Middlemarch

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

Aquinas’ 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

blondness 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