Middlemarch

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Title: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #145]
Last updated: November 27, 2019
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIDDLEMARCH ***
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Middlemarch
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.
Contents
PRELUDE.
BOOK I. MISS BROOKE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
BOOK III. WAITING FOR DEATH.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
BOOK IV. THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
BOOK V. THE DEAD HAND.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
BOOK VI. THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
BOOK VII. TWO TEMPTATIONS.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.
BOOK VIII. SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
CHAPTER LXXII.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXV.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
CHAPTER LXXX.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXXV.
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
FINALE.
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 gum 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 make 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.
1_st Gent_. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2_d 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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
“Sure_ly_, sure_ly_!”—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 Greek.
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 satisfied with having a
wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke
was certainly very naive with all 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 faces.
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. You don’t understand 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 design 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. Perhaps 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 succeeding 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.
1_st 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? . . .
2_d 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 casts 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 opening 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 eyes 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 to 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, Dorothea, 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 herself; 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 carry 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 are?” 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 air. “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 back 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 mind 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 towards
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, muffled, 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
sitting 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 do 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 repulsiveness 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 goûts_, 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 Middlemarch, 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.
1_st Gent_. How class your man?—as better than the most,
Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?
2_d 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 withstood. 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 medical 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 medical 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? I 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-namèd 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 came 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 Physicians, 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 all
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 Middlemarch 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 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
_tête-à-tête_, 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 cast 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, upright, 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 who 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 that 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, run 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. Farebrother
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 others for thinking slightly of him, and
could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.
“The world has been too 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.
“Schön, schön. 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 being
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 will 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 cognoscenti.”
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 one 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 câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumône,
Et tout en écoutant 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.
“Schön! 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, which 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 cases.
“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 dull, 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 course 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 have 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
cat.
“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 downstairs: 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;
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. “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 case 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 now
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 so 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 chin,
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 cast 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.
1_st Gent_. All times are good to seek your wedded home
Bringing a mutual delight.
2_d 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 into 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 stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost in his
ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in the
bookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books. The bright
fire of dry oak-boughs burning on the logs 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? I 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 but 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 ævo 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 featureless 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
to 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 délasser 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 backgammon 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: I
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 cases 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 himself, 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 of living.”
“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 _tête-à-tête_ 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
have 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 hours, 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 always 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.
“1_st Gent_. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws,
Carry no weight, no force.
2_d 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’héritiers une troupe affligée
Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongée,
Lire un long testament où pales, étonnés
On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez.
Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde
Je reviendrais, je crois, exprès de l’autre monde.”
—REGNARD: _Le Légataire 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_ covetous, 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 Featherstones 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.
’T is 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! 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 case, 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 can 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 ill-satisfied 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 suppose 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 cheques 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 of 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 track 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.
His 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 bad 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. But 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 course 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;
tôt 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 Keck—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 in 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 run 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
leveret. 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 hypo_crite_
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
companion 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 became 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 polite 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 case, 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 cast 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!” 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 have 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
Pills, 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 written 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 buy 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 he 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. Politics 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 she
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 his 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 ciò ch’ella mira:
Ov’ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,
E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.
Sicchè, 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
Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente;
Ond’è beato chi prima la vide.
Quel ch’ella par quand’ un poco sorride,
Non si può dicer, nè tener a mente,
Si è 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 have 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 always 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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, in 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 childhood 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
between 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, playfully.
“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 connoiss_ure_ 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.”
“_Im_mediately, 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 connoiss_ures_, 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 Will’s 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 connoiss_ure_, 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 munifi_cence_. 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 price 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 neighborhood. 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 to 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. But 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 without 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 pace, 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 Ken 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.
1_st Gent_. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
2_d 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 at 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 make 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 subject 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, but 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 case, 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? I 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 he 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. But 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 check 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 cast 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 pecking 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 hypo_crite_ 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. Dollop, 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 flat 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 Bulstrode, 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 course 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 be 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 cast. 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 fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de
la vanité 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 whole 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 continuing 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 beständig,
Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füssen,
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschliessen
_Zum höchsten 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 check; 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 old 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 would 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 LXXXV.
“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 cœur se sature d’amour comme d’un sel divin qui le conserve; de là
l’incorruptible adhérence de ceux qui se sont aimés dès l’aube de la
vie, et la fraîcheur des vielles amours prolongées. Il existe un
embaumement d’amour. C’est de Daphnis et Chloé que sont faits Philémon
et Baucis. Cette vieillesse-là, 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 cared 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
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