supposed
that "if things were done at all, they must be done properly"--
he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head
of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand,
he would have probably observed that "it could hardly come to much,"
and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article--
for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear--
it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.
Rosamond, even without such an occasion as Captain Lydgate's visit,
was fond of giving invitations, and Lydgate, though he often thought
the guests tiresome, did not interfere. This sociability seemed
a necessary part of professional prudence, and the entertainment
must be suitable. It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting
the homes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet
to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased
to be remarkable--is it not rather that we expect in men, that they
should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side
and never compare them with each other? Expenditure--like ugliness
and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own
personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is
manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.
Lydgate believed himself to be careless about his dress, and he
despised a man who calculated the effects of his costume; it seemed
to him only a matter of course that he had abundance of fresh garments--
such things were naturally ordered in sheaves. It must be remembered
that he had never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt,
and he walked by habit, not by self-criticism. But the check had come.
Its novelty made it the more irritating. He was amazed,
disgusted that conditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully
disconnected with the objects he cared to occupy himself with,
should have lain in ambush and clutched him when he was unaware.
And there was not only the actual debt; there was the certainty
that in his present position he must go on deepening it.
Two furnishing tradesmen at Brassing, whose bills had been incurred
before his marriage, and whom uncalculated current expenses had
ever since prevented him from paying, had repeatedly sent him
unpleasant letters which had forced themselves on his attention.
This could hardly have been more galling to any disposition than
to Lydgate's, with his intense pride--his dislike of asking a favor
or being under an obligation to any one. He had scorned even to form
conjectures about Mr. Vincy's intentions on money matters, and nothing
but extremity could have induced him to apply to his father-in-law,
even if he had not been made aware in various indirect ways since
his marriage that Mr. Vincy's own affairs were not flourishing,
and that the expectation of help from him would be resented.
Some men easily trust in the readiness of friends; it had never in
the former part of his life occurred to Lydgate that he should need
to do so: he had never thought what borrowing would be to him;
but now that the idea had entered his mind, he felt that he would
rather incur any other hardship. In the mean time he had no money
or prospects of money; and his practice was not getting more lucrative.
No wonder that Lydgate had been unable to suppress all signs
of inward trouble during the last few months, and now that
Rosamond was regaining brilliant health, he meditated taking her
entirely into confidence on his difficulties. New conversance
with tradesmen's bills had forced his reasoning into a new
channel of comparison: he had begun to consider from a new point
of view what was necessary and unnecessary in goods ordered,
and to see that there must be some change of habits. How could
such a change be made without Rosamond's concurrence? The immediate
occasion of opening the disagreeable fact to her was forced upon him.
Having no money, and having privately sought advice as to what security
could possibly be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered
the one good security in his power to the less peremptory creditor,
who was a silversmith and jeweller, and who consented to take on himself
the upholsterer's credit also, accepting interest for a given term.
The security necessary was a bill of sale on the furniture of his house,
which might make a creditor easy for a reasonable time about a debt
amounting to less than four hundred pounds; and the silversmith,
Mr. Dover, was willing to reduce it by taking back a portion
of the plate and any other article which was as good as new.
"Any other article" was a phrase delicately implying jewellery,
and more particularly some purple amethysts costing thirty pounds,
which Lydgate had bought as a bridal present.
Opinions may be divided as to his wisdom in making this present:
some may think that it was a graceful attention to be expected from
a man like Lydgate, and that the fault of any troublesome consequences
lay in the pinched narrowness of provincial life at that time,
which offered no conveniences for professional people whose fortune
was not proportioned to their tastes; also, in Lydgate's ridiculous
fastidiousness about asking his friends for money.
However, it had seemed a question of no moment to him on that fine
morning when he went to give a final order for plate: in the
presence of other jewels enormously expensive, and as an addition
to orders of which the amount had not been exactly calculated,
thirty pounds for ornaments so exquisitely suited to Rosamond's
neck and arms could hardly appear excessive when there was no ready
cash for it to exceed. But at this crisis Lydgate's imagination
could not help dwelling on the possibility of letting the amethysts
take their place again among Mr. Dover's stock, though he shrank
from the idea of proposing this to Rosamond. Having been roused to
discern consequences which he had never been in the habit of tracing,
he was preparing to act on this discernment with some of the rigor
(by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment.
He was nerving himself to this rigor as he rode from Brassing,
and meditated on the representations he must make to Rosamond.
It was evening when he got home. He was intensely miserable,
this strong man of nine-and-twenty and of many gifts. He was not
saying angrily within himself that he had made a profound mistake;
but the mistake was at work in him like a recognized chronic disease,
mingling its uneasy importunities with every prospect, and enfeebling
every thought. As he went along the passage to the drawing-room,
he heard the piano and singing. Of course, Ladislaw was there.
It was some weeks since Will had parted from Dorothea, yet he was
still at the old post in Middlemarch. Lydgate had no objection
in general to Ladislaw's coming, but just now he was annoyed that he
could not find his hearth free. When he opened the door the two
singers went on towards the key-note, raising their eyes and looking
at him indeed, but not regarding his entrance as an interruption.
To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not
soothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the
sense that the painful day has still pains in store. His face,
already paler than usual, took on a scowl as he walked across the room
and flung himself into a chair.
The singers feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had
only three bars to sing, now turned round.
"How are you, Lydgate?" said Will, coming forward to shake hands.
Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak.
"Have you dined, Tertius? I expected you much earlier," said Rosamond,
who had already seen that her husband was in a "horrible humor."
She seated herself in her usual place as she spoke.
"I have dined. I should like some tea, please," said Lydgate,
curtly, still scowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched
out before him.
Will was too quick to need more. "I shall be off," he said,
reaching his hat.
"Tea is coming," said Rosamond; "pray don't go."
"Yes, Lydgate is bored," said Will, who had more comprehension
of Lydgate than Rosamond had, and was not offended by his manner,
easily imagining outdoor causes of annoyance.
"There is the more need for you to stay," said Rosamond, playfully,
and in her lightest accent; "he will not speak to me all the evening."
"Yes, Rosamond, I shall," said Lydgate, in his strong baritone.
"I have some serious business to speak to you about."
No introduction of the business could have been less like that
which Lydgate had intended; but her indifferent manner had been
too provoking.
"There! you see," said Will. "I'm going to the meeting about
the Mechanics' Institute. Good-by;" and he went quickly out of the room.
Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took
her place before the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never
seen him so disagreeable. Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her
and watched her as she delicately handled the tea-service with her
taper fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her
with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable
protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners.
For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculation
about this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself
in the sylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign
of a ready intelligent sensitiveness. His mind glancing back to Laure
while he looked at Rosamond, he said inwardly, "Would SHE kill me
because I wearied her?" and then, "It is the way with all women."
But this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority
in mistake over the dumb animals, was immediately thwarted by Lydgate's
memory of wondering impressions from the behavior of another woman--
from Dorothea's looks and tones of emotion about her husband
when Lydgate began to attend him--from her passionate cry to be
taught what would best comfort that man for whose sake it seemed
as if she must quell every impulse in her except the yearnings
of faithfulness and compassion. These revived impressions succeeded
each other quickly and dreamily in Lydgate's mind while the tea
was being brewed. He had shut his eyes in the last instant of
reverie while he heard Dorothea saying, "Advise me--think what I
can do--he has been all his life laboring and looking forward.
He minds about nothing else--and I mind about nothing else."
That voice of deep-souled womanhood had remained within him as the
enkindling conceptions of dead and sceptred genius had remained
within him (is there not a genius for feeling nobly which also
reigns over human spirits and their conclusions?); the tones were
a music from which he was falling away--he had really fallen into
a momentary doze, when Rosamond said in her silvery neutral way,
"Here is your tea, Tertius," setting it on the small table by
his side, and then moved back to her place without looking at him.
Lydgate was too hasty in attributing insensibility to her; after her
own fashion, she was sensitive enough, and took lasting impressions.
Her impression now was one of offence and repulsion. But then,
Rosamond had no scowls and had never raised her voice: she was
quite sure that no one could justly find fault with her.
Perhaps Lydgate and she had never felt so far off each other before;
but there were strong reasons for not deferring his revelation,
even if he had not already begun it by that abrupt announcement;
indeed some of the angry desire to rouse her into more sensibility
on his account which had prompted him to speak prematurely,
still mingled with his pain in the prospect of her pain.
But he waited till the tray was gone, the candles were lit,
and the evening quiet might be counted on: the interval had left
time for repelled tenderness to return into the old course.
He spoke kindly.
"Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come to sit by me," he said,
gently, pushing away the table, and stretching out his arm to draw
a chair near his own.
Rosamond obeyed. As she came towards him in her drapery of
transparent faintly tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never
looked more graceful; as she sat down by him and laid one hand
on the elbow of his chair, at last looking at him and meeting
his eyes, her delicate neck and cheek and purely cut lips never had
more of that untarnished beauty which touches as in spring-time
and infancy and all sweet freshness. It touched Lydgate now,
and mingled the early moments of his love for her with all the
other memories which were stirred in this crisis of deep trouble.
He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying--
"Dear!" with the lingering utterance which affection gives to
the word. Rosamond too was still under the power of that same past,
and her husband was still in part the Lydgate whose approval had
stirred delight. She put his hair lightly away from his forehead,
then laid her other hand on his, and was conscious of forgiving him.
"I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy. But there
are things which husband and wife must think of together. I dare
say it has occurred to you already that I am short of money."
Lydgate paused; but Rosamond turned her neck and looked at a vase
on the mantel-piece.
"I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before we
were married, and there have been expenses since which I have
been obliged to meet. The consequence is, there is a large debt
at Brassing--three hundred and eighty pounds--which has been pressing
on me a good while, and in fact we are getting deeper every day,
for people don't pay me the faster because others want the money.
I took pains to keep it from you while you were not well; but now we
must think together about it, and you must help me."
"What can--I--do, Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him again.
That little speech of four words, like so many others in all languages,
is capable by varied vocal inflections of expressing all states of mind
from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative perception, from the
completest self-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness.
Rosamond's thin utterance threw into the words "What can--I--do!"
as much neutrality as they could hold. They fell like a mortal chill
on Lydgate's roused tenderness. He did not storm in indignation--
he felt too sad a sinking of the heart. And when he spoke again
it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to fulfil a task.
"It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security
for a time, and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture."
Rosamond colored deeply. "Have you not asked papa for money?"
she said, as soon as she could speak.
"No."
"Then I must ask him!" she said, releasing her hands from Lydgate's,
and rising to stand at two yards' distance from him.
"No, Rosy," said Lydgate, decisively. "It is too late to do that.
The inventory will be begun to-morrow. Remember it is a mere security:
it will make no difference: it is a temporary affair. I insist upon
it that your father shall not know, unless I choose to tell him,"
added Lydgate, with a more peremptory emphasis.
This certainly was unkind, but Rosamond had thrown him back
on evil expectation as to what she would do in the way of quiet
steady disobedience. The unkindness seemed unpardonable to her:
she was not given to weeping and disliked it, but now her chin and
lips began to tremble and the tears welled up. Perhaps it was not
possible for Lydgate, under the double stress of outward material
difficulty and of his own proud resistance to humiliating consequences,
to imagine fully what this sudden trial was to a young creature
who had known nothing but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been
of new indulgence, more exactly to her taste. But he did wish to
spare her as much as he could, and her tears cut him to the heart.
He could not speak again immediately; but Rosamond did not go
on sobbing: she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away
her tears, continuing to look before her at the mantel-piece.
"Try not to grieve, darling," said Lydgate, turning his eyes up
towards her. That she had chosen to move away from him in this
moment of her trouble made everything harder to say, but he must
absolutely go on. "We must brace ourselves to do what is necessary.
It is I who have been in fault: I ought to have seen that I
could not afford-to live in this way. But many things have told
against me in my practice, and it really just now has ebbed
to a low point. I may recover it, but in the mean time we must
pull up--we must change our way of living. We shall weather it.
When I have given this security I shall have time to look about me;
and you are so clever that if you turn your mind to managing you
will school me into carefulness. I have been a thoughtless rascal
about squaring prices--but come, dear, sit down and forgive me."
Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yoke like a creature
who had talons, but who had Reason too, which often reduces us
to meekness. When he had spoken the last words in an imploring tone,
Rosamond returned to the chair by his side. His self-blame gave
her some hope that he would attend to her opinion, and she said--
"Why can you not put off having the inventory made? You can send
the men away to-morrow when they come."
"I shall not send them away," said Lydgate, the peremptoriness
rising again. Was it of any use to explain?
"If we left Middlemarch? there would of course be a sale,
and that would do as well."
"But we are not going to leave Middlemarch."
"I am sure, Tertius, it would be much better to do so. Why can we
not go to London? Or near Durham, where your family is known?"
"We can go nowhere without money, Rosamond."
"Your friends would not wish you to be without money. And surely
these odious tradesmen might be made to understand that, and to wait,
if you would make proper representations to them."
"This is idle Rosamond," said Lydgate, angrily. "You must
learn to take my judgment on questions you don't understand.
I have made necessary arrangements, and they must be carried out.
As to friends, I have no expectations whatever from them, and shall
not ask them for anything."
Rosamond sat perfectly still. The thought in her mind was that if she
had known how Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him.
"We have no time to waste now on unnecessary words, dear,"
said Lydgate, trying to be gentle again. "There are some details
that I want to consider with you. Dover says he will take a good
deal of the plate back again, and any of the jewellery we like.
He really behaves very well."
"Are we to go without spoons and forks then?" said Rosamond, whose very
lips seemed to get thinner with the thinness of her utterance.
She was determined to make no further resistance or suggestions.
"Oh no, dear!" said Lydgate. "But look here," he continued,
drawing a paper from his pocket and opening it; "here is
Dover's account. See, I have marked a number of articles,
which if we returned them would reduce the amount by thirty pounds.
and more. I have not marked any of the jewellery." Lydgate had
really felt this point of the jewellery very bitter to himself;
but he had overcome the feeling by severe argument. He could not
propose to Rosamond that she should return any particular present
of his, but he had told himself that he was bound to put Dover's
offer before her, and her inward prompting might make the affair easy.
"It is useless for me to look, Tertius," said Rosamond, calmly;
"you will return what you please." She would not turn her eyes
on the paper, and Lydgate, flushing up to the roots of his hair,
drew it back and let it fall on his knee. Meanwhile Rosamond quietly
went out of the room, leaving Lydgate helpless and wondering.
Was she not coming back? It seemed that she had no more identified
herself with him than if they had been creatures of different species
and opposing interests. He tossed his head and thrust his hands deep
into his pockets with a sort of vengeance. There was still science--
there were still good objects to work for. He must give a tug still--
all the stronger because other satisfactions were going.
But the door opened and Rosamond re-entered. She carried the
leather box containing the amethysts, and a tiny ornamental basket
which contained other boxes, and laying them on the chair where
she had been sitting, she said, with perfect propriety in her air--
"This is all the jewellery you ever gave me. You can return what
you like of it, and of the plate also. You will not, of course,
expect me to stay at home to-morrow. I shall go to papa's."
To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more
terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance
of the distance she was placing between them.
"And when shall you come back again?" he said, with a bitter edge
on his accent.
"Oh, in the evening. Of course I shall not mention the subject
to mamma." Rosamond was convinced that no woman could behave
more irreproachably than she was behaving; and she went to sit
down at her work-table. Lydgate sat meditating a minute or two,
and the result was that he said, with some of the old emotion
in his tone--
"Now we have been united, Rosy, you should not leave me to myself
in the first trouble that has come."
"Certainly not," said Rosamond; "I shall do everything it becomes
me to do."
"It is not right that the thing should be left to servants, or that I
should have to speak to them about it. And I shall be obliged
to go out--I don't know how early. I understand your shrinking
from the humiliation of these money affairs. But, my dear Rosamond,
as a question of pride, which I feel just as much as you can, it is
surely better to manage the thing ourselves, and let the servants
see as little of it as possible; and since you are my wife, there is
no hindering your share in my disgraces--if there were disgraces."
Rosamond did not answer immediately, but at last she said, "Very well,
I will stay at home."
"I shall not touch these jewels, Rosy. Take them away again.
But I will write out a list of plate that we may return, and that can
be packed up and sent at once."
"The servants will know THAT," said Rosamond, with the slightest
touch of sarcasm.
"Well, we must meet some disagreeables as necessities. Where is
the ink, I wonder?" said Lydgate, rising, and throwing the account
on the larger table where he meant to write.
Rosamond went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table
was going to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by,
put his arm round her and drew her towards him, saying--
"Come, darling, let us make the best of things. It will only be
for a time, I hope, that we shall have to be stingy and particular.
Kiss me."
His native warm-heartedness took a great deal of quenching,
and it is a part of manliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact
that an inexperienced girl has got into trouble by marrying him.
She received his kiss and returned it faintly, and in this way
an appearance of accord was recovered for the time. But Lydgate
could not help looking forward with dread to the inevitable future
discussions about expenditure and the necessity for a complete change
in their way of living.
CHAPTER LIX.
They said of old the Soul had human shape,
But smaller, subtler than the fleshly self,
So wandered forth for airing when it pleased.
And see! beside her cherub-face there floats
A pale-lipped form aerial whispering
Its promptings in that little shell her ear."
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that
pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are)
when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.
This fine comparison has reference to Fred Vincy, who on that evening
at Lowick Parsonage heard a lively discussion among the ladies on
the news which their old servant had got from Tantripp concerning
Mr. Casaubon's strange mention of Mr. Ladislaw in a codicil to his will
made not long before his death. Miss Winifred was astounded to find
that her brother had known the fact before, and observed that Camden
was the most wonderful man for knowing things and not telling them;
whereupon Mary Garth said that the codicil had perhaps got mixed
up with the habits of spiders, which Miss Winifred never would
listen to. Mrs. Farebrother considered that the news had something
to do with their having only once seen Mr. Ladislaw at Lowick,
and Miss Noble made many small compassionate mewings.
Fred knew little and cared less about Ladislaw and the Casaubons,
and his mind never recurred to that discussion till one day calling
on Rosamond at his mother's request to deliver a message as he passed,
he happened to see Ladislaw going away. Fred and Rosamond had little
to say to each other now that marriage had removed her from collision
with the unpleasantness of brothers, and especially now that he had
taken what she held the stupid and even reprehensible step of giving
up the Church to take to such a business as Mr. Garth's. Hence
Fred talked by preference of what he considered indifferent news,
and "a propos of that young Ladislaw" mentioned what he had
heard at Lowick Parsonage.
Now Lydgate, like Mr. Farebrother, knew a great deal more than
he told, and when he had once been set thinking about the relation
between Will and Dorothea his conjectures had gone beyond the fact.
He imagined that there was a passionate attachment on both sides,
and this struck him as much too serious to gossip about.
He remembered Will's irritability when he had mentioned Mrs. Casaubon,
and was the more circumspect. On the whole his surmises, in addition
to what he knew of the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance
towards Ladislaw, and made him understand the vacillation which kept
him at Middlemarch after he had said that he should go away.
It was significant of the separateness be tween Lydgate's mind and
Rosamond's that he had no impulse to speak to her on the subject;
indeed, he did not quite trust her reticence towards Will.
And he was right there; though he had no vision of the way
in which her mind would act in urging her to speak.
When she repeated Fred's news to Lydgate, he said, "Take care you
don't drop the faintest hint to Ladislaw, Rosy. He is likely to fly
out as if you insulted him. Of course it is a painful affair."
Rosamond turned her neck and patted her hair, looking the image
of placid indifference. But the next time Will came when Lydgate
was away, she spoke archly about his not going to London as he
had threatened.
"I know all about it. I have a confidential little bird," said she,
showing very pretty airs of her head over the bit of work held
high between her active fingers. "There is a powerful magnet
in this neighborhood."
"To be sure there is. Nobody knows that better than you," said Will,
with light gallantry, but inwardly prepared to be angry.
"It is really the most charming romance: Mr. Casaubon jealous,
and foreseeing that there was no one else whom Mrs. Casaubon would
so much like to marry, and no one who would so much like to marry
her as a certain gentleman; and then laying a plan to spoil all
by making her forfeit her property if she did marry that gentleman--
and then--and then--and then--oh, I have no doubt the end will be
thoroughly romantic."
"Great God! what do you mean?" said Will, flushing over face and ears,
his features seeming to change as if he had had a violent shake.
"Don't joke; tell me what you mean."
"You don't really know?" said Rosamond, no longer playful, and desiring
nothing better than to tell in order that she might evoke effects.
"No!" he returned, impatiently.
"Don't know that Mr. Casaubon has left it in his will that
if Mrs. Casaubon marries you she is to forfeit all her property?"
"How do you know that it is true?" said Will, eagerly.
"My brother Fred heard it from the Farebrothers." Will started up
from his chair and reached his hat.
"I dare say she likes you better than the property," said Rosamond,
looking at him from a distance.
"Pray don't say any more about it," said Will, in a hoarse undertone
extremely unlike his usual light voice. "It is a foul insult
to her and to me." Then he sat down absently, looking before him,
but seeing nothing.
"Now you are angry with ME," said Rosamond. "It is too bad
to bear ME malice. You ought to be obliged to me for telling you."
"So I am," said Will, abruptly, speaking with that kind of double
soul which belongs to dreamers who answer questions.
"I expect to hear of the marriage," said Rosamond, play. fully.
"Never! You will never hear of the marriage!"
With those words uttered impetuously, Will rose, put out his hand
to Rosamond, still with the air of a somnambulist, and went away.
When he was gone, Rosamond left her chair and walked to the other end
of the room, leaning when she got there against a chiffonniere,
and looking out of the window wearily. She was oppressed by ennui,
and by that dissatisfaction which in women's minds is continually
turning into a trivial jealousy, referring to no real claims,
springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness
of egoism, and yet capable of impelling action as well as speech.
"There really is nothing to care for much," said poor Rosamond inwardly,
thinking of the family at Quallingham, who did not write to her;
and that perhaps Tertius when he came home would tease her
about expenses. She had already secretly disobeyed him by asking
her father to help them, and he had ended decisively by saying,
"I am more likely to want help myself."
CHAPTER LX.
Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable.
--Justice Shallow.
A few days afterwards--it was already the end of August--there was an
occasion which caused some excitement in Middlemarch: the public, if
it chose, was to have the advantage of buying, under the distinguished
auspices of Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, the furniture, books, and pictures
which anybody might see by the handbills to be the best in every kind,
belonging to Edwin Larcher, Esq. This was not one of the sales indicating
the depression of trade; on the contrary, it was due to Mr. Larcher's
great success in the carrying business, which warranted his purchase of a
mansion near Riverston already furnished in high style by an illustrious
Spa physician--furnished indeed with such large framefuls of expensive
flesh-painting in the dining-room, that Mrs. Larcher was nervous until
reassured by finding the subjects to be Scriptural. Hence the fine
opportunity to purchasers which was well pointed out in the handbills
of Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, whose acquaintance with the history of art
enabled him to state that the hall furniture, to be sold without reserve,
comprised a piece of carving by a contemporary of Gibbons.
At Middlemarch in those times a large sale was regarded as a kind
of festival. There was a table spread with the best cold eatables,
as at a superior funeral; and facilities were offered for that
generous-drinking of cheerful glasses which might lead to generous
and cheerful bidding for undesirable articles. Mr. Larcher's sale
was the more attractive in the fine weather because the house stood
just at the end of the town, with a garden and stables attached,
in that pleasant issue from Middlemarch called the London Road,
which was also the road to the New Hospital and to Mr. Bulstrode's
retired residence, known as the Shrubs. In short, the auction was
as good as a fair, and drew all classes with leisure at command:
to some, who risked making bids in order simply to raise prices,
it was almost equal to betting at the races. The second day,
when the best furniture was to be sold, "everybody" was there;
even Mr. Thesiger, the rector of St. Peter's, had looked in for a
short time, wishing to buy the carved table, and had rubbed elbows
with Mr. Bambridge and Mr. Horrock. There was a wreath of Middlemarch
ladies accommodated with seats round the large table in the dining-room,
where Mr. Borthrop Trumbull was mounted with desk and hammer;
but the rows chiefly of masculine faces behind were often varied
by incomings and outgoings both from the door and the large bow-window
opening on to the lawn.
"Everybody" that day did not include Mr. Bulstrode, whose health
could not well endure crowds and draughts. But Mrs. Bulstrode had
particularly wished to have a certain picture--a "Supper at Emmaus,"
attributed in the catalogue to Guido; and at the last moment
before the day of the sale Mr. Bulstrode had called at the office
of the "Pioneer," of which he was now one of the proprietors,
to beg of Mr. Ladislaw as a great favor that he would obligingly use
his remarkable knowledge of pictures on behalf of Mrs. Bulstrode,
and judge of the value of this particular painting--"if," added
the scrupulously polite banker, attendance at the sale would not
interfere with the arrangements for your departure, which I know
is imminent."
This proviso might have sounded rather satirically in Will's ear
if he had been in a mood to care about such satire. It referred
to an understanding entered into many weeks before with the
proprietors of the paper, that he should be at liberty any day
he pleased to hand over the management to the subeditor whom he
had been training; since he wished finally to quit Middlemarch.
But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of
doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know
the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long
that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind
the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle:
impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still--
very wonderful things have happened! Will did not confess this
weakness to himself, but he lingered. What was the use of going
to London at that time of the year? The Rugby men who would remember
him were not there; and so far as political writing was concerned,
he would rather for a few weeks go on with the "Pioneer." At the
present moment, however, when Mr. Bulstrode was speaking to him,
he had both a strengthened resolve to go and an equally strong
resolve not to go till he had once more seen Dorothea. Hence he
replied that he had reasons for deferring his departure a little,
and would be happy to go to the sale.
Will was in a defiant mood, his consciousness being deeply stung
with the thought that the people who looked at him probably knew
a fact tantamount to an accusation against him as a fellow with low
designs which were to be frustrated by a disposal of property.
Like most people who assert their freedom with regard to conventional
distinction, he was prepared to be sudden and quick at quarrel with any
one who might hint that he had personal reasons for that assertion--
that there was anything in his blood, his bearing, or his character
to which he gave the mask of an opinion. When he was under an
irritating impression of this kind he would go about for days with a
defiant look, the color changing in his transparent skin as if he were
on the qui vive, watching for something which he had to dart upon.
This expression was peculiarly noticeable in him at the sale,
and those who had only seen him in his moods of gentle oddity
or of bright enjoyment would have been struck with a contrast.
He was not sorry to have this occasion for appearing in public
before the Middlemarch tribes of Toller, Hackbutt, and the rest,
who looked down on him as an adventurer, and were in a state
of brutal ignorance about Dante--who sneered at his Polish blood,
and were themselves of a breed very much in need of crossing.
He stood in a conspicuous place not far from the auctioneer,
with a fore-finger in each side-pocket and his head thrown backward,
not caring to speak to anybody, though he had been cordially welcomed
as a connoissURE by Mr. Trumbull, who was enjoying the utmost
activity of his great faculties.
And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit
their powers of speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial
auctioneer keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his
encyclopedic knowledge. Some saturnine, sour-blooded persons
might object to be constantly insisting on the merits of all
articles from boot-jacks to "Berghems;" but Mr. Borthrop Trumbull
had a kindly liquid in his veins; he was an admirer by nature,
and would have liked to have the universe under his hammer,
feeling that it would go at a higher figure for his recommendation.
Meanwhile Mrs. Larcher's drawing-room furniture was enough for him.
When Will Ladislaw had come in, a second fender, said to have been
forgotten in its right place, suddenly claimed the auctioneer's
enthusiasm, which he distributed on the equitable principle of praising
those things most which were most in need of praise. The fender
was of polished steel, with much lancet-shaped open-work and a sharp edge
"Now, ladies," said he, "I shall appeal to you. Here is a fender
which at any other sale would hardly be offered with out reserve,
being, as I may say, for quality of steel and quaintness of design,
a kind of thing"--here Mr. Trumbull dropped his voice and became
slightly nasal, trimming his outlines with his left finger--
"that might not fall in with ordinary tastes. Allow me to tell
you that by-and-by this style of workmanship will be the only
one in vogue--half-a-crown, you said? thank you--going at
half-a-crown, this characteristic fender; and I have particular
information that the antique style is very much sought after
in high quarters. Three shillings--three-and-sixpence--hold it
well up, Joseph! Look, ladies, at the chastity of the design--
I have no doubt myself that it was turned out in the last century!
Four shillings, Mr. Mawmsey?--four shillings."
"It's not a thing I would put in MY drawing-room,"
said Mrs. Mawmsey, audibly, for the warning of the rash husband.
"I wonder AT Mrs. Larcher. Every blessed child's head
that fell against it would be cut in two. The edge is like a knife."
"Quite true," rejoined Mr. Trumbull, quickly, "and most uncommonly
useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather
shoe-tie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand:
many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut
him down. Gentlemen, here's a fender that if you had the misfortune
to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time--with astonishing
celerity--four-and-sixpence--five--five-and-sixpence--an appropriate
thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guest
a little out of his mind--six shillings--thank you, Mr. Clintup--
going at six shillings--going--gone!" The auctioneer's glance,
which had been searching round him with a preternatural susceptibility
to all signs of bidding, here dropped on the paper before him,
and his voice too dropped into a tone of indifferent despatch
as he said, "Mr. Clintup. Be handy, Joseph."
"It was worth six shillings to have a fender you could always tell
that joke on," said Mr. Clintup, laughing low and apologetically to his
next neighbor. He was a diffident though distinguished nurseryman,
and feared that the audience might regard his bid as a foolish one.
Meanwhile Joseph had brought a trayful of small articles.
"Now, ladies," said Mr. Trumbull, taking up one of the articles,
"this tray contains a very recherchy lot--a collection of trifles
for the drawing-room table--and trifles make the sum OF
human things--nothing more important than trifles--(yes, Mr. Ladislaw,
yes, by-and-by)--but pass the tray round, Joseph--these bijoux must
be examined, ladies. This I have in my hand is an ingenious contrivance--
a sort of practical rebus, I may call it: here, you see, it looks like
an elegant heart-shaped box, portable--for the pocket; there, again,
it becomes like a splendid double flower--an ornament for the table;
and now"--Mr. Trumbull allowed the flower to fall alarmingly into
strings of heart-shaped leaves--"a book of riddles! No less than
five hundred printed in a beautiful red. Gentlemen, if I had less
of a conscience, I should not wish you to bid high for this lot--
I have a longing for it myself. What can promote innocent mirth,
and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?--it hinders profane
language, and attaches a man to the society of refined females.
This ingenious article itself, without the elegant domino-box,
card-basket, &c., ought alone to give a high price to the lot.
Carried in the pocket it might make an individual welcome in
any society. Four shillings, sir?--four shillings for this remarkable
collection of riddles with the et caeteras. Here is a sample:
`How must you spell honey to make it catch lady-birds? Answer--
money.' You hear?--lady-birds--honey money. This is an amusement
to sharpen the intellect; it has a sting--it has what we call
satire, and wit without indecency. Four-and-sixpence--five shillings."
The bidding ran on with warming rivalry. Mr. Bowyer was a bidder,
and this was too exasperating. Bowyer couldn't afford it,
and only wanted to hinder every other man from making a figure.
The current carried even Mr. Horrock with it, but this committal
of himself to an opinion fell from him with so little sacrifice
of his neutral expression, that the bid might not have been detected
as his but for the friendly oaths of Mr. Bambridge, who wanted to know
what Horrock would do with blasted stuff only fit for haberdashers
given over to that state of perdition which the horse-dealer
so cordially recognized in the majority of earthly existences.
The lot was finally knocked down at a guinea to Mr. Spilkins, a young
Slender of the neighborhood, who was reckless with his pocket-money
and felt his want of memory for riddles.
"Come, Trumbull, this is too bad--you've been putting some old
maid's rubbish into the sale," murmured Mr. Toller, getting close
to the auctioneer. "I want to see how the prints go, and I must
be off soon."
"IMmediately, Mr. Toller. It was only an act of benevolence
which your noble heart would approve. Joseph! quick with the prints--
Lot 235. Now, gentlemen, you who are connoissURES, you
are going to have a treat. Here is an engraving of the Duke
of Wellington surrounded by his staff on the Field of Waterloo;
and notwithstanding recent events which have, as it were,
enveloped our great Hero in a cloud, I will be bold to say--
for a man in my line must not be blown about by political winds--
that a finer subject--of the modern order, belonging to our own
time and epoch--the understanding of man could hardly conceive:
angels might, perhaps, but not men, sirs, not men."
"Who painted it?" said Mr. Powderell, much impressed.
"It is a proof before the letter, Mr. Powderell--the painter is
not known," answered Trumbull, with a certain gaspingness in his
last words, after which he pursed up his lips and stared round him.
"I'll bid a pound!" said Mr. Powderell, in a tone of resolved emotion,
as of a man ready to put himself in the breach. Whether from awe
or pity, nobody raised the price on him.
Next came two Dutch prints which Mr. Toller had been eager for,
and after he had secured them he went away. Other prints, and afterwards
some paintings, were sold to leading Middlemarchers who had come
with a special desire for them, and there was a more active movement
of the audience in and out; some, who had bought what they wanted,
going away, others coming in either quite newly or from a temporary
visit to the refreshments which were spread under the marquee on
the lawn. It was this marquee that Mr. Bambridge was bent on buying,
and he appeared to like looking inside it frequently, as a foretaste
of its possession. On the last occasion of his return from it
he was observed to bring with him a new companion, a stranger to
Mr. Trumbull and every one else, whose appearance, however, led to
the supposition that he might be a relative of the horse-dealer's--
also "given to indulgence." His large whiskers, imposing swagger,
and swing of the leg, made him a striking figure; but his suit
of black, rather shabby at the edges, caused the prejudicial inference
that he was not able to afford himself as much indulgence as he liked.
"Who is it you've picked up, Bam?" said Mr. Horrock, aside.
"Ask him yourself," returned Mr. Bambridge. "He said he'd just
turned in from the road."
Mr. Horrock eyed the stranger, who was leaning back against his
stick with one hand, using his toothpick with the other, and looking
about him with a certain restlessness apparently under the silence
imposed on him by circumstances.
At length the "Supper at Emmaus" was brought forward, to Wills
immense relief, for he was getting so tired of the proceedings that he
had drawn back a little and leaned his shoulder against the wall
just behind the auctioneer. He now came forward again, and his
eye caught the conspicuous stranger, who, rather to his surprise,
was staring at him markedly. But Will was immediately appealed
to by Mr. Trumbull.
"Yes, Mr. Ladislaw, yes; this interests you as a connoissURE,
I think. It is some pleasure," the auctioneer went on with a
rising fervor, "to have a picture like this to show to a company
of ladies and gentlemen--a picture worth any sum to an individual
whose means were on a level with his judgment. It is a painting
of the Italian school--by the celebrated Guydo, the greatest
painter in the world, the chief of the Old Masters, as they are called--
I take it, because they were up to a thing or two beyond most of us--
in possession of secrets now lost to the bulk of mankind.
Let me tell you, gentlemen, I have seen a great many pictures
by the Old Masters, and they are not all up to this mark--some of
them are darker than you might like and not family subjects.
But here is a Guydo--the frame alone is worth pounds--which any
lady might be proud to hang up--a suitable thing for what we call
a refectory in a charitable institution, if any gentleman of the
Corporation wished to show his munifiCENCE. Turn it a little,
sir? yes. Joseph, turn it a little towards Mr. Ladislaw--Mr. Ladislaw,
having been abroad, understands the merit of these things,
you observe."
All eyes were for a moment turned towards Will, who said, coolly,
"Five pounds." The auctioneer burst out in deep remonstrance.
"Ah! Mr. Ladislaw! the frame alone is worth that. Ladies and gentlemen,
for the credit of the town! Suppose it should be discovered
hereafter that a gem of art has been amongst us in this town,
and nobody in Middlemarch awake to it. Five guineas--five seven-six--
five ten. Still, ladies, still! It is a gem, and `Full many a gem,'
as the poet says, has been allowed to go at a nominal pride because
the public knew no better, because it was offered in circles where
there was--I was going to say a low feeling, but no!--Six pounds--
six guineas--a Guydo of the first order going at six guineas--
it is an insult to religion, ladies; it touches us all as Christians,
gentlemen, that a subject like this should go at such a low figure--
six pounds ten--seven--"
The bidding was brisk, and Will continued to share in it,
remembering that Mrs. Bulstrode had a strong wish for the picture,
and thinking that he might stretch the price to twelve pounds.
But it was knocked down to him at ten guineas, whereupon he pushed
his way towards the bow-window and went out. He chose to go
under the marquee to get a glass of water, being hot and thirsty:
it was empty of other visitors, and he asked the woman in attendance
to fetch him some fresh water; but before she was well gone he was
annoyed to see entering the florid stranger who had stared at him.
It struck Will at this moment that the man might be one of those political
parasitic insects of the bloated kind who had once or twice claimed
acquaintance with him as having heard him speak on the Reform question,
and who might think of getting a shilling by news. In this light
his person, already rather heating to behold on a summer's day,
appeared the more disagreeable; and Will, half-seated on the elbow
of a garden-chair, turned his eyes carefully away from the comer.
But this signified little to our acquaintance Mr. Raffles, who never
hesitated to thrust himself on unwilling observation, if it suited
his purpose to do so. He moved. a step or two till he was in front
of Will, and said with full-mouthed haste, "Excuse me, Mr. Ladislaw--
was your mother's name Sarah Dunkirk?"
Will, starting to his feet, moved backward a step, frowning, and saying
with some fierceness, "Yes, sir, it was. And what is that to you?"
It was in Will's nature that the first spark it threw out was a
direct answer of the question and a challenge of the consequences.
To have said, "What is that to you?" in the first instance,
would have seemed like shuffling--as if he minded who knew anything
about his origin!
Raffles on his side had not the same eagerness for a collision
which was implied in Ladislaw's threatening air. The slim young
fellow with his girl's complexion looked like a tiger-cat ready
to spring on him. Under such circumstances Mr. Raffles's pleasure
in annoying his company was kept in abeyance.
"No offence, my good sir, no offence! I only remember your mother--
knew her when she was a girl. But it is your father that
you feature, sir. I had the pleasure of seeing your father too.
Parents alive, Mr. Ladislaw?"
"No!" thundered Will, in the same attitude as before.
"Should be glad to do you a service, Mr. Ladislaw--by Jove, I should!
Hope to meet again."
Hereupon Raffles, who had lifted his hat with the last words,
turned himself round with a swing of his leg and walked away.
Will looked after him a moment, and could see that he did not re-enter
the auction-room, but appeared to be walking towards the road.
For an instant he thought that he had been foolish not to let the man
go on talking;--but no! on the whole he preferred doing without
knowledge from that source.
Later in the evening, however, Raffles overtook him in the street,
and appearing either to have forgotten the roughness of his former
reception or to intend avenging it by a forgiving familiarity,
greeted him jovially and walked by his side, remarking at first
on the pleasantness of the town and neighbor hood. Will suspected
that the man had been drinking and was considering how to shake him
off when Raffles said--
"I've been abroad myself, Mr. Ladislaw--I've seen the world--
used to parley-vous a little. It was at Boulogne I saw your father--
a most uncommon likeness you are of him, by Jove! mouth--nose--eyes--
hair turned off your brow just like his--a little in the foreign style.
John Bull doesn't do much of that. But your father was very ill
when I saw him. Lord, lord! hands you might see through.
You were a small youngster then. Did he get well?"
"No," said Will, curtly.
"Ah! Well! I've often wondered what became of your mother.
She ran away from her friends when she was a young lass--
a proud-spirited lass, and pretty, by Jove! I knew the reason why
she ran away," said Raffles, winking slowly as he looked sideways
at Will.
"You know nothing dishonorable of her, sir," said Will, turning on
him rather savagely. But Mr. Raffles just now was not sensitive
to shades of manner.
"Not a bit!" said he, tossing his head decisively "She was a little
too honorable to like her friends--that was it!" Here Raffles
again winked slowly. "Lord bless you, I knew all about 'em--
a little in what you may call the respectable thieving line--
the high style of receiving-house--none of your holes and corners--
first-rate. Slap-up shop, high profits and no mistake. But Lord!
Sarah would have known nothing about it--a dashing young lady she was--
fine boarding-school--fit for a lord's wife--only Archie Duncan
threw it at her out of spite, because she would have nothing
to do with him. And so she ran away from the whole concern.
I travelled for 'em, sir, in a gentlemanly way--at a high salary.
They didn't mind her running away at first--godly folks, sir,
very godly--and she was for the stage. The son was alive then,
and the daughter was at a discount. Hallo! here we are at the
Blue Bull. What do you say, Mr. Ladislaw?--shall we turn in and have
a glass?"
"No, I must say good evening," said Will, dashing up a passage which
led into Lowick Gate, and almost running to get out of Raffles's reach.
He walked a long while on the Lowick road away from the town,
glad of the starlit darkness when it came. He felt as if he
had had dirt cast on him amidst shouts of scorn. There was this
to confirm the fellow's statement--that his mother never would
tell him the reason why she had run away from her family.
Well! what was he, Will Ladislaw, the worse, supposing the truth
about that family to be the ugliest? His mother had braved
hardship in order to separate herself from it. But if Dorothea's
friends had known this story--if the Chettams had known it--
they would have had a fine color to give their suspicions a welcome
ground for thinking him unfit to come near her. However, let them
suspect what they pleased, they would find themselves in the wrong.
They would find out that the blood in his veins was as free from
the taint of meanness as theirs.
CHAPTER LXI.
"Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right, but imputed
to man they may both be true."--Rasselas.
The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to
Brassing on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall
and drew him into his private sitting-room.
"Nicholas," she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously,
"there has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you--it has
made me quite uncomfortable."
"What kind of man, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, dreadfully certain
of the answer.
"A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner.
He declared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be
sorry not to see him. He wanted to wait for you here, but I told
him he could see you at the Bank to-morrow morning. Most impudent
he was!--stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives.
I don't believe he would have gone away, if Blucher had not
happened to break his chain and come running round on the gravel--
for I was in the garden; so I said, `You'd better go away--the dog
is very fierce, and I can't hold him.' Do you really know anything
of such a man?"
"I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode,
in his usual subdued voice, "an unfortunate dissolute wretch,
whom I helped too much in days gone by. However, I presume you will
not be troubled by him again. He will probably come to the Bank--
to beg, doubtless."
No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode
had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner. His wife,
not sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room
and saw him with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm
on a chest of drawers and staring absently at the ground.
He started nervously and looked up as she entered.
"You look very ill, Nicholas. Is there anything the matter?"
"I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr. Bulstrode,
who was so frequently ailing that his wife was always ready
to believe in this cause of depression.
"Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar."
Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally
the affectionate attention soothed him. Though always polite,
it was his habit to receive such services with marital coolness,
as his wife's duty. But to-day, while she was bending over him,
he said, "You are very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something
new in it to her ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was,
but her woman's solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he
might be going to have an illness.
"Has anything worried you?" she said. "Did that man come to you
at the Bank?"
"Yes; it was as I had supposed. He is a man who at one time might
have done better. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature."
"Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for
certain reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable
to hear him calling himself a friend of yours." At that moment she
would not have liked to say anything which implied her habitual
consciousness that her husband's earlier connections were not quite
on a level with her own. Not that she knew much about them.
That her husband had at first been employed in a bank, that he
had afterwards entered into what he called city business and gained
a fortune before he was three-and-thirty, that he had married
a widow who was much older than himself--a Dissenter, and in other
ways probably of that disadvantageous quality usually perceptible
in a first wife if inquired into with the dispassionate judgment
of a second--was almost as much as she had cared to learn beyond
the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode's narrative occasionally gave of
his early bent towards religion, his inclination to be a preacher,
and his association with missionary and philanthropic efforts.
She believed in him as an excellent man whose piety carried
a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose influence
had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share of
perishable good had been the means of raising her own position.
But she also liked to think that it was well in every sense
for Mr. Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy;
whose family was undeniable in a Middlemarch light--a better light
surely than any thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting
chapel-yards. The unreformed provincial mind distrusted London;
and while true religion was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode
was convinced that to be saved in the Church was more respectable.
She so much wished to ignore towards others that her husband
had ever been a London Dissenter, that she liked to keep it out
of sight even in talking to him. He was quite aware of this;
indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this ingenuous wife,
whose imitative piety and native worldliness were equally sincere,
who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had married out of
a thorough inclination still subsisting. But his fears were such
as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy:
the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from every one
else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth,
would be as the beginning of death to him. When she said--
"Is he quite gone away?"
"Oh, I trust so," he answered, with an effort to throw as much
sober unconcern into his tone as possible!
But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust.
In the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his
eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed.
He had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come
to Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighborhood
would suit him to live in. He had certainly had a few debts to pay
more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet:
a cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present.
What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family,
and know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so
much attached. By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay.
This time Raffles declined to be "seen off the premises," as he
expressed it--declined to quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode's eyes.
He meant to go by coach the next day--if he chose.
Bulstrode felt himself helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing
could avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on
any promise. On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his
heart that Raffles--unless providence sent death to hinder him--
would come back to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty
was a terror.
It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary:
he was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his
neighbors and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his
past life which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium
of the religion with which he had diligently associated himself.
The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable
glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually
recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life
is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay;
but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is
not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present:
it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still
quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and
the tinglings of a merited shame.
Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day,
without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect
and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier
life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we
look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn
our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees
The successive events inward and outward were there in one view:
though each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their
hold in the consciousness.
Once more he saw himself the young banker's clerk, with an
agreeable person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech
and fond of theological definition: an eminent though young member
of a Calvinistic dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking
experience in conviction of sin and sense of pardon. Again he
heard himself called for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings,
speaking on religious platforms, preaching in private houses.
Again he felt himself thinking of the ministry as possibly his vocation,
and inclined towards missionary labor. That was the happiest time
of his life: that was the spot he would have chosen now to awake
in and find the rest a dream. The people among whom Brother
Bulstrode was distinguished were very few, but they were very near
to him, and stirred his satisfaction the more; his power stretched
through a narrow space, but he felt its effect the more intensely.
He believed without effort in the peculiar work of grace within him,
and in the signs that God intended him for special instrumentality.
Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion
he had when he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school,
was invited to a fine villa belonging to Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man
in the congregation. Soon he became an intimate there, honored for
his piety by the wife, marked out for his ability by the husband,
whose wealth was due to a flourishing city and west-end trade.
That was the setting-in of a new current for his ambition,
directing his prospects of "instrumentality" towards the uniting
of distinguished religious gifts with successful business.
By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate
partner died, and nobody seemed to the principal so well fitted
to fill the severely felt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode,
if he would become confidential accountant. The offer was accepted.
The business was a pawnbroker's, of the most magnificent sort both
in extent and profits; and on a short acquaintance with it Bulstrode
became aware that one source of magnificent profit was the easy
reception of any goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where
they came from. But there was a branch house at the west end,
and no pettiness or dinginess to give suggestions of shame.
He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private,
and were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form
of prayer. The business was established and had old roots;
is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept
an investment in an old one? The profits made out of lost souls--
where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions?
Was it not even God's way of saving His chosen? "Thou knowest,"--
the young Bulstrode had said then, as the older Bulstrode was saying now--
"Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from these things--how I view
them all as implements for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there
from the wilderness."
Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual
experiences were not wanting which at last made the retention
of his position seem a service demanded of him: the vista of
a fortune had already opened itself, and Bulstrode's shrinking
remained private. Mr. Dunkirk had never expected that there
would be any shrinking at all: he had never conceived that trade
had anything to do with the scheme of salvation. And it was true
that Bulstrode found himself carrying on two distinct lives;
his religious activity could not be incompatible with his business
as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible.
Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the
same pleas--indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them
into intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding
the moral sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but
less enjoying, his soul had become more saturated with the belief
that he did everything for God's sake, being indifferent to it
for his own. And yet--if he could be back in that far-off spot
with his youthful poverty--why, then he would choose to be a missionary.
But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on.
There was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury. Years before,
the only daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage;
and now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also.
The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out
of the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature,
had come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women
often adore their priest or "man-made" minister. It was natural
that after a time marriage should have been thought of between them.
But Mrs. Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter,
who had long been regarded as lost both to God and her parents.
It was known that the daughter had married, but she was utterly
gone out of sight. The mother, having lost her boy, imagined
a grandson, and wished in a double sense to reclaim her daughter.
If she were found, there would be a channel for property--
perhaps a wide one--in the provision for several grandchildren.
Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs. Dunkirk would marry again.
Bulstrode concurred; but after advertisement as well as other modes
of inquiry had been tried, the mother believed that her daughter
was not to be found, and consented to marry without reservation
of property.
The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew it,
and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.
That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in
the rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.
But for himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory,
the fact was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came
by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up
to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences,
appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the
best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion.
Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness,
had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words--
"Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you!" The events
were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there--
namely, that they were in favor of his own ends. It was easy
for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring
what were God's intentions with regard to himself. Could it be
for God's service that this fortune should in any considerable
proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were given up
to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality--
people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?
Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, "The daughter
shall not be found"--nevertheless when the moment came he kept
her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed
the mother with consolation in the probability that the unhappy
young woman might be no more.
There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action
was unrighteous; but how could he go back? He had mental exercises,
called himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his
course of instrumentality. And after five years Death again came
to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually
withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite
to put an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen
years afterwards before it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas
Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was
become provincially, solidly important--a banker, a Churchman,
a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns,
in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material,
as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk. And now,
when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years--
when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness--
that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible
irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.
Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned
something momentous, something which entered actively into
the struggle of his longings and terrors. There, he thought,
lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.
The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may
be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions
for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.
He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his
theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification
of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.
If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally
in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we
believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest
date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth
as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves,
or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.
The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through
life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:
it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.
Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?
Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?
And to Mr. Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own
rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies,
who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be
as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence.
Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince
of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a
right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant.
This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar
to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable
of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit
of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
But a man who believes in something else than his own greed,
has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less
adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness
to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated
by use--but use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained
his immense need of being something important and predominating.
And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in danger
of being broken and utterly cast away.
What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made
him a stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become
the pretext of the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory?
If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he was cast out from
the temple as one who had brought unclean offerings.
He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But today a
repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply
a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its
aspect for him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must
bring restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that
Bulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible:
a great dread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching
approach of shame wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day,
while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him,
he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--
by what sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these
moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right,
God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion
can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the
religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
He had seen Raffles actually going away on the Brassing coach,
and this was a temporary relief; it removed the pressure of an
immediate dread, but did not put an end to the spiritual conflict and
the need to win protection. At last he came to a difficult resolve,
and wrote a letter to Will Ladislaw, begging him to be at the
Shrubs that evening for a private interview at nine o'clock. Will
had felt no particular surprise at the request, and connected it
with some new notions about the "Pioneer;" but when he was shown
into Mr. Bulstrode's private room, he was struck with the painfully
worn look on the banker's face, and was going to say, "Are you ill?"
when, checking himself in that abruptness, he only inquired after
Mrs. Bulstrode, and her satisfaction with the picture bought for her.
"Thank you, she is quite satisfied; she has gone out with her daughters
this evening. I begged you to come, Mr. Ladislaw, because I have
a communication of a very private--indeed, I will say, of a sacredly
confidential nature, which I desire to make to you. Nothing, I dare say,
has been farther from your thoughts than that there had been
important ties in the past which could connect your history with mine."
Will felt something like an electric shock. He was already in a state
of keen sensitiveness and hardly allayed agitation on the subject
of ties in the past, and his presentiments were not agreeable.
It seemed like the fluctuations of a dream--as if the action begun
by that loud bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed
sickly looking piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib
formality of speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him
as their remembered contrast. He answered, with a marked change
of color--
"No, indeed, nothing."
"You see before you, Mr. Ladislaw, a man who is deeply stricken.
But for the urgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am
before the bar of One who seeth not as man seeth, I should be under
no compulsion to make the disclosure which has been my object
in asking you to come here to-night. So far as human laws go,
you have no claim on me whatever."
Will was even more uncomfortable than wondering. Mr. Bulstrode
had paused, leaning his head on his hand, and looking at the floor.
But he now fixed his examining glance on Will and said--
"I am told that your mother's name was Sarah Dunkirk, and that she
ran away from her friends to go on the stage. Also, that your
father was at one time much emaciated by illness. May I ask
if you can confirm these statements?"
"Yes, they are all true," said Will, struck with the order in which
an inquiry had come, that might have been expected to be preliminary
to the banker's previous hints. But Mr. Bulstrode had to-night followed
the order of his emotions; he entertained no doubt that the opportunity
for restitution had come, and he had an overpowering impulse towards
the penitential expression by which he was deprecating chastisement.
"Do you know any particulars of your mother's family?" he continued.
"No; she never liked to speak of them. She was a very generous,
honorable woman," said Will, almost angrily.
"I do not wish to allege anything against her. Did she never mention
her mother to you at all?"
"I have heard her say that she thought her mother did not know the
reason of her running away. She said `poor mother' in a pitying tone."
"That mother became my wife," said Bulstrode, and then paused a
moment before he added, "you have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw: as I
said before, not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes.
I was enriched by that marriage--a result which would probably
not have taken place--certainly not to the same extent--if your
grandmother could have discovered her daughter. That daughter,
I gather, is no longer living!"
"No," said Will, feeling suspicion and repugnance rising so strongly
within him, that without quite knowing what he did, he took his hat
from the floor and stood up. The impulse within him was to reject
the disclosed connection.
"Pray be seated, Mr. Ladislaw," said Bulstrode, anxiously.
"Doubtless you are startled by the suddenness of this discovery.
But I entreat your patience with one who is already bowed down
by inward trial."
Will reseated himself, feeling some pity which was half contempt
for this voluntary self-abasement of an elderly man.
"It is my wish, Mr. Ladislaw, to make amends for the deprivation
which befell your mother. I know that you are without fortune,
and I wish to supply you adequately from a store which would have
probably already been yours had your grandmother been certain
of your mother's existence and been able to find her."
Mr. Bulstrode paused. He felt that he was performing a striking piece
of scrupulosity in the judgment of his auditor, and a penitential
act in the eyes of God. He had no clew to the state of Will
Ladislaw's mind, smarting as it was from the clear hints of Raffles,
and with its natural quickness in construction stimulated by the
expectation of discoveries which he would have been glad to conjure
back into darkness. Will made no answer for several moments,
till Mr. Bulstrode, who at the end of his speech had cast his
eyes on the floor, now raised them with an examining glance,
which Will met fully, saying--
"I suppose you did know of my mother's existence, and knew where she
might have been found."
Bulstrode shrank--there was a visible quivering in his face and hands.
He was totally unprepared to have his advances met in this way,
or to find himself urged into more revelation than he had beforehand
set down as needful. But at that moment he dared not tell a lie,
and he felt suddenly uncertain of his ground which he had trodden
with some confidence before.
"I will not deny that you conjecture rightly," he answered,
with a faltering in his tone. "And I wish to make atonement to you
as the one still remaining who has suffered a loss through me.
You enter, I trust, into my purpose, Mr. Ladislaw, which has a reference
to higher than merely human claims, and as I have already said,
is entirely independent of any legal compulsion. I am ready to
narrow my own resources and the prospects of my family by binding
myself to allow you five hundred pounds yearly during my life,
and to leave you a proportional capital at my death--nay, to do
still more, if more should be definitely necessary to any laudable
project on your part." Mr. Bulstrode had gone on to particulars
in the expectation that these would work strongly on Ladislaw,
and merge other feelings in grateful acceptance.
But Will was looking as stubborn as possible, with his lip pouting
and his fingers in his side-pockets. He was not in the least touched,
and said firmly,--
"Before I make any reply to your proposition, Mr. Bulstrode, I must
beg you to answer a question or two. Were you connected with the
business by which that fortune you speak of was originally made?"
Mr. Bulstrode's thought was, "Raffles has told him." How could he
refuse to answer when he had volunteered what drew forth the question?
He answered, "Yes."
"And was that business--or was it not--a thoroughly dishonorable one--
nay, one that, if its nature had been made public, might have
ranked those concerned in it with thieves and convicts?"
Will's tone had a cutting bitterness: he was moved to put his
question as nakedly as he could.
Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger. He had been prepared
for a scene of self-abasement, but his intense pride and his habit
of supremacy overpowered penitence, and even dread, when this young man,
whom he had meant to benefit, turned on him with the air of a judge.
"The business was established before I became connected with it,
sir; nor is it for you to institute an inquiry of that kind,"
he answered, not raising his voice, but speaking with quick defiantness.
"Yes, it is," said Will, starting up again with his hat in his hand.
"It is eminently mine to ask such questions, when I have to decide
whether I will have transactions with you and accept your money.
My unblemished honor is important to me. It is important to me
to have no stain on my birth and connections. And now I find there
is a stain which I can't help. My mother felt it, and tried
to keep as clear of it as she could, and so will I. You shall keep
your ill-gotten money. If I had any fortune of my own, I would
willingly pay it to any one who could disprove what you have told me.
What I have to thank you for is that you kept the money till now,
when I can refuse it. It ought to lie with a man's self that he is
a gentleman. Good-night, sir."
Bulstrode was going to speak, but Will, with determined quickness,
was out of the room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had
closed behind him. He was too strongly possessed with passionate
rebellion against this inherited blot which had been thrust on his
knowledge to reflect at present whether he had not been too hard
on Bulstrode--too arrogantly merciless towards a man of sixty,
who was making efforts at retrieval when time had rendered them vain.
No third person listening could have thoroughly understood the
impetuosity of Will's repulse or the bitterness of his words.
No one but himself then knew how everything connected with the
sentiment of his own dignity had an immediate bearing for him on
his relation to Dorothea and to Mr. Casaubon's treatment of him.
And in the rush of impulses by which he flung back that offer
of Bulstrode's there was mingled the sense that it would have been
impossible for him ever to tell Dorothea that he had accepted it.
As for Bulstrode--when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction,
and wept like a woman. It was the first time he had encountered
an open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles;
and with that scorn hurrying like venom through his system,
there was no sensibility left to consolations. Rut the relief
of weeping had to be checked. His wife and daughters soon came
home from hearing the address of an Oriental missionary, and were
full of regret that papa had not heard, in the first instance,
the interesting things which they tried to repeat to him.
Perhaps, through all other hidden thoughts, the one that breathed
most comfort was, that Will Ladislaw at least was not likely
to publish what had taken place that evening.
CHAPTER LXII.
"He was a squyer of lowe degre,
That loved the king's daughter of Hungrie.
--Old Romance.
Will Ladislaw's mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again,
and forthwith quitting Middlemarch. The morning after his agitating
scene with Bulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that
various causes had detained him in the neighborhood longer than he
had expected, and asking her permission to call again at Lowick
at some hour which she would mention on the earliest possible day,
he being anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so until she
had granted him an interview. He left the letter at the office,
ordering the messenger to carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for
an answer.
Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words.
His former farewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam,
and had been announced as final even to the butler. It is certainly
trying to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so:
a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second
lends an opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there
might be bitter sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering.
Still it was on the whole more satisfactory to his feeling to take
the directest means of seeing Dorothea, than to use any device
which might give an air of chance to a meeting of which he
wished her to understand that it was what he earnestly sought.
When he had parted from her before, he had been in ignorance
of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation between them,
and made a more absolute severance than he had then believed in.
He knew nothing of Dorothea's private fortune, and being
little used to reflect on such matters, took it for granted
that according to Mr. Casaubon's arrangement marriage to him,
Will Ladislaw, would mean that she consented to be penniless.
That was not what he could wish for even in his secret heart,
or even if she had been ready to meet such hard contrast for his sake.
And then, too, there was the fresh smart of that disclosure about
his mother's family, which if known would be an added reason why
Dorothea's friends should look down upon him as utterly below her.
The secret hope that after some years he might come back with the
sense that he had at least a personal value equal to her wealth,
seemed now the dreamy continuation of a dream. This change would surely
justify him in asking Dorothea to receive him once more.
But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will's note.
In consequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention
to be at home in a week, she had driven first to Freshitt to carry
the news, meaning to go on to the Grange to deliver some orders
with which her uncle had intrusted her--thinking, as he said,
"a little mental occupation of this sort good for a widow."
If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt
that morning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed
as to the readiness of certain people to sneer at his lingering
in the neighborhood. Sir James, indeed, though much relieved
concerning Dorothea, had been on the watch to learn Ladislaw's movements,
and had an instructed informant in Mr. Standish, who was necessarily
in his confidence on this matter. That Ladislaw had stayed in
Middlemarch nearly two months after he had declared that he was
going immediately, was a fact to embitter Sir James's suspicions,
or at least to justify his aversion to a "young fellow" whom he
represented to himself as slight, volatile, and likely enough to show
such recklessness as naturally went along with a position unriveted
by family ties or a strict profession. But he had just heard something
from Standish which, while it justified these surmises about Will,
offered a means of nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea.
Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves:
there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged
to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same
incongruous manner. Good Sir James was this morning so far unlike
himself that he was irritably anxious to say something to Dorothea
on a subject which he usually avoided as if it had been a matter
of shame to them both. He could not use Celia as a medium,
because he did not choose that she should know the kind of gossip
he had in his mind; and before Dorothea happened to arrive he had
been trying to imagine how, with his shyness and unready tongue,
he could ever manage to introduce his communication. Her unexpected
presence brought him to utter hopelessness in his own power of
saying anything unpleasant; but desperation suggested a resource;
he sent the groom on an unsaddled horse across the park with a
pencilled note to Mrs. Cadwallader, who already knew the gossip,
and would think it no compromise of herself to repeat it as often
as required.
Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr. Garth,
whom she wanted to see, was expected at the hall within the hour,
and she was still talking to Caleb on the gravel when Sir James,
on the watch for the rector's wife, saw her coming and met her
with the needful hints.
"Enough! I understand,"--said Mrs. Cadwallader. "You shall
be innocent. I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself."
"I don't mean that it's of any consequence," said Sir James,
disliking that Mrs. Cadwallader should understand too much.
"Only it is desirable that Dorothea should know there are reasons why
she should not receive him again; and I really can't say so to her.
It will come lightly from you."
It came very lightly indeed. When Dorothea quitted Caleb and
turned to meet them, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped
across the park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat
with Celia in a matronly way about the baby. And so Mr. Brooke
was coming back? Delightful!--coming back, it was to be hoped,
quite cured of Parliamentary fever and pioneering. Apropos
of the "Pioneer"--somebody had prophesied that it would soon
be like a dying dolphin, and turn all colors for want of knowing
how to help itself, because Mr. Brooke's protege, the brilliant
young Ladislaw, was gone or going. Had Sir James heard that?
The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James,
turning aside to whip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.
"All false!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "He is not gone, or going,
apparently; the `Pioneer' keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw
is making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your
Mr. Lydgate's wife, who they tell me is as pretty as pretty can be.
It seems nobody ever goes into the house without finding this
young gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano.
But the people in manufacturing towns are always disreputable."
"You began by saying that one report was false, Mrs. Cadwallader,
and I believe this is false too," said Dorothea, with indignant energy;
"at least, I feel sure it is a misrepresentation. I will not hear
any evil spoken of Mr. Ladislaw; he has already suffered too
much injustice."
Dorothea when thoroughly moved cared little what any one thought
of her feelings; and even if she had been able to reflect, she would
have held it petty to keep silence at injurious words about Will
from fear of being herself misunderstood. Her face was flushed
and her lip trembled.
Sir James, glancing at her, repented of his stratagem;
but Mrs. Cadwallader, equal to all occasions, spread the palms
of her hands outward and said--"Heaven grant it, my dear!--I mean
that all bad tales about anybody may be false. But it is a pity that
young Lydgate should have married one of these Middlemarch girls.
Considering he's a son of somebody, he might have got a woman
with good blood in her veins, and not too young, who would have put
up with his profession. There's Clara Harfager, for instance,
whose friends don't know what to do with her; and she has a portion.
Then we might have had her among us. However!--it's no use
being wise for other people. Where is Celia? Pray let us go in."
"I am going on immediately to Tipton," said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
"Good-by."
Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage.
He was altogether discontented with the result of a contrivance
which had cost him some secret humiliation beforehand.
Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn
corn-fields, not seeing or hearing anything around. The tears
came and rolled down her cheeks, but she did not know it.
The world, it seemed, was turning ugly and hateful, and there was
no place for her trustfulness. "It is not true--it is not true!"
was the voice within her that she listened to; but all the while
a remembrance to which there had always clung a vague uneasiness
would thrust itself on her attention--the remembrance of that day
when she had found Will Ladislaw with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard
his voice accompanied by the piano.
"He said he would never do anything that I disapproved--I wish I
could have told him that I disapproved of that," said poor Dorothea,
inwardly, feeling a strange alternation between anger with Will
and the passionate defence of him. "They all try to blacken him
before me; but I will care for no pain, if he is not to blame.
I always believed he was good."--These were her last thoughts
before she felt that the carriage was passing under the archway
of the lodge-gate at the Grange, when she hurriedly pressed
her handkerchief to her face and began to think of her errands.
The coachman begged leave to take out the horses for half an hour
as there was something wrong with a shoe; and Dorothea, having the
sense that she was going to rest, took off her gloves and bonnet,
while she was leaning against a statue in the entrance-hall,
and talking to the housekeeper. At last she said--
"I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell. I will go into the library
and write you some memoranda from my uncle's letter, if you will
open the shutters for me."
"The shutters are open, madam," said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea,
who had walked along as she spoke. "Mr. Ladislaw is there,
looking for something."
(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he
had missed in the act of packing his movables, and did not choose
to leave behind.)
Dorothea's heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow,
but she was not perceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will
was there was for the moment all-satisfying to her, like the sight
of something precious that one has lost. When she reached the door
she said to Mrs. Kell--
"Go in first, and tell him that I am here."
Will had found his portfolio, and had laid it on the table at the
far end of the room, to turn over the sketches and please himself
by looking at the memorable piece of art which had a relation
to nature too mysterious for Dorothea. He was smiling at it still,
and shaking the sketches into order with the thought that he might
find a letter from her awaiting him at Middlemarch, when Mrs. Kell
close to his elbow said--
"Mrs. Casaubon is coming in, sir."
Will turned round quickly, and the next moment Dorothea was entering.
As Mrs. Kell closed the door behind her they met: each was looking
at the other, and consciousness was overflowed by something that
suppressed utterance. It was not confusion that kept them silent,
for they both felt that parting was near, and there is no shamefacedness
in a sad parting.
She moved automatically towards her uncle's chair against the
writing-table, and Will, after drawing it out a little for her,
went a few paces off and stood opposite to her.
"Pray sit down," said Dorothea, crossing her hands on her lap;
"I am very glad you were here." Will thought that her face looked
just as it did when she first shook hands with him in Rome;
for her widow's cap, fixed in her bonnet, had gone off with it,
and he could see that she had lately been shedding tears. But the
mixture of anger in her agitation had vanished at the sight of him;
she had been used, when they were face to face, always to feel
confidence and the happy freedom which comes with mutual understanding,
and how could other people's words hinder that effect on a sudden?
Let the music which can take possession of our frame and fill the air
with joy for us, sound once more--what does it signify that we heard it
found fault with in its absence?
"I have sent a letter to Lowick Manor to-day, asking leave to
see you," said Will, seating himself opposite to her. "I am going
away immediately, and I could not go without speaking to you again."
"I thought we had parted when you came to Lowick many weeks ago--
you thought you were going then," said Dorothea, her voice trembling
a little.
"Yes; but I was in ignorance then of things which I know now--
things which have altered my feelings about the future. When I
saw you before, I was dreaming that I might come back some day.
I don't think I ever shall--now." Will paused here.
"You wished me to know the reasons?" said Dorothea, timidly.
"Yes," said Will, impetuously, shaking his head backward, and looking
away from her with irritation in his face. "Of course I must wish it.
I have been grossly insulted in your eyes and in the eyes of others.
There has been a mean implication against my character. I wish you
to know that under no circumstances would I have lowered myself by--
under no circumstances would I have given men the chance of saying
that I sought money under the pretext of seeking--something else.
There was no need of other safeguard against me--the safeguard of wealth
was enough."
Will rose from his chair with the last word and went--he hardly
knew where; but it was to the projecting window nearest him,
which had been open as now about the same season a year ago, when he
and Dorothea had stood within it and talked together. Her whole heart
was going out at this moment in sympathy with Will's indignation:
she only wanted to convince him that she had never done him injustice,
and he seemed to have turned away from her as if she too had been
part of the unfriendly world.
"It would be very unkind of you to suppose that I ever attributed
any meanness to you," she began. Then in her ardent way,
wanting to plead with him, she moved from her chair and went
in front of him to her old place in the window, saying, "Do you
suppose that I ever disbelieved in you?"
When Will saw her there, he gave a start and moved backward out
of the window, without meeting her glance. Dorothea was hurt
by this movement following up the previous anger of his tone.
She was ready to say that it was as hard on her as on him,
and that she was helpless; but those strange particulars of their
relation which neither of them could explicitly mention kept
her always in dread of saying too much. At this moment she had
no belief that Will would in any case have wanted to marry her,
and she feared using words which might imply such a belief.
She only said earnestly, recurring to his last word--
"I am sure no safeguard was ever needed against you."
Will did not answer. In the stormy fluctuation of his feelings these
words of hers seemed to him cruelly neutral, and he looked pale and
miserable after his angry outburst. He went to the table and fastened
up his portfolio, while Dorothea looked at him from the distance.
They were wasting these last moments together in wretched silence.
What could he say, since what had got obstinately uppermost in his
mind was the passionate love for her which he forbade himself
to utter? What could she say, since she might offer him no help--
since she was forced to keep the money that ought to have been his?--
since to-day he seemed not to respond as he used to do to her thorough
trust and liking?
But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached
the window again.
"I must go," he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which
sometimes accompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired
and burned with gazing too close at a light.
"What shall you do in life?" said Dorothea, timidly. "Have your
intentions remained just the same as when we said good-by before?"
"Yes," said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject
as uninteresting. "I shall work away at the first thing that offers.
I suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope."
"Oh, what sad words!" said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob.
Then trying to smile, she added, "We used to agree that we were
alike in speaking too strongly."
"I have not spoken too strongly now," said Will, leaning back against
the angle of the wall. "There are certain things which a man can
only go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other
that the best is over with him. This experience has happened to me
while I am very young--that is all. What I care more for than I
can ever care for anything else is absolutely forbidden to me--
I don't mean merely by being out of my reach, but forbidden me,
even if it were within my reach, by my own pride and honor--
by everything I respect myself for. Of course I shall go on living
as a man might do who had seen heaven in a trance."
Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea
to misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting
himself and offending against his self-approval in speaking
to her so plainly; but still--it could not be fairly called
wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her.
It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.
But Dorothea's mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another
vision than his. The thought that she herself might be what Will
most cared for did throb through her an instant, but then came doubt:
the memory of the little they had lived through together turned pale
and shrank before the memory which suggested how much fuller might
have been the intercourse between Will and some one else with whom
he had had constant companionship. Everything he had said might
refer to that other relation, and whatever had passed between him
and herself was thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded
as their simple friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it
by her husband's injurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her
eyes cast down dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left
the sickening certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate.
But why sickening? He wanted her to know that here too his conduct
should be above suspicion.
Will was not surprised at her silence. His mind also was tumultuously
busy while he watched her, and he was feeling rather wildly that something
must happen to hinder their parting--some miracle, clearly nothing
in their own deliberate speech. Yet, after all, had she any love
for him?--he could not pretend to himself that he would rather believe
her to be without that pain. He could not deny that a secret longing
for the assurance that she loved him was at the root of all his words.
Neither of them knew how long they stood in that way. Dorothea was
raising her eyes, and was about to speak, when the door opened
and her footman came to say--
"The horses are ready, madam, whenever you like to start."
"Presently," said Dorothea. Then turning to Will, she said,
"I have some memoranda to write for the housekeeper."
"I must go," said Will, when the door had closed again--advancing
towards her. "The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch."
"You have acted in every way rightly," said Dorothea, in a low tone,
feeling a pressure at her heart which made it difficult to speak.
She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant with.
out speaking, for her words had seemed to him cruelly cold and
unlike herself. Their eyes met, but there was discontent in his,
and in hers there was only sadness. He turned away and took his
portfolio under his arm.
"I have never done you injustice. Please remember me," said Dorothea,
repressing a rising sob.
"Why should you say that?" said Will, with irritation. "As if I
were not in danger of forgetting everything else."
He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it
impelled him to go away without pause. It was all one flash to Dorothea--
his last words--his distant bow to her as he reached the door--
the sense that he was no longer there. She sank into the chair,
and for a few moments sat like a statue, while images and emotions
were hurrying upon her. Joy came first, in spite of the threatening
train behind it--joy in the impression that it was really herself
whom Will loved and was renouncing, that there was really no other
love less permissible, more blameworthy, which honor was hurrying
him away from. They were parted all the same, but--Dorothea drew
a deep breath and felt her strength return--she could think of
him unrestrainedly. At that moment the parting was easy to bear:
the first sense of loving and being loved excluded sorrow. It was as
if some hard icy pressure had melted, and her consciousness had room
to expand: her past was come back to her with larger interpretation.
The joy was not the less--perhaps it was the more complete just then--
because of the irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach,
no contemptuous wonder to imagine in any eye or from any lips.
He had acted so as to defy reproach, and make wonder respectful.
Any one watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying
thought within her. Just as when inventive power is working
with glad ease some small claim on the attention is fully met
as if it were only a cranny opened to the sunlight, it was easy
now for Dorothea to write her memoranda. She spoke her last words
to the housekeeper in cheerful tones, and when she seated herself
in the carriage her eyes were bright and her cheeks blooming
under the dismal bonnet. She threw back the heavy "weepers,"
and looked before her, wondering which road Will had taken.
It was in her nature to be proud that he was blameless, and through
all her feelings there ran this vein--"I was right to defend him."
The coachman was used to drive his grays at a good pane, Mr. Casaubon
being unenjoying and impatient in everything away from his desk,
and wanting to get to the end of all journeys; and Dorothea
was now bowled along quickly. Driving was pleasant, for rain
in the night had laid the dust, and the blue sky looked far off,
away from the region of the great clouds that sailed in masses.
The earth looked like a happy place under the vast heavens,
and Dorothea was wishing that she might overtake Will and see him
once more.
After a turn of the road, there he was with the portfolio under his arm;
but the next moment she was passing him while he raised his hat,
and she felt a pang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation,
leaving him behind. She could not look back at him. It was
as if a crowd of indifferent objects had thrust them asunder,
and forced them along different paths, taking them farther and
farther away from each other, and making it useless to look back.
She could no more make any sign that would seem to say, "Need we part?"
than she could stop the carriage to wait for him. Nay, what a world
of reasons crowded upon her against any movement of her thought
towards a future that might reverse the decision of this day!
"I only wish I had known before--I wish he knew--then we could be
quite happy in thinking of each other, though we are forever parted.
And if I could but have given him the money, and made things easier
for him!"--were the longings that came back the most persistently.
And yet, so heavily did the world weigh on her in spite of her
independent energy, that with this idea of Will as in need of such help
and at a disadvantage with the world, there came always the vision
of that unfittingness of any closer relation between them which lay
in the opinion of every one connected with her. She felt to the full
all the imperativeness of the motives which urged Will's conduct.
How could he dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had
placed between them?--how could she ever say to herself that she
would defy it?
Will's certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance,
had much more bitterness in it. Very slight matters were enough
to gall him in his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea
driving past him while he felt himself plodding along as a poor
devil seeking a position in a world which in his present temper
offered him little that he coveted, made his conduct seem a mere
matter of necessity, and took away the sustainment of resolve.
After all, he had no assurance that she loved him: could any man
pretend that he was simply glad in such a case to have the suffering
all on his own side?
That evening Will spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he
was gone.
BOOK VII.
TWO TEMPTATIONS.
CHAPTER LXIII.
These little things are great to little man.--GOLDSMITH.
"Have you seen much of your scientific phoenix, Lydgate, lately?"
said Mr. Toller at one of his Christmas dinner-parties, speaking
to Mr. Farebrother on his right hand.
"Not much, I am sorry to say," answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry
Mr. Toller's banter about his belief in the new medical light.
"I am out of the way and he is too busy."
"Is he? I am glad to hear it," said Dr. Minchin, with mingled
suavity and surprise.
"He gives a great deal of time to the New Hospital," said Mr. Farebrother,
who had his reasons for continuing the subject: "I hear of that from
my neighbor, Mrs. Casaubon, who goes there often. She says Lydgate
is indefatigable, and is making a fine thing of Bulstrode's institution.
He is preparing a new ward in case of the cholera coming to us."
"And preparing theories of treatment to try on the patients,
I suppose," said Mr. Toller.
"Come, Toller, be candid," said Mr. Farebrother. "You are too clever
not to see the good of a bold fresh mind in medicine, as well as in
everything else; and as to cholera, I fancy, none of you are very
sure what you ought to do. If a man goes a little too far along
a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else."
"I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him," said Dr. Minchin,
looking towards Toller, "for he has sent you the cream of Peacock's patients."
"Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner,"
said Mr. Harry Toller, the brewer. "I suppose his relations in the
North back him up."
"I hope so," said Mr. Chichely, "else he ought not to have married
that nice girl we were all so fond of. Hang it, one has a grudge
against a man who carries off the prettiest girl in the town."
"Ay, by God! and the best too," said Mr. Standish.
"My friend Vincy didn't half like the marriage, I know that,"
said Mr. Chichely. "HE wouldn't do much. How the relations
on the other side may have come down I can't say." There was an
emphatic kind of reticence in Mr. Chichely's manner of speaking.
"Oh, I shouldn't think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living,"
said Mr. Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject
was dropped.
This was not the first time that Mr. Farebrother had heard hints of
Lydgate's expenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice,
but he thought it not unlikely that there were resources or expectations
which excused the large outlay at the time of Lydgate's marriage,
and which might hinder any bad consequences from the disappointment
in his practice. One evening, when he took the pains to go
to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as of old,
he noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy
way of keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever
he had anything to say. Lydgate talked persistently when they were
in his work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability
of certain biological views; but he had none of those definite
things to say or to show which give the waymarks of a patient
uninterrupted pursuit, such as he used himself to insist on,
saying that "there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,"
and that "a man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking
between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass."
That evening he seemed to be talking widely for the sake of resisting
any personal bearing; and before long they went into the drawing room,
where Lydgate, having asked Rosamond to give them music, sank back
in his chair in silence, but with a strange light in his eyes.
"He may have been taking an opiate," was a thought that crossed
Mr. Farebrother's mind--"tic-douloureux perhaps--or medical worries."
It did not occur to him that Lydgate's marriage was not delightful:
he believed, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable,
docile creature, though he had always thought her rather uninteresting--
a little too much the pattern-card of the finishing-school;
and his mother could not forgive Rosamond because she never seemed
to see that Henrietta Noble was in the room. "However, Lydgate
fell in love with her," said the Vicar to himself, "and she must
be to his taste."
Mr. Farebrother was aware that Lydgate was a proud man, but having
very little corresponding fibre in himself, and perhaps too little care
about personal dignity, except the dignity of not being mean or foolish,
he could hardly allow enough for the way in which Lydgate shrank,
as from a burn, from the utterance of any word about his private affairs.
And soon after that conversation at Mr. Toller's, the Vicar
learned something which made him watch the more eagerly for an
opportunity of indirectly letting Lydgate know that if he wanted
to open himself about any difficulty there was a friendly ear ready.
The opportunity came at Mr. Vincy's, where, on New Year's Day,
there was a party, to which Mr. Farebrother was irresistibly invited,
on the plea that he must not forsake his old friends on the first
new year of his being a greater man, and Rector as well as Vicar.
And this party was thoroughly friendly: all the ladies of the
Farebrother family were present; the Vincy children all dined
at the table, and Fred had persuaded his mother that if she did
not invite Mary Garth, the Farebrothers would regard it as a slight
to themselves, Mary being their particular friend. Mary came, and Fred
was in high spirits, though his enjoyment was of a checkered kind--
triumph that his mother should see Mary's importance with the chief
personages in the party being much streaked with jealousy when
Mr. Farebrother sat down by her. Fred used to be much more easy
about his own accomplishments in the days when he had not begun
to dread being "bowled out by Farebrother," and this terror was
still before him. Mrs. Vincy, in her fullest matronly bloom,
looked at Mary's little figure, rough wavy hair, and visage quite
without lilies and roses, and wondered; trying unsuccessfully
to fancy herself caring about Mary's appearance in wedding clothes,
or feeling complacency in grandchildren who would "feature" the Garths.
However, the party was a merry one, and Mary was particularly bright;
being glad, for Fred's sake, that his friends were getting
kinder to her, and being also quite willing that they should
see how much she was valued by others whom they must admit to be judges.
Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy
spoke as little as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly
graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar
had not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total
absence of that interest in her husband's presence which a loving
wife is sure to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him.
When Lydgate was taking part in the conversation, she never looked
towards him any more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modelled
to look another way: and when, after being called out for an hour
or two, he re-entered the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact,
which eighteen months before would have had the effect of a numeral
before ciphers. In reality, however, she was intensely aware
of Lydgate's voice and movements; and her pretty good-tempered air
of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which she satisfied
her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety.
When the ladies were in the drawing-room after Lydgate had been
called away from the dessert, Mrs. Farebrother, when Rosamond
happened to be near her, said--"You have to give up a great deal
of your husband's society, Mrs. Lydgate."
"Yes, the life of a medical man is very arduous: especially when he
is so devoted to his profession as Mr. Lydgate is," said Rosamond,
who was standing, and moved easily away at the end of this correct
little speech.
"It is dreadfully dull for her when there is no company,"
said Mrs. Vincy, who was seated at the old lady's side.
"I am sure I thought so when Rosamond was ill, and I was staying
with her. You know, Mrs. Farebrother, ours is a cheerful house.
I am of a cheerful disposition myself, and Mr. Vincy always likes
something to be going on. That is what Rosamond has been used to.
Very different from a husband out at odd hours, and never knowing
when he will come home, and of a close, proud disposition,
_I_ think"--indiscreet Mrs. Vincy did lower her tone slightly with
this parenthesis. "But Rosamond always had an angel of a temper;
her brothers used very often not to please her, but she was never
the girl to show temper; from a baby she was always as good as good,
and with a complexion beyond anything. But my children are all
good-tempered, thank God."
This was easily credible to any one looking at Mrs. Vincy as she threw
back her broad cap-strings, and smiled towards her three little girls,
aged from seven to eleven. But in that smiling glance she was
obliged to include Mary Garth, whom the three girls had got into
a corner to make her tell them stories. Mary was just finishing
the delicious tale of Rumpelstiltskin, which she had well by heart,
because Letty was never tired of communicating it to her ignorant
elders from a favorite red volume. Louisa, Mrs. Vincy's darling,
now ran to her with wide-eyed serious excitement, crying, "Oh mamma,
mamma, the little man stamped so hard on the floor he couldn't
get his leg out again!"
"Bless you, my cherub!" said mamma; "you shall tell me all about it
to-morrow. Go and listen!" and then, as her eyes followed Louisa
back towards the attractive corner, she thought that if Fred wished
her to invite Mary again she would make no objection, the children
being so pleased with her.
But presently the corner became still more animated, for Mr. Farebrother
came in, and seating himself behind Louisa, took her on his lap;
whereupon the girls all insisted that he must hear Rumpelstiltskin,
and Mary must tell it over again. He insisted too, and Mary,
without fuss, began again in her neat fashion, with precisely
the same words as before. Fred, who had also seated himself near,
would have felt unmixed triumph in Mary's effectiveness if
Mr. Farebrother had not been looking at her with evident admiration,
while he dramatized an intense interest in the tale to please
the children.
"You will never care any more about my one-eyed giant, Loo,"
said Fred at the end.
"Yes, I shall. Tell about him now," said Louisa.
"Oh, I dare say; I am quite cut out. Ask Mr. Farebrother."
"Yes," added Mary; "ask Mr. Farebrother to tell you about the ants
whose beautiful house was knocked down by a giant named Tom,
and he thought they didn't mind because he couldn't hear them cry,
or see them use their pocket-handkerchiefs."
"Please," said Louisa, looking up at the Vicar.
"No, no, I am a grave old parson. If I try to draw a story out
of my bag a sermon comes instead. Shall I preach you a sermon?"
said he, putting on his short-sighted glasses, and pursing up
his lips.
"Yes," said Louisa, falteringly.
"Let me see, then. Against cakes: how cakes are bad things,
especially if they are sweet and have plums in them."
Louisa took the affair rather seriously, and got down from the
Vicar's knee to go to Fred.
"Ah, I see it will not do to preach on New Year's Day,"
said Mr. Farebrother, rising and walking--away. He had discovered
of late that Fred had become jealous of him, and also that he
himself was not losing his preference for Mary above all other women.
"A delightful young person is Miss Garth," said Mrs. Farebrother,
who had been watching her son's movements.
"Yes," said Mrs. Vincy, obliged to reply, as the old lady turned
to her expectantly. "It is a pity she is not better-looking."
"I cannot say that," said Mrs. Farebrother, decisively. "I like
her countenance. We must not always ask for beauty, when a good
God has seen fit to make an excellent young woman without it.
I put good manners first, and Miss Garth will know how to conduct
herself in any station."
The old lady was a little sharp in her tone, having a prospective
reference to Mary's becoming her daughter-in-law; for there was this
inconvenience in Mary's position with regard to Fred, that it was
not suitable to be made public, and hence the three ladies at Lowick
Parsonage were still hoping that Camden would choose Miss Garth.
New visitors entered, and the drawing-room was given up to music
and games, while whist-tables were prepared in the quiet room
on the other side of the hall. Mr. Farebrother played a rubber
to satisfy his mother, who regarded her occasional whist as a
protest against scandal and novelty of opinion, in which light
even a revoke had its dignity. But at the end he got Mr. Chichely
to take his place, and left the room. As he crossed the hall,
Lydgate had just come in and was taking off his great-coat.
"You are the man I was going to look for," said the Vicar;
and instead of entering the drawing-room, they walked along the hall
and stood against the fireplace, where the frosty air helped to make
a glowing bank. "You see, I can leave the whist-table easily enough,"
he went on, smiling at Lydgate, "now I don't play for money.
I owe that to you, Mrs. Casaubon says."
"How?" said Lydgate, coldly.
"Ah, you didn't mean me to know it; I call that ungenerous reticence.
You should let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have
done him a good turn. I don't enter into some people's dislike
of being under an obligation: upon my word, I prefer being under
an obligation to everybody for behaving well to me."
"I can't tell what you mean," said Lydgate, "unless it is that I once
spoke of you to Mrs. Casaubon. But I did not think that she would
break her promise not to mention that I had done so," said Lydgate,
leaning his back against the corner of the mantel-piece, and showing
no radiance in his face.
"It was Brooke who let it out, only the other day. He paid me
the compliment of saying that he was very glad I had the living
though you had come across his tactics, and had praised me up as a
lien and a Tillotson, and that sort of thing, till Mrs. Casaubon
would hear of no one else."
"Oh, Brooke is such a leaky-minded fool," said Lydgate, contemptuously.
"Well, I was glad of the leakiness then. I don't see why you
shouldn't like me to know that you wished to do me a service,
my dear fellow. And you certainly have done me one. It's rather
a strong check to one's self-complacency to find how much of one's
right doing depends on not being in want of money. A man will not
be tempted to say the Lord's Prayer backward to please the devil,
if he doesn't want the devil's services. I have no need to hang
on the smiles of chance now."
"I don't see that there's any money-getting without chance,"
said Lydgate; "if a man gets it in a profession, it's pretty sure
to come by chance."
Mr. Farebrother thought he could account for this speech, in striking
contrast with Lydgate's former way of talking, as the perversity
which will often spring from the moodiness of a man ill at ease
in his affairs. He answered in a tone of good-humored admission--
"Ah, there's enormous patience wanted with the way of the world.
But it is the easier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends
who love him, and ask for nothing better than to help him through,
so far as it lies in their power."
"Oh yes," said Lydgate, in a careless tone, changing his attitude
and looking at his watch. "People make much more of their
difficulties than they need to do."
He knew as distinctly as possible that this was an offer of help
to himself from Mr. Farebrother, and he could not bear it.
So strangely determined are we mortals, that, after having been
long gratified with the sense that he had privately done the Vicar
a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a
service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.
Besides, behind all making of such offers what else must come?--that he
should "mention his case," imply that he wanted specific things.
At that moment, suicide seemed easier.
Mr. Farebrother was too keen a man not to know the meaning of that reply,
and there was a certain massiveness in Lydgate's manner and tone,
corresponding with his physique, which if he repelled your advances
in the first instance seemed to put persuasive devices out of question.
"What time are you?" said the Vicar, devouring his wounded feeling.
"After eleven," said Lydgate. And they went into the drawing-room.
CHAPTER LXIV.
1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
2d Gent. Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright
The coming pest with border fortresses,
Or catch your carp with subtle argument.
All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
Unless effect be there; and action's self
Must needs contain a passive. So command
Exists but with obedience."
Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs,
he knew that it would have hardly been in Mr. Farebrother's power
to give him the help he immediately wanted. With the year's bills
coming in from his tradesmen, with Dover's threatening hold on
his furniture, and with nothing to depend on but slow dribbling
payments from patients who must not be offended--for the handsome
fees he had had from Freshitt Hall and Lowick Manor had been
easily absorbed--nothing less than a thousand pounds would have
freed him from actual embarrassment, and left a residue which,
according to the favorite phrase of hopefulness in such circumstances,
would have given him "time to look about him."
Naturally, the merry Christmas bringing the happy New Year,
when fellow-citizens expect to be paid for the trouble and goods
they have smilingly bestowed on their neighbors, had so tightened
the pressure of sordid cares on Lydgate's mind that it was hardly
possible for him to think unbrokenly of any other subject, even the
most habitual and soliciting. He was not an ill-tempered man;
his intellectual activity, the ardent kindness of his heart, as well
as his strong frame, would always, under tolerably easy conditions,
have kept him above the petty uncontrolled susceptibilities which make
bad temper. But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which
arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness
underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading
preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes.
"THIS is what I am thinking of; and THAT is what I might
have been thinking of," was the bitter incessant murmur within him,
making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general
discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their
great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous
self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.
Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that
there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying
around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable
isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might
allay such fears. His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid,
and beneath the attention of lofty persons who can know nothing
of debt except on a magnificent scale. Doubtless they were sordid;
and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from
sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base
hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests.
its horse-dealer's desire to make bad work pass for good,
its seeking for function which ought to be another's, its compulsion
often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity.
It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck
beneath this vile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state
which was continually widening Rosamond's alienation from him.
After the first disclosure about the bill of sale, he had made
many efforts to draw her into sympathy with him about possible
measures for narrowing their expenses, and with the threatening
approach of Christmas his propositions grew more and more definite.
"We two can do with only one servant, and live on very little,"
he said, "and I shall manage with one horse." For Lydgate,
as we have seen, had begun to reason, with a more distinct vision,
about the expenses of living, and any share of pride he had given to
appearances of that sort was meagre compared with the pride which made
him revolt from exposure as a debtor, or from asking men to help him
with their money.
"Of course you can dismiss the other two servants, if you like,"
said Rosamond; "but I should have thought it would be very injurious
to your position for us to live in a poor way. You must expect
your practice to be lowered."
"My dear Rosamond, it is not a question of choice. We have begun
too expensively. Peacock, you know, lived in a much smaller house
than this. It is my fault: I ought to have known better, and I
deserve a thrashing--if there were anybody who had a right to give
it me--for bringing you into the necessity of living in a poorer
way than you have been used to. But we married because we loved
each other, I suppose. And that may help us to pull along till
things get better. Come, dear, put down that work and come to me."
He was really in chill gloom about her at that moment, but he dreaded
a future without affection, and was determined to resist the oncoming
of division between them. Rosamond obeyed him, and he took her on
his knee, but in her secret soul she was utterly aloof from him.
The poor thing saw only that the world was not ordered to her liking,
and Lydgate was part of that world. But he held her waist with one
hand and laid the other gently on both of hers; for this rather abrupt
man had much tenderness in his manners towards women, seeming to
have always present in his imagination the weakness of their frames
and the delicate poise of their health both in body and mind.
And he began again to speak persuasively.
"I find, now I look into things a little, Rosy, that it is wonderful
what an amount of money slips away in our housekeeping. I suppose
the servants are careless, and we have had a great many people coming.
But there must be many in our rank who manage with much less:
they must do with commoner things, I suppose, and look after
the scraps. It seems, money goes but a little way in these matters,
for Wrench has everything as plain as possible, and he has a very
large practice."
"Oh, if you think of living as the Wrenches do!" said Rosamond,
with a little turn of her neck. "But I have heard you express your
disgust at that way of living."
"Yes, they have bad taste in everything--they make economy look ugly.
We needn't do that. I only meant that they avoid expenses,
although Wrench has a capital practice."
"Why should not you have a good practice, Tertius? Mr. Peacock had.
You should be more careful not to offend people, and you should
send out medicines as the others do. I am sure you began well,
and you got several good houses. It cannot answer to be eccentric;
you should think what will be generally liked," said Rosamond, in a
decided little tone of admonition.
Lydgate's anger rose: he was prepared to be indulgent towards
feminine weakness, but not towards feminine dictation.
The shallowness of a waternixie's soul may have a charm until
she becomes didactic. But he controlled himself, and only said,
with a touch of despotic firmness--
"What I am to do in my practice, Rosy, it is for me to judge.
That is not the question between us. It is enough for you
to know that our income is likely to be a very narrow one--
hardly four hundred, perhaps less, for a long time to come, and we
must try to re-arrange our lives in accordance with that fact."
Rosamond was silent for a moment or two, looking before her,
and then said, "My uncle Bulstrode ought to allow you a salary
for the time you give to the Hospital: it is not right that you
should work for nothing."
"It was understood from the beginning that my services would
be gratuitous. That, again, need not enter into our discussion.
I have pointed out what is the only probability," said Lydgate,
impatiently. Then checking himself, he went on more quietly--
"I think I see one resource which would free us from a good deal
of the present difficulty. I hear that young Ned Plymdale is going
to be married to Miss Sophy Toller. They are rich, and it is not often
that a good house is vacant in Middlemarch. I feel sure that they
would be glad to take this house from us with most of our furniture,
and they would be willing to pay handsomely for the lease.
I can employ Trumbull to speak to Plymdale about it."
Rosamond left her husband's knee and walked slowly to the other
end of the room; when she turned round and walked towards him it
was evident that the tears had come, and that she was biting her
under-lip and clasping her hands to keep herself from crying.
Lydgate was wretched--shaken with anger and yet feeling that it
would be unmanly to vent the anger just now.
"I am very sorry, Rosamond; I know this is painful."
"I thought, at least, when I had borne to send the plate back
and have that man taking an inventory of the furniture--I should
have thought THAT would suffice."
"I explained it to you at the time, dear. That was only a security
and behind that Security there is a debt. And that debt must be paid
within the next few months, else we shall have our furniture sold.
If young Plymdale will take our house and most of our furniture,
we shall be able to pay that debt, and some others too, and we
shall be quit of a place too expensive for us. We might take
a smaller house: Trumbull, I know, has a very decent one to let
at thirty pounds a-year, and this is ninety." Lydgate uttered this
speech in the curt hammering way with which we usually try to nail
down a vague mind to imperative facts. Tears rolled silently down
Rosamond's cheeks; she just pressed her handkerchief against them,
and stood looking al; the large vase on the mantel-piece. It was
a moment of more intense bitterness than she had ever felt before.
At last she said, without hurry and with careful emphasis--
"I never could have believed that you would like to act in that way."
"Like it?" burst out Lydgate, rising from his chair, thrusting his
hands in his pockets and stalking away from the hearth; "it's not
a question of liking. Of course, I don't like it; it's the only
thing I can do." He wheeled round there, and turned towards her.
"I should have thought there were many other means than that,"
said Rosamond. "Let us have a sale and leave Middlemarch altogether."
"To do what? What is the use of my leaving my work in Middlemarch
to go where I have none? We should be just as penniless elsewhere
as we are here," said Lydgate still more angrily.
"If we are to be in that position it will be entirely your
own doing, Tertius," said Rosamond, turning round to speak
with the fullest conviction. "You will not behave as you ought
to do to your own family. You offended Captain Lydgate.
Sir Godwin was very kind to me when we were at Quallingham,
and I am sure if you showed proper regard to him and told him
your affairs, he would do anything for you. But rather than that,
you like giving up our house and furniture to Mr. Ned Plymdale."
There was something like fierceness in Lydgate's eyes, as he
answered with new violence, "Well, then, if you will have it so,
I do like it. I admit that I like it better than making a fool
of myself by going to beg where it's of no use. Understand then,
that it is what I LIKE TO DO."
There was a tone in the last sentence which was equivalent
to the clutch of his strong hand on Rosamond's delicate arm.
But for all that, his will was not a whit stronger than hers.
She immediately walked out of the room in silence, but with an intense
determination to hinder what Lydgate liked to do.
He went out of the house, but as his blood cooled he felt that the chief
result of the discussion was a deposit of dread within him at the idea
of opening with his wife in future subjects which might again urge
him to violent speech. It was as if a fracture in delicate crystal
had begun, and he was afraid of any movement that might mate it fatal.
His marriage would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could
not go on loving each other. He had long ago made up his mind to
what he thought was her negative character--her want of sensibility,
which showed itself in disregard both of his specific wishes and of
his general aims. The first great disappointment had been borne:
the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must
be renounced, and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation,
as it is by men who have lost their limbs. But the real wife
had not only her claims, she had still a hold on his heart,
and it was his intense desire that the hold should remain strong.
In marriage, the certainty, "She will never love me much,"
is easier to bear than the fear, "I shall love her no more." Hence,
after that outburst, his inward effort was entirely to excuse her,
and to blame the hard circumstances which were partly his fault.
He tried that evening, by petting her, to heal the wound he had
made in the morning, and it was not in Rosamond's nature to be
repellent or sulky; indeed, she welcomed the signs that her husband
loved her and was under control. But this was something quite
distinct from loving HIM. Lydgate would not have chosen soon
to recur to the plan of parting with the house; he was resolved
to carry it out, and say as little more about it as possible.
But Rosamond herself touched on it at breakfast by saying, mildly--
"Have you spoken to Trumbull yet?"
"No," said Lydgate, "but I shall call on him as I go by this morning.
No time must be lost." He took Rosamond's question as a sign that
she withdrew her inward opposition, and kissed her head caressingly
when he got up to go away.
As soon as it was late enough to make a call, Rosamond went to
Mrs. Plymdale, Mr. Ned's mother, and entered with pretty congratulations
into the of the coming marriage. Mrs. Plymdale's maternal view was,
that Rosamond might possibly now have retrospective glimpses
of her own folly; and feeling the advantages to be at present
all on the side of her son, was too kind a woman not to behave graciously.
"Yes, Ned is most happy, I must say. And Sophy Toller is all
I could desire in a daughter-in-law. Of course her father is
able to do something handsome for her--that is only what would
be expected with a brewery like his. And the connection is
everything we should desire. But that is not what I look at.
She is such a very nice girl--no airs, no pretensions, though on
a level with the first. I don't mean with the titled aristocracy.
I see very little good in people aiming out of their own sphere.
I mean that Sophy is equal to the best in the town, and she is
contented with that."
"I have always thought her very agreeable," said Rosamond.
"I look upon it as a reward for Ned, who never held his head
too high, that he should have got into the very best connection,"
continued Mrs. Plymdale, her native sharpness softened by a fervid
sense that she was taking a correct view. "And such particular people
as the Tollers are, they might have objected because some of our
friends are not theirs. It is well known that your aunt Bulstrode
and I have been intimate from our youth, and Mr. Plymdale has been
always on Mr. Bulstrode's side. And I myself prefer serious opinions.
But the Tollers have welcomed Ned all the same."
"I am sure he is a very deserving, well-principled young man,"
said Rosamond, with a neat air of patronage in return for
Mrs. Plymdale's wholesome corrections.
"Oh, he has not the style of a captain in the army, or that sort
of carriage as if everybody was beneath him, or that showy kind
of talking, and singing, and intellectual talent. But I am thankful
he has not. It is a poor preparation both for here and Hereafter."
"Oh dear, yes; appearances have very little to do with happiness,"
said Rosamond. "I think there is every prospect of their being a
happy couple. What house will they take?"
"Oh, as for that, they must put up with what they can get.
They have been looking at the house in St. Peter's Place, next to
Mr. Hackbutt's; it belongs to him, and he is putting it nicely
in repair. I suppose they are not likely to hear of a better.
Indeed, I think Ned will decide the matter to-day."
"I should think it is a nice house; I like St. Peter's Place."
"Well, it is near the Church, and a genteel situation.
But the windows are narrow, and it is all ups and downs.
You don't happen to know of any other that would be at liberty?"
said Mrs. Plymdale, fixing her round black eyes on Rosamond
with the animation of a sudden thought in them.
"Oh no; I hear so little of those things."
Rosamond had not foreseen that question and answer in setting out to pay
her visit; she had simply meant to gather any information which would
help her to avert the parting with her own house under circumstances
thoroughly disagreeable to her. As to the untruth in her reply,
she no more reflected on it than she did on the untruth there was
in her saying that appearances had very little to do with happiness.
Her object, she was convinced, was thoroughly justifiable:
it was Lydgate whose intention was inexcusable; and there was a plan
in her mind which, when she had carried it out fully, would prove
how very false a step it would have been for him to have descended
from his position.
She returned home by Mr. Borthrop Trumbull's office, meaning to
call there. It was the first time in her life that Rosamond had
thought of doing anything in the form of business, but she felt
equal to the occasion. That she should be obliged to do what she
intensely disliked, was an idea which turned her quiet tenacity
into active invention. Here was a case in which it could not be
enough simply to disobey and be serenely, placidly obstinate:
she must act according to her judgment, and she said to herself
that her judgment was right--"indeed, if it had not been,
she would not have wished to act on it."
Mr. Trumbull was in the back-room of his office, and received
Rosamond with his finest manners, not only because he had much
sensibility to her charms, but because the good-natured fibre in him
was stirred by his certainty that Lydgate was in difficulties,
and that this uncommonly pretty woman--this young lady with the highest
personal attractions--was likely to feel the pinch of trouble--
to find herself involved in circumstances beyond her control.
He begged her to do him the honor to take a seat, and stood before
her trimming and comporting himself with an eager solicitude,
which was chiefly benevolent. Rosamond's first question was,
whether her husband had called on Mr. Trumbull that morning, to speak
about disposing of their house.
"Yes, ma'am, yes, he did; he did so," said the good auctioneer,
trying to throw something soothing into his iteration.
"I was about to fulfil his order, if possible, this afternoon.
He wished me not to procrastinate."
"I called to tell you not to go any further, Mr. Trumbull;
and I beg of you not to mention what has been said on the subject.
Will you oblige me?"
"Certainly I will, Mrs. Lydgate, certainly. Confidence is sacred
with me on business or any other topic. I am then to consider the
commission withdrawn?" said Mr. Trumbull, adjusting the long ends
of his blue cravat with both hands, and looking at Rosamond deferentially.
"Yes, if you please. I find that Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house--
the one in St. Peter's Place next to Mr. Hackbutt's. Mr. Lydgate
would be annoyed that his orders should be fulfilled uselessly.
And besides that, there are other circumstances which render the
proposal unnecessary."
"Very good, Mrs. Lydgate, very good. I am at your commands,
whenever you require any service of me," said Mr. Trumbull, who felt
pleasure in conjecturing that some new resources had been opened.
"Rely on me, I beg. The affair shall go no further."
That evening Lydgate was a little comforted by observing that Rosamond
was more lively than she had usually been of late, and even seemed
interested in doing what would please him without being asked.
He thought, "If she will be happy and I can rub through, what does
it all signify? It is only a narrow swamp that we have to pass
in a long journey. If I can get my mind clear again, I shall do."
He was so much cheered that he began to search for an account
of experiments which he had long ago meant to look up, and had
neglected out of that creeping self-despair which comes in the train
of petty anxieties. He felt again some of the old delightful
absorption in a far-reaching inquiry, while Rosamond played the
quiet music which was as helpful to his meditation as the plash
of an oar on the evening lake. It was rather late; he had pushed
away all the books, and was looking at the fire with his hands
clasped behind his head in forgetfulness of everything except the
construction of a new controlling experiment, when Rosamond, who
had left the piano and was leaning back in her chair watching him, said--
"Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house already."
Lydgate, startled and jarred, looked up in silence for a moment,
like a man who has been disturbed in his sleep. Then flushing
with an unpleasant consciousness, he asked--
"How do you know?"
"I called at Mrs. Plymdale's this morning, and she told me that he
had taken the house in St. Peter's Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt's."
Lydgate was silent. He drew his hands from behind his head and
pressed them against the hair which was hanging, as it was apt to do,
in a mass on his forehead, while he rested his elbows on his knees.
He was feeling bitter disappointment, as if he had opened
a door out of a suffocating place and had found it walled up;
but he also felt sure that Rosamond was pleased with the cause of
his disappointment. He preferred not looking at her and not speaking,
until he had got over the first spasm of vexation. After all,
he said in his bitterness, what can a woman care about so much
as house and furniture? a husband without them is an absurdity.
When he looked up and pushed his hair aside, his dark eyes had
a miserable blank non-expectance of sympathy in them, but he
only said, coolly--
"Perhaps some one else may turn up. I told Trumbull to be on
the look-out if he failed with Plymdale."
Rosamond made no remark. She trusted to the chance that nothing
more would pass between her husband and the auctioneer until some
issue should have justified her interference; at any rate, she had
hindered the event which she immediately dreaded. After a pause,
she said--
"How much money is it that those disagreeable people want?"
"What disagreeable people?"
"Those who took the list--and the others. I mean, how much money
would satisfy them so that you need not be troubled any more?"
Lydgate surveyed her for a moment, as if he were looking for symptoms,
and then said, "Oh, if I could have got six hundred from Plymdale
for furniture and as premium, I might have managed. I could have
paid off Dover, and given enough on account to the others to make
them wait patiently, if we contracted our expenses."
"But I mean how much should you want if we stayed in this house?"
"More than I am likely to get anywhere," said Lydgate, with rather
a grating sarcasm in his tone. It angered him to perceive that
Rosamond's mind was wandering over impracticable wishes instead
of facing possible efforts.
"Why should you not mention the sum?" said Rosamond, with a mild
indication that she did not like his manners.
"Well," said Lydgate in a guessing tone, "it would take at least
a thousand to set me at ease. But," he added, incisively, "I have
to consider what I shall do without it, not with it."
Rosamond said no more.
But the next day she carried out her plan of writing to Sir
Godwin Lydgate. Since the Captain's visit, she had received a
letter from him, and also one from Mrs. Mengan, his married sister,
condoling with her on the loss of her baby, and expressing
vaguely the hope that they should see her again at Quallingham.
Lydgate had told her that this politeness meant nothing; but she
was secretly convinced that any backwardness in Lydgate's family
towards him was due to his cold and contemptuous behavior, and she
had answered the letters in her most charming manner, feeling some
confidence that a specific invitation would follow. But there had
been total silence. The Captain evidently was not a great penman,
and Rosamond reflected that the sisters might have been abroad.
However, the season was come for thinking of friends at home,
and at any rate Sir Godwin, who had chucked her under the chin,
and pronounced her to be like the celebrated beauty, Mrs. Croly,
who had made a conquest of him in 1790, would be touched by any appeal
from her, and would find it pleasant for her sake to behave as he ought
to do towards his nephew. Rosamond was naively convinced of what an
old gentleman ought to do to prevent her from suffering annoyance.
And she wrote what she considered the most judicious letter possible--
one which would strike Sir Godwin as a proof of her excellent sense--
pointing out how desirable it was that Tertius should quit such a place
as Middlemarch for one more fitted to his talents, how the unpleasant
character of the inhabitants had hindered his professional success,
and how in consequence he was in money difficulties, from which it
would require a thousand pounds thoroughly to extricate him.
She did not say that Tertius was unaware of her intention to write;
for she had the idea that his supposed sanction of her letter would
be in accordance with what she did say of his great regard for his
uncle Godwin as the relative who had always been his best friend.
Such was the force of Poor Rosamond's tactics now she applied them
to affairs.
This had happened before the party on New Year's Day, and no answer
had yet come from Sir Godwin. But on the morning of that day
Lydgate had to learn that Rosamond had revoked his order to
Borthrop Trumbull. Feeling it necessary that she should be gradually
accustomed to the idea of their quitting the house in Lowick Gate,
he overcame his reluctance to speak to her again on the subject,
and when they were breakfasting said--
"I shall try to see Trumbull this morning, and tell him to.
advertise the house in the `Pioneer' and the `Trumpet.' If the thing
were advertised, some one might be inclined to take it who would
not otherwise have thought of a change. In these country places
many people go on in their old houses when their families are too
large for them, for want of knowing where they can find another.
And Trumbull seems to have got no bite at all."
Rosamond knew that the inevitable moment was come. "I ordered
Trumbull not to inquire further," she said, with a careful calmness
which was evidently defensive.
Lydgate stared at her in mute amazement. Only half an hour
before he had been fastening up her plaits for her, and talking
the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not
returning it, accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image,
now and then miraculously dimpling towards her votary.
With such fibres still astir in him, the shock he received could
not at once be distinctly anger; it was confused pain. He laid
down the knife and fork with which he was carving, and throwing
himself back in his chair, said at last, with a cool irony in his tone--
"May I ask when and why you did so?"
"When I knew that the Plymdales had taken a house, I called to tell
him not to mention ours to them; and at the same time I told him
not to let the affair go on any further. I knew that it would be
very injurious to you if it were known that you wished to part with
your house and furniture, and I had a very strong objection to it.
I think that was reason enough."
"It was of no consequence then that I had told you imperative
reasons of another kind; of no consequence that I had come to a
different conclusion, and given an order accordingly?" said Lydgate,
bitingly, the thunder and lightning gathering about his brow and eyes.
The effect of any one's anger on Rosamond had always been to make
her shrink in cold dislike, and to become all the more calmly correct,
in the conviction that she was not the person to misbehave whatever
others might do. She replied--
"I think I had a perfect right to speak on a subject which concerns
me at least as much as you."
"Clearly--you had a right to speak, but only to me. You had no right
to contradict my orders secretly, and treat me as if I were a fool,"
said Lydgate, in the same tone as before. Then with some added scorn,
"Is it possible to make you understand what the consequences will be?
Is it of any use for me to tell you again why we must try to part
with the house?"
"It is not necessary for you to tell me again," said Rosamond,
in a voice that fell and trickled like cold water-drops. "I remembered
what you said. You spoke just as violently as you do now.
But that does not alter my opinion that you ought to try every
other means rather than take a step which is so painful to me.
And as to advertising the house, I think it would be perfectly
degrading to you."
"And suppose I disregard your opinion as you disregard mine?"
"You can do so, of course. But I think you ought to have told me
before we were married that you would place me in the worst position,
rather than give up your own will."
Lydgate did not speak, but tossed his head on one side, and twitched
the corners of his mouth in despair. Rosamond, seeing that he was
not looking at her, rose and set his cup of coffee before him; but he
took no notice of it, and went on with an inward drama and argument,
occasionally moving in his seat, resting one arm on the table,
and rubbing his hand against his hair. There was a conflux of emotions
and thoughts in him that would not let him either give thorough
way to his anger or persevere with simple rigidity of resolve.
Rosamond took advantage of his silence.
"When we were married everyone felt that your position was very high.
I could not have imagined then that you would want to sell our furniture,
and take a house in Bride Street, where the rooms are like cages.
If we are to live in that way let us at least leave Middlemarch."
"These would be very strong considerations," said Lydgate,
half ironically--still there was a withered paleness about his
lips as he looked at his coffee, and did not drink--"these would
be very strong considerations if I did not happen to be in debt."
"Many persons must have been in debt in the same way, but if they
are respectable, people trust them. I am sure I have heard papa
say that the Torbits were in debt, and they went on very well It
cannot be good to act rashly," said Rosamond, with serene wisdom.
Lydgate sat paralyzed by opposing impulses: since no reasoning
he could apply to Rosamond seemed likely to conquer her assent,
he wanted to smash and grind some object on which he could at least
produce an impression, or else to tell her brutally that he was master,
and she must obey. But he not only dreaded the effect of such
extremities on their mutual life--he had a growing dread of Rosamond's
quiet elusive obstinacy, which would not allow any assertion of power
to be final; and again, she had touched him in a spot of keenest
feeling by implying that she had been deluded with a false vision
of happiness in marrying him. As to saying that he was master,
it was not the fact. The very resolution to which he had wrought
himself by dint of logic and honorable pride was beginning to relax
under her torpedo contact. He swallowed half his cup of coffee,
and then rose to go.
"I may at least request that you will not go to Trumbull at present--
until it has been seen that there are no other means," said Rosamond.
Although she was not subject to much fear, she felt it safer not
to betray that she had written to Sir Godwin. "Promise me that you
will not go to him for a few weeks, or without telling me."
Lydgate gave a short laugh. "I think it is I who should exact
a promise that you will do nothing without telling me," he said,
turning his eyes sharply upon her, and then moving to the door.
"You remember that we are going to dine at papa's," said Rosamond,
wishing that he should turn and make a more thorough concession
to her. But he only said "Oh yes," impatiently, and went away.
She held it to be very odious in him that he did not think
the painful propositions he had had to make to her were enough,
without showing so unpleasant a temper. And when she put the
moderate request that he would defer going to Trumbull again,
it was cruel in him not to assure her of what he meant to do.
She was convinced of her having acted in every way for the best;
and each grating or angry speech of Lydgate's served only
as an addition to the register of offences in her mind.
Poor Rosamond for months had begun to associate her husband with
feelings of disappointment, and the terribly inflexible relation
of marriage had lost its charm of encouraging delightful dreams.
It had freed her from the disagreeables of her father's house,
but it had not given her everything that she had wished and hoped.
The Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy
conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their
place had been taken by every-day details which must be lived
through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid
selection of favorable aspects. The habits of Lydgate's profession,
his home preoccupation with scientific subjects, which seemed
to her almost like a morbid vampire's taste, his peculiar views
of things which had never entered into the dialogue of courtship--
all these continually alienating influences, even without the fact
of his having placed himself at a disadvantage in the town,
and without that first shock of revelation about Dover's debt,
would have made his presence dull to her. There was another
presence which ever since the early days of her marriage, until four
months ago, had been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone:
Rosamond would not confess to herself how much the consequent blank
had to do with her utter ennui; and it seemed to her (perhaps
she was right) that an invitation to Quallingham, and an opening
for Lydgate to settle elsewhere than in Middlemarch--in London,
or somewhere likely to be free from unpleasantness--would satisfy her
quite well, and make her indifferent to the absence of Will Ladislaw,
towards whom she felt some resentment for his exaltation of
Mrs. Casaubon.
That was the state of things with Lydgate and Rosamond on the New
Year's Day when they dined at her father's, she looking mildly
neutral towards him in remembrance of his ill-tempered behavior
at breakfast, and he carrying a much deeper effect from the inward
conflict in which that morning scene was only one of many epochs.
His flushed effort while talking to Mr. Farebrother--his effort after
the cynical pretence that all ways of getting money are essentially
the same, and that chance has an empire which reduces choice
to a fool's illusion--was but the symptom of a wavering resolve,
a benumbed response to the old stimuli of enthusiasm.
What was he to do? He saw even more keenly than Rosamond did
the dreariness of taking her into the small house in Bride Street,
where she would have scanty furniture around her and discontent within:
a life of privation and life with Rosamond were two images which
had become more and more irreconcilable ever since the threat
of privation had disclosed itself. But even if his resolves had
forced the two images into combination, the useful preliminaries
to that hard change were not visibly within reach. And though
he had not given the promise which his wife had asked for,
he did not go again to Trumbull. He even began to think
of taking a rapid journey to the North and seeing Sir Godwin.
He had once believed that nothing would urge him into making
an application for money to his uncle, but he had not then known
the full pressure of alternatives yet more disagreeable. He could
not depend on the effect of a letter; it was only in an interview,
however disagreeable this might be to himself, that he could give
a thorough explanation and could test the effectiveness of kinship.
No sooner had Lydgate begun to represent this step to himself as
the easiest than there was a reaction of anger that he--he who had
long ago determined to live aloof from such abject calculations,
such self-interested anxiety about the inclinations and the pockets
of men with whom he had been proud to have no aims in common--should have
fallen not simply to their level, but to the level of soliciting them.
CHAPTER LXV.
"One of us two must bowen douteless,
And, sith a man is more reasonable
Than woman is, ye [men] moste be suffrable.
--CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.
The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs
even over the present quickening in the general pace of things:
what wonder then that in 1832 old Sir Godwin Lydgate was slow
to write a letter which was of consequence to others rather
than to himself? Nearly three weeks of the new year were gone,
and Rosamond, awaiting an answer to her winning appeal, was every
day disappointed. Lydgate, in total ignorance of her expectations,
was seeing the bills come in, and feeling that Dover's use of
his advantage over other creditors was imminent. He had never
mentioned to Rosamond his brooding purpose of going to Quallingham:
he did not want to admit what would appear to her a concession
to her wishes after indignant refusal, until the last moment;
but he was really expecting to set off soon. A slice of the railway
would enable him to manage the whole journey and back in four days.
But one morning after Lydgate had gone out, a letter came addressed
to him, which Rosamond saw clearly to be from Sir Godwin. She was full
of hope. Perhaps there might be a particular note to her enclosed;
but Lydgate was naturally addressed on the question of money or other aid,
and the fact that he was written to, nay, the very delay in writing
at all, seemed to certify that the answer was thoroughly compliant.
She was too much excited by these thoughts to do anything but light
stitching in a warm corner of the dining-room, with the outside
of this momentous letter lying on the table before her. About twelve
she heard her husband's step in the passage, and tripping to open
the door, she said in her lightest tones, "Tertius, come in here--
here is a letter for you."
"Ah?" he said, not taking off his hat, but just turning her round
within his arm to walk towards the spot where the letter lay.
"My uncle Godwin!" he exclaimed, while Rosamond reseated herself,
and watched him as he opened the letter. She had expected him to
be surprised.
While Lydgate's eyes glanced rapidly over the brief letter, she saw
his face, usually of a pale brown, taking on a dry whiteness;
with nostrils and lips quivering he tossed down the letter before her,
and said violently--
"It will be impossible to endure life with you, if you will always
be acting secretly--acting in opposition to me and hiding your actions."
He checked his speech and turned his back on her--then wheeled
round and walked about, sat down, and got up again restlessly,
grasping hard the objects deep down in his pockets. He was afraid
of saying something irremediably cruel.
Rosamond too had changed color as she read. The letter ran
in this way:--
"DEAR TERTIUS,--Don't set your wife to write to me when you have
anything to ask. It is a roundabout wheedling sort of thing
which I should not have credited you with. I never choose to write
to a woman on matters of business. As to my supplying you with a
thousand pounds, or only half that sum, I can do nothing of the sort.
My own family drains me to the last penny. With two younger sons
and three daughters, I am not likely to have cash to spare. You seem
to have got through your own money pretty quickly, and to have made
a mess where you are; the sooner you go somewhere else the better.
But I have nothing to do with men of your profession, and can't
help you there. I did the best I could for you as guardian,
and let you have your own way in taking to medicine. You might
have gone into the army or the Church. Your money would have held
out for that, and there would have been a surer ladder before you.
Your uncle Charles has had a grudge against you for not going
into his profession, but not I. I have always wished you well,
but you must consider yourself on your own legs entirely now.
Your affectionate uncle,
GODWIN LYDGATE."
When Rosamond had finished reading the letter she sat quite still,
with her hands folded before her, restraining any show of her
keen disappointment, and intrenching herself in quiet passivity
under her husband's wrath Lydgate paused in his movements,
looked at her again, and said, with biting severity--
"Will this be enough to convince you of the harm you may
do by secret meddling? Have you sense enough to recognize
now your incompetence to judge and act for me--to interfere
with your ignorance in affairs which it belongs to me to decide on?"
The words were hard; but this was not the first time that Lydgate
had been frustrated by her. She did not look at him, and made
no reply.
"I had nearly resolved on going to Quallingham. It would have cost
me pain enough to do it, yet it might have been of some use.
But it has been of no use for me to think of anything.
You have always been counteracting me secretly. You delude me
with a false assent, and then I am at the mercy of your devices.
If you mean to resist every wish I express, say so and defy me.
I shall at least know what I am doing then."
It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love's
bond has turned to this power of galling. In spite of Rosamond's
self-control a tear fell silently and rolled over her lips. She still
said nothing; but under that quietude was hidden an intense effect:
she was in such entire disgust with her husband that she wished she
had never seen him. Sir Godwin's rudeness towards her and utter
want of feeling ranged him with Dover and all other creditors--
disagreeable people who only thought of themselves, and did not
mind how annoying they were to her. Even her father was unkind,
and might have done more for them. In fact there was but one person
in Rosamond's world whom she did not regard as blameworthy, and that
was the graceful creature with blond plaits and with little hands
crossed before her, who had never expressed herself unbecomingly,
and had always acted for the best--the best naturally being what she
best liked.
Lydgate pausing and looking at her began to feel that half-maddening
sense of helplessness which comes over passionate people when their
passion is met by an innocent-looking silence whose meek victimized
air seems to put them in the wrong, and at last infects even the
justest indignation with a doubt of its justice. He needed to
recover the full sense that he was in the right by moderating his words.
"Can you not see, Rosamond," he began again, trying to be simply
grave and not bitter, "that nothing can be so fatal as a want of
openness and confidence between us? It has happened again and again
that I have expressed a decided wish, and you have seemed to assent,
yet after that you have secretly disobeyed my wish. In that way I can
never know what I have to trust to. There would be some hope for us
if you would admit this. Am I such an unreasonable, furious brute?
Why should you not be open with me?" Still silence.
"Will you only say that you have been mistaken, and that I may
depend on your not acting secretly in future?" said Lydgate,
urgently, but with something of request in his tone which Rosamond
was quick to perceive. She spoke with coolness.
"I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such
words as you have used towards me. I have not been accustomed
to language of that kind. You have spoken of my `secret meddling,'
and my `interfering ignorance,' and my `false assent.' I have never
expressed myself in that way to you, and I think that you ought
to apologize. You spoke of its being impossible to live with me.
Certainly you have not made my life pleasant to me of late.
I think it was to be expected that I should try to avert some of
the hardships which our marriage has brought on me." Another tear
fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and she pressed it away as quietly
as the first.
Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated. What place
was there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in? He laid down
his hat, flung an arm over the back of his chair, and looked down
for some moments without speaking. Rosamond had the double purchase
over him of insensibility to the point of justice in his reproach,
and of sensibility to the undeniable hardships now present in her
married life. Although her duplicity in the affair of the house
had exceeded what he knew, and had really hindered the Plymdales
from knowing of it, she had no consciousness that her action could
rightly be called false. We are not obliged to identify our own acts
according to a strict classification, any more than the materials
of our grocery and clothes. Rosamond felt that she was aggrieved,
and that this was what Lydgate had to recognize.
As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which was
inflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers.
He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss
of love for him, and the consequent dreariness of their life.
The ready fulness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly
with the first violent movements of his anger. It would assuredly
have been a vain boast in him to say that he was her master.
"You have not made my life pleasant to me of late"--"the hardships
which our marriage has brought on me"--these words were
stinging his imagination as a pain makes an exaggerated dream.
If he were not only to sink from his highest resolve,
but to sink into the hideous fettering of domestic hate?
"Rosamond," he said, turning his eyes on her with a melancholy look,
"you should allow for a man's words when he is disappointed
and provoked. You and I cannot have opposite interests.
I cannot part my happiness from yours. If I am angry with you,
it is that you seem not to see how any concealment divides us.
How could I wish to make anything hard to you either by my words
or conduct? When I hurt you, I hurt part of my own life. I should
never be angry with you if you would be quite open with me."
"I have only wished to prevent you from hurrying us into wretchedness
without any necessity," said Rosamond, the tears coming again
from a softened feeling now that her husband had softened.
"It is so very hard to be disgraced here among all the people we know,
and to live in such a miserable way. I wish I had died with the baby."
She spoke and wept with that gentleness which makes such words
and tears omnipotent over a loving-hearted man. Lydgate drew
his chair near to hers and pressed her delicate head against
his cheek with his powerful tender hand. He only caressed her;
he did not say anything; for what was there to say? He could not
promise to shield her from the dreaded wretchedness, for he could
see no sure means of doing so. When he left her to go out again,
he told himself that it was ten times harder for her than for him:
he had a life away from home, and constant appeals to his activity on
behalf of others. He wished to excuse everything in her if he could--
but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think
of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species.
Nevertheless she had mastered him.
CHAPTER LXVI.
"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."
--Measure for Measure.
Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service
his practice did him in counteracting his personal cares.
He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and
speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients, the direct
external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added
impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply
that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live
respectably and unhappy men to live calmly--it was a perpetual
claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the
consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back
through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known
has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact,
directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need
with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some
of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the
Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet
and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy.
Mr. Farebrother's suspicion as to the opiate was true, however.
Under the first galling pressure of foreseen difficulties,
and the first perception that his marriage, if it were not to be
a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort to go on loving
without too much care about being loved, he had once or twice
tried a dose of opium. But he had no hereditary constitutional
craving after such transient escapes from the hauntings of misery.
He was strong, could drink a great deal of wine, but did not care
about it; and when the men round him were drinking spirits, he took
sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity even for the earliest
stages of excitement from drink. It was the same with gambling.
He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris, watching it
as if it had been a disease. He was no more tempted by such winning
than he was by drink. He had said to himself that the only winning
he cared for must be attained by a conscious process of high,
difficult combination tending towards a beneficent result.
The power he longed for could not be represented by agitated fingers
clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous, half-idiotic
triumph in the eyes of a man who sweeps within his arms the ventures
of twenty chapfallen companions.
But just as he had tried opium, so his thought now began to turn
upon gambling--not with appetite for its excitement, but with a
sort of wistful inward gaze after that easy way of getting money,
which implied no asking and brought no responsibility. If he had been
in London or Paris at that time, it is probable that such thoughts,
seconded by opportunity, would have taken him into a gambling-house,
no longer to watch the gamblers, but to watch with them in
kindred eagerness. Repugnance would have been surmounted by the
immense need to win, if chance would be kind enough to let him.
An incident which happened not very long after that airy notion
of getting aid from his uncle had been excluded, was a strong sign
of the effect that might have followed any extant opportunity of gambling.
The billiard-room at the Green Dragon was the constant resort of
a certain set, most of whom, like our acquaintance Mr. Bambridge,
were regarded as men of pleasure. It was here that poor Fred Vincy
had made part of his memorable debt, having lost money in betting,
and been obliged to borrow of that gay companion. It was generally known
in Middlemarch that a good deal of money was lost and won in this way;
and the consequent repute of the Green Dragon as a place of dissipation
naturally heightened in some quarters the temptation to go there.
Probably its regular visitants, like the initiates of freemasonry,
wished that there were something a little more tremendous to keep
to themselves concerning it; but they were not a closed community,
and many decent seniors as well as juniors occasionally turned into
the billiard-room to see what was going on. Lydgate, who had the
muscular aptitude for billiards, and was fond of the game, had once
or twice in the early days after his arrival in Middlemarch taken
his turn with the cue at the Green Dragon; but afterwards he had no
leisure for the game, and no inclination for the socialities there.
One evening, however, he had occasion to seek Mr. Bambridge at
that resort. The horsedealer had engaged to get him a customer
for his remaining good horse, for which Lydgate had determined
to substitute a cheap hack, hoping by this reduction of style
to get perhaps twenty pounds; and he cared now for every small sum,
as a help towards feeding the patience of his tradesmen. To run up
to the billiard-room, as he was passing, would save time.
Mr. Bambridge was not yet come, bat would be sure to arrive by-and-by,
said his friend Mr. Horrock; and Lydgate stayed, playing a game
for the sake of passing the time. That evening he had the peculiar
light in the eyes and the unusual vivacity which had been once
noticed in him by Mr. Farebrother. The exceptional fact of his
presence was much noticed in the room, where there was a good deal
of Middlemarch company; and several lookers-on, as well as some of
the players, were betting with animation. Lydgate was playing well,
and felt confident; the bets were dropping round him, and with a swift
glancing thought of the probable gain which might double the sum
he was saving from his horse, he began to bet on his own play,
and won again and again. Mr. Bambridge had come in, but Lydgate
did not notice him. He was not only excited with his play,
but visions were gleaming on him of going the next day to Brassing,
where there was gambling on a grander scale to be had, and where,
by one powerful snatch at the devil's bait, he might carry it off
without the hook, and buy his rescue from his daily solicitings.
He was still winning when two new visitors entered. One of them
was a young Hawley, just come from his law studies in town, and the
other was Fred Vincy, who had spent several evenings of late at this
old haunt of his. Young Hawley, an accomplished billiard-player,
brought a cool fresh hand to the cue. But Fred Vincy, startled at
seeing Lydgate, and astonished to see him betting with an excited air,
stood aside, and kept out of the circle round the table.
Fred had been rewarding resolution by a little laxity of late.
He had been working heartily for six months at all outdoor occupations
under Mr. Garth, and by dint of severe practice had nearly mastered
the defects of his handwriting, this practice being, perhaps,
a little the less severe that it was often carried on in the evening
at Mr. Garth's under the eyes of Mary. But the last fortnight
Mary had been staying at Lowick Parsonage with the ladies there,
during Mr. Farebrother's residence in Middlemarch, where he was
carrying out some parochial plans; and Fred, not seeing anything
more agreeable to do, had turned into the Green Dragon, partly to
play at billiards, partly to taste the old flavor of discourse
about horses, sport, and things in general, considered from a point
of view which was not strenuously correct. He had not been out
hunting once this season, had had no horse of his own to ride,
and had gone from place to place chiefly with Mr. Garth in his gig,
or on the sober cob which Mr. Garth could lend him. It was a little
too bad, Fred began to think, that he should be kept in the traces
with more severity than if he had been a clergyman. "I will tell
you what, Mistress Mary--it will be rather harder work to learn
surveying and drawing plans than it would have been to write sermons,"
he had said, wishing her to appreciate what he went through for
her sake; "and as to Hercules and Theseus, they were nothing to me.
They had sport, and never learned to write a bookkeeping hand."
And now, Mary being out of the way for a little while, Fred,
like any other strong dog who cannot slip his collar, had pulled
up the staple of his chain and made a small escape, not of course
meaning to go fast or far. There could be no reason why he
should not play at billiards, but he was determined not to bet.
As to money just now, Fred had in his mind the heroic project of
saving almost all of the eighty pounds that Mr. Garth offered him,
and returning it, which he could easily do by giving up all futile
money-spending, since he had a superfluous stock of clothes,
and no expense in his board. In that way he could, in one year,
go a good way towards repaying the ninety pounds of which he had
deprived Mrs. Garth, unhappily at a time when she needed that sum
more than she did now. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged
that on this evening, which was the fifth of his recent visits
to the billiard-room, Fred had, not in his pocket, but in his mind,
the ten pounds which he meant to reserve for himself from his
half-year's salary (having before him the pleasure of carrying
thirty to Mrs. Garth when Mary was likely to be come home again)--
he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund from which he
might risk something, if there were a chance of a good bet.
Why? Well, when sovereigns were flying about, why shouldn't
he catch a few? He would never go far along that road again;
but a man likes to assure himself, and men of pleasure generally,
what he could do in the way of mischief if he chose, and that
if he abstains from making himself ill, or beggaring himself,
or talking with the utmost looseness which the narrow limits
of human capacity will allow, it is not because he is a spooney.
Fred did not enter into formal reasons, which are a very artificial,
inexact way of representing the tingling returns of old habit,
and the caprices of young blood: but there was lurking in him
a prophetic sense that evening, that when he began to play he should
also begin to bet--that he should enjoy some punch-drinking, and in
general prepare himself for feeling "rather seedy" in the morning.
It is in such indefinable movements that action often begins.
But the last thing likely to have entered Fred's expectation
was that he should see his brother-in-law Lydgate--of whom he
had never quite dropped the old opinion that he was a prig,
and tremendously conscious of his superiority--looking excited
and betting, just as he himself might have done. Fred felt a shock
greater than he could quite account for by the vague knowledge that
Lydgate was in debt, and that his father had refused to help him;
and his own inclination to enter into the play was suddenly checked.
It was a strange reversal of attitudes: Fred's blond face and blue eyes,
usually bright and careless, ready to give attention to anything
that held out a promise of amusement, looking involuntarily grave
and almost embarrassed as if by the sight of something unfitting;
while Lydgate, who had habitually an air of self-possessed strength,
and a certain meditativeness that seemed to lie behind his most
observant attention, was acting, watching, speaking with that excited
narrow consciousness which reminds one of an animal with fierce
eyes and retractile claws.
Lydgate, by betting on his own strokes, had won sixteen pounds;
but young Hawley's arrival had changed the poise of things. He made
first-rate strokes himself, and began to bet against Lydgate's strokes,
the strain of whose nerves was thus changed from simple confidence
in his own movements to defying another person's doubt in them.
The defiance was more exciting than the confidence, but it was less sure.
He continued to bet on his own play, but began often to fail. Still he
went on, for his mind was as utterly narrowed into that precipitous
crevice of play as if he had been the most ignorant lounger there.
Fred observed that Lydgate was losing fast, and found himself in the
new situation of puzzling his brains to think of some device by which,
without being offensive, he could withdraw Lydgate's attention,
and perhaps suggest to him a reason for quitting the room. He saw
that others were observing Lydgate's strange unlikeness to himself,
and it occurred to him that merely to touch his elbow and call
him aside for a moment might rouse him from his absorption.
He could think of nothing cleverer than the daring improbability
of saying that he wanted to see Rosy, and wished to know if she
were at home this evening; and he was going desperately to carry
out this weak device, when a waiter came up to him with a message,
saying that Mr. Farebrother was below, and begged to speak with him.
Fred was surprised, not quite comfortably, but sending word
that he would be down immediately, he went with a new impulse up
to Lydgate, said, "Can I speak to you a moment?" and drew him aside.
"Farebrother has just sent up a message to say that he wants to speak
to me. He is below. I thought you might like to know he was there,
if you had anything to say to him."
Fred had simply snatched up this pretext for speaking, because he
could not say, "You are losing confoundedly, and are making everybody
stare at you; you had better come away." But inspiration could
hardly have served him better. Lydgate had not before seen that
Fred was present, and his sudden appearance with an announcement
of Mr. Farebrother had the effect of a sharp concussion.
"No, no," said Lydgate; "I have nothing particular to say to him.
But--the game is up--I must be going--I came in just to see Bambridge."
"Bambridge is over there, but he is making a row--I don't think
he's ready for business. Come down with me to Farebrother.
I expect he is going to blow me up, and you will shield me,"
said Fred, with some adroitness.
Lydgate felt shame, but could not bear to act as if he felt it,
by refusing to see Mr. Farebrother; and he went down. They merely
shook hands, however, and spoke of the frost; and when all
three had turned into the street, the Vicar seemed quite willing
to say good-by to Lydgate. His present purpose was clearly
to talk with Fred alone, and he said, kindly, "I disturbed you,
young gentleman, because I have some pressing business with you.
Walk with me to St. Botolph's, will you?"
It was a fine night, the sky thick with stars, and Mr. Farebrother
proposed that they should make a circuit to the old church
by the London road. The next thing he said was--
"I thought Lydgate never went to the Green Dragon?"
"So did I," said Fred. "But he said that he went to see Bambridge."
"He was not playing, then?"
Fred had not meant to tell this, but he was obliged now to say,
"Yes, he was. But I suppose it was an accidental thing. I have
never seen him there before."
"You have been going often yourself, then, lately?"
"Oh, about five or six times."
"I think you had some good reason for giving up the habit of going there?"
"Yes. You know all about it," said Fred, not liking to be catechised
in this way. "I made a clean breast to you."
"I suppose that gives me a warrant to speak about the matter now.
It is understood between us, is it not?--that we are on a footing
of open friendship: I have listened to you, and you will be
willing to listen to me. I may take my turn in talking a little
about myself?"
"I am under the deepest obligation to you, Mr. Farebrother,"
said Fred, in a state of uncomfortable surmise.
"I will not affect to deny that you are under some obligation to me.
But I am going to confess to you, Fred, that I have been tempted
to reverse all that by keeping silence with you just now.
When somebody said to me, `Young Vincy has taken to being at the
billiard-table every night again--he won't bear the curb long;'
I was tempted to do the opposite of what I am doing--to hold my tongue
and wait while you went down the ladder again, betting first and then--"
"I have not made any bets," said Fred, hastily.
"Glad to hear it. But I say, my prompting was to look on and see
you take the wrong turning, wear out Garth's patience, and lose
the best opportunity of your life--the opportunity which you made
some rather difficult effort to secure. You can guess the feeling
which raised that temptation in me--I am sure you know it.
I am sure you know that the satisfaction of your affections stands
in the way of mine."
There was a pause. Mr. Farebrother seemed to wait for a recognition
of the fact; and the emotion perceptible in the tones of his fine
voice gave solemnity to his words. But no feeling could quell
Fred's alarm.
"I could not be expected to give her up," he said, after a
moment's hesitation: it was not a case for any pretence of generosity.
"Clearly not, when her affection met yours. But relations of this sort,
even when they are of long standing, are always liable to change.
I can easily conceive that you might act in a way to loosen the tie
she feels towards you--it must be remembered that she is only
conditionally bound to you--and that in that ease, another man,
who may flatter himself that he has a hold on her regard,
might succeed in winning that firm place in her love as well
as respect which you had let slip. I can easily conceive such
a result," repeated Mr. Farebrother, emphatically. "There is
a companionship of ready sympathy, which might get the advantage
even over the longest associations." It seemed to Fred that if
Mr. Farebrother had had a beak and talons instead of his very
capable tongue, his mode of attack could hardly be more cruel.
He had a horrible conviction that behind all this hypothetic
statement there was a knowledge of some actual change in Mary's feeling.
"Of course I know it might easily be all up with me," he said,
in a troubled voice. "If she is beginning to compare--" He broke off,
not liking to betray all he felt, and then said, by the help of a
little bitterness, "But I thought you were friendly to me."
"So I am; that is why we are here. But I have had a strong disposition
to be otherwise. I have said to myself, `If there is a likelihood
of that youngster doing himself harm, why should you interfere?
Aren't you worth as much as he is, and don't your sixteen years
over and above his, in which you have gone rather hungry, give you
more right to satisfaction than he has? If there's a chance of his
going to the dogs, let him--perhaps you could nohow hinder it--
and do you take the benefit.'"
There was a pause, in which Fred was seized by a most uncomfortable
chill. What was coming next? He dreaded to hear that something
had been said to Mary--he felt as if he were listening to a
threat rather than a warning. When the Vicar began again there
was a change in his tone like the encouraging transition to a major key.
"But I had once meant better than that, and I am come back to my
old intention. I thought that I could hardly SECURE MYSELF
in it better, Fred, than by telling you just what had gone on in me.
And now, do you understand me? want you to make the happiness of her
life and your own, and if there is any chance that a word of warning
from me may turn aside any risk to the contrary--well, I have uttered it."
There was a drop in the Vicar's voice when he spoke the last words
He paused--they were standing on a patch of green where the road
diverged towards St. Botolph's, and he put out his hand, as if to
imply that the conversation was closed. Fred was moved quite newly.
Some one highly susceptible to the contemplation of a fine
act has said, that it produces a sort of regenerating shudder
through the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new life.
A good degree of that effect was just then present in Fred Vincy.
"I will try to be worthy," he said, breaking off before he could
say "of you as well as of her." And meanwhile Mr. Farebrother
had gathered the impulse to say something more.
"You must not imagine that I believe there is at present any
decline in her preference of you, Fred. Set your heart at rest,
that if you keep right, other things will keep right."
"I shall never forget what you have done," Fred answered.
"I can't say anything that seems worth saying--only I will try
that your goodness shall not be thrown away."
"That's enough. Good-by, and God bless you."
In that way they parted. But both of them walked about a long
while before they went out of the starlight. Much of Fred's
rumination might be summed up in the words, "It certainly would
have been a fine thing for her to marry Farebrother--but if she
loves me best and I am a good husband?"
Perhaps Mr. Farebrother's might be concentrated into a single shrug
and one little speech. "To think of the part one little woman can
play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very
good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!"
CHAPTER LXVII.
Now is there civil war within the soul:
Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne
By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier
Makes humble compact, plays the supple part
Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist
For hungry rebels.
Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought
away no encouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary,
he felt unmixed disgust with himself the next day when he had to
pay four or five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried
about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure he had made,
not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but behaving
just as they did. A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly
distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances:
the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections,
and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable cud in that way. His reason
told him how the affair might have been magnified into ruin by a
slight change of scenery--if it had been a gambling-house that he
had turned into, where chance could be clutched with both hands
instead of being picked up with thumb and fore-finger. Nevertheless,
though reason strangled the desire to gamble, there remained
the feeling that, with an assurance of luck to the needful amount,
he would have liked to gamble, rather than take the alternative
which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.
That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode. Lydgate had
so many times boasted both to himself and others that he was
totally independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent
himself solely because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas
of professional work and public benefit--he had so constantly
in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense
that he was making a good social use of this predominating banker,
whose opinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often
seemed to him an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions--
that he had been creating for himself strong ideal obstacles
to the proffering of any considerable request to him on his own account.
Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin
to say that their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive
that the act which they had called impossible to them is becoming
manifestly possible. With Dover's ugly security soon to be put
in force, with the proceeds of his practice immediately absorbed
in paying back debts, and with the chance, if the worst were known,
of daily supplies being refused on credit, above all with the
vision of Rosamond's hopeless discontent continually haunting him,
Lydgate had begun to see that he should inevitably bend himself to ask
help from somebody or other. At first he had considered whether he
should write to Mr. Vincy; but on questioning Rosamond he found that,
as he had suspected, she had already applied twice to her father,
the last time being since the disappointment from Sir Godwin;
and papa had said that Lydgate must look out for himself. "Papa said
he had come, with one bad year after another, to trade more and
more on borrowed capital, and had had to give up many indulgences;
he could not spare a single hundred from the charges of his family.
He said, let Lydgate ask Bulstrode: they have always been hand
and glove."
Indeed, Lydgate himself had come to the conclusion that if he
must end by asking for a free loan, his relations with Bulstrode,
more at least than with any other man, might take the shape of a
claim which was not purely personal. Bulstrode had indirectly
helped to cause the failure of his practice, and had also been
highly gratified by getting a medical partner in his plans:--
but who among us ever reduced himself to the sort of dependence
in which Lydgate now stood, without trying to believe that he had
claims which diminished the humiliation of asking? It was true
that of late there had seemed to be a new languor of interest
in Bulstrode about the Hospital; but his health had got worse,
and showed signs of a deep-seated nervous affection. In other respects
he did not appear to be changed: he had always been highly polite,
but Lydgate had observed in him from the first a marked coldness about
his marriage and other private circumstances, a coldness which he
had hitherto preferred to any warmth of familiarity between them.
He deferred the intention from day to day, his habit of acting on his
conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance to every possible
conclusion and its consequent act. He saw Mr. Bulstrode often,
but he did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose.
At one moment he thought, "I will write a letter: I prefer that to
any circuitous talk;" at another he thought, "No; if I were talking
to him, I could make a retreat before any signs of disinclination."
Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special
interview sought. In his shrinking from the humiliation of a
dependent attitude towards Bulstrode, he began to familiarize his
imagination with another step even more unlike his remembered self.
He began spontaneously to consider whether it would be possible
to carry out that puerile notion of Rosamond's which had often made
him angry, namely, that they should quit Middlemarch without seeing
anything beyond that preface. The question came--"Would any man
buy the practice of me even now, for as little as it is worth?
Then the sale might happen as a necessary preparation for going away."
But against his taking this step, which he still felt to be
a contemptible relinquishment of present work, a guilty turning
aside from what was a real and might be a widening channel for
worthy activity, to start again without any justified destination,
there was this obstacle, that the purchaser, if procurable at all,
might not be quickly forthcoming. And afterwards? Rosamond in
a poor lodging, though in the largest city or most distant town,
would not find the life that could save her from gloom,
and save him from the reproach of having plunged her into it.
For when a man is at the foot of the hill in his fortunes, he may
stay a long while there in spite of professional accomplishment.
In the British climate there is no incompatibility between scientific
insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility is chiefly
between scientific ambition and a wife who objects to that kind
of residence.
But in the midst of his hesitation, opportunity came to decide him.
A note from Mr. Bulstrode requested Lydgate to call on him at
the Bank. A hypochondriacal tendency had shown itself in the
banker's constitution of late; and a lack of sleep, which was
really only a slight exaggeration of an habitual dyspeptic symptom,
had been dwelt on by him as a sign of threatening insanity.
He wanted to consult Lydgate without delay on that particular morning,
although he had nothing to tell beyond what he had told before.
He listened eagerly to what Lydgate had to say in dissipation
of his fears, though this too was only repetition; and this moment
in which Bulstrode was receiving a medical opinion with a sense
of comfort, seemed to make the communication of a personal need to
him easier than it had been in Lydgate's contemplation beforehand.
He had been insisting that it would be well for Mr. Bulstrode to relax
his attention to business.
"One sees how any mental strain, however slight, may affect
a delicate frame," said Lydgate at that stage of the consultation
when the remarks tend to pass from the personal to the general,
"by the deep stamp which anxiety will make for a time even on
the young and vigorous. I am naturally very strong; yet I
have been thoroughly shaken lately by an accumulation of trouble."
"I presume that a constitution in the susceptible state in which
mine at present is, would be especially liable to fall a victim
to cholera, if it visited our district. And since its appearance
near London, we may well besiege the Mercy-seat for our protection,"
said Mr. Bulstrode, not intending to evade Lydgate's allusion,
but really preoccupied with alarms about himself.
"You have at all events taken your share in using good practical
precautions for the town, and that is the best mode of asking
for protection," said Lydgate, with a strong distaste for
the broken metaphor and bad logic of the banker's religion,
somewhat increased by the apparent deafness of his sympathy.
But his mind had taken up its long-prepared movement towards
getting help, and was not yet arrested. He added, "The town
has done well in the way of cleansing, and finding appliances;
and I think that if the cholera should come, even our enemies
will admit that the arrangements in the Hospital are a public good."
"Truly," said Mr. Bulstrode, with some coldness. "With regard to
what you say, Mr. Lydgate, about the relaxation of my mental labor,
I have for some time been entertaining a purpose to that effect--
a purpose of a very decided character. I contemplate at least
a temporary withdrawal from the management of much business,
whether benevolent or commercial. Also I think of changing my residence
for a time: probably I shall close or let `The Shrubs,' and take
some place near the coast--under advice of course as to salubrity.
That would be a measure which you would recommend?"
"Oh yes," said Lydgate, falling backward in his chair,
with ill-repressed impatience under the banker's pale earnest
eyes and intense preoccupation with himself.
"I have for some time felt that I should open this subject with you in
relation to our Hospital," continued Bulstrode. "Under the circumstances
I have indicated, of course I must cease to have any personal share
in the management, and it is contrary to my views of responsibility
to continue a large application of means to an institution which I
cannot watch over and to some extent regulate. I shall therefore,
in case of my ultimate decision to leave Middlemarch, consider that I
withdraw other support to the New Hospital than that which will subsist
in the fact that I chiefly supplied the expenses of building it,
and have contributed further large sums to its successful working."
Lydgate's thought, when Bulstrode paused according to his wont,
was, "He has perhaps been losing a good deal of money."
This was the most plausible explanation of a speech which had caused
rather a startling change in his expectations. He said in reply--
"The loss to the Hospital can hardly be made up, I fear."
"Hardly," returned Bulstrode, in the same deliberate, silvery tone;
"except by some changes of plan. The only person who may be certainly
counted on as willing to increase her contributions is Mrs. Casaubon.
I have had an interview with her on the subject, and I have pointed
out to her, as I am about to do to you, that it will be desirable to win
a more general support to the New Hospital by a change of system."
Another pause, but Lydgate did not speak.
"The change I mean is an amalgamation with the Infirmary,
so that the New Hospital shall be regarded as a special addition
to the elder institution, having the same directing board.
It will be necessary, also, that the medical management of the
two shall be combined. In this way any difficulty as to the
adequate maintenance of our new establishment will be removed;
the benevolent interests of the town will cease to be divided."
Mr. Bulstrode had lowered his eyes from Lydgate's face to the buttons
of his coat as he again paused.
"No doubt that is a good device as to ways and means," said Lydgate,
with an edge of irony in his tone. "But I can't be expected
to rejoice in it at once, since one of the first results will be
that the other medical men will upset or interrupt my methods,
if it were only because they are mine."
"I myself, as you know, Mr. Lydgate, highly valued the opportunity
of new and independent procedure which you have diligently employed:
the original plan, I confess, was one which I had much at heart,
under submission to the Divine Will. But since providential
indications demand a renunciation from me, I renounce."
Bulstrode showed a rather exasperating ability in this conversation.
The broken metaphor and bad logic of motive which had stirred
his hearer's contempt were quite consistent with a mode of putting
the facts which made it difficult for Lydgate to vent his own
indignation and disappointment. After some rapid reflection,
he only asked--
"What did Mrs. Casaubon say?"
"That was the further statement which I wished to make to you,"
said Bulstrode, who had thoroughly prepared his ministerial explanation.
"She is, you are aware, a woman of most munificent disposition,
and happily in possession--not I presume of great wealth, but of
funds which she can well spare. She has informed me that though
she has destined the chief part of those funds to another purpose,
she is willing to consider whether she cannot fully take my place
in relation to the Hospital. But she wishes for ample time to mature
her thoughts on the subject, and I have told her that there is no need
for haste--that, in fact, my own plans are not yet absolute."
Lydgate was ready to say, "If Mrs. Casaubon would take your place,
there would be gain, instead of loss." But there was still
a weight on his mind which arrested this cheerful candor.
He replied, "I suppose, then, that I may enter into the subject
with Mrs. Casaubon."
"Precisely; that is what she expressly desires. Her decision,
she says, will much depend on what you can tell her. But not
at present: she is, I believe, just setting out on a journey.
I have her letter here," said Mr. Bulstrode, drawing it out,
and reading from it. "`I am immediately otherwise engaged,' she says.
`I am going into Yorkshire with Sir James and Lady Chettam; and the
conclusions I come to about some land which I am to see there may
affect my power of contributing to the Hospital.' Thus, Mr. Lydgate,
there is no haste necessary in this matter; but I wished to apprise
you beforehand of what may possibly occur."
Mr. Bulstrode returned the letter to his side-pocket, and changed
his attitude as if his business were closed. Lydgate, whose renewed
hope about the Hospital only made him more conscious of the facts
which poisoned his hope, felt that his effort after help, if made
at all, must be made now and vigorously.
"I am much obliged to you for giving me full notice," he said,
with a firm intention in his tone, yet with an interruptedness in
his delivery which showed that he spoke unwillingly. "The highest
object to me is my profession, and I had identified the Hospital with
the best use I can at present make of my profession. But the best
use is not always the same with monetary success. Everything which
has made the Hospital unpopular has helped with other causes--
I think they are all connected with my professional zeal--to make me
unpopular as a practitioner. I get chiefly patients who can't pay me.
I should like them best, if I had nobody to pay on my own side."
Lydgate waited a little, but Bulstrode only bowed, looking at
him fixedly, and he went on with the same interrupted enunciation--
as if he were biting an objectional leek.
"I have slipped into money difficulties which I can see no way out of,
unless some one who trusts me and my future will advance me a sum
without other security. I had very little fortune left when I
came here. I have no prospects of money from my own family.
My expenses, in consequence of my marriage, have been very much
greater than I had expected. The result at this moment is that it
would take a thousand pounds to clear me. I mean, to free me from
the risk of having all my goods sold in security of my largest debt--
as well as to pay my other debts--and leave anything to keep us
a little beforehand with our small income. I find that it is out
of the question that my wife's father should make such an advance.
That is why I mention my position to--to the only other man who
may be held to have some personal connection with my prosperity
or ruin."
Lydgate hated to hear himself. But he had spoken now, and had spoken
with unmistakable directness. Mr. Bulstrode replied without haste,
but also without hesitation.
"I am grieved, though, I confess, not surprised by this information,
Mr. Lydgate. For my own part, I regretted your alliance with my
brother-in-law's family, which has always been of prodigal habits,
and which has already been much indebted to me for sustainment
in its present position. My advice to you, Mr. Lydgate, would be,
that instead of involving yourself in further obligations,
and continuing a doubtful struggle, you should simply become
a bankrupt."
"That would not improve my prospect," said Lydgate, rising and
speaking bitterly, "even if it were a more agreeable thing in itself."
"It is always a trial," said Mr. Bulstrode; "but trial, my dear sir,
is our portion here, and is a needed corrective. I recommend you
to weigh the advice I have given."
"Thank you," said Lydgate, not quite knowing what he said.
"I have occupied you too long. Good-day."
CHAPTER LXVIII.
"What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
Which all this mighty volume of events
The world, the universal map of deeds,
Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,
That the directest course still best succeeds.
For should not grave and learn'd Experience
That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,
And with all ages holds intelligence,
Go safer than Deceit without a guide!
--DANIEL: Musophilus.
That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated
or betrayed in his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him
by some severe experience which he had gone through since the epoch
of Mr. Larcher's sale, when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw,
and when the banker had in vain attempted an act of restitution
which might move Divine Providence to arrest painful consequences.
His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to
Middlemarch before long, had been justified. On Christmas Eve he
had reappeared at The Shrubs. Bulstrode was at home to receive him,
and hinder his communication with the rest of the family, but he
could not altogether hinder the circumstances of the visit from
compromising himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved more
unmanageable than he had shown himself to be in his former appearances,
his chronic state of mental restlessness, the growing effect
of habitual intemperance, quickly shaking off every impression
from what was said to him. He insisted on staying in the house,
and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of evils, felt that this was
at least not a worse alternative than his going into the town.
He kept him in his own room for the evening and saw him to bed,
Raffles all the while amusing himself with the annoyance he was
causing this decent and highly prosperous fellow-sinner, an amusement
which he facetiously expressed as sympathy with his friend's pleasure
in entertaining a man who had been serviceable to him, and who had
not had all his earnings. There was a cunning calculation under this
noisy joking--a cool resolve to extract something the handsomer
from Bulstrode as payment for release from this new application
of torture. But his cunning had a little overcast its mark.
Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles could
enable him to imagine. He had told his wife that he was simply taking
care of this wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might otherwise
injure himself; he implied, without the direct form of falsehood,
that there was a family tie which bound him to this care, and that
there were signs of mental alienation in Raffles which urged caution.
He would himself drive the unfortunate being away the next morning.
In these hints he felt that he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrode
with precautionary information for his daughters and servants,
and accounting for his allowing no one but himself to enter the room
even with food and drink. But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles
should be overheard in his loud and plain references to past facts--
lest Mrs. Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door.
How could he hinder her, how betray his terror by opening the door
to detect her? She was a woman of honest direct habits, and little
likely to take so low a course in order to arrive at painful knowledge;
but fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far, and produced
an effect which had not been in his plan. By showing himself
hopelessly unmanageable he had made Bulstrode feel that a strong
defiance was the only resource left. After taking Raffles to bed
that night the banker ordered his closed carriage to be ready at
half-past seven the next morning. At six o'clock he had already
been long dressed, and had spent some of his wretchedness in prayer,
pleading his motives for averting the worst evil if in anything he had
used falsity and spoken what was not true before God. For Bulstrode
shrank from a direct lie with an intensity disproportionate to the
number of his more indirect misdeeds. But many of these misdeeds
were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account
of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we
fix our mind on and desire. And it is only what we are vividly
conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omniscience.
Bulstrode carried his candle to the bedside of Raffles, who was
apparently in a painful dream. He stood silent, hoping that the presence
of the light would serve to waken the sleeper gradually and gently,
for he feared some noise as the consequence of a too sudden awakening.
He had watched for a couple of minutes or more the shudderings
and pantings which seemed likely to end in waking, when Raffles,
with a long half-stifled moan, started up and stared round him
in terror, trembling and gasping. But he made no further noise,
and Bulstrode, setting down the candle, awaited his recovery.
It was a quarter of an hour later before Bulstrode, with a cold
peremptoriness of manner which he had not before shown, said, "I came
to call you thus early, Mr. Raffles, because I have ordered the carriage
to be ready at half-past seven, and intend myself to conduct you as far
as Ilsely, where you can either take the railway or await a coach."
Raffles was about to speak, but Bulstrode anticipated him imperiously
with the words, "Be silent, sir, and hear what I have to say.
I shall supply you with money now, and I will furnish you with a
reasonable sum from time to time, on your application to me by letter;
but if you choose to present yourself here again, if you return
to Middlemarch, if you use your tongue in a manner injurious to me,
you will have to live on such fruits as your malice can bring you,
without help from me. Nobody will pay you well for blasting my name:
I know the worst you can do against me, and I shall brave it if you
dare to thrust yourself upon me again. Get up, sir, and do as I
order you, without noise, or I will send for a policeman to take
you off my premises, and you may carry your stories into every
pothouse in the town, but you shall have no sixpence from me to pay
your expenses there."
Bulstrode had rarely in his life spoken with such nervous energy:
he had been deliberating on this speech and its probable effects
through a large part of the night; and though he did not trust to its
ultimately saving him from any return of Raffles, he had concluded
that it was the best throw he could make. It succeeded in enforcing
submission from the jaded man this morning: his empoisoned system
at this moment quailed before Bulstrode's cold, resolute bearing,
and he was taken off quietly in the carriage before the family
breakfast time. The servants imagined him to be a poor relation,
and were not surprised that a strict man like their master, who held
his head high in the world, should be ashamed of such a cousin
and want to get rid of him. The banker's drive of ten miles with
his hated companion was a dreary beginning of the Christmas day;
but at the end of the drive, Raffles had recovered his spirits,
and parted in a contentment for which there was the good reason
that the banker had given him a hundred pounds. Various motives
urged Bulstrode to this open-handedness, but he did not himself
inquire closely into all of them. As he had stood watching Raffles
in his uneasy sleep, it had certainly entered his mind that the man
had been much shattered since the first gift of two hundred pounds.
He had taken care to repeat the incisive statement of his resolve
not to be played on any more; and had tried to penetrate Raffles
with the fact that he had shown the risks of bribing him to be
quite equal to the risks of defying him. But when, freed from his
repulsive presence, Bulstrode returned to his quiet home, he brought
with him no confidence that he had secured more than a respite.
It was as if he had had a loathsome dream, and could not shake off
its images with their hateful kindred of sensations--as if on all
the pleasant surroundings of his life a dangerous reptile had left
his slimy traces.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the
thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric
of opinion is threatened with ruin?
Bulstrode was only the more conscious that there was a deposit
of uneasy presentiment in his wife's mind, because she carefully
avoided any allusion to it. He had been used every day to taste
the flavor of supremacy and the tribute of complete deference:
and the certainty that he was watched or measured with a hidden
suspicion of his having some discreditable secret, made his voice
totter when he was speaking to edification. Foreseeing, to men
of Bulstrode's anxious temperament, is often worse than seeing;
and his imagination continually heightened the anguish of an
imminent disgrace. Yes, imminent; for if his defiance of Raffles
did not keep the man away--and though he prayed for this result he
hardly hoped for it--the disgrace was certain. In vain he said
to himself that, if permitted, it would be a divine visitation,
a chastisement, a preparation; he recoiled from the imagined burning;
and he judged that it must be more for the Divine glory that he
should escape dishonor. That recoil had at last urged him to make
preparations for quitting Middlemarch. If evil truth must be reported
of him, he would then be at a less scorching distance from the
contempt of his old neighbors; and in a new scene, where his life
would not have gathered the same wide sensibility, the tormentor,
if he pursued him, would be less formidable. To leave the place
finally would, he knew, be extremely painful to his wife, and on other
grounds he would have preferred to stay where he had struck root.
Hence he made his preparations at first in a conditional way,
wishing to leave on all sides an opening for his return after
brief absence, if any favorable intervention of Providence should
dissipate his fears. He was preparing to transfer his management
of the Bank, and to give up any active control of other commercial
affairs in the neighborhood, on the ground of his failing health,
but without excluding his future resumption of such work. The measure
would cause him some added expense and some diminution of income beyond
what he had already undergone from the general depression of trade;
and the Hospital presented itself as a principal object of outlay
on which he could fairly economize.
This was the experience which had determined his conversation
with Lydgate. But at this time his arrangements had most of them
gone no farther than a stage at which he could recall them if they
proved to be unnecessary. He continually deferred the final steps;
in the midst of his fears, like many a man who is in danger of
shipwreck or of being dashed from his carriage by runaway horses,
he had a clinging impression that something would happen to hinder
the worst, and that to spoil his life by a late transplantation
might be over-hasty--especially since it was difficult to account
satisfactorily to his wife for the project of their indefinite exile
from the only place where she would like to live.
Among the affairs Bulstrode had to care for, was the management
of the farm at Stone Court in case of his absence; and on this
as well as on all other matters connected with any houses and land
he possessed in or about Middlemarch, he had consulted Caleb Garth.
Like every one else who had business of that sort, he wanted to get the
agent who was more anxious for his employer's interests than his own.
With regard to Stone Court, since Bulstrode wished to retain his hold
on the stock, and to have an arrangement by which he himself could,
if he chose, resume his favorite recreation of superintendence,
Caleb had advised him not to trust to a mere bailiff, but to let
the land, stock, and implements yearly, and take a proportionate
share of the proceeds.
"May I trust to you to find me a tenant on these terms, Mr. Garth?"
said Bulstrode. "And will you mention to me the yearly sum
which would repay you for managing these affairs which we have
discussed together?"
"I'll think about it," said Caleb, in his blunt way. "I'll see
how I can make it out."
If it had not been that he had to consider Fred Vincy's future,
Mr. Garth would not probably have been glad of any addition to his work,
of which his wife was always fearing an excess for him as he grew older.
But on quitting Bulstrode after that conversation, a very alluring
idea occurred to him about this said letting of Stone Court.
What if Bulstrode would agree to his placing Fred Vincy there
on the understanding that he, Caleb Garth, should be responsible
for the management? It would be an excellent schooling for Fred;
he might make a modest income there, and still have time left to get
knowledge by helping in other business. He mentioned his notion
to Mrs. Garth with such evident delight that she could not bear
to chill his pleasure by expressing her constant fear of his
undertaking too much.
"The lad would be as happy as two," he said, throwing himself
back in his chair, and looking radiant, "if I could tell him it
was all settled. Think; Susan! His mind had been running on
that place for years before old Featherstone died. And it would
be as pretty a turn of things as could be that he should hold
the place in a good industrious way after all--by his taking
to business. For it's likely enough Bulstrode might let him go on,
and gradually buy the stock. He hasn't made up his mind, I can see,
whether or not he shall settle somewhere else as a lasting thing.
I never was better pleased with a notion in my life. And then
the children might be married by-and-by, Susan."
"You will not give any hint of the plan to Fred, until you are
sure that Bulstrode would agree to the plan?" said Mrs. Garth,
in a tone of gentle caution. "And as to marriage, Caleb, we old
people need not help to hasten it."
"Oh, I don't know," said Caleb, swinging his head aside.
"Marriage is a taming thing. Fred would want less of my bit
and bridle. However, I shall say nothing till I know the ground
I'm treading on. I shall speak to Bulstrode again."
He took his earliest opportunity of doing so. Bulstrode had anything
but a warm interest in his nephew Fred Vincy, but he had a strong
wish to secure Mr. Garth's services on many scattered points of
business at which he was sure to be a considerable loser, if they
were under less conscientious management. On that ground he made
no objection to Mr. Garth's proposal; and there was also another
reason why he was not sorry to give a consent which was to benefit
one of the Vincy family. It was that Mrs. Bulstrode, having heard
of Lydgate's debts, had been anxious to know whether her husband could
not do something for poor Rosamond, and had been much troubled on
learning from him that Lydgate's affairs were not easily remediable,
and that the wisest plan was to let them "take their course."
Mrs. Bulstrode had then said for the first time, "I think you are
always a little hard towards my family, Nicholas. And I am sure I
have no reason to deny any of my relatives. Too worldly they may be,
but no one ever had to say that they were not respectable."
"My dear Harriet," said Mr. Bulstrode, wincing under his wife's eyes,
which were filling with tears, "I have supplied your brother
with a great deal of capital. I cannot be expected to take care
of his married children."
That seemed to be true, and Mrs. Bulstrode's remonstrance subsided
into pity for poor Rosamond, whose extravagant education she had
always foreseen the fruits of.
But remembering that dialogue, Mr. Bulstrode felt that when he had
to talk to his wife fully about his plan of quitting Middlemarch,
he should be glad to tell her that he had made an arrangement
which might be for the good of her nephew Fred. At present he had
merely mentioned to her that he thought of shutting up The Shrubs
for a few months, and taking a house on the Southern Coast.
Hence Mr. Garth got the assurance he desired, namely, that in case
of Bulstrode's departure from Middlemarch for an indefinite time,
Fred Vincy should be allowed to have the tenancy of Stone Court on
the terms proposed.
Caleb was so elated with his hope of this "neat turn" being given
to things, that if his self-control had not been braced by a little
affectionate wifely scolding, he would have betrayed everything to Mary,
wanting "to give the child comfort." However, he restrained himself,
and kept in strict privacy from Fred certain visits which he
was making to Stone Court, in order to look more thoroughly into
the state of the land and stock, and take a preliminary estimate.
He was certainly more eager in these visits than the probable speed
of events required him to be; but he was stimulated by a fatherly
delight in occupying his mind with this bit of probable happiness
which he held in store like a hidden birthday gift for Fred and Mary.
"But suppose the whole scheme should turn out to be a castle
in the air?" said Mrs. Garth.
"Well, well," replied Caleb; "the castle will tumble about nobody's head."
CHAPTER LXIX.
"If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee."
--Ecclesiasticus.
Mr. Bulstrode was still seated in his manager's room at the Bank,
about three o'clock of the same day on which he had received Lydgate
there, when the clerk entered to say that his horse was waiting,
and also that Mr. Garth was outside and begged to speak with him.
"By all means," said Bulstrode; and Caleb entered. "Pray sit down,
Mr. Garth," continued the banker, in his suavest tone.
"I am glad that you arrived just in time to find me here.
I know you count your minutes."
"Oh," said Caleb, gently, with a slow swing of his head on one side,
as he seated himself and laid his hat on the floor.
He looked at the ground, leaning forward and letting his long fingers
droop between his legs, while each finger moved in succession,
as if it were sharing some thought which filled his large quiet brow.
Mr. Bulstrode, like every one else who knew Caleb, was used
to his slowness in beginning to speak on any topic which he felt
to be important, and rather expected that he was about to recur
to the buying of some houses in Blindman's Court, for the sake
of pulling them down, as a sacrifice of property which would be
well repaid by the influx of air and light on that spot. It was
by propositions of this kind that Caleb was sometimes troublesome
to his employers; but he had usually found Bulstrode ready to meet
him in projects of improvement, and they had got on well together.
When he spoke again, however, it was to say, in rather a subdued voice--
"I have just come away from Stone Court, Mr. Bulstrode."
"You found nothing wrong there, I hope," said the banker; "I was
there myself yesterday. Abel has done well with the lambs this year."
"Why, yes," said Caleb, looking up gravely, "there is something wrong--
a stranger, who is very ill, I think. He wants a doctor, and I came
to tell you of that. His name is Raffles."
He saw the shock of his words passing through Bulstrode's frame.
On this subject the banker had thought that his fears were too constantly
on the watch to be taken by surprise; but he had been mistaken.
"Poor wretch!" he said in a compassionate tone, though his lips
trembled a little. "Do you know how he came there?"
"I took him myself," said Caleb, quietly--"took him up in my gig.
He had got down from the coach, and was walking a little
beyond the turning from the toll-house, and I overtook him.
He remembered seeing me with you once before, at Stone Court,
and he asked me to take him on. I saw he was ill: it seemed
to me the right thing to do, to carry him under shelter.
And now I think you should lose no time in getting advice for him."
Caleb took up his hat from the floor as he ended, and rose slowly
from his seat.
"Certainly," said Bulstrode, whose mind was very active at this moment.
"Perhaps you will yourself oblige me, Mr. Garth, by calling at
Mr. Lydgate's as you pass--or stay! he may at this hour probably
be at the Hospital. I will first send my man on the horse there
with a note this instant, and then I will myself ride to Stone Court."
Bulstrode quickly wrote a note, and went out himself to give
the commission to his man. When he returned, Caleb was standing
as before with one hand on the back of the chair, holding his hat
with the other. In Bulstrode's mind the dominant thought was,
"Perhaps Raffles only spoke to Garth of his illness. Garth may wonder,
as he must have done before, at this disreputable fellow's claiming
intimacy with me; but he will know nothing. And he is friendly to me--
I can be of use to him."
He longed for some confirmation of this hopeful conjecture,
but to have asked any question as to what Raffles had said or done
would have been to betray fear.
"I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mr. Garth," he said, in his usual
tone of politeness. "My servant will be back in a few minutes,
and I shall then go myself to see what can be done for this
unfortunate man. Perhaps you had some other business with me?
If so, pray be seated."
"Thank you," said Caleb, making a slight gesture with his right
hand to waive the invitation. "I wish to say, Mr. Bulstrode,
that I must request you to put your business into some other hands
than mine. I am obliged to you for your handsome way of meeting me--
about the letting of Stone Court, and all other business.
But I must give it up." A sharp certainty entered like a stab into
Bulstrode's soul.
"This is sudden, Mr. Garth," was all he could say at first.
"It is," said Caleb; "but it is quite fixed. I must give it up."
He spoke with a firmness which was very gentle, and yet he could see
that Bulstrode seemed to cower under that gentleness, his face looking
dried and his eyes swerving away from the glance which rested on him.
Caleb felt a deep pity for him, but he could have used no pretexts
to account for his resolve, even if they would have been of any use.
"You have been led to this, I apprehend, by some slanders
concerning me uttered by that unhappy creature," said Bulstrode,
anxious now to know the utmost.
"That is true. I can't deny that I act upon what I heard from him."
"You are a conscientious man, Mr. Garth--a man, I trust,
who feels himself accountable to God. You would not wish to injure
me by being too ready to believe a slander," said Bulstrode,
casting about for pleas that might be adapted to his hearer's mind.
"That is a poor reason for giving up a connection which I think
I may say will be mutually beneficial."
"I would injure no man if I could help it," said Caleb; "even if I
thought God winked at it. I hope I should have a feeling for my
fellow-creature. But, sir--I am obliged to believe that this Raffles
has told me the truth. And I can't be happy in working with you,
or profiting by you. It hurts my mind. I must beg you to seek
another agent."
"Very well, Mr. Garth. But I must at least claim to know the worst
that he has told you. I must know what is the foul speech that I
am liable to be the victim of," said Bulstrode, a certain amount
of anger beginning to mingle with his humiliation before this quiet
man who renounced his benefits.
"That's needless," said Caleb, waving his hand, bowing his head slightly,
and not swerving from the tone which had in it the merciful intention
to spare this pitiable man. "What he has said to me will never
pass from my lips, unless something now unknown forces it from me.
If you led a harmful life for gain, and kept others out of their
rights by deceit, to get the more for yourself, I dare say you repent--
you would like to go back, and can't: that must be a bitter thing"--
Caleb paused a moment and shook his head--"it is not for me to make
your life harder to you."
"But you do--you do make it harder to me," said Bulstrode constrained
into a genuine, pleading cry. "You make it harder to me by turning
your back on me."
"That I'm forced to do," said Caleb, still more gently, lifting up
his hand. "I am sorry. I don't judge you and say, he is wicked,
and I am righteous. God forbid. I don't know everything. A man
may do wrong, and his will may rise clear out of it, though he can't
get his life clear. That's a bad punishment. If it is so with you,--
well, I'm very sorry for you. But I have that feeling inside me,
that I can't go on working with you. That's all, Mr. Bulstrode.
Everything else is buried, so far as my will goes. And I wish
you good-day."
"One moment, Mr. Garth!" said Bulstrode, hurriedly. "I may trust
then to your solemn assurance that you will not repeat either
to man or woman what--even if it have any degree of truth in it--
is yet a malicious representation?" Caleb's wrath was stirred,
and he said, indignantly--
"Why should I have said it if I didn't mean it? I am in no fear
of you. Such tales as that will never tempt my tongue."
"Excuse me--I am agitated--I am the victim of this abandoned man."
"Stop a bit! you have got to consider whether you didn't help
to make him worse, when you profited by his vices."
"You are wronging me by too readily believing him," said Bulstrode,
oppressed, as by a nightmare, with the inability to deny flatly
what Raffles might have said; and yet feeling it an escape
that Caleb had not so stated it to him as to ask for that flat denial.
"No," said Caleb, lifting his hand deprecatingly; "I am ready to
believe better, when better is proved. I rob you of no good chance.
As to speaking, I hold it a crime to expose a man's sin unless
I'm clear it must be done to save the innocent. That is my way
of thinking, Mr. Bulstrode, and what I say, I've no need to swear.
I wish you good-day."
Some hours later, when he was at home, Caleb said to his wife,
incidentally, that he had had some little differences with Bulstrode,
and that in consequence, he had given up all notion of taking
Stone Court, and indeed had resigned doing further business for him.
"He was disposed to interfere too much, was he?" said Mrs. Garth,
imagining that her husband had been touched on his sensitive point,
and not been allowed to do what he thought right as to materials
and modes of work.
"Oh," said Caleb, bowing his head and waving his hand gravely.
And Mrs. Garth knew that this was a sign of his not intending to speak
further on the subject.
As for Bulstrode, he had almost immediately mounted his horse and set
off for Stone Court, being anxious to arrive there before Lydgate.
His mind was crowded with images and conjectures, which were a language
to his hopes and fears, just as we hear tones from the vibrations
which shake our whole system. The deep humiliation with which he
had winced under Caleb Garth's knowledge of his past and rejection
of his patronage, alternated with and almost gave way to the sense
of safety in the fact that Garth, and no other, had been the man
to whom Raffles had spoken. It seemed to him a sort of earnest
that Providence intended his rescue from worse consequences;
the way being thus left open for the hope of secrecy. That Raffles
should be afflicted with illness, that he should have been led
to Stone Court rather than elsewhere--Bulstrode's heart fluttered
at the vision of probabilities which these events conjured up.
If it should turn out that he was freed from all danger of disgrace--
if he could breathe in perfect liberty--his life should be more
consecrated than it had ever been before. He mentally lifted
up this vow as if it would urge the result he longed for--
he tried to believe in the potency of that prayerful resolution--
its potency to determine death. He knew that he ought to say,
"Thy will be done;" and he said it often. But the intense desire
remained that the will of God might be the death of that hated man.
Yet when he arrived at Stone Court he could not see the change
in Raffles without a shock. But for his pallor and feebleness,
Bulstrode would have called the change in him entirely mental.
Instead of his loud tormenting mood, he showed an intense, vague terror,
and seemed to deprecate Bulstrode's anger, because the money was
all gone--he had been robbed--it had half of it been taken from him.
He had only come here because he was ill and somebody was hunting him--
somebody was after him he had told nobody anything, he had kept
his mouth shut. Bulstrode, not knowing the significance of
these symptoms, interpreted this new nervous susceptibility into
a means of alarming Raffles into true confessions, and taxed him
with falsehood in saying that he had not told anything, since he
had just told the man who took him up in his gig and brought him
to Stone Court. Raffles denied this with solemn adjurations;
the fact being that the links of consciousness were interrupted in him,
and that his minute terror-stricken narrative to Caleb Garth had been
delivered under a set of visionary impulses which had dropped back
into darkness.
Bulstrode's heart sank again at this sign that he could get no
grasp over the wretched man's mind, and that no word of Raffles
could be trusted as to the fact which he most wanted to know,
namely, whether or not he had really kept silence to every one in
the neighborhood except Caleb Garth. The housekeeper had told him
without the least constraint of manner that since Mr. Garth left,
Raffles had asked her for beer, and after that had not spoken,
seeming very ill. On that side it might be concluded that there
had been no betrayal. Mrs. Abel thought, like the servants at
The Shrubs, that the strange man belonged to the unpleasant "kin"
who are among the troubles of the rich; she had at first referred
the kinship to Mr. Rigg, and where there was property left,
the buzzing presence of such large blue-bottles seemed natural enough.
How he could be "kin" to Bulstrode as well was not so clear,
but Mrs. Abel agreed with her husband that there was "no knowing,"
a proposition which had a great deal of mental food for her,
so that she shook her head over it without further speculation.
In less than an hour Lydgate arrived. Bulstrode met him outside
the wainscoted parlor, where Raffles was, and said--
"I have called you in, Mr. Lydgate, to an unfortunate man who was once
in my employment, many years ago. Afterwards he went to America,
and returned I fear to an idle dissolute life. Being destitute,
he has a claim on me. He was slightly connected with Rigg,
the former owner of this place, and in consequence found his way here.
I believe he is seriously ill: apparently his mind is affected.
I feel bound to do the utmost for him."
Lydgate, who had the remembrance of his last conversation with
Bulstrode strongly upon him, was not disposed to say an unnecessary
word to him, and bowed slightly in answer to this account;
but just before entering the room he turned automatically
and said, "What is his name?"--to know names being as much a part
of the medical man's accomplishment as of the practical politician's.
"Raffles, John Raffles," said Bulstrode, who hoped that whatever
became of Raffles, Lydgate would never know any more of him.
When he had thoroughly examined and considered the patient, Lydgate
ordered that he should go to bed, and be kept there in as complete
quiet as possible, and then went with Bulstrode into another room.
"It is a serious case, I apprehend," said the banker, before Lydgate
began to speak.
"No--and yes," said Lydgate, half dubiously. "It is difficult
to decide as to the possible effect of long-standing complications;
but the man had a robust constitution to begin with. I should not
expect this attack to be fatal, though of course the system is
in a ticklish state. He should be well watched and attended to."
"I will remain here myself," said Bulstrode. "Mrs. Abel and her
husband are inexperienced. I can easily remain here for the night,
if you will oblige me by taking a note for Mrs. Bulstrode."
"I should think that is hardly necessary," said Lydgate. "He seems
tame and terrified enough. He might become more unmanageable.
But there is a man here--is there not?"
"I have more than once stayed here a few nights for the sake
of seclusion," said Bulstrode, indifferently; "I am quite disposed
to do so now. Mrs. Abel and her husband can relieve or aid me,
if necessary."
"Very well. Then I need give my directions only to you," said Lydgate,
not feeling surprised at a little peculiarity in Bulstrode.
"You think, then, that the case is hopeful?" said Bulstrode,
when Lydgate had ended giving his orders.
"Unless there turn out to be further complications, such as I
have not at present detected--yes," said Lydgate. "He may pass
on to a worse stage; but I should not wonder if ho got better
in a few days, by adhering to the treatment I have prescribed.
There must be firmness. Remember, if he calls for liquors of any sort,
not to give them to him. In my opinion, men in his condition are
oftener killed by treatment than by the disease. Still, new symptoms
may arise. I shall come again to-morrow morning."
After waiting for the note to be carried to Mrs. Bulstrode,
Lydgate rode away, forming no conjectures, in the first instance,
about the history of Raffles, but rehearsing the whole argument,
which had lately been much stirred by the publication of Dr. Ware's
abundant experience in America, as to the right way of treating
cases of alcoholic poisoning such as this. Lydgate, when abroad,
had already been interested in this question: he was strongly
convinced against the prevalent practice of allowing alcohol
and persistently administering large doses of opium; and he had
repeatedly acted on this conviction with a favorable result.
"The man is in a diseased state," he thought, "but there's a good deal
of wear in him still. I suppose he is an object of charity to Bulstrode.
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by
side in men's dispositions. Bulstrode seems the most unsympathetic
fellow I ever saw about some people, and yet he has taken no end
of trouble, and spent a great deal of money, on benevolent objects.
I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven
cares for--he has made up his mind that it doesn't care for me."
This streak of bitterness came from a plenteous source, and kept
widening in the current of his thought as he neared Lowick Gate.
He had not been there since his first interview with Bulstrode
in the morning, having been found at the Hospital by the banker's
messenger; and for the first time he was returning to his home
without the vision of any expedient in the background which left
him a hope of raising money enough to deliver him from the coming
destitution of everything which made his married life tolerable--
everything which saved him and Rosamond from that bare isolation
in which they would be forced to recognize how little of a comfort
they could be to each other. It was more bearable to do without
tenderness for himself than to see that his own tenderness could
make no amends for the lack of other things to her. The sufferings
of his own pride from humiliations past and to come were keen enough,
yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself from that more acute
pain which dominated them--the pain of foreseeing that Rosamond
would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of disappointment and
unhappiness to her. He had never liked the makeshifts of poverty,
and they had never before entered into his prospects for himself;
but he was beginning now to imagine how two creatures who loved
each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, might laugh
over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they
could afford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry
seemed as far off from him as the carelessness of the golden age;
in poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look
small in. He got down from his horse in a very sad mood, and went
into the house, not expecting to be cheered except by his dinner,
and reflecting that before the evening closed it would be wise
to tell Rosamond of his application to Bulstrode and its failure.
It would be well not to lose time in preparing her for the worst.
But his dinner waited long for him before he was able to eat it.
For on entering he found that Dover's agent had already put a man
in the house, and when he asked where Mrs. Lydgate was, he was told
that she was in her bedroom. He went up and found her stretched
on the bed pale and silent, without an answer even in her face
to any word or look of his. He sat down by the bed and leaning
over her said with almost a cry of prayer--
"Forgive me for this misery, my poor Rosamond! Let us only love
one another."
She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face;
but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled.
The strong man had had too much to bear that day. He let his head
fall beside hers and sobbed.
He did not hinder her from going to her father early in the morning--
it seemed now that he ought not to hinder her from doing as she pleased.
In half an hour she came back, and said that papa and mamma wished her
to go and stay with them while things were in this miserable state.
Papa said he could do nothing about the debt--if he paid this,
there would be half-a-dozen more. She had better come back
home again till Lydgate had got a comfortable home for her.
"Do you object, Tertius?"
"Do as you like," said Lydgate. "But things are not coming
to a crisis immediately. There is no hurry."
"I should not go till to-morrow," said Rosamond; "I shall want
to pack my clothes."
"Oh, I would wait a little longer than to-morrow--there is no
knowing what may happen," said Lydgate, with bitter irony.
"I may get my neck broken, and that may make things easier to you."
It was Lydgate's misfortune and Rosamond's too, that his tenderness
towards her, which was both an emotional prompting and a well-considered
resolve, was inevitably interrupted by these outbursts of indignation
either ironical or remonstrant. She thought them totally unwarranted,
and the repulsion which this exceptional severity excited in
her was in danger of making the more persistent tenderness unacceptable.
"I see you do not wish me to go," she said, with chill mildness;
"why can you not say so, without that kind of violence? I shall stay
until you request me to do otherwise."
Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds. He felt bruised
and shattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which
Rosamond had not seen before. She could not bear to look at him.
Tertius had a way of taking things which made them a great deal
worse for her.
CHAPTER LXX.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are."
Bulstrode's first object after Lydgate had left Stone Court was
to examine Raffles's pockets, which he imagined were sure to carry
signs in the shape of hotel-bills of the places he had stopped in,
if he had not told the truth in saying that he had come straight
from Liverpool because he was ill and had no money. There were
various bills crammed into his pocketbook, but none of a later
date than Christmas at any other place, except one, which bore
date that morning. This was crumpled up with a hand-bill about
a horse-fair in one of his tail-pockets, and represented the cost
of three days' stay at an inn at Bilkley, where the fair was held--
a town at least forty miles from Middlemarch. The bill was heavy,
and since Raffles had no luggage with him, it seemed probable that he
had left his portmanteau behind in payment, in order to save money
for his travelling fare; for his purse was empty, and he had only
a couple of sixpences and some loose pence in his pockets.
Bulstrode gathered a sense of safety from these indications that
Raffles had really kept at a distance from Middlemarch since his
memorable visit at Christmas. At a distance and among people who
were strangers to Bulstrode, what satisfaction could there be to
Raffles's tormenting, self-magnifying vein in telling old scandalous
stories about a Middlemarch banker? And what harm if he did talk?
The chief point now was to keep watch over him as long as there
was any danger of that intelligible raving, that unaccountable
impulse to tell, which seemed to have acted towards Caleb Garth;
and Bulstrode felt much anxiety lest some such impulse should come
over him at the sight of Lydgate. He sat up alone with him through
the night, only ordering the housekeeper to lie down in her clothes,
so as to be ready when he called her, alleging his own indisposition
to sleep, and his anxiety to carry out the doctor's orders.
He did carry them out faithfully, although Raffles was incessantly
asking for brandy, and declaring that he was sinking away--
that the earth was sinking away from under him. He was restless
and sleepless, but still quailing and manageable. On the offer
of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, and the denial
of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate
all his terror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger,
his revenge on him by starvation, and declaring with strong oaths
that he had never told any mortal a word against him. Even this
Bulstrode felt that he would not have liked Lydgate to hear;
but a more alarming sign of fitful alternation in his delirium was,
that in-the morning twilight Raffles suddenly seemed to imagine
a doctor present, addressing him and declaring that Bulstrode
wanted to starve him to death out of revenge for telling, when he
never had told.
Bulstrode's native imperiousness and strength of determination served
him well. This delicate-looking man, himself nervously perturbed,
found the needed stimulus in his strenuous circumstances, and through
that difficult night and morning, while he had the air of an animated
corpse returned to movement without warmth, holding the mastery
by its chill impassibility his mind was intensely at work thinking
of what he had to guard against and what would win him security.
Whatever prayers he might lift up, whatever statements he might inwardly
make of this man's wretched spiritual condition, and the duty he
himself was under to submit to the punishment divinely appointed for
him rather than to wish for evil to another--through all this effort
to condense words into a solid mental state, there pierced and spread
with irresistible vividness the images of the events he desired.
And in the train of those images came their apology. He could not
but see the death of Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance.
What was the removal of this wretched creature? He was impenitent--
but were not public criminals impenitent?--yet the law decided
on their fate. Should Providence in this case award death,
there was no sin in contemplating death as the desirable issue--
if he kept his hands from hastening it--if he scrupulously did
what was prescribed. Even here there might be a mistake:
human prescriptions were fallible things: Lydgate had said that
treatment had hastened death,--why not his own method of treatment?
But of course intention was everything in the question of right
and wrong.
And Bulstrode set himself to keep his intention separate from
his desire. He inwardly declared that he intended to obey orders.
Why should he have got into any argument about the validity of
these orders? It was only the common trick of desire--which avails
itself of any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger room for itself
in all uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks
like the absence of law. Still, he did obey the orders.
His anxieties continually glanced towards Lydgate, and his remembrance
of what had taken place between them the morning before was accompanied
with sensibilities which had not been roused at all during the
actual scene. He had then cared but little about Lydgate's painful
impressions with regard to the suggested change in the Hospital,
or about the disposition towards himself which what he held to be his
justifiable refusal of a rather exorbitant request might call forth.
He recurred to the scene now with a perception that he had probably
made Lydgate his enemy, and with an awakened desire to propitiate him,
or rather to create in him a strong sense of personal obligation.
He regretted that he had not at once made even an unreasonable
money-sacrifice. For in case of unpleasant suspicions, or even
knowledge gathered from the raving of Raffles, Bulstrode would have
felt that he had a defence in Lydgate's mind by having conferred
a momentous benefit on him. Bat the regret had perhaps come too late.
Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man,
who had longed for years to be better than he was--who had taken
his selfish passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes,
so that he had walked with them as a devout choir, till now that
a terror had risen among them, and they could chant no longer,
but threw out their common cries for safety.
It was nearly the middle of the day before Lydgate arrived:
he had meant to come earlier, but had been detained, he said;
and his shattered looks were noticed by Balstrode. But he immediately
threw himself into the consideration of the patient, and inquired
strictly into all that had occurred. Raffles was worse, would take
hardly any food, was persistently wakeful and restlessly raving;
but still not violent. Contrary to Bulstrode's alarmed expectation,
he took little notice of Lydgate's presence, and continued to talk or
murmur incoherently.
"What do you think of him?" said Bulstrode, in private.
"The symptoms are worse."
"You are less hopeful?"
"No; I still think he may come round. Are you going to stay here yourself?"
said Lydgate, looking at Bulstrode with an abrupt question, which made
him uneasy, though in reality it was not due to any suspicious conjecture.
"Yes, I think so," said Bulstrode, governing himself and speaking
with deliberation. "Mrs. Bulstrode is advised of the reasons which
detain me. Mrs. Abel and her husband are not experienced enough
to be left quite alone, and this kind of responsibility is scarcely
included in their service of me. You have some fresh instructions,
I presume."
The chief new instruction that Lydgate had to give was on
the administration of extremely moderate doses of opium,
in case of the sleeplessness continuing after several hours.
He had taken the precaution of bringing opium in his pocket, and he
gave minute directions to Bulstrode as to the doses, and the point
at which they should cease. He insisted on the risk of not ceasing;
and repeated his order that no alcohol should be given.
"From what I see of the case," he ended, "narcotism is the only
thing I should be much afraid of. He may wear through even without
much food. There's a good deal of strength in him."
"You look ill yourself, Mr. Lydgate--a most unusual, I may say
unprecedented thing in my knowledge of you," said Bulstrode,
showing a solicitude as unlike his indifference the day before,
as his present recklessness about his own fatigue was unlike his
habitual self-cherishing anxiety. "I fear you are harassed."
"Yes, I am," said Lydgate, brusquely, holding his hat, and ready
to go.
"Something new, I fear," said Bulstrode, inquiringly. "Pray be seated."
"No, thank you," said Lydgate, with some hauteur. "I mentioned
to you yesterday what was the state of my affairs. There is nothing
to add, except that the execution has since then been actually put into
my house. One can tell a good deal of trouble in a short sentence.
I will say good morning."
"Stay, Mr. Lydgate, stay," said Bulstrode; "I have been
reconsidering this subject. I was yesterday taken by surprise,
and saw it superficially. Mrs. Bulstrode is anxious for her niece,
and I myself should grieve at a calamitous change in your position.
Claims on me are numerous, but on reconsideration, I esteem it right
that I should incur a small sacrifice rather than leave you unaided.
You said, I think, that a thousand pounds would suffice entirely to
free you from your burthens, and enable you to recover a firm stand?"
"Yes," said Lydgate, a great leap of joy within him surmounting every
other feeling; "that would pay all my debts, and leave me a little
on hand. I could set about economizing in our way of living.
And by-and-by my practice might look up."
"If you will wait a moment, Mr. Lydgate, I will draw a cheek to
that amount. I am aware that help, to be effectual in these cases,
should be thorough."
While Bulstrode wrote, Lydgate turned to the window thinking of his home--
thinking of his life with its good start saved from frustration,
its good purposes still unbroken.
"You can give me a note of hand for this, Mr. Lydgate," said the banker,
advancing towards him with the check. "And by-and-by, I hope,
you may be in circumstances gradually to repay me. Meanwhile, I have
pleasure in thinking that you will be released from further difficulty."
"I am deeply obliged to you," said Lydgate. "You have restored
to me the prospect of working with some happiness and some chance
of good."
It appeared to him a very natural movement in Bulstrode that he
should have reconsidered his refusal: it corresponded with the more
munificent side of his character. But as he put his hack into
a canter, that he might get the sooner home, and tell the good news
to Rosamond, and get cash at the bank to pay over to Dover's agent,
there crossed his mind, with an unpleasant impression, as from
a dark-winged flight of evil augury across his vision, the thought
of that contrast in himself which a few months had brought--that he
should be overjoyed at being under a strong personal obligation--
that he should be overjoyed at getting money for himself from Bulstrode.
The banker felt that he had done something to nullify one cause
of uneasiness, and yet he was scarcely the easier. He did not measure
the quantity of diseased motive which had made him wish for Lydgate's
good-will, but the quantity was none the less actively there,
like an irritating agent in his blood. A man vows, and yet will not
east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly
means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break
it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination,
and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself
over again the reasons for his vow. Raffles, recovering quickly,
returning to the free use of his odious powers--how could Bulstrode
wish for that? Raffles dead was the image that brought release,
and indirectly he prayed for that way of release, beseeching that,
if it were possible, the rest of his days here below might be
freed from the threat of an ignominy which would break him utterly
as an instrument of God's service. Lydgate's opinion was not
on the side of promise that this prayer would be fulfilled;
and as the day advanced, Bulstrode felt himself getting irritated
at the persistent life in this man, whom he would fain have seen
sinking into the silence of death imperious will stirred murderous
impulses towards this brute life, over which will, by itself,
had no power. He said inwardly that he was getting too much worn;
he would not sit up with the patient to-night, but leave him to
Mrs. Abel, who, if necessary, could call her husband.
At six o'clock, Raffles, having had only fitful perturbed
snatches of sleep, from which he waked with fresh restlessness
and perpetual cries that he was sinking away, Bulstrode began
to administer the opium according to Lydgate's directions.
At the end of half an hour or more he called Mrs. Abel and told
her that he found himself unfit for further watching. He must
now consign the patient to her care; and he proceeded to repeat
to her Lydgate's directions as to the quantity of each dose.
Mrs. Abel had not before known anything of Lydgate's prescriptions;
she had simply prepared and brought whatever Bulstrode ordered,
and had done what he pointed out to her. She began now to ask
what else she should do besides administering the opium.
"Nothing at present, except the offer of the soup or the soda-water:
you can come to me for further directions. Unless there is any
important change, I shall not come into the room again to-night. You
will ask your husband for help if necessary. I must go to bed early."
"You've much need, sir, I'm sure," said Mrs. Abel, "and to take
something more strengthening than what you've done.
Bulstrode went-away now without anxiety as to what Raffles might say
in his raving, which had taken on a muttering incoherence not likely
to create any dangerous belief. At any rate he must risk this.
He went down into the wainscoted parlor first, and began to
consider whether he would not have his horse saddled and go home
by the moonlight, and give up caring for earthly consequences.
Then, he wished that he had begged Lydgate to come again
that evening. Perhaps he might deliver a different opinion,
and think that Raffles was getting into a less hopeful state.
Should he send for Lydgate? If Raffles were really getting worse,
and slowly dying, Bulstrode felt that he could go to bed and sleep
in gratitude to Providence. But was he worse? Lydgate might come
and simply say that he was going on as he expected, and predict
that he would by-and-by fall into a good sleep, and get well.
What was the use of sending for him? Bulstrode shrank from that result.
No ideas or opinions could hinder him from seeing the one probability
to be, that Raffles recovered would be just the same man as before,
with his strength as a tormentor renewed, obliging him to drag away
his wife to spend her years apart from her friends and native place,
carrying an alienating suspicion against him in her heart.
He had sat an hour and a half in this conflict by the firelight only,
when a sudden thought made him rise and light the bed-candle,
which he had brought down with him. The thought was, that he
had not told Mrs. Abel when the doses of opium must cease.
He took hold of the candlestick, but stood motionless for a long while.
She might already have given him more than Lydgate had prescribed.
But it was excusable in him, that he should forget part of an order,
in his present wearied condition. He walked up-stairs, candle
in hand, not knowing whether he should straightway enter his own
room and go to bed, or turn to the patient's room and rectify
his omission. He paused in the passage, with his face turned towards
Raffles's room, and he could hear him moaning and murmuring.
He was not asleep, then. Who could know that Lydgate's prescription
would not be better disobeyed than followed, since there was still
no sleep?
He turned into his own room. Before he had quite undressed,
Mrs. Abel rapped at the door; he opened it an inch, so that he
could hear her speak low.
"If you please, sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give
the poor creetur? He feels sinking away, and nothing else will
he swaller--and but little strength in it, if he did--only the opium.
And he says more and more he's sinking down through the earth."
To her surprise, Mr. Bulstrode did not answer. A struggle was going
on within him.
"I think he must die for want o' support, if he goes on in that way.
When I nursed my poor master, Mr. Robisson, I had to give him port-wine
and brandy constant, and a big glass at a time," added Mrs. Abel,
with a touch of remonstrance in her tone.
But again Mr. Bulstrode did not answer immediately, and she continued,
"It's not a time to spare when people are at death's door, nor would
you wish it, sir, I'm sure. Else I should give him our own bottle o'
rum as we keep by us. But a sitter-up so as you've been, and doing
everything as laid in your power--"
Here a key was thrust through the inch of doorway, and Mr. Bulstrode
said huskily, "That is the key of the wine-cooler. You will find
plenty of brandy there."
Early in the morning--about six--Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent
some time in prayer. Does any one suppose that private prayer
is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action?
Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative:
who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
Bulstrode had not yet unravelled in his thought the confused promptings
of the last four-and-twenty hours.
He listened in the passage, and could hear hard stertorous breathing.
Then he walked out in the garden, and looked at the early rime on
the grass and fresh spring leaves. When he re-entered the house,
he felt startled at the sight of Mrs. Abel.
"How is your patient--asleep, I think?" he said, with an attempt
at cheerfulness in his tone.
"He's gone very deep, sir," said Mrs. Abel. "He went off gradual
between three and four o'clock. Would you please to go and look
at him? I thought it no harm to leave him. My man's gone afield,
and the little girl's seeing to the kettles."
Bulstrode went up. At a glance he knew that Raffles was not in
the sleep which brings revival, but in the sleep which streams
deeper and deeper into the gulf of death.
He looked round the room and saw a bottle with some brandy in it,
and the almost empty opium phial. He put the phial out of sight,
and carried the brandy-bottle down-stairs with him, locking it again
in the wine-cooler.
While breakfasting he considered whether he should ride to
Middlemarch at once, or wait for Lydgate's arrival. He decided
to wait, and told Mrs. Abel that she might go about her work--
he could watch in the bed-chamber.
As he sat there and beheld the enemy of his peace going irrevocably
into silence, he felt more at rest than he had done for many months.
His conscience was soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy,
which seemed just then like an angel sent down for his relief.
He drew out his pocket-book to review various memoranda there as
to the arrangements he had projected and partly carried out in the
prospect of quitting Middlemarch, and considered how far he would
let them stand or recall them, now that his absence would be brief.
Some economies which he felt desirable might still find a suitable
occasion in his temporary withdrawal from management, and he hoped
still that Mrs. Casaubon would take a large share in the expenses
of the Hospital. In that way the moments passed, until a change
in the stertorous breathing was marked enough to draw his attention
wholly to the bed, and forced him to think of the departing life,
which had once been subservient to his own--which he had once been
glad to find base enough for him to act on as he would. It was his
gladness then which impelled him now to be glad that the life was at
an end.
And who could say that the death of Raffles had been hastened?
Who knew what would have saved him?
Lydgate arrived at half-past ten, in time to witness the final
pause of the breath. When he entered the room Bulstrode observed
a sudden expression in his face, which was not so much surprise as a
recognition that he had not judged correctly. He stood by the bed
in silence for some time, with his eyes turned on the dying man,
but with that subdued activity of expression which showed that he
was carrying on an inward debate.
"When did this change begin?" said he, looking at Bulstrode.
"I did not watch by him last night," said Bulstrode.
"I was over-worn, and left him under Mrs. Abel's care.
She said that he sank into sleep between three and four o'clock.
When I came in before eight he was nearly in this condition."
Lydgate did not ask another question, but watched in silence until
he said, "It's all over."
This morning Lydgate was in a state of recovered hope and freedom.
He had set out on his work with all his old animation, and felt himself
strong enough to bear all the deficiencies of his married life.
And he was conscious that Bulstrode had been a benefactor to him.
But he was uneasy about this case. He had not expected it to
terminate as it had done. Yet he hardly knew how to put a question
on the subject to Bulstrode without appearing to insult him;
and if he examined the housekeeper--why, the man was dead.
There seemed to be no use in implying that somebody's ignorance
or imprudence had killed him. And after all, he himself might
be wrong.
He and Bulstrode rode back to Middlemarch together, talking of
many things--chiefly cholera and the chances of the Reform Bill
in the House of Lords, and the firm resolve of the political Unions.
Nothing was said about Raffles, except that Bulstrode mentioned
the necessity of having a grave for him in Lowick churchyard,
and observed that, so far as he knew, the poor man had no connections,
except Rigg, whom he had stated to be unfriendly towards him.
On returning home Lydgate had a visit from Mr. Farebrother. The Vicar
had not been in the town the day before, but the news that there
was an execution in Lydgate's house had got to Lowick by the evening,
having been carried by Mr. Spicer, shoemaker and parish-clerk, who had
it from his brother, the respectable bell-hanger in Lowick Gate.
Since that evening when Lydgate had come down from the billiard
room with Fred Vincy, Mr. Farebrother's thoughts about him had
been rather gloomy. Playing at the Green Dragon once or oftener
might have been a trifle in another man; but in Lydgate it was
one of several signs that he was getting unlike his former self.
He was beginning to do things for which he had formerly even an
excessive scorn. Whatever certain dissatisfactions in marriage,
which some silly tinklings of gossip had given him hints of,
might have to do with this change, Mr. Farebrother felt sure
that it was chiefly connected with the debts which were being
more and more distinctly reported, and he began to fear that any
notion of Lydgate's having resources or friends in the background
must be quite illusory. The rebuff he had met with in his first
attempt to win Lydgate's confidence, disinclined him to a second;
but this news of the execution being actually in the house,
determined the Vicar to overcome his reluctance.
Lydgate had just dismissed a poor patient, in whom he was much interested,
and he came forward to put out his hand--with an open cheerfulness
which surprised Mr. Farebrother. Could this too be a proud rejection of
sympathy and help? Never mind; the sympathy and help should be offered.
"How are you, Lydgate? I came to see you because I had heard
something which made me anxious about you," said the Vicar, in the
tone of a good brother, only that there was no reproach in it.
They were both seated by this time, and Lydgate answered immediately--
"I think I know what you mean. You had heard that there was
an execution in the house?"
"Yes; is it true?"
"It was true," said Lydgate, with an air of freedom, as if he did
not mind talking about the affair now. "But the danger is over;
the debt is paid. I am out of my difficulties now: I shall be freed
from debts, and able, I hope, to start afresh on a better plan."
"I am very thankful to hear it," said the Vicar, falling back in
his chair, and speaking with that low-toned quickness which often
follows the removal of a load. "I like that better than all
the news in the `Times.' I confess I came to you with a heavy heart."
"Thank you for coming," said Lydgate, cordially. "I can enjoy
the kindness all the more because I am happier. I have certainly
been a good deal crushed. I'm afraid I shall find the bruises
still painful by-and by," he added, smiling rather sadly;
"but just now I can only feel that the torture-screw is off."
Mr. Farebrother was silent for a moment, and then said earnestly,
"My dear fellow, let me ask you one question. Forgive me if I take
a liberty."
"I don't believe you will ask anything that ought to offend me."
"Then--this is necessary to set my heart quite at rest--you have not--
have you?--in order to pay your debts, incurred another debt which
may harass you worse hereafter?"
"No," said Lydgate, coloring slightly. "There is no reason why I
should not tell you--since the fact is so--that the person to whom I
am indebted is Bulstrode. He has made me a very handsome advance--
a thousand pounds--and he can afford to wait for repayment."
"Well, that is generous," said Mr. Farebrother, compelling himself
to approve of the man whom he disliked. His delicate feeling shrank
from dwelling even in his thought on the fact that he had always
urged Lydgate to avoid any personal entanglement with Bulstrode.
He added immediately, "And Bulstrode must naturally feel an interest
in your welfare, after you have worked with him in a way which has
probably reduced your income instead of adding to it. I am glad
to think that he has acted accordingly."
Lydgate felt uncomfortable under these kindly suppositions.
They made more distinct within him the uneasy consciousness
which had shown its first dim stirrings only a few hours before,
that Bulstrode's motives for his sudden beneficence following
close upon the chillest indifference might be merely selfish.
He let the kindly suppositions pass. He could not tell the history
of the loan, but it was more vividly present with him than ever,
as well as the fact which the Vicar delicately ignored--that this
relation of personal indebtedness to Bulstrode was what he had once
been most resolved to avoid.
He began, instead of answering, to speak of his projected economies,
and of his having come to look at his life from a different point
of view.
"I shall set up a surgery," he said. "I really think I made
a mistaken effort in that respect. And if Rosamond will not mind,
I shall take an apprentice. I don't like these things, but if
one carries them out faithfully they are not really lowering.
I have had a severe galling to begin with: that will make the small
rubs seem easy."
Poor Lydgate! the "if Rosamond will not mind," which had fallen
from him involuntarily as part of his thought, was a significant
mark of the yoke he bore. But Mr. Farebrother, whose hopes entered
strongly into the same current with Lydgate's, and who knew
nothing about him that could now raise a melancholy presentiment,
left him with affectionate congratulation.
CHAPTER LXXI.
Clown. . . . 'Twas in the Bunch of Grapes, where, indeed,
you have a delight to sit, have you not?
Froth. I have so: because it is an open room, and good for winter.
Clo. Why, very well then: I hope here be truths.
--Measure for Measure.
Five days after the death of Raffles, Mr. Bambridge was standing
at his leisure under the large archway leading into the yard of the
Green Dragon. He was not fond of solitary contemplation, but he
had only just come out of the house, and any human figure standing
at ease under the archway in the early afternoon was as certain
to attract companionship as a pigeon which has found something worth
peeking at. In this case there was no material object to feed upon,
but the eye of reason saw a probability of mental sustenance in the
shape of gossip. Mr. Hopkins, the meek-mannered draper opposite,
was the first to act on this inward vision, being the more ambitious
of a little masculine talk because his customers were chiefly women.
Mr. Bambridge was rather curt to the draper, feeling that Hopkins
was of course glad to talk to HIM, but that he was not going
to waste much of his talk on Hopkins. Soon, however, there was
a small cluster of more important listeners, who were either
deposited from the passers-by, or had sauntered to the spot expressly
to see if there were anything going on at the Green Dragon;
and Mr. Bambridge was finding it worth his while to say many
impressive things about the fine studs he had been seeing and the
purchases he had made on a journey in the north from which he had
just returned. Gentlemen present were assured that when they could
show him anything to cut out a blood mare, a bay, rising four,
which was to be seen at Doncaster if they chose to go and look
at it, Mr. Bambridge would gratify them by being shot "from here
to Hereford." Also, a pair of blacks which he was going to put
into the break recalled vividly to his mind a pair which he had sold
to Faulkner in '19, for a hundred guineas, and which Faulkner had
sold for a hundred and sixty two months later--any gent who could
disprove this statement being offered the privilege of calling
Mr. Bambridge by a very ugly name until the exercise made his throat dry.
When the discourse was at this point of animation, came up Mr. Frank
Hawley. He was not a man to compromise his dignity by lounging at
the Green Dragon, but happening to pass along the High Street and
seeing Bambridge on the other side, he took some of his long strides
across to ask the horsedealer whether he had found the first-rate
gig-horse which he had engaged to look for. Mr. Hawley was requested
to wait until he had seen a gray selected at Bilkley: if that did
not meet his wishes to a hair, Bambridge did not know a horse when he
saw it, which seemed to be the highest conceivable unlikelihood.
Mr. Hawley, standing with his back to the street, was fixing a time for
looking at the gray and seeing it tried, when a horseman passed slowly by.
"Bulstrode!" said two or three voices at once in a low tone, one of them,
which was the draper's, respectfully prefixing the "Mr.;" but nobody
having more intention in this interjectural naming than if they had said
"the Riverston coach" when that vehicle appeared in the distance.
Mr. Hawley gave a careless glance round at Bulstrode's back,
but as Bambridge's eyes followed it he made a sarcastic grimace.
"By jingo! that reminds me," he began, lowering his voice a little,
"I picked up something else at Bilkley besides your gig-horse,
Mr. Hawley. I picked up a fine story about Bulstrode.
Do you know how he came by his fortune? Any gentleman wanting
a bit of curious information, I can give it him free of expense.
If everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode might have had to say
his prayers at Botany Bay."
"What do you mean?" said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his hands into
his pockets, and pushing a little forward under the archway.
If Bulstrode should turn out to be a rascal, Frank Hawley had
a prophetic soul.
"I had it from a party who was an old chum of Bulstrode's.
I'll tell you where I first picked him up," said Bambridge,
with a sudden gesture of his fore-finger. "He was at Larcher's sale,
but I knew nothing of him then--he slipped through my fingers--
was after Bulstrode, no doubt. He tells me he can tap Bulstrode
to any amount, knows all his secrets. However, he blabbed to me
at Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass. Damme if I think he meant
to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort of bragging fellow,
the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, till he'd brag of a
spavin as if it 'ud fetch money. A man should know when to pull up."
Mr. Bambridge made this remark with an air of disgust, satisfied that
his own bragging showed a fine sense of the marketable.
"What's the man's name? Where can he be found?" said Mr. Hawley.
"As to where he is to be found, I left him to it at the Saracen's Head;
but his name is Raffles."
"Raffles!" exclaimed Mr. Hopkins. "I furnished his funeral yesterday.
He was buried at Lowick. Mr. Bulstrode followed him. A very
decent funeral." There was a strong sensation among the listeners.
Mr. Bambridge gave an ejaculation in which "brimstone" was the
mildest word, and Mr. Hawley, knitting his brows and bending
his head forward, exclaimed, "What?--where did the man die?"
"At Stone Court," said the draper. "The housekeeper said he was
a relation of the master's. He came there ill on Friday."
"Why, it was on Wednesday I took a glass with him," interposed Bambridge.
"Did any doctor attend him?" said Mr. Hawley
"Yes. Mr. Lydgate. Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night.
He died the third morning."
"Go on, Bambridge," said Mr. Hawley, insistently. "What did this
fellow say about Bulstrode?"
The group had already become larger, the town-clerk's presence being
a guarantee that something worth listening to was going on there;
and Mr. Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven.
It was mainly what we know, including the fact about Will Ladislaw,
with some local color and circumstance added: it was what Bulstrode
had dreaded the betrayal of--and hoped to have buried forever with
the corpse of Raffles--it was that haunting ghost of his earlier
life which as he rode past the archway of the Green Dragon he was
trusting that Providence had delivered him from. Yes, Providence.
He had not confessed to himself yet that he had done anything
in the way of contrivance to this end; he had accepted what seemed
to have been offered. It was impossible to prove that he had done
anything which hastened the departure of that man's soul.
But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like
the smell of fire. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information
by sending a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court on a pretext
of inquiring about hay, but really to gather all that could be
learned about Raffles and his illness from Mrs. Abel. In this way
it came to his knowledge that Mr. Garth had carried the man to Stone
Court in his gig; and Mr. Hawley in consequence took an opportunity
of seeing Caleb, calling at his office to ask whether he had time
to undertake an arbitration if it were required, and then asking
him incidentally about Raffles. Caleb was betrayed into no word
injurious to Bulstrode beyond the fact which he was forced to admit,
that he had given up acting for him within the last week.
Mr Hawley drew his inferences, and feeling convinced that Raffles
had told his story to Garth, and that Garth had given up Bulstrode's
affairs in consequence, said so a few hours later to Mr. Toller.
The statement was passed on until it had quite lost the stamp
of an inference, and was taken as information coming straight
from Garth, so that even a diligent historian might have concluded
Caleb to be the chief publisher of Bulstrode's misdemeanors.
Mr. Hawley was not slow to perceive that there was no handle
for the law either in the revelations made by Raffles or in the
circumstances of his death. He had himself ridden to Lowick village
that he might look at the register and talk over the whole matter
with Mr. Farebrother, who was not more surprised than the lawyer
that an ugly secret should have come to light about Bulstrode,
though he had always had justice enough in him to hinder his antipathy
from turning into conclusions. But while they were talking another
combination was silently going forward in Mr. Farebrother's mind,
which foreshadowed what was soon to be loudly spoken of in Middlemarch
as a necessary "putting of two and two together." With the reasons
which kept Bulstrode in dread of Raffles there flashed the thought
that the dread might have something to do with his munificence
towards his medical man; and though he resisted the suggestion
that it had been consciously accepted in any way as a bribe, he had
a foreboding that this complication of things might be of malignant
effect on Lydgate's reputation. He perceived that Mr. Hawley knew
nothing at present of the sudden relief from debt, and he himself
was careful to glide away from all approaches towards the subject.
"Well," he said, with a deep breath, wanting to wind up the
illimitable discussion of what might have been, though nothing could
be legally proven, "it is a strange story. So our mercurial Ladislaw
has a queer genealogy! A high-spirited young lady and a musical
Polish patriot made a likely enough stock for him to spring from,
but I should never have suspected a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker.
However, there's no knowing what a mixture will turn out beforehand.
Some sorts of dirt serve to clarify."
"It's just what I should have expected," said Mr. Hawley,
mounting his horse. "Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy."
"I know he's one of your black sheep, Hawley. But he is really
a disinterested, unworldly fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.
"Ay, ay, that is your Whiggish twist," said Mr. Hawley, who had been
in the habit of saying apologetically that Farebrother was such
a damned pleasant good-hearted fellow you would mistake him for a Tory.
Mr. Hawley rode home without thinking of Lydgate's attendance on
Raffles in any other light than as a piece of evidence on the side
of Bulstrode. But the news that Lydgate had all at once become
able not only to get rid of the execution in his house but to pay
all his debts in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round
it conjectures and comments which gave it new body and impetus,
and soon filling the ears of other persons besides Mr. Hawley,
who were not slow to see a significant relation between this sudden
command of money and Bulstrode's desire to stifle the scandal
of Raffles. That the money came from Bulstrode would infallibly
have been guessed even if there had been no direct evidence of it;
for it had beforehand entered into the gossip about Lydgate's affairs,
that neither his father-in-law nor his own family would do anything
for him, and direct evidence was furnished not only by a clerk
at the Bank, but by innocent Mrs. Bulstrode herself, who mentioned
the loan to Mrs. Plymdale, who mentioned it to her daughter-in-law
of the house of Toller, who mentioned it generally. The business
was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners
to feed it, and many invitations were just then issued and accepted
on the strength of this scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate;
wives, widows, and single ladies took their work and went out to tea
oftener than usual; and all public conviviality, from the Green
Dragon to Dollop's, gathered a zest which could not be won from
the question whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill.
For hardly anybody doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at
the bottom of Bulstrode's liberality to Lydgate. Mr. Hawley indeed,
in the first instance, invited a select party, including the
two physicians, with Mr Toller and Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold
a close discussion as to the probabilities of Raffles's illness,
reciting to them all the particulars which had been gathered from
Mrs. Abel in connection with Lydgate's certificate, that the death
was due to delirium tremens; and the medical gentlemen, who all
stood undisturbedly on the old paths in relation to this disease,
declared that they could see nothing in these particulars which could
be transformed into a positive ground of suspicion. But the moral
grounds of suspicion remained: the strong motives Bulstrode
clearly had for wishing to be rid of Raffles, and the fact that at
this critical moment he had given Lydgate the help which he must
for some time have known the need for; the disposition, moreover,
to believe that Bulstrode would be unscrupulous, and the absence
of any indisposition to believe that Lydgate might be as easily
bribed as other haughty-minded men when they have found themselves
in want of money. Even if the money had been given merely to make
him hold his tongue about the scandal of Bulstrode's earlier life,
the fact threw an odious light on Lydgate, who had long been sneered
at as making himself subservient to the banker for the sake of working
himself into predominance, and discrediting the elder members of
his profession. Hence, in spite of the negative as to any direct
sign of guilt in relation to the death at Stone Court, Mr. Hawley's
select party broke up with the sense that the affair had "an ugly look."
But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough
to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial
professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior
power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture
how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became
more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance
for the incompatible. Even the more definite scandal concerning
Bulstrode's earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass
of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue,
and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. Dollop,
the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had often
to resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think
that their reports from the outer world were of equal force with
what had "come up" in her mind. How it had been brought to her she
didn't know, but it was there before her as if it had been scored
with the chalk on the chimney-board--" as Bulstrode should say,
his inside was THAT BLACK as if the hairs of his head knowed
the thoughts of his heart, he'd tear 'em up by the roots."
"That's odd," said Mr. Limp, a meditative shoemaker, with weak
eyes and a piping voice. "Why, I read in the `Trumpet' that was
what the Duke of Wellington said when he turned his coat and went
over to the Romans."
"Very like," said Mrs. Dollop. "If one raskill said it, it's more
reason why another should. But hypoCRITE as he's been,
and holding things with that high hand, as there was no parson i'
the country good enough for him, he was forced to take Old Harry
into his counsel, and Old Harry's been too many for him."
"Ay, ay, he's a 'complice you can't send out o' the country,"
said Mr. Crabbe, the glazier, who gathered much news and groped
among it dimly. "But by what I can make out, there's them says
Bulstrode was for running away, for fear o' being found out,
before now."
"He'll be drove away, whether or no," said Mr. Dill, the barber,
who had just dropped in. "I shaved Fletcher, Hawley's clerk,
this morning--he's got a bad finger--and he says they're all of one
mind to get rid of Bulstrode. Mr. Thesiger is turned against him,
and wants him out o' the parish. And there's gentlemen in this town
says they'd as soon dine with a fellow from the hulks. `And a deal
sooner I would,' says Fletcher; `for what's more against one's stomach
than a man coming and making himself bad company with his religion,
and giving out as the Ten Commandments are not enough for him,
and all the while he's worse than half the men at the tread-mill?'
Fletcher said so himself."
"It'll be a bad thing for the town though, if Bulstrode's money
goes out of it," said Mr. Limp, quaveringly.
"Ah, there's better folks spend their money worse," said a
firm-voiced dyer, whose crimson hands looked out of keeping
with his good-natured face.
"But he won't keep his money, by what I can make out," said the glazier.
"Don't they say as there's somebody can strip it off him?
By what I can understan', they could take every penny off him,
if they went to lawing."
"No such thing!" said the barber, who felt himself a little above
his company at Dollop's, but liked it none the worse. "Fletcher says
it's no such thing. He says they might prove over and over again
whose child this young Ladislaw was, and they'd do no more than
if they proved I came out of the Fens--he couldn't touch a penny."
"Look you there now!" said Mrs. Dollop, indignantly. "I thank
the Lord he took my children to Himself, if that's all the law
can do for the motherless. Then by that, it's o' no use who your
father and mother is. But as to listening to what one lawyer says
without asking another--I wonder at a man o' your cleverness,
Mr. Dill. It's well known there's always two sides, if no more;
else who'd go to law, I should like to know? It's a poor tale,
with all the law as there is up and down, if it's no use proving
whose child you are. Fletcher may say that if he likes, but I say,
don't Fletcher ME!"
Mr. Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs. Dollop,
as a woman who was more than a match for the lawyers; being disposed
to submit to much twitting from a landlady who had a long score
against him.
"If they come to lawing, and it's all true as folks say,
there's more to be looked to nor money," said the glazier.
"There's this poor creetur as is dead and gone; by what I can make out,
he'd seen the day when he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode."
"Finer gentleman! I'll warrant him," said Mrs. Dollop; "and a far
personabler man, by what I can hear. As I said when Mr. Baldwin,
the tax-gatherer, comes in, a-standing where you sit, and says,
`Bulstrode got all his money as he brought into this town by thieving
and swindling,'--I said, `You don't make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin:
it's set my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin' here he came
into Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head:
folks don't look the color o' the dough-tub and stare at you as if they
wanted to see into your backbone for nothingk.' That was what I said,
and Mr. Baldwin can bear me witness."
"And in the rights of it too," said Mr. Crabbe. "For by what I can
make out, this Raffles, as they call him, was a lusty, fresh-colored man
as you'd wish to see, and the best o' company--though dead he lies
in Lowick churchyard sure enough; and by what I can understan',
there's them knows more than they SHOULD know about how he got there."
"I'll believe you!" said Mrs. Dallop, with a touch of scorn
at Mr. Crabbe's apparent dimness. "When a man's been 'ticed
to a lone house, and there's them can pay for hospitals and nurses
for half the country-side choose to be sitters-up night and day,
and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk,
and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flush o'
money as he can pay off Mr. Byles the butcher as his bill has
been running on for the best o' joints since last Michaelmas was
a twelvemonth--I don't want anybody to come and tell me as there's
been more going on nor the Prayer-book's got a service for--
I don't want to stand winking and blinking and thinking."
Mrs. Dollop looked round with the air of a landlady accustomed
to dominate her company. There was a chorus of adhesion from the
more courageous; but Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his
fiat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees,
looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as if the scorching
power of Mrs. Dollop's speech had quite dried up and nullified
his wits until they could be brought round again by further moisture.
"Why shouldn't they dig the man up and have the Crowner?"
said the dyer. "It's been done many and many's the time.
If there's been foul play they might find it out."
"Not they, Mr. Jonas!" said Mrs Dollop, emphatically."I know
what doctors are. They're a deal too cunning to be found out.
And this Doctor Lydgate that's been for cutting up everybody before
the breath was well out o' their body--it's plain enough what use
he wanted to make o' looking into respectable people's insides.
He knows drugs, you may be sure, as you can neither smell nor see,
neither before they're swallowed nor after. Why, I've seen drops
myself ordered by Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a
good charikter, and has brought more live children into the world nor
ever another i' Middlemarch--I say I've seen drops myself as made
no difference whether they was in the glass or out, and yet have
griped you the next day. So I'll leave your own sense to judge.
Don't tell me! All I say is, it's a mercy they didn't take this Doctor
Lydgate on to our club. There's many a mother's child might ha'
rued it."
The heads of this discussion at "Dollop's" had been the common
theme among all classes in the town, had been carried to Lowick
Parsonage on one side and to Tipton Grange on the other, had come
fully to the ears of the Vincy family, and had been discussed with
sad reference to "poor Harriet" by all Mrs. Bulstrode's friends,
before Lydgate knew distinctly why people were looking strangely at him,
and before Bulstrode himself suspected the betrayal of his secrets.
He had not been accustomed to very cordial relations with his neighbors,
and hence he could not miss the signs of cordiality; moreover, he had
been taking journeys on business of various kinds, having now made
up his mind that he need not quit Middlemarch, and feeling able
consequently to determine on matters which he had before left in suspense.
"We will make a journey to Cheltenham in the course of a month or two,"
he had said to his wife. "There are great spiritual advantages
to be had in that town along with the air and the waters, and six
weeks there will be eminently refreshing to us."
He really believed in the spiritual advantages, and meant that his
life henceforth should be the more devoted because of those later sins
which he represented to himself as hypothetic, praying hypothetically
for their pardon:--"if I have herein transgressed." as to the Hospital,
he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate, fearing to manifest
a too sudden change of plans immediately on the death of Raffles.
In his secret soul he believed that Lydgate suspected his orders to have
been intentionally disobeyed, and suspecting this he must also suspect
a motive. But nothing had been betrayed to him as to the history
of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would
give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. As to any certainty
that a particular method of treatment would either save or kill,
Lydgate himself was constantly arguing against such dogmatism;
he had no right to speak, and he had every motive for being silent.
Hence Bulstrode felt himself providentially secured. The only
incident he had strongly winced under had been an occasional encounter
with Caleb Garth, who, however, had raised his hat with mild gravity.
Meanwhile, on the part of the principal townsmen a strong
determination was growing against him.
A meeting was to be held in the Town-Hall on a sanitary question
which had risen into pressing importance by the occurrence of a cholera
case in the town. Since the Act of Parliament, which had been
hurriedly passed, authorizing assessments for sanitary measures,
there had been a Board for the superintendence of such measures
appointed in Middlemarch, and much cleansing and preparation
had been concurred in by Whigs and Tories. The question now was,
whether a piece of ground outside the town should be secured as a
burial-ground by means of assessment or by private subscription.
The meeting was to be open, and almost everybody of importance
in the town was expected to be there.
Mr. Bulstrode was a member of the Board, and just before twelve
o'clock he started from the Bank with the intention of urging the plan
of private subscription. Under the hesitation of his projects,
he had for some time kept himself in the background, and he felt
that he should this morning resume his old position as a man of action
and influence in the public affairs of the town where he expected to
end his days. Among the various persons going in the same direction,
he saw Lydgate; they joined, talked over the object of the meeting,
and entered it together.
It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they.
But there were still spaces left near the head of the large
central table, and they made their way thither. Mr. Farebrother
sat opposite, not far from Mr. Hawley; all the medical men were there;
Mr. Thesiger was in the chair, and Mr. Brooke of Tipton was on his
right hand.
Lydgate noticed a peculiar interchange of glances when he
and Bulstrode took their seats.
After the business had been fully opened by the chairman,
who pointed out the advantages of purchasing by subscription a piece
of ground large enough to be ultimately used as a general cemetery,
Mr. Bulstrode, whose rather high-pitched but subdued and fluent
voice the town was used to at meetings of this sort, rose and asked
leave to deliver his opinion. Lydgate could see again the peculiar
interchange of glances before Mr. Hawley started up, and said
in his firm resonant voice, "Mr. Chairman, I request that before
any one delivers his opinion on this point I may be permitted
to speak on a question of public feeling, which not only by myself,
but by many gentlemen present, is regarded as preliminary."
Mr. Hawley's mode of speech, even when public decorum repressed his
"awful language," was formidable in its curtness and self-possession.
Mr. Thesiger sanctioned the request, Mr. Bulstrode sat down,
and Mr. Hawley continued.
"In what I have to say, Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking simply
on my own behalf: I am speaking with the concurrence and at
the express request of no fewer than eight of my fellow-townsmen,
who are immediately around us. It is our united sentiment that
Mr. Bulstrode should be called upon--and I do now call upon him--
to resign public positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer,
but as a gentleman among gentlemen. There are practices and there
are acts which, owing to circumstances, the law cannot visit,
though they may be worse than many things which are legally punishable.
Honest men and gentlemen, if they don't want the company of people who
perpetrate such acts, have got to defend themselves as they best can,
and that is what I and the friends whom I may call my clients in this
affair are determined to do. I don't say that Mr. Bulstrode has
been guilty of shameful acts, but I call upon him either publicly
to deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a
man now dead, and who died in his house--the statement that he was
for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that he won his
fortune by dishonest procedures--or else to withdraw from positions
which could only have been allowed him as a gentleman among gentlemen."
All eyes in the room were turned on Mr. Bulstrode, who, since the first
mention of his name, had been going through a crisis of feeling almost
too violent for his delicate frame to support. Lydgate, who himself
was undergoing a shock as from the terrible practical interpretation
of some faint augury, felt, nevertheless, that his own movement
of resentful hatred was checked by that instinct of the Healer
which thinks first of bringing rescue or relief to the sufferer,
when he looked at the shrunken misery of Bulstrode's livid face.
The quick vision that his life was after all a failure, that he was
a dishonored man, and must quail before the glance of those towards
whom he had habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover--that God
had disowned him before men and left him unscreened to the triumphant
scorn of those who were glad to have their hatred justified--the sense
of utter futility in that equivocation with his conscience in dealing
with the life of his accomplice, an equivocation which now turned
venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie:--
all this rushed through him like the agony of terror which fails to kill,
and leaves the ears still open to the returning wave of execration.
The sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of
safety came--not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to--
the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such
mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped
for him.
But in that intense being lay the strength of reaction. Through all
his bodily infirmity there ran a tenacious nerve of ambitious
self-preserving will, which had continually leaped out like a flame,
scattering all doctrinal fears, and which, even while he sat
an object of compassion for the merciful, was beginning to stir
and glow under his ashy paleness. Before the last words were
out of Mr. Hawley's mouth, Bulstrode felt that he should answer,
and that his answer would be a retort. He dared not get up and say,
"I am not guilty, the whole story is false"--even if he had
dared this, it would have seemed to him, under his present keen sense
of betrayal, as vain as to pull, for covering to his nakedness,
a frail rag which would rend at every little strain.
For a few moments there was total silence, while every man
in the room was looking at Bulstrode. He sat perfectly still,
leaning hard against the back of his chair; he could not venture
to rise, and when he began to speak he pressed his hands upon
the seat on each side of him. But his voice was perfectly audible,
though hoarser than usual, and his words were distinctly pronounced,
though he paused between sentence as if short of breath. He said,
turning first toward Mr. Thesiger, and then looking at Mr. Hawley--
"I protest before you, sir, as a Christian minister, against the sanction
of proceedings towards me which are dictated by virulent hatred.
Those who are hostile to me are glad to believe any libel uttered
by a loose tongue against me. And their consciences become strict
against me. Say that the evil-speaking of which I am to be made
the victim accuses me of malpractices--" here Bulstrode's voice
rose and took on a more biting accent, till it seemed a low cry--
"who shall be my accuser? Not men whose own lives are unchristian,
nay, scandalous--not men who themselves use low instruments to
carry out their ends--whose profession is a tissue of chicanery--
who have been spending their income on their own sensual enjoyments,
while I have been devoting mine to advance the best objects with
regard to this life and the next."
After the word chicanery there was a growing noise, half of murmurs
and half of hisses, while four persons started up at once--Mr. Hawley,
Mr. Toller, Mr. Chichely, and Mr. Hackbutt; but Mr. Hawley's
outburst was instantaneous, and left the others behind in silence.
"If you mean me, sir, I call you and every one else to the inspection
of my professional life. As to Christian or unchristian, I repudiate
your canting palavering Christianity; and as to the way in which I
spend my income, it is not my principle to maintain thieves and cheat
offspring of their due inheritance in order to support religion
and set myself up as a saintly Killjoy. I affect no niceness
of conscience--I have not found any nice standards necessary yet
to measure your actions by, sir. And I again call upon you to enter
into satisfactory explanations concerning the scandals against you,
or else to withdraw from posts in which we at any rate decline you
as a colleague. I say, sir, we decline to co-operate with a man
whose character is not cleared from infamous lights cast upon it,
not only by reports but by recent actions."
"Allow me, Mr. Hawley," said the chairman; and Mr. Hawley,
still fuming, bowed half impatiently, and sat down with his hands
thrust deep in his pockets.
"Mr. Bulstrode, it is not desirable, I think, to prolong the
present discussion," said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid
trembling man; "I must so far concur with what has fallen from
Mr. Hawley in expression of a general feeling, as to think it
due to your Christian profession that you should clear yourself,
if possible, from unhappy aspersions. I for my part should be
willing to give you full opportunity and hearing. But I must say
that your present attitude is painfully inconsistent with those
principles which you have sought to identify yourself with, and for
the honor of which I am bound to care. I recommend you at present,
as your clergyman, and one who hopes for your reinstatement
in respect, to quit the room, and avoid further hindrance to business."
Bulstrode, after a moment's hesitation, took his hat from the
floor and slowly rose, but he grasped the corner of the chair
so totteringly that Lydgate felt sure there was not strength
enough in him to walk away without support. What could he do?
He could not see a man sink close to him for want of help.
He rose and gave his arm to Bulstrode, and in that way led him out
of the room; yet this act, which might have been one of gentle duty
and pure compassion, was at this moment unspeakably bitter to him.
It seemed as if he were putting his sign-manual to that association
of himself with Bulstrode, of which he now saw the full meaning
as it must have presented itself to other minds. He now felt the
conviction that this man who was leaning tremblingly on his arm,
had given him the thousand pounds as a bribe, and that somehow the
treatment of Raffles had been tampered with from an evil motive.
The inferences were closely linked enough; the town knew of the loan,
believed it to be a bribe, and believed that he took it as a bribe.
Poor Lydgate, his mind struggling under the terrible clutch
of this revelation, was all the while morally forced to take
Mr. Bulstrode to the Bank, send a man off for his carriage,
and wait to accompany him home.
Meanwhile the business of the meeting was despatched, and fringed
off into eager discussion among various groups concerning this
affair of Bulstrode--and Lydgate.
Mr. Brooke, who had before heard only imperfect hints of it,
and was very uneasy that he had "gone a little too far"
in countenancing Bulstrode, now got himself fully informed,
and felt some benevolent sadness in talking to Mr. Farebrother
about the ugly light in which Lydgate had come to be regarded.
Mr. Farebrother was going to walk back to Lowick.
"Step into my carriage," said Mr. Brooke. "I am going round to see
Mrs. Casaubon. She was to come back from Yorkshire last night.
She will like to see me, you know."
So they drove along, Mr. Brooke chatting with good-natured hope
that there had not really been anything black in Lydgate's behavior--
a young fellow whom he had seen to be quite above the common mark,
when he brought a letter from his uncle Sir Godwin. Mr. Farebrother
said little: he was deeply mournful: with a keen perception of
human weakness, he could not be confident that under the pressure
of humiliating needs Lydgate had not fallen below himself.
When the carriage drove up to the gate of the Manor, Dorothea was
out on the gravel, and came to greet them.
"Well, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, "we have just come from a meeting--
a sanitary meeting, you know."
"Was Mr. Lydgate there?" said Dorothea, who looked full of health
and animation, and stood with her head bare under the gleaming
April lights. "I want to see him and have a great consultation
with him about the Hospital. I have engaged with Mr. Bulstrode
to do so."
"Oh, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, "we have been hearing bad news--
bad news, you know."
They walked through the garden towards the churchyard gate,
Mr. Farebrother wanting to go on to the parsonage; and Dorothea
heard the whole sad story.
She listened with deep interest, and begged to hear twice over the
facts and impressions concerning Lydgate. After a short silence,
pausing at the churchyard gate, and addressing Mr. Farebrother,
she said energetically--
"You don't believe that Mr. Lydgate is guilty of anything base?
I will not believe it. Let us find out the truth and clear him!"
BOOK VIII.
SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
CHAPTER LXXII.
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.
Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once
to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having
accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she
came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light
of Mr. Farebrother's experience.
"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said. "How can we begin
to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the
magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate.
As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon,
else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject
with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably
take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the
difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And--one should
know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident
of a good result."
"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"
said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two
years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable
construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather
discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious
weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts
of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.
Two days afterwards, he was dining at the Manor with her uncle
and the Chettams, and when the dessert was standing uneaten,
the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was nodding
in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.
"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny
about him their first wish must be to justify him. What do we
live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me
in MY trouble, and attended me in my illness."
Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they
had been when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly
three years before, and her experience since had given her more
right to express a decided opinion. But Sir James Chettam was no
longer the diffident and acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious
brother-in-law, with a devout admiration for his sister, but with a
constant alarm lest she should fall under some new illusion almost
as bad as marrying Casaubon. He smiled much less; when he said
"Exactly" it was more often an introduction to a dissentient opinion
than in those submissive bachelor days; and Dorothea found to her
surprise that she had to resolve not to be afraid of him--all the
more because he was really her best friend. He disagreed with her now.
"But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake
to manage a man's life for him in that way. Lydgate must know--
at least he will soon come to know how he stands. If he can
clear himself, he will. He must act for himself."
"I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity,"
added Mr. Farebrother. "It is possible--I have often felt
so much weakness in myself that I can conceive even a man of
honorable disposition, such as I have always believed Lydgate to be,
succumbing to such a temptation as that of accepting money which was
offered more or less indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence
about scandalous facts long gone by. I say, I can conceive this,
if he were under the pressure of hard circumstances--if he had been
harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has been. I would not believe
anything worse of him except under stringent proof. But there is
the terrible Nemesis following on some errors, that it is always
possible for those who like it to interpret them into a crime:
there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own consciousness
and assertion."
"Oh, how cruel!" said Dorothea, clasping her hands. "And would you
not like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence,
if the rest of the world belied him? Besides, there is a man's
character beforehand to speak for him."
"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently
at her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something
solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing,
and may become diseased as our bodies do."
"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not
be afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might
help him. Why should I be afraid? Now that I am not to have
the land, James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and take
his place in providing for the Hospital; and I have to consult
Mr. Lydgate, to know thoroughly what are the prospects of doing
good by keeping up the present plans. There is the best opportunity
in the world for me to ask for his confidence; and he would be able
to tell me things which might make all the circumstances clear.
Then we would all stand by him and bring him out of his trouble.
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might
show on behalf of their nearest neighbors." Dorothea's eyes had
a moist brightness in them, and the changed tones of her voice
roused her uncle, who began to listen.
"It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which
would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother,
almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.
"Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who
know the world better than she does." said Sir James, with his
little frown. "Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should
really keep back at present, and not volunteer any meddling with
this Bulstrode business. We don't know yet what may turn up.
You must agree with me?" he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.
"I do think it would be better to wait," said the latter.
"Yes, yes, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point
the discussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution
which was generally appropriate. "It is easy to go too far, you know.
You must not let your ideas run away with you. And as to being
in a hurry to put money into schemes--it won't do, you know.
Garth has drawn me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that sort
of thing: I'm uncommonly out of pocket with one thing or another.
I must pull up. As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune on
those oak fences round your demesne."
Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with
Celia into the library, which was her usual drawing-room.
"Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says," said Celia, "else you
will be getting into a scrape. You always did, and you always will,
when you set about doing as you please. And I think it is a mercy
now after all that you have got James to think for you. He lets
you have your plans, only he hinders you from being taken in.
And that is the good of having a brother instead of a husband.
A husband would not let you have your plans."
"As if I wanted a husband!" said Dorothea. "I only want not to
have my feelings checked at every turn." Mrs. Casaubon was still
undisciplined enough to burst into angry tears.
"Now, really, Dodo," said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than usual,
"you ARE contradictory: first one thing and then another.
You used to submit to Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you
would have given up ever coming to see me if he had asked you."
"Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my
feeling for him," said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.
"Then why can't you think it your duty to submit a little to what
James wishes?" said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument.
"Because he only wishes what is for your own good. And, of course,
men know best about everything, except what women know better."
Dorothea laughed and forgot her tears.
"Well, I mean about babies and those things," explained Celia.
"I should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used
to do to Mr. Casaubon."
CHAPTER LXXIII.
Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.
When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her
that her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting,
but that he trusted soon to see him better and would call again
the next day, unless she-sent for him earlier, he went directly home,
got on his horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake
of being out of reach.
He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging
under the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on
which he had come to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened
to him there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality,
which had come as a blight on his honorable ambition, and must make
even people who had only vulgar standards regard his reputation
as irrevocably damaged. In such moments a man can hardly escape
being unloving. Lydgate thought of himself as the sufferer,
and of others as the agents who had injured his lot. He had meant
everything to turn out differently; and others had thrust themselves
into his life and thwarted his purposes. His marriage seemed an
unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond before
he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight
of her should exasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably.
There are episodes in most men's lives in which their highest
qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill
their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present just
then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an
emotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--
the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--
can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity
into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people
who suspected him of baseness? How could he go silently away from
Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation?
And yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?
For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed,
although it had told him no particulars, had been enough to make
his own situation thoroughly clear to him. Bulstrode had been
in dread of scandalous disclosures on the part of Raffles.
Lydgate could now construct all the probabilities of the case.
"He was afraid of some betrayal in my hearing: all he wanted was
to bind me to him by a strong obligation: that was why he passed
on a sudden from hardness to liberality. And he may have tampered
with the patient--he may have disobeyed my orders. I fear he did.
But whether he did or not, the world believes that he somehow or other
poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I didn't help
in it. And yet--and yet he may not be guilty of the last offence;
and it is just possible that the change towards me may have been a
genuine relenting--the effect of second thoughts such as he alleged.
What we call the `just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we
find it easier to believe is grossly false. In his last dealings
with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite of my
suspicion to the contrary."
There was a benumbing cruelty in his position. Even if he renounced
every other consideration than that of justifying himself--
if he met shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation,
and made a public statement of all the facts as he knew them,
who would be convinced? It would be playing the part of a fool
to offer his own testimony on behalf of himself, and say, "I did
not take the money as a bribe." The circumstances would always
be stronger than his assertion. And besides, to come forward
and tell everything about himself must include declarations about
Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of others against him.
He must tell that he had not known of Raffles's existence when he
first mentioned his pressing need of money to Bulstrode, and that
he took the money innocently as a result of that communication,
not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have arisen on
his being called in to this man. And after all, the suspicion
of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.
But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
the same way if he had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had
continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part
of Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
recent heavy obligation. But if he had not received any money--
if Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy--
would he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding
the man dead?--would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode--
would the dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument
that his own treatment would pass for the wrong with most members
of his profession--have had just the same force or significance
with him?
That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he
was reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he
had been independent, this matter of a patient's treatment
and the distinct rule that he must do or see done that which he
believed best for the life committed to him, would have been
the point on which he would have been the sturdiest. As it was,
he had rested in the consideration that disobedience to his orders,
however it might have arisen, could not be considered a crime,
that in the dominant opinion obedience to his orders was just as
likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply one of etiquette.
Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he had denounced
the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and had said--
"the purest experiment in treatment may still be conscientious:
my business is to take care of life, and to do the best I can
think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science
is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of
money obligation and selfish respects.
"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I
were a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--
I can see that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence,
it would make little difference to the blessed world here.
I have been set down as tainted and should be cheapened to them
all the same."
Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely.
at him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients
of his had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too
plain now. The general black-balling had begun.
No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a
hopeless misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance.
The scowl which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not
a meaningless accident. Already when he was re-entering the town
after that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was
setting his mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst
that could be done against him. He would not retreat before calumny,
as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act
of his should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity
as well as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink
from showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.
It was true that the association with this man had been fatal to him--
true that if he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with
all his debts unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode,
and taken beggary rather than the rescue which had been sullied with
the suspicion of a bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest
among the sons of men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from
this crushed fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful
effort to get acquittal for himself by howling against another.
"I shall do as I think right, and explain to nobody. They will try
to starve me out, but--" he was going on with an obstinate resolve,
but he was getting near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged
itself again into that chief place from which it had been thrust
by the agonized struggles of wounded honor and pride.
How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to drag,
and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common
to them both. He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure
which events must soon bring about.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
"Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together."
--BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.
In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town
held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry
her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the
unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman
with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on
something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral
impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.
Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant,
to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you
did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct,
or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for
its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase,
but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife
look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest
too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint
given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency
in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger
than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement,
sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks
tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring
at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell
what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer.
On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work
setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.
There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes
would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral
activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs. Bulstrode
was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any
human being. Men had always thought her a handsome comfortable woman,
and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's hypocrisy that he
had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy
person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal
about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her--"Ah, poor woman!
She's as honest as the day--SHE never suspected anything wrong
in him, you may depend on it." Women, who were intimate with her,
talked together much of "poor Harriet," imagined what her feelings
must be when she came to know everything, and conjectured how much
she had already come to know. There was no spiteful disposition
towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxious to ascertain
what it would be well for her to feel and do under the circumstances,
which of course kept the imagination occupied with her character
and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy till now.
With the review of Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was inevitable
to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same blight
with her aunt's. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less pitied,
though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had always
been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage
with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they
lay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be "found out"
concerning them. Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance
to her husband. Harriet's faults were her own.
"She has always been showy," said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for
a small party, "though she has got into the way of putting her
religion forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold
her head up above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites
clergymen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places."
"We can hardly blame her for that," said Mrs. Sprague; "because few
of the best people in the town cared to associate with Balstrode,
and she must have somebody to sit down at her table."
"Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I think he must be sorry now."
"But he was never fond of him in his heart--that every one knows,"
said Mrs. Tom Toller. "Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes.
He keeps to the truth in what is evangelical. It is only clergymen
like Mr. Tyke, who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind
of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to their taste."
"I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes
have half kept the Tyke family."
"And of coarse it is a discredit to his doctrines," said Mrs. Sprague,
who was elderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.
"People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch
for a good while to come."
"I think we must not set down people's bad actions to their religion,"
said falcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.
"Oh, my dear, we are forgetting," said Mrs. Sprague. "We ought
not to be talking of this before you."
"I am sure I have no reason to be partial," said Mrs. Plymdale,
coloring. "It's true Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms
with Mr. Bulstrode, and Harriet Vincy was my friend long before
she married him. But I have always kept my own opinions and told
her where she was wrong, poor thing. Still, in point of religion,
I must say, Mr. Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse,
and yet have been a man of no religion. I don't say that there
has not been a little too much of that--I like moderation myself.
But truth is truth. The men tried at the assizes are not all
over-religious, I suppose."
"Well," said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, "all I can say is,
that I think she ought to separate from him."
"I can't say that," said Mrs. Sprague. "She took him for better
or worse, you know."
"But `worse' can never mean finding out that your husband is fit
for Newgate," said Mrs. Hackbutt. "Fancy living with such a man!
I should expect to be poisoned."
"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are
to be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.
"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"She thinks her husband the first of men. It's true he has never
denied her anything."
"Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I suppose she knows nothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust
I shall not see her, for I should be frightened to death lest I
should say anything about her husband. Do you think any hint has
reached her?"
"I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller. "We hear that he
is ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting
on Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday,
and they had new Tuscan bonnets. Her own had a feather in it.
I have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress."
"She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale,
a little stung. "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale
lavender on purpose to be consistent. I must say it of Harriet
that she wishes to do right."
"As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the meeting.
It will he a great blow to him. There is his daughter as well
as his sister."
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague. "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate
can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black
about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.
It really makes one shudder."
"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"
said Mrs. Plymdale. "She needed a lesson."
"I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "That is what is generally done when there is
anything disgraceful in a family."
"And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be. I pity her from my heart.
And with all her faults, few women are better. From a girl she had
the neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.
You might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.
And so she has brought up Kate and Ellen. You may think how hard it
will be for her to go among foreigners."
"The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among
the French."
"That would suit HER well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;
"there is that kind of lightness about her. But she got that from
her mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always
gave her good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had
her marry elsewhere."
Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication
of feeling. There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode,
but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing
house with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined
her to desire that the mildest view of his character should be
the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming
to palliate his culpability. Again, the late alliance of her family
with the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle,
which gratified her in every direction except in the inclination to
those serious views which she believed to be the best in another sense.
The sharp little woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in
the adjustment of these opposing "bests," and of her griefs and
satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those
who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose
faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.
Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the
oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret
uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last
visit of Raffles to The Shrubs. That the hateful man had come ill
to Stone Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there
and watch over him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that
Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this
made a tie of benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness;
and she had been since then innocently cheered by her husband's
more hopeful speech about his own health and ability to continue
his attention to business. The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had
brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting
assurances during the next few days, she cried in private from
the conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily
illness merely, but from something that afflicted his mind.
He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit with him,
alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet she
suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted
to be busy with his papers. Something, she felt sure, had happened.
Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth
day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church--
"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.
Has anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"
"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively. He felt
that it was not for him to make the painful revelation.
"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly
at him with her large dark eyes.
"There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,"
said Lydgate. "Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people
in proportion to the delicacy of their systems. It is often
impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack--or rather,
to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment."
Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer. There remained
in her the belief that some calamity had befallen her husband,
of which she was to be kept in ignorance; and it was in her nature
strongly to object to such concealment. She begged leave for her
daughters to sit with their father, and drove into the town to pay
some visits, conjecturing that if anything were known to have gone
wrong in Mr. Bulstrode's affairs, she should see or hear some sign
of it.
She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then
drove to Mrs. Hackbutt's on the other side of the churchyard.
Mrs. Hackbutt saw her coming from an up-stairs window, and remembering
her former alarm lest she should meet Mrs. Bulstrode, felt almost
bound in consistency to send word that she was not at home;
but against that, there was a sudden strong desire within her for
the excitement of an interview in which she was quite determined
not to make the slightest allusion to what was in her mind.
Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt
went to her, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than
was usually observable in her, these being precautions adopted against
freedom of speech. She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.
"I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week,"
said Mrs. Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks.
"But Mr. Bulstrode was taken so ill at the meeting on Thursday
that I have not liked to leave the house."
Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other
held against her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern
on the rug.
"Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?" persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.
"Yes, he was," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude.
"The land is to be bought by subscription, I believe."
"Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be
buried in it," said Mrs. Bulstrode. "It is an awful visitation.
But I always think Middlemarch a very healthy spot. I suppose it
is being used to it from a child; but I never saw the town I should
like to live at better, and especially our end."
"I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch,
Mrs. Bulstrode," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh. "Still, we
must learn to resign ourselves, wherever our lot may be east.
Though I am sure there will always be people in this town who will
wish you well."
Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, "if you take my advice you will part
from your husband," but it seemed clear to her that the poor
woman knew nothing of the thunder ready to bolt on her head,
and she herself could do no more than prepare her a little.
Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly rather chill and trembling: there was
evidently something unusual behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt's;
but though she had set out with the desire to be fully informed,
she found herself unable now to pursue her brave purpose, and turning
the conversation by an inquiry about the young Hackbutts, she soon
took her leave saying that she was going to see Mrs. Plymdale.
On her way thither she tried to imagine that there might have been
some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr. Bulstrode and
some of his frequent opponents--perhaps Mr. Hackbutt might have been
one of them. That would account for everything.
But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting
explanation seemed no longer tenable. "Selina" received her with a
pathetic affectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on
the commonest topics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary
quarrel of which the most important consequence was a perturbation
of Mr. Bulstrode's health. Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought
that she would sooner question Mrs. Plymdale than any one else;
but she found to her surprise that an old friend is not always
the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was
the barrier of remembered communication under other circumstances--
there was the dislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been
long wont to allow her the superiority. For certain words of mysterious
appropriateness that Mrs. Plymdale let fall about her resolution
never to turn her back on her friends, convinced Mrs. Bulstrode
that what had happened must be some kind of misfortune, and instead
of being able to say with her native directness, "What is it that you
have in your mind?" she found herself anxious to get away before she
had heard anything more explicit. She began to have an agitating
certainty that the misfortune was something more than the mere
loss of money, being keenly sensitive to the fact that Selina now,
just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before, avoided noticing what she said
about her husband, as they would have avoided noticing a personal blemish.
She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive
to Mr. Vincy's warehouse. In that short drive her dread gathered
so much force from the sense of darkness, that when she entered
the private counting-house where her brother sat at his desk,
her knees trembled and her usually florid face was deathly pale.
Something of the same effect was produced in him by the sight of her:
he rose from his seat to meet her, took her by the hand, and said,
with his impulsive rashness--
"God help you, Harriet! you know all."
That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after. It contained
that concentrated experience which in great crises of emotion
reveals the bias of a nature, and is prophetic of the ultimate
act which will end an intermediate struggle. Without that memory
of Raffles she might still have thought only of monetary ruin,
but now along with her brother's look and words there darted into
her mind the idea of some guilt in her husband--then, under the
working of terror came the image of her husband exposed to disgrace--
and then, after an instant of scorching shame in which she felt
only the eyes of the world, with one leap of her heart she was
at his side in mournful but unreproaching fellowship with shame
and isolation. All this went on within her in a mere flash of time--
while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes to her brother,
who stood over her. "I know nothing, Walter. What is it?"
she said, faintly.
He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments,
making her aware that the scandal went much beyond proof,
especially as to the end of Raffles.
"People will talk," he said. "Even if a man has been acquitted by
a jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink--and as far as the world goes,
a man might often as well be guilty as not. It's a breakdown blow,
and it damages Lydgate as much as Bulstrode. I don't pretend to say
what is the truth. I only wish we had never heard the name of either
Bulstrode or Lydgate. You'd better have been a Vincy all your life,
and so had Rosamond." Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.
"But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet. People don't blame
YOU. And I'll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,"
said the brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.
"Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter," said Mrs. Bulstrode.
"I feel very weak."
And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, "I am
not well, my dear; I must go and lie down. Attend to your papa.
Leave me in quiet. I shall take no dinner."
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her
maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk
steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen
on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently:
the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated
him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars
that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with
that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left
to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him.
Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited
dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were
an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose
prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who
had unvaryingly cherished her--now that punishment had befallen
him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him.
There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies
on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by
unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she
should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse
his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach.
But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life.
When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some
little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker;
they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible
that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.
She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown,
and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair,
she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made
her look suddenly like an early Methodist.
Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in
saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation
equal to hers. He had looked forward to her learning the truth
from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something
easier to him than any confession. But now that he imagined the
moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish.
His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he
had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it.
He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he
should never see his wife's face with affection in it again.
And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure
of retribution.
It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his
wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes
bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller--
he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion
and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting
one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other
on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly--
"Look up, Nicholas."
He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half
amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress,
the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands
and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they
cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak
to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the
acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent,
and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was,
she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their
mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire.
She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?"
and he did not say, "I am innocent."
CHAPTER LXXV.
"Le sentiment de la faussete' des plaisirs presents, et l'ignorance
de la vanite des plaisirs absents, causent l'inconstance."--PASCAL.
Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed
from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors
were paid. But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled
none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.
In this brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had
often been stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the
pain Rosamond had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her;
but he, too, had lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it
necessary to refer to an economical change in their way of living
as a matter of course, trying to reconcile her to it gradually,
and repressing his anger when she answered by wishing that he
would go to live in London. When she did not make this answer,
she listened languidly, and wondered what she had that was worth
living for. The hard and contemptuous words which had fallen from
her husband in his anger had deeply offended that vanity which he
had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she regarded
as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret repulsion,
which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor substitute
for the happiness he had failed to give her. They were at a
disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any
outlook towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except
in an occasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite
of what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea,
she secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily
come to have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one
of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet
would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
Mrs. Casaubon was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before
he knew Mrs. Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself,
which was a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry,
as the disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt
that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama
which Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.
She even fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--
that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order
to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been
busy before Will's departure. He would have made, she thought,
a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.
No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent
in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself,
to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the
nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better
had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed
a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life:
Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her,
always to be at her command, and have an understood though never
fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent
flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure
had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased
her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the alternative
dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the family
at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life
had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their
vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion,
and oftener still for a mighty love. Will Ladislaw had written
chatty letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied:
their separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change
she now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work
with quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
delightful promise which inspirited her.
It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall,
and was nothing less than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate,
which turned indeed chiefly on his new interest in plans of colonization,
but mentioned incidentally, that he might find it necessary to pay
a visit to Middlemarch within the next few weeks--a very pleasant
necessity, he said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolboy.
He hoped there was his old place on the rug, and a great deal of
music in store for him. But he was quite uncertain as to the time.
While Lydgate was reading the letter to Rosamond, her face looked
like a reviving flower--it grew prettier and more blooming.
There was nothing unendurable now: the debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw
was coming, and Lydgate would be persuaded to leave Middlemarch
and settle in London, which was "so different from a provincial town."
That was a bright bit of morning. But soon the sky became black
over poor Rosamond. The presence of a new gloom in her husband,
about which he was entirely reserved towards her--for he dreaded
to expose his lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception--
soon received a painfully strange explanation, alien to all her
previous notions of what could affect her happiness. In the new
gayety of her spirits, thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit
of moodiness than usual, causing him to leave her remarks unanswered,
and evidently to keep out of her way as much as possible, she chose,
a few days after the meeting, and without speaking to him on
the subject, to send out notes of invitation for a small evening party,
feeling convinced that this was a judicious step, since people seemed
to have been keeping aloof from them, and wanted restoring to the
old habit of intercourse. When the invitations had been accepted,
she would tell Lydgate, and give him a wise admonition as to how
a medical man should behave to his neighbors; for Rosamond had
the gravest little airs possible about other people's duties.
But all the invitations were declined, and the last answer came
into Lydgate's hands.
"This is Chichely's scratch. What is he writing to you about?"
said Lydgate, wonderingly, as he handed the note to her.
She was obliged to let him see it, and, looking at her severely,
he said--
"Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without
telling me, Rosamond? I beg, I insist that you will not invite
any one to this house. I suppose you have been inviting others,
and they have refused too." She said nothing.
"Do you hear me?" thundered Lydgate.
"Yes, certainly I hear you," said Rosamond, turning her head aside
with the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.
Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room,
feeling himself dangerous. Rosamond's thought was, that he
was getting more and more unbearable--not that there was any new
special reason for this peremptoriness His indisposition to tell
her anything in which he was sure beforehand that she would not be
interested was growing into an unreflecting habit, and she was in
ignorance of everything connected with the thousand pounds except
that the loan had come from her uncle Bulstrode. Lydgate's odious
humors and their neighbors' apparent avoidance of them had an
unaccountable date for her in their relief from money difficulties.
If the invitations had been accepted she would have gone to invite
her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen nothing of for several days;
and she now put on her bonnet to go and inquire what had become
of them all, suddenly feeling as if there were a conspiracy to leave
her in isolation with a husband disposed to offend everybody.
It was after the dinner hour, and she found her father and mother
seated together alone in the drawing-room. They greeted her with
sad looks, saying "Well, my dear!" and no more. She had never seen
her father look so downcast; and seating herself near him she said--
"Is there anything the matter, papa?"
He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, "Oh, my dear, have you
heard nothing? It won't be long before it reaches you."
"Is it anything about Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning pale.
The idea of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been
unaccountable to her in him.
"Oh, my dear, yes. To think of your marrying into this trouble.
Debt was bad enough, but this will be worse."
"Stay, stay, Lucy," said Mr. Vincy. "Have you heard nothing about
your uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?"
"No, papa," said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not
anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power
with an iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.
Her father told her everything, saying at the end, "It's better
for you to know, my dear. I think Lydgate must leave the town.
Things have gone against him. I dare say he couldn't help it.
I don't accuse him of any harm," said Mr. Vincy. He had always before
been disposed to find the utmost fault with Lydgate.
The shock to Rosamond was terrible. It seemed to her that no lot
could be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had
become the centre of infamous suspicions. In many cases it is
inevitable that the shame is felt to be the worst part of crime;
and it would have required a great deal of disentangling reflection,
such as had never entered into Rosamond's life, for her in these
moments to feel that her trouble was less than if her husband
had been certainly known to have done something criminal.
All the shame seemed to be there. And she had innocently married
this man with the belief that he and his family were a glory to her!
She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and only said,
that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left Middlemarch
long ago.
"She bears it beyond anything," said her mother when she was gone.
"Ah, thank God!" said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.
But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards
her husband. What had he really done--how had he really acted?
She did not know. Why had he not told her everything? He did not
speak to her on the subject, and of course she could not speak to him.
It came into her mind once that she would ask her father to let
her go home again; but dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter
dreariness to her: a married woman gone back to live with her parents--
life seemed to have no meaning for her in such a position:
she could not contemplate herself in it.
The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that she
had heard the bad news. Would she speak to him about it, or would she
go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she believed
him guilty? We must remember that he was in a morbid state of mind,
in which almost all contact was pain. Certainly Rosamond in this
case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence
on his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;--
was he not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her,
since now she knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him?
But a deeper-lying consciousness that he was in fault made
him restless, and the silence between them became intolerable to him;
it was as if they were both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked
away from each other.
He thought, "I am a fool. Haven't I given up expecting anything?
I have married care, not help." And that evening he said--
"Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?"
"Yes," she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying
on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.
"What have you heard?"
"Everything, I suppose. Papa told me."
"That people think me disgraced?"
"Yes," said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.
There was silence. Lydgate thought, "If she has any trust in me--
any notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does
not believe I have deserved disgrace."
But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly.
Whatever was to be said on the subject she expected to come from Tertius.
What did she know? And if he were innocent of any wrong, why did
he not do something to clear himself?
This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood
in which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed
in him--even Farebrother had not come forward. He had begun to
question her with the intent that their conversation should disperse
the chill fog which had gathered between them, but he felt his
resolution checked by despairing resentment. Even this trouble,
like the rest, she seemed to regard as if it were hers alone.
He was always to her a being apart, doing what she objected to.
He started from his chair with an angry impulse, and thrusting his hands
in his pockets, walked up and down the room. There was an underlying
consciousness all the while that he should have to master this anger,
and tell her everything, and convince her of the facts. For he had
almost learned the lesson that he must bend himself to her nature,
and that because she came short in her sympathy, he must give the more.
Soon he recurred to his intention of opening himself: the occasion
must not be lost. If he could bring her to feel with some solemnity
that here was a slander which must be met and not run away from,
and that the whole trouble had come out of his desperate want of money,
it would be a moment for urging powerfully on her that they should be
one in the resolve to do with as little money as possible, so that
they might weather the bad time and keep themselves independent.
He would mention the definite measures which he desired to take,
and win her to a willing spirit. He was bound to try this--and what
else was there for him to do?
He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards
and forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he
would sit down. She too had begun to think this an opportunity for
urging on Tertius what he ought to do. Whatever might be the truth
about all this misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.
Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair,
but in one nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her,
and looking at her gravely before he reopened the sad subject.
He had conquered himself so far, and was about to speak with a sense
of solemnity, as on an occasion which was not to be repeated.
He had even opened his lips, when Rosamond, letting her hands fall,
looked at him and said--
"Surely, Tertius--"
"Well?"
"Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in Middlemarch.
I cannot go on living here. Let us go to London. Papa, and every
one else, says you had better go. Whatever misery I have to put
up with, it will be easier away from here."
Lydgate felt miserably jarred. Instead of that critical outpouring
for which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old
round to be gone through again. He could not bear it. With a quick
change of countenance he rose and went out of the room.
Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination
to be the more because she was less, that evening might have had
a better issue. If his energy could have borne down that check,
he might still have wrought on Rosamond's vision and will.
We cannot be sure that any natures, however inflexible or peculiar,
will resist this effect from a more massive being than their own.
They may be taken by storm and for the moment converted, becoming part
of the soul which enwraps them in the ardor of its movement.
But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain within him, and his energy
had fallen short of its task.
The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off
as ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.
They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart,
Lydgate going about what work he had in a mood of despair,
and Rosamond feeling, with some justification, that he was
behaving cruelly. It was of no use to say anything to Tertius;
but when Will Ladislaw came, she was determined to tell him everything.
In spite of her general reticence, she needed some one who would
recognize her wrongs.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
"To mercy, pity, peace, and love
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight,
Return their thankfulness.
. . . . . .
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
--WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.
Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence
of a summons from Dorothea. The summons had not been unexpected,
since it had followed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated
that he had resumed his arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must
remind Lydgate of his previous communications about the Hospital,
to the purport of which he still adhered. It had been his duty,
before taking further steps, to reopen the subject with Mrs. Casaubon,
who now wished, as before, to discuss the question with Lydgate.
"Your views may possibly have undergone some change," wrote Mr. Bulstrode;
"but, in that case also, it is desirable that you should lay them
before her."
Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest. Though, in
deference to her masculine advisers, she had refrained from what
Sir James had called "interfering in this Bulstrode business,"
the hardship of Lydgate's position was continually in her mind,
and when Bulstrode applied to her again about the hospital,
she felt that the opportunity was come to her which she had been
hindered from hastening. In her luxurious home, wandering under
the boughs of her own great trees, her thought was going out over
the lot of others, and her emotions were imprisoned. The idea
of some active good within her reach, "haunted her like a passion,"
and another's need having once come to her as a distinct image,
preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give relief, and made
her own ease tasteless. She was full of confident hope about
this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of his
personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman.
Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence
on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship.
As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live through
again all the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her memories.
They all owed their significance to her marriage and its troubles--
but no; there were two occasions in which the image of Lydgate
had come painfully in connection with his wife and some one else.
The pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it had left in her an
awakened conjecture as to what Lydgate's marriage might be to him,
a susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate.
These thoughts were like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright,
and gave an attitude of suspense to her whole frame, though she was
only looking out from the brown library on to the turf and the bright
green buds which stood in relief against the dark evergreens.
When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face,
which was strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for
two months. It was not the change of emaciation, but that effect
which even young faces will very soon show from the persistent presence
of resentment and despondency. Her cordial look, when she put
out her hand to him, softened his expression, but only with melancholy.
"I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,"
said Dorothea when they were seated opposite each other; "but I put
off asking you to come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about
the Hospital. I know that the advantage of keeping the management
of it separate from that of the Infirmary depends on you, or, at least,
on the good which you are encouraged to hope for from having it
under your control. And I am sure you will not refuse to tell me
exactly what you think."
"You want to decide whether you should give a generous support
to the Hospital," said Lydgate. "I cannot conscientiously
advise you to do it in dependence on any activity of mine.
I may be obliged to leave the town."
He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able
to carry out any purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.
"Not because there is no one to believe in you?" said Dorothea,
pouring out her words in clearness from a full heart. "I know
the unhappy mistakes about you. I knew them from the first moment
to be mistakes. You have never done anything vile. You would not
do anything dishonorable."
It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on
Lydgate's ears. He drew a deep breath, and said, "Thank you."
He could say no more: it was something very new and strange in his
life that these few words of trust from a woman should be so much
to him.
"I beseech you to tell me how everything was," said Dorothea,
fearlessly. "I am sure that the truth would clear you."
Lydgate started up from his chair and went towards the window,
forgetting where he was. He had so often gone over in his mind
the possibility of explaining everything without aggravating
appearances that would tell, perhaps unfairly, against Bulstrode,
and had so often decided against it--he had so often said to
himself that his assertions would not change people's impressions--
that Dorothea's words sounded like a temptation to do something
which in his soberness he had pronounced to be unreasonable.
"Tell me, pray," said Dorothea, with simple earnestness;
"then we can consult together. It is wicked to let people think
evil of any one falsely, when it can be hindered."
Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea's face
looking up at him with a sweet trustful gravity. The presence
of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity,
changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger,
quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged
in the wholeness of our character. That influence was beginning
to act on Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one
who is dragged and struggling amid the throng. He sat down again,
and felt that he was recovering his old self in the consciousness
that he was with one who believed in it.
"I don't want," he said, "to bear hard on Bulstrode, who has lent
me money of which I was in need--though I would rather have gone
without it now. He is hunted down and miserable, and has only a poor
thread of life in him. But I should like to tell you everything.
It will be a comfort to me to speak where belief has gone beforehand,
and where I shall not seem to be offering assertions of my own honesty.
You will feel what is fair to another, as you feel what is fair
to me."
"Do trust me," said Dorothea; "I will not repeat anything without
your leave. But at the very least, I could say that you have made
all the circumstances clear to me, and that I know you are not in
any way guilty. Mr. Farebrother would believe me, and my uncle,
and Sir James Chettam. Nay, there are persons in Middlemarch to
whom I could go; although they don't know much of me, they would
believe me. They would know that I could have no other motive
than truth and justice. I would take any pains to clear you.
I have very little to do. There is nothing better that I can do
in the world."
Dorothea's voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she
would do, might have been almost taken as a proof that she could
do it effectively. The searching tenderness of her woman's tones
seemed made for a defence against ready accusers. Lydgate did
not stay to think that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up,
for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaning
entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve.
And he told her everything, from the time when, under the pressure
of his difficulties, he unwillingly made his first application
to Bulstrode; gradually, in the relief of speaking, getting into
a more thorough utterance of what had gone on in his mind--
entering fully into the fact that his treatment of the patient
was opposed to the dominant practice, into his doubts at the last,
his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy consciousness that the
acceptance of the money had made some difference in his private
inclination and professional behavior, though not in his fulfilment
of any publicly recognized obligation.
"It has come to my knowledge since," he added, "that Hawley sent
some one to examine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said
that she gave the patient all the opium in the phial I left,
as well as a good deal of brandy. But that would not have been
opposed to ordinary prescriptions, even of first-rate men.
The suspicions against me had no hold there: they are grounded
on the knowledge that I took money, that Bulstrode had strong
motives for wishing the man to die, and that he gave me the money
as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other against
the patient--that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my tongue.
They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately,
because they lie in people's inclination and can never be disproved.
How my orders came to be disobeyed is a question to which I don't
know the answer. It is still possible that Bulstrode was innocent
of any criminal intention--even possible that he had nothing to do
with the disobedience, and merely abstained from mentioning it.
But all that has nothing to do with the public belief. It is one of
those cases on which a man is condemned on the ground of his character--
it is believed that he has committed a crime in some undefined way,
because he had the motive for doing it; and Bulstrode's character
has enveloped me, because I took his money. I am simply blighted--
like a damaged ear of corn--the business is done and can't
be undone."
"Oh, it is hard!" said Dorothea. "I understand the difficulty there
is in your vindicating yourself. And that all this should have come
to you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find
out better ways--I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable.
I know you meant that. I remember what you said to me when you first
spoke to me about the hospital. There is no sorrow I have thought
more about than that--to love what is great, and try to reach it,
and yet to fail."
"Yes," said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full
meaning of his grief. "I had some ambition. I meant everything to be
different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But
the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."
"Suppose," said Dorothea, meditatively,--"suppose we kept on the
Hospital according to the present plan, and you stayed here though
only with the friendship and support of a few, the evil feeling
towards you would gradually die out; there would come opportunities
in which people would be forced to acknowledge that they had been
unjust to you, because they would see that your purposes were pure.
You may still win a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have
heard you speak of, and we shall all be proud of you," she ended,
with a smile.
"That might do if I had my old trust in myself," said Lydgate,
mournfully. "Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round
and running away before this slander, leaving it unchecked behind me.
Still, I can't ask any one to put a great deal of money into a plan
which depends on me."
"It would be quite worth my while," said Dorothea, simply. "Only think.
I am very uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I have too
little for any great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I have
too much. I don't know what to do. I have seven hundred a-year of my
own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left me,
and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank.
I wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of my income
which I don't want, to buy land with and found a village which should
be a school of industry; but Sir James and my uncle have convinced
me that the risk would be too great. So you see that what I should
most rejoice at would be to have something good to do with my money:
I should like it to make other people's lives better to them.
It makes me very uneasy--coming all to me who don't want it."
A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate's face. The childlike
grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said all this
was irresistible--blent into an adorable whale with her ready
understanding of high experience. (Of lower experience such as
plays a great part in the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had a very
blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by her imagination.)
But she took the smile as encouragement of her plan.
"I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously," she said,
in a tone of persuasion. "The hospital would be one good; and making
your life quite whole and well again would be another."
Lydgate's smile had died away. "You have the goodness as well
as the money to do all that; if it could be done," he said.
"But--"
He hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window;
and she sat in silent expectation. At last he turned towards her and
said impetuously--
"Why should I not tell you?--you know what sort of bond marriage is.
You will understand everything."
Dorothea felt her heart beginning to beat faster. Had he that
sorrow too? But she feared to say any word, and he went on immediately.
"It is impossible for me now to do anything--to take any step
without considering my wife's happiness. The thing that I might
like to do if I were alone, is become impossible to me. I can't see
her miserable. She married me without knowing what she was going into,
and it might have been better for her if she had not married me."
"I know, I know--you could not give her pain, if you were not obliged
to do it," said Dorothea, with keen memory of her own life.
"And she has set her mind against staying. She wishes to go.
The troubles she has had here have wearied her," said Lydgate,
breaking off again, lest he should say too much.
"But when she saw the good that might come of staying--"said
Dorothea, remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if he had forgotten
the reasons which had just been considered. He did not speak immediately.
"She would not see it," he said at last, curtly, feeling at first
that this statement must do without explanation. "And, indeed,
I have lost all spirit about carrying on my life here." He paused
a moment and then, following the impulse to let Dorothea see deeper
into the difficulty of his life, he said, "The fact is, this trouble
has come upon her confusedly. We have not been able to speak to
each other about it. I am not sure what is in her mind about it:
she may fear that I have really done something base. It is my fault;
I ought to be more open. But I have been suffering cruelly."
"May I go and see her?" said Dorothea, eagerly. "Would she accept
my sympathy? I would tell her that you have not been blamable
before any one's judgment but your own. I would tell her that you
shall be cleared in every fair mind. I would cheer her heart.
Will you ask her if I may go to see her? I did see her once."
"I am sure you may," said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with
some hope. "She would feel honored--cheered, I think, by the proof
that you at least have some respect for me. I will not speak to her
about your coming--that she may not connect it with my wishes at all.
I know very well that I ought not to have left anything to be told
her by others, but--"
He broke off, and there was a moment's silence. Dorothea refrained
from saying what was in her mind--how well she knew that there
might be invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife.
This was a point on which even sympathy might make a wound.
She returned to the more outward aspect of Lydgate's position,
saying cheerfully--
"And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe
in you and support you, she might then be glad that you should stay
in your place and recover your hopes--and do what you meant to do.
Perhaps then you would see that it was right to agree with what I
proposed about your continuing at the Hospital. Surely you would,
if you still have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?"
Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.
"You need not decide immediately," she said, gently. "A few days hence
it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode."
Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most
decisive tones.
"No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering.
I am no longer sure enough of myself--I mean of what it would be
possible for me to do under the changed circumstances of my life.
It would be dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything
serious in dependence on me. I might be obliged to go away after all;
I see little chance of anything else. The whole thing is too problematic;
I cannot consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted.
No--let the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary,
and everything go on as it might have done if I had never come.
I have kept a valuable register since I have been there; I shall
send it to a man who will make use of it," he ended bitterly.
"I can think of nothing for a long while but getting an income."
"It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly," said Dorothea.
"It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you
from that. Think how much money I have; it would be like taking
a burthen from me if you took some of it every year till you got
free from this fettering want of income. Why should not people
do these things? It is so difficult to make shares at all even.
This is one way."
"God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!" said Lydgate, rising as if with the
same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm
on the back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in.
"It is good that you should have such feelings. But I am not the man
who ought to allow himself to benefit by them. I have not given
guarantees enough. I must not at least sink into the degradation
of being pensioned for work that I never achieved. It is very clear
to me that I must not count on anything else than getting away
from Middlemarch as soon as I can manage it. I should not be able
for a long while, at the very best, to get an income here, and--
and it is easier to make necessary changes in a new place.
I must do as other men do, and think what will please the world
and bring in money; look for a little opening in the London crowd,
and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to some southern
town where there are plenty of idle English, and get myself puffed,--
that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to keep my soul
alive in."
"Now that is not brave," said Dorothea,--"to give up the fight."
"No, it is not brave," said Lydgate, "but if a man is afraid
of creeping paralysis?" Then, in another tone, "Yet you have made
a great difference in my courage by believing in me. Everything seems
more bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear
me in a few other minds, especially in Farebrother's, I shall be
deeply grateful. The point I wish you not to mention is the fact
of disobedience to my orders. That would soon get distorted.
After all, there is no evidence for me but people's opinion
of me beforehand. You can only repeat my own report of myself."
"Mr. Farebrother will believe--others will believe," said Dorothea.
"I can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you
would be bribed to do a wickedness."
"I don't know," said Lydgate, with something like a groan
in his voice. "I have not taken a bribe yet. But there is
a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.
You will do me another great kindness, then, and come to see my wife?"
"Yes, I will. I remember how pretty she is," said Dorothea,
into whose mind every impression about Rosamond had cut deep.
"I hope she will like me."
As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature has a heart
large enough for the Virgin Mary. She evidently thinks nothing
of her own future, and would pledge away half her income at once,
as if she wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which
she can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray
to her. She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before--
a fountain of friendship towards men--a man can make a friend of her.
Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her.
I wonder if she could have any other sort of passion for a man?
Ladislaw?--there was certainly an unusual feeling between them.
And Casaubon must have had a notion of it. Well--her love might help
a man more than her money."
Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving
Lydgate from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure
was a part, though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear.
She sat down at once under the inspiration of their interview,
and wrote a brief note, in which she pleaded that she had more claim
than Mr. Bulstrode had to the satisfaction of providing the money which
had been serviceable to Lydgate--that it would be unkind in Lydgate
not to grant her the position of being his helper in this small matter,
the favor being entirely to her who had so little that was plainly
marked out for her to do with her superfluous money. He might call
her a creditor or by any other name if it did but imply that he
granted her request. She enclosed a check for a thousand pounds,
and determined to take the letter with her the next day when she
went to see Rosamond.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
"And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion."
--Henry V.
The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond
that he should be away until the evening. Of late she had
never gone beyond her own house and garden, except to church,
and once to see her papa, to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away,
you will help us to move, will you not, papa? I suppose we shall
have very little money. I am sure I hope some one will help us."
And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I don't mind a hundred or two.
I can see the end of that." With these exceptions she had sat
at home in languid melancholy and suspense, fixing her mind on
Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and interest,
and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make immediate
arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London, till she
felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the going,
without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences is
too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced
is often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing
except the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect,
rids us of doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was
the process going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects
around her with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--
or sat down to the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting,
yet lingering on the music stool with her white fingers suspended
on the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy ennui.
Her melancholy had become so marked that Lydgate felt a strange
timidity before it, as a perpetual silent reproach, and the strong man,
mastered by his keen sensibilities towards this fair fragile creature
whose life he seemed somehow to have bruised, shrank from her look,
and sometimes started at her approach, fear of her and fear for her
rushing in only the more forcibly after it had been momentarily expelled
by exasperation.
But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--
where she sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--
equipped for a walk in the town. She had a letter to post--a letter
addressed to Mr. Ladislaw and written with charming discretion,
but intended to hasten his arrival by a hint of trouble.
The servant-maid, their sole house-servant now, noticed her coming
down-stairs in her walking dress, and thought "there never did
anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor thing."
Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going
to Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the
probable future, which gathered round the idea of that visit.
Until yesterday when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse
of some trouble in his married life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate
had always been associated for her with that of Will Ladislaw.
Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she had been agitated
by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of gossip--
her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been towards
the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted
his words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate
which he was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had
had a quick, sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his
constant opportunities of companionship with that fair creature,
who most likely shared his other tastes as she evidently did
his delight in music. But there had followed his parting words--
the few passionate words in which he had implied that she herself
was the object of whom his love held him in dread, that it was his
love for her only which he was resolved not to declare but to carry
away into banishment. From the time of that parting, Dorothea,
believing in Will's love for her, believing with a proud delight in
his delicate sense of honor and his determination that no one should
impeach him justly, felt her heart quite at rest as to the regard he
might have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was sure that the regard was blameless.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious
of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us
over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us;
and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down
the invisible altar of trust. "If you are not good, none is good"--
those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility,
may hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.
Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay
along the easily counted open channels of her ardent character;
and while she was full of pity for the, visible mistakes of others,
she had not yet any material within her experience for subtle
constructions and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity
of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception
of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. And it
had from the first acted strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt,
when he parted from her, that the brief words by which he had tried
to convey to her his feeling about herself and the division which
her fortune made between them, would only profit by their brevity
when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that in her mind he
had found his highest estimate.
And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea
had felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other,
as one which was inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an
active force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned
on the defence either of plans or persons that she believed in;
and the wrongs which she felt that Will had received from her husband,
and the external conditions which to others were grounds for
slighting him, only gave the more tenacity to her affection
and admiring judgment. And now with the disclosures about
Bulstrode had come another fact affecting Will's social position,
which roused afresh Dorothea's inward resistance to what was
said about him in that part of her world which lay within park palings.
"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker"
was a phrase which had entered emphatically into the dialogues
about the Bulstrode business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt,
and was a worse kind of placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian
with white mice." Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his
own satisfaction was righteous when he thought with some complacency
that here was an added league to that mountainous distance between
Ladislaw and Dorothea, which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety
in that direction as too absurd. And perhaps there had been
some pleasure in pointing Mr. Brooke's attention to this ugly bit
of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh candle for him to see his own
folly by. Dorothea had observed the animus with which Will's part
in the painful story had been recalled more than once; but she had
uttered no word, being checked now, as she had not been formerly
in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a deeper relation
between them which must always remain in consecrated secrecy.
But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium,
only gave something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.
She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union,
and yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted
her whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows,
and would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward
wail because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed
to dwell on the superfluities of her lot. She could bear that the
chief pleasures of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea
of marriage came to her solely as a repulsive proposition from
some suitor of whom she at present knew nothing, but whose merits,
as seen by her friends, would be a source of torment to her:--
"somebody who will manage your property for you, my dear,"
was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of suitable characteristics.
"I should like to manage it myself, if I knew what to do with it,"
said Dorothea. No--she adhered to her declaration that she would
never be married again, and in the long valley of her life which
looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as she
walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way.
This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong.
in all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit
to Mrs. Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she
saw Rosamond's figure presented to her without hindrances to her
interest and compassion. There was evidently some mental separation,
some barrier to complete confidence which had arisen between this
wife and the husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him.
That was a trouble which no third person must directly touch.
But Dorothea thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must
have come upon Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband;
and there would surely be help in the manifestation of respect for
Lydgate and sympathy with her.
"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she
was being driven towards the town. The clear spring morning,
the scent of the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their
creased-up wealth of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths,
seemed part of the cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation
with Mr. Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying
explanation of Lydgate's conduct. "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news,
and perhaps she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."
Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out
of her carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across
the street, having told the coachman to wait for some packages.
The street door was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity
of looking out at the carriage which was pausing within sight
when it became apparent to her that the lady who "belonged to it"
was coming towards her.
"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.
"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in,"
said Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron,
but collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title
for this queenly young widow with a carriage and pair. "Will you
please to walk in, and I'll go and see."
"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved
forward intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go
up-stairs to see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.
They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned
up the passage which led to the garden. The drawing-room door
was unlatched, and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room,
waited for Mrs. Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door
having swung open and swung back again without noise.
Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning,
being filled with images of things as they had been and were going
to be. She found herself on the other side of the door without
seeing anything remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice
speaking in low tones which startled her as with a sense of dreaming
in daylight, and advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the
projecting slab of a bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination
of a certainty which filled up all outlines, something which made
her pause, motionless, without self-possession enough to speak.
Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against
the wall on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw
Will Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond,
her bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped
both her upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.
Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware
of her presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her
hands and rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested.
Will Ladislaw, starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's
eyes with a new lightning in them, seemed changing to marble:
But she immediately turned them away from him to Rosamond and said
in a firm voice--
"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I
wished to put into your own hands."
She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked
her retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant
glance and bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the
passage the surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress
was not at home, and then showed the strange lady out with an inward
reflection that grand people were probably more impatient than others.
Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step
and was quickly in her carriage again.
"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one looking
at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual she was
never animated by a more self-possessed energy. And that was really
her experience. It was as if she had drunk a great draught of scorn
that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object.
She needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.
She felt power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink.
And she would carry out the purpose with which she had started
in the morning, of going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James
and her uncle all that she wished them to know about Lydgate,
whose married loneliness under his trial now presented itself to her
with new significance, and made her more ardent in readiness to be
his champion. She had never felt anything like this triumphant power
of indignation in the struggle of her married life, in which there
had always been a quickly subduing pang; and she took it as a sign
of new strength.
"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James
was gone out of the room. "And you don't see anything you look at,
Arthur or anything. You are going to do something uncomfortable,
I know. Is it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?"
Celia had been used to watch her sister with expectation.
"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo,
in her full tones.
"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
forward upon them.
"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth,"
said Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.
"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia,
a little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.
But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
until she descended at her own door.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
With her sweet faith above for monument "
Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--
he looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
towards him with doubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond,
in whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as
gratification from what had just happened. Shallow natures dream
of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly
in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident,
by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not
as though it were. She knew that Will had received a severe blow,
but she had been little used to imagining other people's states
of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes;
and she believed in her own power to soothe or subdue. Even Tertius,
that most perverse of men, was always subdued in the long-run:
events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond would have said now,
as she did before her marriage, that she never gave up what she had set
her mind on.
She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
coat-sleeve.
"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again,
as if his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.
He wheeled round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her,
with the tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back,
looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away
from her.
She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such
as only Lydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet
and seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with
her shawl. Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.
It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this;
on the contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter
Rosamond with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality
she had drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be
to a panther to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.
And yet--how could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?
He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge:
he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the
decisive vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--
"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."
"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.
"Do you think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever
uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather?--Explain! How can
a man explain at the expense of a woman?"
"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.
"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you?
She is not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable--
to believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard
to you."
He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal
that sees prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again--
"I had no hope before--not much--of anything better to come.
But I had one certainty--that she believed in me. Whatever people
had said or done about me, she believed in me.--That's gone!
She'll never again think me anything but a paltry pretence--
too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, and yet
selling myself for any devil's change by the sly. She'll think
of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the first moment we--"
Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage
by snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles
to be throttled and flung off.
"Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell!
Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her,
any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists
by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead,
than I would touch any other woman's living."
Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her,
was almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be
waking into some new terrible existence. She had no sense
of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification
such as she had known under Lydgate's most stormy displeasure:
all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain;
she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before.
What another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt
and bitten into her consciousness. When Will had ceased to speak
she had become an image of sickened misery: her lips were pale,
and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them. If it had been Tertius
who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would have been
a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort her,
with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very cheap.
Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.
He had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled
the ideal treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.
He knew that he was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence
of mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point
of going away from her without further speech, he shrank from it
as a brutality; he felt checked and stultified in his anger.
He walked towards the mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it,
and waited in silence for--he hardly knew what. The vindictive fire
was still burning in him, and he could utter no word of retractation;
but it was nevertheless in his mind that having come back to this
hearth where he had enjoyed a caressing friendship he had found.
calamity seated there--he had had suddenly revealed to him a trouble
that lay outside the home as well as within it. And what seemed
a foreboding was pressing upon him as with slow pincers:--that his
life might come to be enslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown
herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her heart. But he was
in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick apprehensiveness
foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on Rosamond's blighted
face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of the two;
for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can
turn into compassion.
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other,
far apart, in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage,
and Rosamond's by a mute misery. The poor thing had no force to fling
out any passion in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion
towards which all her hope had been strained was a stroke which had
too thoroughly shaken her: her little world was in ruins, and she
felt herself tottering in the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them
both in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship. But she
said nothing, and at last with a desperate effort over himself,
he asked, "Shall I come in and see Lydgate this evening?"
"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.
And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he
had been in.
After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting. When she came to herself again, she felt too ill
to make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained
helpless until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for
the first time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms.
Rosamond said that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted
to be helped up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed
with her clothes on, and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done
once before on a memorable day of grief.
Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there. The perception that she was ill threw every
other thought into the background. When he felt her pulse,
her eyes rested on him with more persistence than they had done
for a long while, as if she felt some content that he was there.
He perceived the difference in a moment, and seating himself
by her put his arm gently under her, and bending over her said,
"My poor Rosamond! has something agitated you?" Clinging to him
she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and for the next hour
he did nothing but soothe and tend her. He imagined that Dorothea
had been to see her, and that all this effect on her nervous system,
which evidently involved some new turning towards himself,
was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that visit
had raised.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
"Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their talk,
they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain;
and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog.
The name of the slough was Despond."--BUNYAN.
When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's
letter addressed to him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if
Mrs. Casaubon had called, but the reading of this letter assured him
of the fact, for Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.
When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with
a surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the
earlier visit, and Will could not say, "Did not Mrs. Lydgate
tell you that I came this morning?"
"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.
"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.
"No--only a slight nervous shock--the effect of some agitation.
She has been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an
unlucky devil. We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since
you left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever.
I suppose you are only just come down--you look rather battered--
you have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"
"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o'clock
this morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting," said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.
And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles which Rosamond
had already depicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned
the fact of Will's name being connected with the public story--
this detail not immediately affecting her--and he now heard it
for the first time.
"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up
with the disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand better
than most men how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation.
"You will be sure to hear it as soon as you turn out into the town.
I suppose it is true that Raffles spoke to you."
"Yes," said Will, sardonically. "I shall be fortunate if gossip
does not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair.
I should think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles
to murder Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose."
He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"
But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him. Will was very
open and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among
the more exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he
had a delicate generosity which warned him into reticence here.
He shrank from saying that he had rejected Bulstrode's money,
in the moment when he was learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune
to have accepted it.
Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea
he only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward
and say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention
of her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each
other not to fear that his words might have some hidden painful
bearing on it. And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real
cause of the present visit to Middlemarch.
The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who
guessed the extent of his companion's trouble. When Lydgate
spoke with desperate resignation of going to settle in London,
and said with a faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow."
Will felt inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had
that morning entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it
seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future
where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding
to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner
history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed
to him this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond
had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation:
he dreaded Lydgate's unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste
for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.
CHAPTER LXXX.
"Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
--WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.
When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had
promised to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt.
There was a frequent interchange of visits between her and the
Farebrother family, which enabled her to say that she was not at
all lonely at the Manor, and to resist for the present the severe
prescription of a lady companion. When she reached home and remembered
her engagement, she was glad of it; and finding that she had still
an hour before she could dress for dinner, she walked straight
to the schoolhouse and entered into a conversation with the master
and mistress about the new bell, giving eager attention to their small
details and repetitions, and getting up a dramatic sense that her life
was very busy. She paused on her way back to talk to old Master
Bunney who was putting in some garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely
with that rural sage about the crops that would make the most return
on a perch of ground, and the result of sixty years' experience as
to soils--namely, that if your soil was pretty mellow it would do,
but if there came wet, wet, wet to make it all of a mummy, why then--
Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier
than was necessary. That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother,
like another White of Selborne, having continually something new
to tell of his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was
teaching the boys not to torment; and he had just set up a pair
of beautiful goats to be pets of the village in general, and to
walk at large as sacred animals. The evening went by cheerfully
till after tea, Dorothea talking more than usual and dilating
with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of creatures that
converse compendiously with their antennae, and for aught we know
may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some inarticulate
little sounds were heard which called everybody's attention.
"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"
"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily coutinuing
her beaver-like notes.
"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up
his glasses and looking at the carpet.
"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble. "A German box--
very pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."
"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother,
in a deep tone of comprehension, getting up and hunting.
The box was found at last under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble
grasped it with delight, saying, "it was under a fender the last time."
"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.
"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."
"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.
Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised
and annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently,
and that it was quite useless to try after a recovery of her
former animation. Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal
of a change so marked in its occasion, she rose and said in a low
voice with undisguised anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."
Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true;
you must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate.
That sort of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."
He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt
to speak, even when he said good-night.
The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless within
the clutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a few faint
words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards the vacant
room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and moaned out--
"Oh, I did love him!"
Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
thoroughly to leave any power of thought. She could only cry
in loud whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she
had planted and kept alive from a very little seed since the days
in Rome--after her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith
to one who, misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--
after her lost woman's pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet
dim perspective of hope, that along some pathway they should meet
with unchanged recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.
In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude
have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--
she besought hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring
her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish:
she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her;
while her grand woman's frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been
a despairing child.
There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two,
as if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child
divided by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast
while her gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried
away by the lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.
Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she
had trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting
the dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life;
and now, with a full consciousness which had never awakened before,
she stretched out her arms towards him and cried with bitter
cries that their nearness was a parting vision: she discovered
her passion to herself in the unshrinking utterance of despair.
And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever
she moved, was the Will Ladislaw' who was a changed belief
exhausted of hope, a detected illusion--no, a living man towards
whom there could not yet struggle any wail of regretful pity,
from the midst of scorn and indignation and jealous offended pride.
The fire of Dorothea's anger was not easily spent, and it flamed
out in fitful returns of spurning reproach. Why had he come
obtruding his life into hers, hers that might have been whole
enough without him? Why had he brought his cheap regard and his
lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in exchange?
He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole
price of her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before.
Why had he not stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--
but only prayed that they might be less contemptible?
But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries
and moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor
she sobbed herself to sleep.
In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim
around her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she
was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness
that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow. She rose,
and wrapped warm things around her, and seated
herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked
to a new condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from
its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief,
but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer
in her thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly. It was not
in Dorothea's nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm,
to sit in the narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery
of a consciousness that only sees another's lot as an accident
of its own.
She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again,
forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning.
Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced
herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a woman
towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some clearness
and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap of jealous
indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she had
flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever.
But that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival
than to a faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence
in Dorothea when the dominant spirit of justice within her had once
overcome the tumult and had once shown her the truer measure of things.
All the active thought with which she had before been representing to
herself the trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which,
like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--
all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power:
it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will
not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said
to her own irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful,
instead of driving her back from effort.
And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose
contact with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been
suppliants bearing the sacred branch? The objects of her rescue
were not to be sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her.
She yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might make a
throne within her, and rule her errant will. "What should I do--
how should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own pain,
and compel it to silence, and think of those three?"
It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was
light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked
out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond
outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle
on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could
see figures moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off
in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness
of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.
She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could
neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator,
nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.
What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear,
but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
murmur which would soon gather distinctness. She took off the clothes
which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
and began to make her toilet. Presently she rang for Tantripp,
who came in her dressing-gown.
"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night,"
burst out Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face,
which in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a
mater dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you WILL. Anybody
might think now you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."
"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling. "I have slept;
I am not ill. I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
my new bonnet to-day."
"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam,
and most thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds'
worth less of crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire.
"There's a reason in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds
at the bottom of your skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--
and if ever anybody looked like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--
is what's consistent for a second year. At least, that's MY
thinking," ended Tantripp, looking anxiously at the fire;
"and if anybody was to marry me flattering himself I should wear
those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be deceived by his
own vanity, that's all."
"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she
used to do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice;
"get me the coffee."
She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against
it in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering
at this strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the
morning when she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should
have asked for her lighter mourning which she had waived before.
Tantripp would never have found the clew to this mystery.
Dorothea wished to acknowledge that she had not the less an
active life before her because she had buried a private joy;
and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to all initiation,
haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that slight outward
help towards calm resolve. For the resolve was not easy.
Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
"Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig,
Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen,
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen
Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
--Faust: 2r Theil.
When Dorothea was again at Lydgate's door speaking to Martha,
he was in the room close by with the door ajar, preparing to go out.
He heard her voice, and immediately came to her.
"Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this morning?"
she said, having reflected that it would be better to leave out all
allusion to her previous visit.
"I have no doubt she will," said Lydgate, suppressing his thought
about Dorothea's looks, which were as much changed as Rosamond's,
"if you will be kind enough to come in and let me tell her that you
are here. She has not been very well since you were here yesterday,
but she is better this morning, and I think it is very likely
that she will be cheered by seeing you again."
It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected, knew nothing
about the circumstances of her yesterday's visit; nay, he appeared
to imagine that she had carried it out according to her intention.
She had prepared a little note asking Rosamond to see her, which she
would have given to the servant if he had not been in the way,
but now she was in much anxiety as to the result of his announcement.
After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to take a letter
from his pocket and put it into her hands, saying, "I wrote this
last night, and was going to carry it to Lowick in my ride.
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks,
writing is less unsatisfactory than speech one does not at least
HEAR how inadequate the words are."
Dorothea's face brightened. "It is I who have most to thank for,
since you have let me take that place. You HAVE consented?"
she said, suddenly doubting.
"Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day."
He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had but lately
finished dressing herself, and sat languidly wondering what she
should do next, her habitual industry in small things, even in the
days of her sadness, prompting her to begin some kind of occupation,
which she dragged through slowly or paused in from lack of interest.
She looked ill, but had recovered her usual quietude of manner,
and Lydgate had feared to disturb her by any questions. He had
told her of Dorothea's letter containing the check, and afterwards
he had said, "Ladislaw is come, Rosy; he sat with me last night;
I dare say he will be here again to-day. I thought he looked rather
battered and depressed." And Rosamond had made no reply.
Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, "Rosy, dear,
Mrs. Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like to see her,
would you not?" That she colored and gave rather a startled
movement did not surprise him after the agitation produced by the
interview yesterday--a beneficent agitation, he thought, since it
seemed to have made her turn to him again.
Rosamond dared not say no. She dared not with a tone of her voice
touch the facts of yesterday. Why had Mrs. Casaubon come again?
The answer was a blank which Rosamond could only fill up
with dread, for Will Ladislaw's lacerating words had made every
thought of Dorothea a fresh smart to her. Nevertheless, in her
new humiliating uncertainty she dared do nothing but comply.
She did not say yes, but she rose and let Lydgate put a light shawl
over her shoulders, while he said, "I am going out immediately."
Then something crossed her mind which prompted her to say,
"Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into the drawing-room."
And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully understood this wish.
He led her down to the drawing-room door, and then turned away,
observing to himself that he was rather a blundering husband
to be dependent for his wife's trust in him on the influence of
another woman.
Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked
towards Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve.
Had Mrs. Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will? If so,
it was a liberty that Rosamond resented; and she prepared herself
to meet every word with polite impassibility. Will had bruised
her pride too sorely for her to feel any compunction towards
him and Dorothea: her own injury seemed much the greater.
Dorothea was not only the "preferred" woman, but had also a
formidable advantage in being Lydgate's benefactor; and to poor
Rosamond's pained confused vision it seemed that this Mrs. Casaubon--
this woman who predominated in all things concerning her--must have
come now with the sense of having the advantage, and with animosity
prompting her to use it. Indeed, not Rosamond only, but any one else,
knowing the outer facts of the case, and not the simple inspiration
on which Dorothea acted, might well have wondered why she came.
Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful slimness
wrapped in her soft white shawl, the rounded infantine mouth
and cheek inevitably suggesting mildness and innocence, Rosamond
paused at three yards' distance from her visitor and bowed.
But Dorothea, who had taken off her gloves, from an impulse
which she could never resist when she wanted a sense of freedom,
came forward, and with her face full of a sad yet sweet openness,
put out her hand. Rosamond could not avoid meeting her glance,
could not avoid putting her small hand into Dorothea's, which clasped
it with gentle motherliness; and immediately a doubt of her own
prepossessions began to stir within her. Rosamond's eye was quick
for faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon's face looked pale and changed
since yesterday, yet gentle, and like the firm softness of her hand.
But Dorothea had counted a little too much on her own strength:
the clearness and intensity of her mental action this morning
were the continuance of a nervous exaltation which made her frame
as dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal;
and in looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling,
and was unable to speak--all her effort was required to keep back tears.
She succeeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face
like the spirit of a sob; but it added to Rosamond's impression
that Mrs. Casaubon's state of mind must be something quite different
from what she had imagined.
So they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that
happened to be nearest, and happened also to be close together;
though Rosamond's notion when she first bowed was that she should
stay a long way off from Mrs. Casaubon. But she ceased thinking
how anything would turn out--merely wondering what would come.
And Dorothea began to speak quite simply, gathering firmness as she
went on.
"I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that is why I am
here again so soon. You will not think me too troublesome when I
tell you that I came to talk to you about the injustice that has
been shown towards Mr. Lydgate. It will cheer you--will it not?--
to know a great deal about him, that he may not like to speak
about himself just because it is in his own vindication and to his
own honor. You will like to know that your husband has warm friends,
who have not left off believing in his high character? You will let
me speak of this without thinking that I take a liberty?"
The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with generous
heedlessness above all the facts which had filled Rosamond's mind
as grounds of obstruction and hatred between her and this woman,
came as soothingly as a warm stream over her shrinking fears.
Of course Mrs. Casaubon had the facts in her mind, but she was
not going to speak of anything connected with them. That relief
was too great for Rosamond to feel much else at the moment.
She answered prettily, in the new ease of her soul--
"I know you have been very good. I shall like to hear anything
you will say to me about Tertius."
"The day before yesterday," said Dorothea, "when I had asked him to
come to Lowick to give me his opinion on the affairs of the Hospital,
he told me everything about his conduct and feelings in this sad event
which has made ignorant people cast suspicions on him. The reason he
told me was because I was very bold and asked him. I believed that he
had never acted dishonorably, and I begged him to tell me the history.
He confessed to me that he had never told it before, not even
to you, because he had a great dislike to say, `I was not wrong,'
as if that were proof, when there are guilty people who will say so.
The truth is, he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there
were any bad secrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode
offered him the money because he repented, out of kindness, of having
refused it before. All his anxiety about his patient was to treat
him rightly, and he was a little uncomfortable that the case did
not end as he had expected; but he thought then and still thinks
that there may have been no wrong in it on any one's part. And I
have told Mr. Farebrother, and Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam:
they all believe in your husband. That will cheer you, will it not?
That will give you courage?"
Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond
very close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before
a superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor. She said,
with blushing embarrassment, "Thank you: you are very kind."
"And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything
about this to you. But you will forgive him. It was because he
feels so much more about your happiness than anything else--
he feels his life bound into one with yours, and it hurts
him more than anything, that his misfortunes must hurt you.
He could speak to me because I am an indifferent person.
And then I asked him if I might come to see you; because I felt
so much for his trouble and yours. That is why I came yesterday,
and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not?--
How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing trouble--
and we could help them, and never try?"
Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering,
forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart
of her own trial to Rosamond's. The emotion had wrought itself
more and more into her utterance, till the tones might have gone
to one's very marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature
in the darkness. And she had unconsciously laid her hand again
on the little hand that she had pressed before.
Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her
had been probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done
the day before when she clung to her husband. Poor Dorothea
was feeling a great wave of her own sorrow returning over her--
her thought being drawn to the possible share that Will Ladislaw
might have in Rosamond's mental tumult. She was beginning to fear
that she should not be able to suppress herself enough to the end of
this meeting, and while her hand was still resting on Rosamond's lap,
though the hand underneath it was withdrawn, she was struggling
against her own rising sobs. She tried to master herself with
the thought that this might be a turning-point in three lives--
not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had happened, but--
in those three lives which were touching hers with the solemn
neighborhood of danger and distress. The fragile creature who was
crying close to her--there might still be time to rescue her from
the misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike
any other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with
the same thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both.
She felt the relation between them to be peculiar enough to give
her a peculiar influence, though she had no conception that the way
in which her own feelings were involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.
It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even Dorothea
could imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered
her dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself
and critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation
of feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking
aversion and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred
towards her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she
had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.
When Rosamond's convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she
withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face,
her eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers.
What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying?
And Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
silent tear. Pride was broken down between these two.
"We were talking about your husband," Dorothea said, with some timidity.
"I thought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the other day.
I had not seen him for many weeks before. He said he had been
feeling very lonely in his trial; but I think he would have borne
it all better if he had been able to be quite open with you."
"Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything," said Rosamond,
imagining that he had been complaining of her to Dorothea. "He ought
not to wonder that I object to speak to him on painful subjects."
"It was himself he blamed for not speaking," said Dorothea.
"What he said of you was, that he could not be happy in doing anything
which made you unhappy--that his marriage was of course a bond
which must affect his choice about everything; and for that reason he
refused my proposal that he should keep his position at the Hospital,
because that would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not
undertake to do anything which would be painful to you. He could say
that to me, because he knows that I had much trial in my marriage,
from my husband's illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him;
and he knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear
of hurting another who is tied to us."
Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing
over Rosamond's face. But there was no answer, and she went on,
with a gathering tremor, "Marriage is so unlike everything else.
There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we
loved some one else better than--than those we were married to,
it would be no use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety,
could only seize her language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks
up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort
of love. I know it may be very dear--but it murders our marriage--
and then the marriage stays with us like a murder--and everything
else is gone. And then our husband--if he loved and trusted us,
and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life--"
Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming
too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection
addressing error. She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety,
to be aware that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need
to express pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on
Rosamond's, and said with more agitated rapidity,--"I know, I know that
the feeling may be very dear--it has taken hold of us unawares--it is so
hard, it may seem like death to part with it--and we are weak--I am weak--"
The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling
to save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force.
She stopped in speechless agitation. not crying, but feeling
as if she were being inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a
deathlier paleness, her lips trembled, and she pressed her hands
helplessly on the hands that lay under them.
Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own--
hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new,
awful, undefined aspect--could find no words, but involuntarily
she put her lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her,
and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they
had been in a shipwreck.
"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager
half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round her--
urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something
that oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.
They moved apart, looking at each other.
"When you came in yesterday--it was not as you thought,"
said Rosamond in the same tone.
There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea She expected
a vindication of Rosamond herself.
"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know
he could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more
hurried as she went on. "And now I think he hates me because--
because you mistook him yesterday. He says it is through me
that you will think ill of him--think that he is a false person.
But it shall not be through me. He has never had any love for me--
I know he has not--he has always thought slightly of me.
He said yesterday that no other woman existed for him beside you.
The blame of what happened is entirely mine. He said he could never
explain to you--because of me. He said you could never think well
of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot reproach me
any more."
Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not
known before. She had begun her confession under the subduing
influence of Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had
gathered the sense that she was repelling Will's reproaches,
which were still like a knife-wound within her.
The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and
morning made a resistant pain:--she could only perceive that this
would be joy when she had recovered her power of feeling it.
Her immediate consciousness was one of immense sympathy without cheek;
she cared for Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly
to her last words--
"No, he cannot reproach you any more."
With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others,
she felt a great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond,
for the generous effort which had redeemed her from suffering,
not counting that the effort was a reflex of her own energy.
After they had been silent a little, she said--
"You are not sorry that I came this morning?"
"No, you have been very good to me," said Rosamond. "I did not think
that you would be so good. I was very unhappy. I am not happy now.
Everything is so sad."
"But better days will come. Your husband will be rightly valued.
And he depends on you for comfort. He loves you best.
The worst loss would be to lose that--and you have not lost it,"
said Dorothea.
She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her
own relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that Rosamond's
affection was yearning back towards her husband.
"Tertius did not find fault with me, then?" said Rosamond,
understanding now that Lydgate might have said anything to
Mrs. Casaubon, and that she certainly was different from other women.
Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy in the question.
A smile began to play over Dorothea's face as she said--
"No, indeed! How could you imagine it?" But here the door opened,
and Lydgate entered.
"I am come back in my quality of doctor," he said. "After I
went away, I was haunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked
as much in need of care as you, Rosy. And I thought that I
had not done my duty in leaving you together; so when I had been
to Coleman's I came home again. I noticed that you were walking,
Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has changed--I think we may have rain.
May I send some one to order your carriage to come for you?"
"Oh, no! I am strong: I need the walk," said Dorothea,
rising with animation in her face. "Mrs. Lydgate and I
have chatted a great deal, and it is time for me to go.
I have always been accused of being immoderate and saying too much."
She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet good-by
without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between them
too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it superficially.
As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond,
but told him of Mr. Farebrother and the other friends who had
listened with belief to his story.
When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself
on the sofa, in resigned fatigue.
"Well, Rosy," he said, standing over her, and touching her hair,
"what do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much
of her?"
"I think she must be better than any one," said Rosamond,
"and she is very beautiful. If you go to talk to her so often,
you will be more discontented with me than ever!"
Lydgate laughed at the "so often." "But has she made you any less
discontented with me?"
"I think she has," said Rosamond, looking up in his face.
"How heavy your eyes are, Tertius--and do push your hair back."
He lifted up his large white hand to obey her, and felt thankful
for this little mark of interest in him. Poor Rosamond's vagrant
fancy had come back terribly scourged--meek enough to nestle
under the old despised shelter. And the shelter was still there:
Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation.
He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burthen
of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that
burthen pitifully.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
"My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
--SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay
in banishment unless they are obliged. When Will Ladislaw exiled
himself from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his
return than his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier,
but simply a state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other
states of mind, and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving
place with polite facility. As the months went on, it had seemed
more and more difficult to him to say why he should not run down
to Middlemarch--merely for the sake of hearing something about Dorothea;
and if on such a flying visit he should chance by some strange
coincidence to meet with her, there was no reason for him to be
ashamed of having taken an innocent journey which he had beforehand
supposed that he should not take. Since he was hopelessly
divided from her, he might surely venture into her neighborhood;
and as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch over her--
their opinions seemed less and less important with time and change
of air.
And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which seemed
to make a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty.
Will had given a disinterested attention to an intended settlement
on a new plan in the Far West, and the need for funds in order to
carry out a good design had set him on debating with himself whether
it would not be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode,
to urge the application of that money which had been offered to himself
as a means of carrying out a scheme likely to be largely beneficial.
The question seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnance
to again entering into any relation with the banker might have made
him dismiss it quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination
the probability that his judgment might be more safely determined
by a visit to Middlemarch.
That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason
for coming down. He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss
the money question with him, and he had meant to amuse himself
for the few evenings of his stay by having a great deal of music
and badinage with fair Rosamond, without neglecting his friends
at Lowick Parsonage:--if the Parsonage was close to the Manor,
that was no fault of his. He had neglected the Farebrothers before
his departure, from a proud resistance to the possible accusation
of indirectly seeking interviews with Dorothea; but hunger tames us,
and Will had become very hungry for the vision of a certain form
and the sound of a certain voice. Nothing, had done instead--
not the opera, or the converse of zealous politicians, or the flattering
reception (in dim corners) of his new hand in leading articles.
Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost
everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed,
that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found
that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even
badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this
visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next
morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences--
he dreaded so much the immediate issues before him--that seeing
while he breakfasted the arrival of the Riverston coach, he went
out hurriedly and took his place on it, that he might be relieved,
at least for a day, from the necessity of doing or saying anything
in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw was in one of those tangled crises
which are commoner in experience than one might imagine, from the
shallow absoluteness of men's judgments. He had found Lydgate,
for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances which
claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the reason why,
in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will to have
avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible.
To a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was
a difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
increased for him. He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded
to show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again;
the friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness
was a power which he dreaded. And all the while there was no more
foretaste of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs
had been lopped off and he was making his fresh start on crutches.
In the night he had debated whether he should not get on the coach,
not for Riverston, but for London, leaving a note to Lydgate
which would give a makeshift reason for his retreat. But there
were strong cords pulling him back from that abrupt departure:
the blight on his happiness in thinking of Dorothea, the crushing
of that chief hope which had remained in spite of the acknowledged
necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery for him to
resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance which was
also despair.
Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach.
He came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made
up his mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening.
The Rubicon, we know, was a very insignificant stream to look at;
its significance lay entirely in certain invisible conditions.
Will felt as if he were forced to cross his small boundary ditch,
and what he saw beyond it was not empire, but discontented subjection.
But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to
witness the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy
of rescue that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship.
If Dorothea, after her night's anguish, had not taken that walk
to Rosamond--why, she perhaps would have been a woman who gained
a higher character for discretion, but it would certainly not have
been as well for those three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's
house at half-past seven that evening.
Rosamond had been prepared for Will's visit, and she received him with a
languid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous exhaustion,
of which he could not suppose that it had any relation to Will.
And when she sat in silence bending over a bit of work, he innocently
apologized for her in an indirect way by begging her to lean backward
and rest. Will was miserable in the necessity for playing the part
of a friend who was making his first appearance and greeting to Rosamond,
while his thoughts were busy about her feeling since that scene
of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclose them both,
like the painful vision of a double madness. It happened that nothing
called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,
and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded
paper in his saucer. He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he
went back to his inn he had no eagerness to unfold the paper.
What Rosamond had written to him would probably deepen the painful
impressions of the evening. Still, he opened and read it by his
bed-candle. There were only these few words in her neatly flowing hand:--
"I have told Mrs. Casaubon. She is not under any mistake about you.
I told her because she came to see me and was very kind. You will
have nothing to reproach me with now. I shall not have made any
difference to you."
The effect of these words was not quite all gladness. As Will dwelt
on them with excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning
at the thought of what had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond--
at the uncertainty how far Dorothea might still feel her dignity
wounded in having an explanation of his conduct offered to her.
There might still remain in her mind a changed association with him
which made an irremediable difference--a lasting flaw. With active
fancy he wrought himself into a state of doubt little more easy
than that of the man who has escaped from wreck by night and stands
on unknown ground in the darkness. Until that wretched yesterday--
except the moment of vexation long ago in the very same room and
in the very same presence--all their vision, all their thought of
each other, had been as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on
tall white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered.
But now--would Dorothea meet him in that world again?
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
"And now good-morrow to our waking souls
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere."
--DR. DONNE.
On the second morning after Dorothea's visit to Rosamond, she had had
two nights of sound sleep, and had not only lost all traces of fatigue,
but felt as if she had a great deal of superfluous strength--
that is to say, more strength than she could manage to concentrate
on any occupation. The day before, she had taken long walks
outside the grounds, and had paid two visits to the Parsonage;
but she never in her life told any one the reason why she spent
her time in that fruitless manner, and this morning she was rather
angry with herself for her childish restlessness. To-day was to be
spent quite differently. What was there to be done in the village?
Oh dear! nothing. Everybody was well and had flannel; nobody's pig
had died; and it was Saturday morning, when there was a general
scrubbing of doors and door-stones, and when it was useless to go
into the school. But there were various subjects that Dorothea
was trying to get clear upon, and she resolved to throw herself
energetically into the gravest of all. She sat down in the library
before her particular little heap of books on political economy and
kindred matters, out of which she was trying to get light as to the
best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or--
what comes to the same thing--so as to do them the most good.
Here was a weighty subject which, if she could but lay hold of it,
would certainly keep her mind steady. Unhappily her mind slipped
off it for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading
sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things,
but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless.
Should she order the carriage and drive to Tipton? No; for some
reason or other she preferred staying at Lowick. But her vagrant
mind must be reduced to order: there was an art in self-discipline;
and she walked round and round the brown library considering by
what sort of manoeuvre she could arrest her wandering thoughts.
Perhaps a mere task was the best means--something to which she
must go doggedly. Was there not the geography of Asia Minor,
in which her slackness had often been rebuked by Mr. Casaubon?
She went to the cabinet of maps and unrolled one: this morning
she might make herself finally sure that Paphlagonia was not on
the Levantine coast, and fix her total darkness about the Chalybes
firmly on the shores of the Euxine. A map was a fine thing to study
when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up
of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.
Dorothea set earnestly to work, bending close to her map, and uttering
the names in an audible, subdued tone, which often got into a chime.
She looked amusingly girlish after all her deep experience--
nodding her head and marking the names off on her fingers,
with a little pursing of her lip, and now and then breaking off
to put her hands on each side of her face and say, "Oh dear!
oh dear!"
There was no reason why this should end any more than a merry-go-round;
but it was at last interrupted by the opening of the door and the
announcement of Miss Noble.
The little old lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea's shoulder,
was warmly welcomed, but while her hand was being pressed she made
many of her beaver-like noises, as if she had something difficult
to say.
"Do sit down," said Dorothea, rolling a chair forward. "Am I
wanted for anything? I shall be so glad if I can do anything."
"I will not stay," said Miss Noble, putting her hand into her small
basket, and holding some article inside it nervously; "I have left
a friend in the churchyard." She lapsed into her inarticulate sounds,
and unconsciously drew forth the article which she was fingering.
It was the tortoise-shell lozenge-box, and Dorothea felt the color
mounting to her cheeks.
"Mr. Ladislaw," continued the timid little woman. "He fears he
has offended you, and has begged me to ask if you will see him
for a few minutes."
Dorothea did not answer on the instant: it was crossing her mind
that she could not receive him in this library, where her husband's
prohibition seemed to dwell. She looked towards the window.
Could she go out and meet him in the grounds? The sky was heavy,
and the trees had begun to shiver as at a coming storm. Besides,
she shrank from going out to him.
"Do see him, Mrs. Casaubon," said Miss Noble, pathetically; "else I
must go back and say No, and that will hurt him."
"Yes, I will see him," said Dorothea. "Pray tell him to come."
What else was there to be done? There was nothing that she longed
for at that moment except to see Will: the possibility of seeing him
had thrust itself insistently between her and every other object;
and yet she had a throbbing excitement like an alarm upon her--
a sense that she was doing something daringly defiant for his sake.
When the little lady had trotted away on her mission, Dorothea stood
in the middle of the library with her hands falling clasped
before her, making no attempt to compose herself in an attitude
of dignified unconsciousness. What she was least conscious of just
then was her own body: she was thinking of what was likely to be in
Will's mind, and of the hard feelings that others had had about him.
How could any duty bind her to hardness? Resistance to unjust
dispraise had mingled with her feeling for him from the very first,
and now in the rebound of her heart after her anguish the resistance
was stronger than ever. "If I love him too much it is because he
has been used so ill:"--there was a voice within her saying this
to some imagined audience in the library, when the door was opened,
and she saw Will before her.
She did not move, and he came towards her with more doubt and timidity
in his face than she had ever seen before. He was in a state
of uncertainty which made him afraid lest some look or word of his
should condemn him to a new distance from her; and Dorothea was afraid
of her OWN emotion. She looked as if there were a spell upon her,
keeping her motionless and hindering her from unclasping her hands,
while some intense, grave yearning was imprisoned within her eyes.
Seeing that she did not put out her hand as usual, Will paused
a yard from her and said with embarrassment, "I am so grateful
to you for seeing me."
"I wanted to see you," said Dorothea, having no other words at command.
It did not occur to her to sit down, and Will did not give
a cheerful interpretation to this queenly way of receiving him;
but he went on to say what he had made up his mind to say.
"I fear you think me foolish and perhaps wrong for coming back
so soon. I have been punished for my impatience. You know--
every one knows now---a painful story about my parentage. I knew
of it before I went away, and I always meant to tell you of it if--
if we ever met again."
There was a slight movement in Dorothea, and she unclasped her hands,
but immediately folded them over each other.
"But the affair is matter of gossip now," Will continued. "I wished
you to know that something connected with it--something which
happened before I went away, helped to bring me down here again.
At least I thought it excused my coming. It was the idea of getting
Bulstrode to apply some money to a public purpose--some money which
he had thought of giving me. Perhaps it is rather to Bulstrode's
credit that he privately offered me compensation for an old injury:
he offered to give me a good income to make amends; but I suppose
you know the disagreeable story?"
Will looked doubtfully at Dorothea, but his manner was gathering
some of the defiant courage with which he always thought of this
fact in his destiny. He added, "You know that it must be altogether
painful to me."
"Yes--yes--I know," said Dorothea, hastily.
"I did not choose to accept an income from such a source. I was
sure that you would not think well of me if I did so," said Will.
Why should he mind saying anything of that sort to her now?
She knew that he had avowed his love for her. "I felt that"--
he broke off, nevertheless.
"You acted as I should have expected you to act," said Dorothea,
her face brightening and her head becoming a little more erect on
its beautiful stem.
"I did not believe that you would let any circumstance of my birth
create a prejudice in you against me, though it was sure to do so
in others," said Will, shaking his head backward in his old way,
and looking with a grave appeal into her eyes.
"If it were a new hardship it would be a new reason for me to cling
to you," said Dorothea, fervidly. "Nothing could have changed
me but--"her heart was swelling, and it was difficult to go on;
she made a great effort over herself to say in a low tremulous voice,
"but thinking that you were different--not so good as I had believed
you to be."
"You are sure to believe me better than I am in everything but one,"
said Will, giving way to his own feeling in the evidence of hers.
"I mean, in my truth to you. When I thought you doubted of that,
I didn't care about anything that was left. I thought it was
all over with me, and there was nothing to try for--only things
to endure."
"I don't doubt you any longer," said Dorothea, putting out her hand;
a vague fear for him impelling her unutterable affection.
He took her hand and raised it to his lips with something like a sob.
But he stood with his hat and gloves in the other hand, and might
have done for the portrait of a Royalist. Still it was difficult
to loose the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion
that distressed her, looked and moved away.
"See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed,"
she said, walking towards the window, yet speaking and moving with
only a dim sense of what she was doing.
Will followed her at a little distance, and leaned against the tall back
of a leather chair, on which he ventured now to lay his hat and gloves,
and free himself from the intolerable durance of formality to which
he had been for the first time condemned in Dorothea's presence.
It must be confessed that he felt very happy at that moment leaning
on the chair. He was not much afraid of anything that she might feel now.
They stood silent, not looking at each other, but looking
at the evergreens which were being tossed, and were showing
the pale underside of their leaves against the blackening sky.
Will never enjoyed the prospect of a storm so much: it delivered
him from the necessity of going away. Leaves and little branches
were hurled about, and the thunder was getting nearer. The light
was more and more sombre, but there came a flash of lightning
which made them start and look at each other, and then smile.
Dorothea began to say what she had been thinking of.
"That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have
had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good,
other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for.
Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearly than ever,
when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could have
borne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength."
"You have never felt the sort of misery I felt," said Will;
"the misery of knowing that you must despise me."
"But I have felt worse--it was worse to think ill--" Dorothea
had begun impetuously, but broke off.
Will colored. He had the sense that whatever she said was uttered
in the vision of a fatality that kept them apart. He was silent
a moment, and then said passionately--
"We may at least have the comfort of speaking to each other
without disguise. Since I must go away--since we must always
be divided--you may think of me as one on the brink of the grave."
While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit
each of them up for the other--and the light seemed to be the terror
of a hopeless love. Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window;
Will followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement;
and so they stood, with their hands clasped, like two children,
looking out on the storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack
and roll above them, and the rain began to pour down. Then they
turned their faces towards each other, with the memory of his last
words in them, and they did not loose each other's hands.
"There is no hope for me," said Will. "Even if you loved
me as well as I love you--even if I were everything to you--
I shall most likely always be very poor: on a sober calculation,
one can count on nothing but a creeping lot. It is impossible
for us ever to belong to each other. It is perhaps base of me
to have asked for a word from you. I meant to go away into silence,
but I have not been able to do what I meant."
"Don't be sorry," said Dorothea, in her clear tender tones.
"I would rather share all the trouble of our parting."
Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were
the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly,
and then they moved apart.
The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit
were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind;
it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle
pause with a certain awe.
Dorothea sat down on the seat nearest to her, a long low ottoman
in the middle of the room, and with her hands folded over each
other on her lap, looked at the drear outer world. Will stood
still an instant looking at her, then seated himself beside her,
and laid his hand on hers, which turned itself upward to be clasped.
They sat in that way without looking at each other, until the rain
abated and began to fall in stillness. Each had been full of thoughts
which neither of them could begin to utter.
But when the rain was quiet, Dorothea turned to look at Will.
With passionate exclamation, as if some torture screw were
threatening him, he started up and said, "It is impossible!"
He went and leaned on the back of the chair again, and seemed to be
battling with his own anger, while she looked towards him sadly.
"It is as fatal as a murder or any other horror that divides people,"
he burst out again; "it is more intolerable--to have our life maimed
by petty accidents."
"No--don't say that--your life need not be maimed," said Dorothea, gently.
"Yes, it must," said Will, angrily. "It is cruel of you to speak
in that way--as if there were any comfort. You may see beyond
the misery of it, but I don't. It is unkind--it is throwing back
my love for you as if it were a trifle, to speak in that way
in the face of the fact. We can never be married."
"Some time--we might," said Dorothea, in a trembling voice.
"When?" said Will, bitterly. "What is the use of counting on
any success of mine? It is a mere toss up whether I shall ever
do more than keep myself decently, unless I choose to sell myself
as a mere pen and a mouthpiece. I can see that clearly enough.
I could not offer myself to any woman, even if she had no luxuries
to renounce."
There was silence. Dorothea's heart was full of something that she
wanted to say, and yet the words were too difficult. She was wholly
possessed by them: at that moment debate was mute within her.
And it was very hard that she could not say what she wanted to say.
Will was looking out of the window angrily. If he would have looked
at her and not gone away from her side, she thought everything
would have been easier. At last he turned, still resting against
the chair, and stretching his hand automatically towards his hat,
said with a sort of exasperation, "Good-by."
"Oh, I cannot bear it--my heart will break," said Dorothea,
starting from her seat, the flood of her young passion bearing down
all the obstructions which had kept her silent--the great tears
rising and falling in an instant:"I don't mind about poverty--
I hate my wealth."
In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her,
but she drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go
on speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply,
while she said in a sobbing childlike way, "We could live quite
well on my own fortune--it is too much--seven hundred a-year--I want
so little--no new clothes--and I will learn what everything costs."
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
"Though it be songe of old and yonge,
That I sholde be to blame,
Theyrs be the charge, that spoke so large
In hurtynge of my name."
--The Not-browne Mayde.
It was just after the Lords had thrown out the Reform Bill:
that explains how Mr. Cadwallader came to be walking on the
slope of the lawn near the great conservatory at Freshitt Hall,
holding the "Times" in his hands behind him, while he talked
with a trout-fisher's dispassionateness about the prospects
of the country to Sir James Chettam. Mrs. Cadwallader,
the Dowager Lady Chettam, and Celia were sometimes seated on
garden-chairs, sometimes walking to meet little Arthur, who was
being drawn in his chariot, and, as became the infantine Bouddha,
was sheltered by his sacred umbrella with handsome silken fringe.
The ladies also talked politics, though more fitfully.
Mrs. Cadwallader was strong on the intended creation of peers:
she had it for certain from her cousin that Truberry had gone
over to the other side entirely at the instigation of his wife,
who had scented peerages in the air from the very first introduction
of the Reform question, and would sign her soul away to take precedence
of her younger sister, who had married a baronet. Lady Chettam
thought that such conduct was very reprehensible, and remembered
that Mrs. Truberry's mother was a Miss Walsingham of Melspring.
Celia confessed it was nicer to be "Lady" than "Mrs.," and that Dodo
never minded about precedence if she could have her own way.
Mrs. Cadwallader held that it was a poor satisfaction to take
precedence when everybody about you knew that you had not a drop
of good blood in your veins; and Celia again, stopping to look
at Arthur, said, "It would be very nice, though, if he were a Viscount--
and his lordship's little tooth coming through! He might have been,
if James had been an Earl."
"My dear Celia," said the Dowager, "James's title is worth far more
than any new earldom. I never wished his father to be anything
else than Sir James."
"Oh, I only meant about Arthur's little tooth," said Celia,
comfortably. "But see, here is my uncle coming."
She tripped off to meet her uncle, while Sir James and Mr. Cadwallader
came forward to make one group with the ladies. Celia had slipped
her arm through her uncle's, and he patted her hand with a rather
melancholy "Well, my dear!" As they approached, it was evident
that Mr. Brooke was looking dejected, but this was fully accounted
for by the state of politics; and as he was shaking hands all round
without more greeting than a "Well, you're all here, you know,"
the Rector said, laughingly--
"Don't take the throwing out of the Bill so much to heart, Brooke;
you've got all the riff-raff of the country on your side."
"The Bill, eh? ah!" said Mr. Brooke, with a mild distractedness
of manner. "Thrown out, you know, eh? The Lords are going
too far, though. They'll have to pull up. Sad news, you know.
I mean, here at home--sad news. But you must not blame me, Chettam."
"What is the matter?" said Sir James. "Not another gamekeeper shot,
I hope? It's what I should expect, when a fellow like Trapping Bass
is let off so easily."
"Gamekeeper? No. Let us go in; I can tell you all in the house,
you know," said Mr. Brooke, nodding at the Cadwalladers, to show
that he included them in his confidence. "As to poachers like
Trapping Bass, you know, Chettam," he continued, as they were entering,
"when you are a magistrate, you'll not find it so easy to commit.
Severity is all very well, but it's a great deal easier when you've
got somebody to do it for you. You have a soft place in your
heart yourself, you know--you're not a Draco, a Jeffreys, that sort
of thing."
Mr. Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation.
When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way
to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it
were a medicine that would get a milder flavor by mixing He continued
his chat with Sir James about the poachers until they were all seated,
and Mrs. Cadwallader, impatient of this drivelling, said--
"I'm dying to know the sad news. The gamekeeper is not shot:
that is settled. What is it, then?"
"Well, it's a very trying thing, you know," said Mr. Brooke.
"I'm glad you and the Rector are here; it's a family matter--
but you will help us all to bear it, Cadwallader. I've got
to break it to you, my dear." Here Mr. Brooke looked at Celia--
"You've no notion what it is, you know. And, Chettam, it will annoy
you uncommonly--but, you see, you have not been able to hinder it,
any more than I have. There's something singular in things:
they come round, you know."
"It must be about Dodo," said Celia, who had been used to think
of her sister as the dangerous part of the family machinery.
She had seated herself on a low stool against her husband's knee.
"For God's sake let us hear what it is!" said Sir James.
"Well, you know, Chettam, I couldn't help Casaubon's will:
it was a sort of will to make things worse."
"Exactly," said Sir James, hastily. "But WHAT is worse?"
"Dorothea is going to be married again, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
nodding towards Celia, who immediately looked up at her husband
with a frightened glance, and put her hand on his knee. Sir James
was almost white with anger, but he did not speak.
"Merciful heaven!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Not to YOUNG Ladislaw?"
Mr. Brooke nodded, saying, "Yes; to Ladislaw," and then fell into
a prudential silence.
"You see, Humphrey!" said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her arm towards
her husband. "Another time you will admit that I have some foresight;
or rather you will contradict me and be just as blind as ever.
YOU supposed that the young gentleman was gone out of the country."
"So he might be, and yet come back," said the Rector, quietly
"When did you learn this?" said Sir James, not liking to hear
any one else speak, though finding it difficult to speak himself.
"Yesterday," said Mr. Brooke, meekly. "I went to Lowick.
Dorothea sent for me, you know. It had come about quite suddenly--
neither of them had any idea two days ago--not any idea, you know.
There's something singular in things. But Dorothea is quite
determined--it is no use opposing. I put it strongly to her.
I did my duty, Chettam. But she can act as she likes, you know."
"It would have been better if I had called him out and shot
him a year ago," said Sir James, not from bloody-mindedness,
but because he needed something strong to say.
"Really, James, that would have been very disagreeable," said Celia.
"Be reasonable, Chettam. Look at the affair more quietly,"
said Mr. Cadwallader, sorry to see his good-natured friend
so overmastered by anger.
"That is not so very easy for a man of any dignity--with any
sense of right--when the affair happens to be in his own family,"
said Sir James, still in his white indignation. "It is
perfectly scandalous. If Ladislaw had had a spark of honor he would
have gone out of the country at once, and never shown his face
in it again. However, I am not surprised. The day after Casaubon's
funeral I said what ought to be done. But I was not listened to."
"You wanted what was impossible, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke.
"You wanted him shipped off. I told you Ladislaw was not to be done
as we liked with: he had his ideas. He was a remarkable fellow--
I always said he was a remarkable fellow."
"Yes," said Sir James, unable to repress a retort, "it is rather
a pity you formed that high opinion of him. We are indebted to that
for his being lodged in this neighborhood. We are indebted to that
for seeing a woman like Dorothea degrading herself by marrying him."
Sir James made little stoppages between his clauses, the words
not coming easily. "A man so marked out by her husband's will,
that delicacy ought to have forbidden her from seeing him again--
who takes her out of her proper rank--into poverty--has the meanness
to accept such a sacrifice--has always had an objectionable position--
a bad origin--and, I BELIEVE, is a man of little principle and
light character. That is my opinion." Sir James ended emphatically,
turning aside and crossing his leg.
"I pointed everything out to her," said Mr. Brooke, apologetically--
"I mean the poverty, and abandoning her position. I said, `My dear,
you don't know what it is to live on seven hundred a-year,
and have no carriage, and that kind of thing, and go amongst
people who don't know who you are.' I put it strongly to her.
But I advise you to talk to Dorothea herself. The fact is, she has
a dislike to Casaubon's property. You will hear what she says,
you know."
"No--excuse me--I shall not," said Sir James, with more coolness.
"I cannot bear to see her again; it is too painful. It hurts me too
much that a woman like Dorothea should have done what is wrong."
"Be just, Chettam," said the easy, large-lipped Rector,
who objected to all this unnecessary discomfort. "Mrs. Casaubon
may be acting imprudently: she is giving up a fortune for the sake
of a man, and we men have so poor an opinion of each other that we
can hardly call a woman wise who does that. But I think you should
not condemn it as a wrong action, in the strict sense of the word."
"Yes, I do," answered Sir James. "I think that Dorothea commits
a wrong action in marrying Ladislaw."
"My dear fellow, we are rather apt to consider an act wrong because
it is unpleasant to us," said the Rector, quietly. Like many men
who take life easily, he had the knack of saying a home truth
occasionally to those who felt themselves virtuously out of temper.
Sir James took out his handkerchief and began to bite the corner.
"It is very dreadful of Dodo, though," said Celia, wishing to
justify her husband. "She said she NEVER WOULD marry again--
not anybody at all."
"I heard her say the same thing myself," said Lady Chettam,
majestically, as if this were royal evidence.
"Oh, there is usually a silent exception in such cases,"
said Mrs. Cadwallader. "The only wonder to me is, that any of
you are surprised. You did nothing to hinder it. If you would
have had Lord Triton down here to woo her with his philanthropy,
he might have carried her off before the year was over. There was
no safety in anything else. Mr. Casaubon had prepared all this
as beautifully as possible. He made himself disagreeable--or it
pleased God to make him so--and then he dared her to contradict him.
It's the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high
price in that way."
"I don't know what you mean by wrong, Cadwallader," said Sir James,
still feeling a little stung, and turning round in his chair
towards the Rector. "He's not a man we can take into the family.
At least, I must speak for myself," he continued, carefully keeping
his eyes off Mr. Brooke. "I suppose others will find his society
too pleasant to care about the propriety of the thing."
"Well, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke, good-humoredly, nursing
his leg, "I can't turn my back on Dorothea. I must be a father
to her up to a certain point. I said, `My dear, I won't refuse
to give you away.' I had spoken strongly before. But I can cut
off the entail, you know. It will cost money and be troublesome;
but I can do it, you know."
Mr. Brooke nodded at Sir James, and felt that he was both showing
his own force of resolution and propitiating what was just in the
Baronet's vexation. He had hit on a more ingenious mode of parrying than
he was aware of. He had touched a motive of which Sir James was ashamed.
The mass of his feeling about Dorothea's marriage to Ladislaw was
due partly to excusable prejudice, or even justifiable opinion,
partly to a jealous repugnance hardly less in Ladislaw's case
than in Casaubon's. He was convinced that the marriage was a fatal
one for Dorothea. But amid that mass ran a vein of which he was
too good and honorable a man to like the avowal even to himself:
it was undeniable that the union of the two estates--Tipton and Freshitt--
lying charmingly within a ring-fence, was a prospect that flattered
him for his son and heir. Hence when Mr. Brooke noddingly appealed
to that motive, Sir James felt a sudden embarrassment; there was
a stoppage in his throat; he even blushed. He had found more words
than usual in the first jet of his anger, but Mr. Brooke's propitiation
was more clogging to his tongue than Mr. Cadwallader's caustic hint.
But Celia was glad to have room for speech after her uncle's suggestion
of the marriage ceremony, and she said, though with as little eagerness
of manner as if the question had turned on an invitation to dinner,
"Do you mean that Dodo is going to be married directly, uncle?"
"In three weeks, you know," said Mr. Brooke, helplessly. "I can do
nothing to hinder it, Cadwallader," he added, turning for a little
countenance toward the Rector, who said--
"--I--should not make any fuss about it. If she likes to be poor,
that is her affair. Nobody would have said anything if she had
married the young fellow because he was rich. Plenty of beneficed
clergy are poorer than they will be. Here is Elinor," continued the
provoking husband; "she vexed her friends by me: I had hardly
a thousand a-year--I was a lout--nobody could see anything in me--
my shoes were not the right cut--all the men wondered how a woman
could like me. Upon my word, I must take Ladislaw's part until I
hear more harm of him."
"Humphrey, that is all sophistry, and you know it," said his wife.
"Everything is all one--that is the beginning and end with you.
As if you had not been a Cadwallader! Does any one suppose that I
would have taken such a monster as you by any other name?"
"And a clergyman too," observed Lady Chettam with approbation.
"Elinor cannot be said to have descended below her rank. It is
difficult to say what Mr. Ladislaw is, eh, James?"
Sir James gave a small grunt, which was less respectful than
his usual mode of answering his mother. Celia looked up at him
like a thoughtful kitten.
"It must be admitted that his blood is a frightful mixture!"
said Mrs. Cadwallader. "The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to begin with,
and then a rebellious Polish fiddler or dancing-master, was it?--
and then an old clo--"
"Nonsense, Elinor," said the Rector, rising. "It is time for us
to go."
"After all, he is a pretty sprig," said Mrs. Cadwallader, rising too,
and wishing to make amends. "He is like the fine old Crichley
portraits before the idiots came in."
"I'll go with you," said Mr. Brooke, starting up with alacrity.
"You must all come and dine with me to-morrow, you know--eh, Celia,
my dear?"
"You will, James--won't you?" said Celia, taking her husband's hand.
"Oh, of course, if you like," said Sir James, pulling down his waistcoat,
but unable yet to adjust his face good-humoredly. "That is to say,
if it is not to meet anybody else.':
"No, no, no," said Mr. Brooke, understanding the condition.
"Dorothea would not come, you know, unless you had been to see her."
When Sir James and Celia were alone, she said, "Do you mind about
my having the carriage to go to, Lowick, James?"
"What, now, directly?" he answered, with some surprise.
"Yes, it is very important," said Celia.
"Remember, Celia, I cannot see her," said Sir James.
"Not if she gave up marrying?"
"What is the use of saying that?--however, I'm going to the stables.
I'll tell Briggs to bring the carriage round."
Celia thought it was of great use, if not to say that, at least
to take a journey to Lowick in order to influence Dorothea's mind.
All through their girlhood she had felt that she could act on
her sister by a word judiciously placed--by opening a little
window for the daylight of her own understanding to enter among
the strange colored lamps by which Dodo habitually saw. And Celia
the matron naturally felt more able to advise her childless sister.
How could any one understand Dodo so well as Celia did or love her
so tenderly?
Dorothea, busy in her boudoir, felt a glow of pleasure at the sight
of her sister so soon after the revelation of her intended marriage.
She had prefigured to herself, even with exaggeration, the disgust
of her friends, and she had even feared that Celia might be kept
aloof from her.
"O Kitty, I am delighted to see you!" said Dorothea, putting her
hands on Celia's shoulders, and beaming on her. "I almost thought
you would not come to me."
"I have not brought Arthur, because I was in a hurry," said Celia,
and they sat down on two small chairs opposite each other,
with their knees touching.
"You know, Dodo, it is very bad," said Celia, in her placid guttural,
looking as prettily free from humors as possible. "You have disappointed
us all so. And I can't think that it ever WILL be--you never
can go and live in that way. And then there are all your plans!
You never can have thought of that. James would have taken any trouble
for you, and you might have gone on all your life doing what you liked."
"On the contrary, dear," said Dorothea, "I never could do anything
that I liked. I have never carried out any plan yet."
"Because you always wanted things that wouldn't do. But other plans
would have come. And how can you marry Mr. Ladislaw, that we none of us
ever thought you COULD marry? It shocks James so dreadfully.
And then it is all so different from what you have always been.
You would have Mr. Casaubon because he had such a great soul,
and was so and dismal and learned; and now, to think of marrying
Mr. Ladislaw, who has got no estate or anything. I suppose it
is because you must be making yourself uncomfortable in some way
or other."
Dorothea laughed.
"Well, it is very serious, Dodo," said Celia, becoming more impressive.
"How will you live? and you will go away among queer people.
And I shall never see you--and you won't mind about little Arthur--
and I thought you always would--"
Celia's rare tears had got into her eyes, and the corners of her
mouth were agitated.
"Dear Celia," said Dorothea, with tender gravity, "if you don't
ever see me, it will not be my fault."
"Yes, it will," said Celia, with the same touching distortion
of her small features. "How can I come to you or have you with me
when James can't bear it?--that is because he thinks it is not right--
he thinks you are so wrong, Dodo. But you always were wrong: only I
can't help loving you. And nobody can think where you will live:
where can you go?"
"I am going to London," said Dorothea.
"How can you always live in a street? And you will be so poor.
I could give you half my things, only how can I, when I never
see you?"
"Bless you, Kitty," said Dorothea, with gentle warmth. "Take comfort:
perhaps James will forgive me some time."
"But it would be much better if you would not be married," said Celia,
drying her eyes, and returning to her argument; "then there would
be nothing uncomfortable. And you would not do what nobody thought
you could do. James always said you ought to be a queen; but this
is not at all being like a queen. You know what mistakes you
have always been making, Dodo, and this is another. Nobody thinks
Mr. Ladislaw a proper husband for you. And you SAID YOU would
never be married again."
"It is quite true that I might be a wiser person, Celia," said Dorothea,
"and that I might have done something better, if I had been better.
But this is what I am going to do. I have promised to marry
Mr. Ladislaw; and I am going to marry him."
The tone in which Dorothea said this was a note that Celia had long
learned to recognize. She was silent a few moments, and then said,
as if she had dismissed all contest, "Is he very fond of you, Dodo?"
"I hope so. I am very fond of him."
"That is nice," said Celia, comfortably. "Only I rather you had such
a sort of husband as James is, with a place very near, that I could
drive to."
Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative.
Presently she said, "I cannot think how it all came about."
Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.
"I dare say not," said-Dorothea, pinching her sister's chin.
"If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you."
"Can't you tell me?" said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
"No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know."
CHAPTER LIXXV.
"Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good,
Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind,
Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, Mr. Implacable,
who every one gave in his private verdict against him among themselves,
and afterwards unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty
before the judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman,
the foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic.
Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the earth!
Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very look of him. Then said
Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I, said Mr. Live-loose;
for he would be always condemning my way. Hang him, hang him,
said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth
against him, said Mr. Enmity. He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar.
Hanging is too good for him, said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch
him out of the way said Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable,
Might I have all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him;
therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death."
--Pilgrim's Progress.
When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions
bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful?
That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have
not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd--
to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.
The pitiable lot is that of the man who could not call himself a martyr
even though he were to persuade himself that the men who stoned
him were but ugly passions incarnate--who knows that he is stoned,
not for professing the Right, but for not being the man he professed
to be.
This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he
made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end
his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.
The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from
one dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a
tribunal before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy.
His equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had
sustained the conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to,
yet he had a terror upon him which would not let him expose them
to judgment by a full confession to his wife: the acts which he had
washed and diluted with inward argument and motive, and for which it
seemed comparatively easy to win invisible pardon--what name would
she call them by? That she should ever silently call his acts
Murder was what he could not bear. He felt shrouded by her doubt:
he got strength to face her from the sense that she could not yet
feel warranted in pronouncing that worst condemnation on him.
Some time, perhaps--when he was dying--he would tell her all:
in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand in the
gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from
his touch. Perhaps: but concealment had been the habit of his life,
and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread
of a deeper humiliation.
He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he
deprecated any harshness of judgment from her, but because he
felt a deep distress at the sight of her suffering. She had
sent her daughters away to board at a school on the coast,
that this crisis might be hidden from them as far as possible.
Set free by their absence from the intolerable necessity of
accounting for her grief or of beholding their frightened wonder,
she could live unconstrainedly with the sorrow that was every
day streaking her hair with whiteness and making her eyelids languid.
"Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,"
Bulstrode had said to her; "I mean with regard to arrangements
of property. It is my intention not to sell the land I possess
in this neighborhood, but to leave it to you as a safe provision.
If you have any wish on such subjects, do not conceal it from me."
A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to
her brother's, she began to speak to her husband on a subject
which had for some time been in her mind.
"I SHOULD like to do something for my brother's family,
Nicholas; and I think we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond
and her husband. Walter says Mr. Lydgate must leave the town,
and his practice is almost good for nothing, and they have very little
left to settle anywhere with. I would rather do without something
for ourselves, to make some amends to my poor brother's family."
Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the phrase
"make some amends;" knowing that her husband must understand her.
He had a particular reason, which she was not aware of, for wincing
under her suggestion. He hesitated before he said--
"It is not possible to carry out your wish in the way you propose,
my dear. Mr. Lydgate has virtually rejected any further service
from me. He has returned the thousand pounds which I lent him.
Mrs. Casaubon advanced him the sum for that purpose. Here is
his letter."
The letter seemed to cut Mrs. Bulstrode severely. The mention of
Mrs. Casaubon's loan seemed a reflection of that public feeling which
held it a matter of course that every one would avoid a connection
with her husband. She was silent for some time; and the tears fell
one after the other, her chin trembling as she wiped them away.
Bulstrode, sitting opposite to her, ached at the sight of that
grief-worn face, which two months before had been bright and blooming.
It had aged to keep sad company with his own withered features.
Urged into some effort at comforting her, he said--
"There is another means, Harriet, by which I might do a service
to your brother's family, if you like to act in it. And it would,
I think, be beneficial to you: it would be an advantageous way
of managing the land which I mean to be yours."
She looked attentive.
"Garth once thought of undertaking the management of Stone Court
in order to place your nephew Fred there. The stock was to remain
as it is, and they were to pay a certain share of the profits
instead of an ordinary rent. That would be a desirable beginning
for the young man, in conjunction with his employment under Garth.
Would it be a satisfaction to you?"
"Yes, it would," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with some return of energy.
"Poor Walter is so cast down; I would try anything in my power
to do him some good before I go away. We have always been brother
and sister."
"You must make the proposal to Garth yourself, Harriet,"
said Mr. Bulstrode, not liking what he had to say, but desiring
the end he had in view, for other reasons besides the consolation
of his wife. "You must state to him that the land is virtually yours,
and that he need have no transactions with me. Communications can
be made through Standish. I mention this, because Garth gave
up being my agent. I can put into your hands a paper which he
himself drew up, stating conditions; and you can propose his
renewed acceptance of them. I think it is not unlikely that
he will accept when you propose the thing for the sake of your nephew."
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
"Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le conserve;
de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se sont aimes des
l'aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles amours prolonges.
Il existe un embaumement d'amour. C'est de Daphnis et Chloe
que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette vieillesse la,
ressemblance du soir avec l'aurore."
--VICTOR HUGO: L'homme qui rit.
Mrs. Garth, hearing Caleb enter the passage about tea-time, opened
the parlor-door and said, "There you are, Caleb. Have you had
your dinner?" (Mr. Garth's meals were much subordinated to "business.")
"Oh yes, a good dinner--cold mutton and I don't know what.
Where is Mary?"
"In the garden with Letty, I think."
"Fred is not come yet?"
"No. Are you going out again without taking tea, Caleb?"
said Mrs. Garth, seeing that her absent-minded husband
was putting on again the hat which he had just taken off.
"No, no; I'm only going to Mary a minute."
Mary was in a grassy corner of the garden, where there was a swing
loftily hung between two pear-trees. She had a pink kerchief tied
over her head, making a little poke to shade her eyes from the
level sunbeams, while she was giving a glorious swing to Letty,
who laughed and screamed wildly.
Seeing her father, Mary left the swing and went to meet him,
pushing back the pink kerchief and smiling afar off at him with
the involuntary smile of loving pleasure.
"I came to look for you, Mary," said Mr. Garth. "Let us-walk
about a bit." Mary knew quite well that her father had something
particular to say: his eyebrows made their pathetic angle,
and there was a tender gravity in his voice: these things had been
signs to her when she was Letty's age. She put her arm within his,
and they turned by the row of nut-trees.
"It will be a sad while before you can be married, Mary," said her father,
not looking at her, but at the end of the stick which he held in his other
hand.
"Not a sad while, father--I mean to be merry," said Mary,
laughingly. "I have been single and merry for four-and-twenty
years and more: I suppose it will not be quite as long again
as that." Then, after a little pause, she said, more gravely,
bending her face before her father's, "If you are contented with Fred?"
Caleb screwed up his mouth and turned his head aside wisely.
"Now, father, you did praise him last Wednesday. You said he
had an uncommon notion of stock, and a good eye for things."
"Did I?" said Caleb, rather slyly.
"Yes, I put it all down, and the date, anno Domini, and everything,"
said Mary. "You like things to be neatly booked. And then his
behavior to you, father, is really good; he has a deep respect for you;
and it is impossible to have a better temper than Fred has."
"Ay, ay; you want to coax me into thinking him a fine match."
"No, indeed, father. I don't love him because he is a fine match."
"What for, then?"
"Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like
scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought
of in a husband."
"Your mind is quite settled, then, Mary?" said Caleb, returning to
his first tone. "There's no other wish come into it since things
have been going on as they have been of late?" (Caleb meant a great
deal in that vague phrase;) "because, better late than never.
A woman must not force her heart--she'll do a man no good by that."
"My feelings have not changed, father," said Mary, calmly.
"I shall be constant to Fred as long as he is constant to me.
I don't think either of us could spare the other, or like any one
else better, however much we might admire them. It would make too
great a difference to us--like seeing all the old places altered,
and changing the name for everything. We must wait for each other
a long while; but Fred knows that."
Instead of speaking immediately, Caleb stood still and screwed his
stick on the grassy walk. Then he said, with emotion in his voice,
"Well, I've got a bit of news. What do you think of Fred going
to live at Stone Court, and managing the land there?"
"How can that ever be, father?" said Mary, wonderingly.
"He would manage it for his aunt Bulstrode. The poor woman has
been to me begging and praying. She wants to do the lad good,
and it might be a fine thing for him. With saving, he might gradually
buy the stock, and he has a turn for farming."
"Oh, Fred would be so happy! It is too good to believe."
"Ah, but mind you," said Caleb, turning his head warningly, "I must take
it on MY shoulders, and be responsible, and see after everything;
and that will grieve your mother a bit, though she mayn't say so.
Fred had need be careful."
"Perhaps it is too much, father," said Mary, checked in her joy.
"There would be no happiness in bringing you any fresh trouble."
"Nay, nay; work is my delight, child, when it doesn't vex your mother.
And then, if you and Fred get married," here Caleb's voice shook
just perceptibly, "he'll be steady and saving; and you've got
your mother's cleverness, and mine too, in a woman's sort of way;
and you'll keep him in order. He'll be coming by-and-by, so I
wanted to tell you first, because I think you'd like to tell HIM
by yourselves. After that, I could talk it well over with him,
and we could go into business and the nature of things."
"Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her
father's neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed.
"I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world!"
"Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better."
"Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; "husbands
are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order."
When they were entering the house with Letty, who had run to join them,
Mary saw Fred at the orchard-gate, and went to meet him.
"What fine clothes you wear, you extravagant youth!" said Mary,
as Fred stood still and raised his hat to her with playful formality.
"You are not learning economy."
"Now that is too bad, Mary," said Fred. "Just look at the edges
of these coat-cuffs! It is only by dint of good brushing that I
look respectable. I am saving up three suits--one for a wedding-suit."
"How very droll you will look!--like a gentleman in an old fashion-book."
"Oh no, they will keep two years."
"Two years! be reasonable, Fred," said Mary, turning to walk.
"Don't encourage flattering expectations."
"Why not? One lives on them better than on unflattering ones.
If we can't be married in two years, the truth will be quite bad
enough when it comes."
"I have heard a story of a young gentleman who once encouraged
flattering expectations, and they did him harm."
"Mary, if you've got something discouraging to tell me, I shall bolt;
I shall go into the house to Mr. Garth. I am out of spirits.
My father is so cut up--home is not like itself. I can't bear any
more bad news."
"Should you call it bad news to be told that you were to live
at Stone Court, and manage the farm, and be remarkably prudent,
and save money every year till all the stock and furniture were
your own, and you were a distinguished agricultural character,
as Mr. Borthrop Trumbull says--rather stout, I fear, and with the
Greek and Latin sadly weather-worn?"
"You don't mean anything except nonsense, Mary?" said Fred,
coloring slightly nevertheless.
"That is what my father has just told me of as what may happen,
and he never talks nonsense," said Mary, looking up at Fred now,
while he grasped her hand as they walked, till it rather hurt her;
but she would not complain.
"Oh, I could be a tremendously good fellow then, Mary, and we could
be married directly."
"Not so fast, sir; how do you know that I would not rather defer
our marriage for some years? That would leave you time to misbehave,
and then if I liked some one else better, I should have an excuse
for jilting you."
"Pray don't joke, Mary," said Fred, with strong feeling. "Tell me
seriously that all this is true, and that you are happy because of it--
because you love me best."
"It is all true, Fred, and I am happy because of it--because I love
you best," said Mary, in a tone of obedient recitation.
They lingered on the door-step under the steep-roofed porch,
and Fred almost in a whisper said--
"When we were first engaged, with the umbrella-ring, Mary, you used to--"
The spirit of joy began to laugh more decidedly in Mary's eyes,
but the fatal Ben came running to the door with Brownie yapping
behind him, and, bouncing against them, said--
"Fred and Mary! are you ever coming in?--or may I eat your cake?"
FINALE.
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young
lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know
what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life,
however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may
not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension;
latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error
may urge a grand retrieval.
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives,
is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept
their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the
thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning
of the home epic--the gradual conquest or irremediable loss
of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax,
and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment
of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience
with each other and the world.
All who have oared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to
know that these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid
mutual happiness. Fred surprised his neighbors in various ways.
He became rather distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic
and practical farmer, and produced a work on the "Cultivation of
Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding" which won him high
congratulations at agricultural meetings. In Middlemarch admiration
was more reserved: most persons there were inclined to believe
that the merit of Fred's authorship was due to his wife, since they
had never expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.
But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called "Stories
of Great Men, taken from Plutarch," and had it printed and published
by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing
to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he
had been to the University, "where the ancients were studied,"
and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.
In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived,
and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book,
since it was always done by somebody else.
Moreover, Fred remained unswervingly steady. Some years after
his marriage he told Mary that his happiness was half owing
to Farebrother, who gave him a strong pull-up at the right moment.
I cannot say that he was never again misled by his hopefulness:
the yield of crops or the profits of a cattle sale usually fell
below his estimate; and he was always prone to believe that he
could make money by the purchase of a horse which turned out badly--
though this, Mary observed, was of course the fault of the horse,
not of Fred's judgment. He kept his love of horsemanship, but he rarely
allowed himself a day's hunting; and when he did so, it was remarkable
that he submitted to be laughed at for cowardliness at the fences,
seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on the five-barred gate,
or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch.
There were three boys: Mary was not discontented that she brought
forth men-children only; and when Fred wished to have a girl like her,
she said, laughingly, "that would be too great a trial to your mother."
Mrs. Vincy in her declining years, and in the diminished lustre of
her housekeeping, was much comforted by her perception that two at least
of Fred's boys were real Vincys, and did not "feature the Garths."
But Mary secretly rejoiced that the youngest of the three was very
much what her father must have been when he wore a round jacket,
and showed a marvellous nicety of aim in playing at marbles,
or in throwing stones to bring down the mellow pears.
Ben and Letty Garth, who were uncle and aunt before they were well
in their teens, disputed much as to whether nephews or nieces were
more desirable; Ben contending that it was clear girls were good
for less than boys, else they would not be always in petticoats,
which showed how little they were meant for; whereupon Letty,
who argued much from books, got angry in replying that God made coats
of skins for both Adam and Eve alike--also it occurred to her that
in the East the men too wore petticoats. But this latter argument,
obscuring the majesty of the former, was one too many, for Ben
answered contemptuously, "The more spooneys they!" and immediately
appealed to his mother whether boys were not better than girls.
Mrs. Garth pronounced that both were alike naughty, but that boys
were undoubtedly stronger, could run faster, and throw with more
precision to a greater distance. With this oracular sentence Ben was
well satisfied, not minding the naughtiness; but Letty took it ill,
her feeling of superiority being stronger than her muscles.
Fred never became rich--his hopefulness had not led him to expect that;
but he gradually saved enough to become owner of the stock and furniture
at Stone Court, and the work which Mr. Garth put into his hands
carried him in plenty through those "bad times" which are always
present with farmers. Mary, in her matronly days, became as solid
in figure as her mother; but, unlike her, gave the boys little
formal teaching, so that Mrs. Garth was alarmed lest they should never
be well grounded in grammar and geography. Nevertheless, they were
found quite forward enough when they went to school; perhaps,
because they had liked nothing so well as being with their mother.
When Fred was riding home on winter evenings he had a pleasant
vision beforehand of the bright hearth in the wainscoted parlor,
and was sorry for other men who could not have Mary for their wife;
especially for Mr. Farebrother. "He was ten times worthier of you
than I was," Fred could now say to her, magnanimously. "To be sure
he was," Mary answered; "and for that reason he could do better
without me. But you--I shudder to think what you would have been--
a curate in debt for horse-hire and cambric pocket-handkerchiefs!"
On inquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still
inhabit Stone Court--that the creeping plants still cast the foam
of their blossoms over the fine stone-wall into the field where the
walnut-trees stand in stately row--and that on sunny days the two
lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen
in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth,
in the days of old Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered
to look out for Mr. Lydgate.
Lydgate's hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty,
leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance
on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, alternating,
according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place;
having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal
of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients,
but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he
once meant to do. His acquaintances thought him enviable to have
so charming a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion.
Rosamond never committed a second compromising indiscretion. She simply
continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment,
disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him
by stratagem. As the years went on he opposed her less and less,
whence Rosamond concluded that he had learned the value of her opinion;
on the other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents
now that he gained a good income, and instead of the threatened cage
in Bride Street provided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the
bird of paradise that she resembled. In brief, Lydgate was what is
called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria,
and Rosamond afterwards married an elderly and wealthy physician,
who took kindly to her four children. She made a very pretty show
with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke
of her happiness as "a reward"--she did not say for what, but probably
she meant that it was a reward for her patience with Tertius,
whose temper never became faultless, and to the last occasionally
let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs
he made of his repentance. He once called her his basil plant;
and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant
which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.
Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then
had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw,
whom he was always praising and placing above her. And thus
the conversation ended with the advantage on Rosamond's side.
But it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word
in depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance
the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of
her life.
Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women,
feeling that there was always something better which she might have done,
if she had only been better and known better. Still, she never
repented that she had given up position and fortune to marry
Will Ladislaw, and he would have held it the greatest shame as well
as sorrow to him if she had repented. They were bound to each other
by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.
No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled
with emotion, and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent
activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering
and marking out for herself. Will became an ardent public man,
working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young
hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days,
and getting at last returned to Parliament by a constituency
who paid his expenses. Dorothea could have liked nothing better,
since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick
of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help.
Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare
a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another,
and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.
But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought
rather to have done--not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further
than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married
Will Ladislaw.
But this opinion of his did not cause a lasting alienation; and the
way in which the family was made whole again was characteristic
of all concerned. Mr. Brooke could not resist the pleasure of
corresponding with Will and Dorothea; and one morning when his pen
had been remarkably fluent on the prospects of Municipal Reform,
it ran off into an invitation to the Grange, which, once written,
could not be done away with at less cost than the sacrifice
(hardly to be conceived) of the whole valuable letter.
During the months of this correspondence Mr. Brooke had continually,
in his talk with Sir James Chettam, been presupposing or hinting
that the intention of cutting off the entail was still maintained;
and the day on which his pen gave the daring invitation, he went
to Freshitt expressly to intimate that he had a stronger sense than
ever of the reasons for taking that energetic step as a precaution
against any mixture of low blood in the heir of the Brookes.
But that morning something exciting had happened at the Hall.
A letter had come to Celia which made her cry silently as she read it;
and when Sir James, unused to see her in tears, asked anxiously what
was the matter, she burst out in a wail such as he had never heard
from her before.
"Dorothea has a little boy. And you will not let me go and see her.
And I am sure she wants to see me. And she will not know what to do
with the baby--she will do wrong things with it. And they thought
she would die. It is very dreadful! Suppose it had been me and
little Arthur, and Dodo had been hindered from coming to see me!
I wish you would be less unkind, James!"
"Good heavens, Celia!" said Sir James, much wrought upon, "what do
you wish? I will do anything you like. I will take you to town
to-morrow if you wish it." And Celia did wish it.
It was after this that Mr. Brooke came, and meeting the Baronet
in the grounds, began to chat with him in ignorance of the news,
which Sir James for some reason did not care to tell him immediately.
But when the entail was touched on in the usual way, he said,
"My dear sir, it is not for me to dictate to you, but for my part I
would let that alone. I would let things remain as they are."
Mr. Brooke felt so much surprised that he did not at once find
out how much he was relieved by the sense that he was not expected
to do anything in particular.
Such being the bent of Celia's heart, it was inevitable that Sir James
should consent to a reconciliation with Dorothea and her husband.
Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
Sir James never liked Ladislaw, and Will always preferred to have Sir
James's company mixed with another kind: they were on a footing
of reciprocal tolerance which was made quite easy only when Dorothea
and Celia were present.
It became an understood thing that Mr. and Mrs. Ladislaw should pay
at least two visits during the year to the Grange, and there came
gradually a small row of cousins at Freshitt who enjoyed playing
with the two cousins Visiting Tipton as much as if the blood
of these cousins had been less dubiously mixed.
Mr. Brooke lived to a good old age, and his estate was inherited by
Dorothea's son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined,
thinking that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he
remained out of doors.
Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a mistake;
and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch,
where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl
who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in
little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry
his cousin--young enough to have been his son, with no property,
and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea
usually observed that she could not have been "a nice woman,"
else she would not have married either the one or the other.
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful.
They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling
amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great
feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is
so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.
A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming
a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her
heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial:
the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.
But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are
preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present
a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great
name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around
her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world
is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so
ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the
number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
The end of Project Gutenberg Etext of "Middlemarch"
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