*B1 *C1 *Mm Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it. ˛The˛ ˛Maid's˛ ˛Tragedy˛: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER *M *L1 *X29 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 parlour, 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 *X30 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 ˛Pense-te´te˛ 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 ardour: 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 *X74 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. *C6 *X75 *Mm 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. *M *L1 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 lodgekeeper regarded her as an important personage, from the low curtsey which was dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton. "Well, Mrs Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?" said the high-coloured, 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." "O 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 *X76 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 labourers 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 neighbourliness 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 socialy uniting. Mr Brooke, seeing Mrs Cadwallader's merits from a different point of view, winced a litle 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 politics, 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 *X77 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 youself, 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 -- *X78 ˛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 signboard." # 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 quarrelles with his oldest neighbours? Who could taste the fine flavour in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like a 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 *X79 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." "O 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." *X80 "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 strategem, 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 by, 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 whih 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 *X81 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 litle 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] Heis no better than a mummy]" (The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.) *X82 "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-bye]" 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 math that she liked to think she had a hand in was frustrated, should *X83 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 colour. 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. Cadwallder's matchmaking 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 humours of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal, -- there were topics of which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduuced them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more because she believed as unquestioningly 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 *X84 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 honour 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 *X85 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 Broke, there could not have been a more skilful move toward 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 *Mm Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff, Not to be come at by the willing hand. *M 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 *X86 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. *C7 *X87 *Mm ˛Piacer˛ ˛e˛ ˛popone˛ ˛Vuol˛ ˛la˛ ˛sua˛ ˛stagione˛. -- ˛Italian˛ ˛Proverb˛ *M *L1 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 labour 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, so 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 *X88 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 naiµve 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 *X89 hour together, like a schooolmaster 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 circunstances. 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, mathamatics, 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 alwyas 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 *X90 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 is 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 *X91 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. *C8 *X92 *Mm Oh, rescue her] I am her brother now, And you her father. Every gentle maid Should have a guardian in each gentleman. *M *L1 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 perhpas 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 land-holder and clergyman in the county -- a significant fact which was in agreement with the amiable expression of their faces. *X93 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-humour 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 litle 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 arrangements 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, afterr 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 *X94 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 not 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 arm-holes 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,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, colouring. "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 honour, it *X95 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, *X96 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 wouuld 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 *X97 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 conpanionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess. *C9 *X98 *Mm ˛lst˛ ˛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?... ˛2nd˛ ˛Gent˛. Why, where they lay of old -- in human souls. *M +L1 MR CASAUBON's behaviour about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtships. 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 grey 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, *X99 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, Fir 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 thinkgs which had common-sense in them, and not about learning] Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weather-worn 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 colours 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 parinfully 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 wife-hood, 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. *X100 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 favour 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." "O Dodo," said Celia, "will you not have the bow-windowed room upstairs?" 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 book-case 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 *X101 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 favourably 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 grey 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 grey, 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, gillyflowers, 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 *X102 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 sketchbook. 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 and 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, where the curate had probably no pretty 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 *X103 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." *X104 "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 younger 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 grey 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, colouring, 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 coloured sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool. *X105 "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 A+Eolian 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 *X106 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 *X107 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 favourable 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, *X108 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 becomes less afraid of "saying things" to Dorothea since this engagement; cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever. *C10 *X109 *Mm He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed. FULLER *M *L1 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 circumstances 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 *X110 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 neighbouring clergyman's alleged greatness of soul, of 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 unfavourable 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 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 labours; 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 *X111 held sublime for our neighbour to expect the utmost there, howeverer 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 honoured; 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 *X112 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 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 neighbourhood 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 *X113 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 that Mr Casaubon? Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea's joyous grateful expectation was unbroken, and however her lover might occasionallly 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 coloured 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 toward 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, *X114 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-grey 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' *X115 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." *X116 "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 honour 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 suplement 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 *X117 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 about 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 Northmberland, 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 *X118 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 toilette 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 ˛prote-te´te˛ was one of Rosamond's objects in coming to Stone Court. Old Featherstone would not begin the dialogue till the door had been closed. He continued to look at Fred with the same twinkle and with one of his habitual grimaces, alternately screwing and widening his mouth; and when he spoke, it was in a low tone, which might be taken for that of an informer ready to be bought off, rather than for the tone of an offended senior. He was not a man to feel any strong moral indignation even on account of trespasses against himself. It was natural that others should want to get an advantage over him, but then, he was a little too cunning for them. "So, sir, you've been paying ten per cent. for money which you've promised to pay off by mortgaging my land when I'm dead and gone, eh? You put my life at a twelvemonth, say. But I can alter my will yet." Fred blushed. He had not borrowed money in that way, for excellent reasons. But he was conscious of having spoken with some confidence (perhaps with more than he exactly remembered) about his prospect of getting Featherstone's land as a future means of paying present debts. "I don't know what you refer to, sir. I have certainly never borrowed any money on such an insecurity. Please to explain." *X137 "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 contradiciting 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] your 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 pecular 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 *X138 instant, and then added, in politic appeal to his uncle's vanity, "That is hardly a thing for a gentlman 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 coloured 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 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 *X139 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-flows and the weathercock, 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 toilette-table near the window while Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of her fingertips to her hair -- hair of infantile 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 *X140 world, and some called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contary, 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 a 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 flavour 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 humour 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?" *X141 "I? Oh, minding the house -- pouring out syrup -- pretending to be amiable and contended -- 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 manganimous 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 *X142 cambric pocket handerchief. 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˛ ˛gou'&ts˛, 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." *X143 "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 favourite 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 *X144 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 behaviour: 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. *X145 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 *X146 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 humour 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 magnificient. 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 *X147 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 plainy 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." *X148 "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. *B2 OLD AND YOUNG *C13 *X151 *Mm ˛lst˛ ˛Gent˛. How class your man? -- as better than the most, Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak? As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite? ˛2nd˛ ˛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. *M *L1 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 Mrs 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 grey-besprinkled brown hair, light-grey 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 candour 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 *X152 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 unfavourable 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 Ludgate. "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 *X153 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 favour 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 without our reach. I have consulted eminent men in the metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardness under which medical treatment labours 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 nor more notion than the man in the moon." Mr Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form *X154 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 interets 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 *X155 I may ask of you is, that in virtue of the co-operation 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 case 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 favour. 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." *X156 "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 humoured.) "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 som. 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 our 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 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: *X157 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 saw that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and inconsistent folly." "Very well," said Mr Vincy, kicking spite of resolutions, "I never profess 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 not 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 honour 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 be it would be a poor sort of religion to put *X158 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, *X159 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 neighbours. 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 of 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 greatcoat, 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 *X160 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 litle, 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 tomorrow." *C14 *X161 *Mm 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˛. *M *L1 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˛ *X162 ˛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 belive a thing because Bulstrode writes it out fine, eh?" Fred coloured. "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 humours 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 favour to one person by being especially disagreeable to another, and Mary was *X163 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-clothres. "You expect I'm 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 hand 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 prssented 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 eyeing 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? *X164 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 ˛is˛ 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 youself, able to throw away any amount of money on buying bad bargains." "Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now. Eighty pounds 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. *X165 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 Bulstrokde'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." *X166 Mary did not mean to betray a 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 him 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 undercurrent of laughter pleasant to hear. "I don' 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, but 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." *X167 "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 mantelpiece. "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 poeple, you are good to me." "Because I like you better than any one else. But I know you despise me." "Yes, I do -- a litle," 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 sate laughingly. He was certainly an affectionate fellow, and as he had grown from boy *X168 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 their 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 *X169 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 supose. 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. Do 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. *C15 *X170 *Mm 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-name>d Nature] *M *L1 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 arm-chair 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 probably that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrothouse. I at least have so much to do in unravelling 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 *X171 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 neighbours' 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 an "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 than 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 *X172 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 rare 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 we 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 intelectual 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 grey-paper backs and dingy-labels -- the volumes *X173 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 heading 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 "makdon 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 *X174 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 ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour 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 carred 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 this 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 *X175 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-rarified 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 meantime 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 neighbours 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 *X176 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, *X177 when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about l829 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 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, fundamentaly 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 sumptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of l829, 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, *X178 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 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 gentlmen 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 litle spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched *X179 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 makred 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 intentions 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 ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his teling) 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 *X180 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 acress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak to. She was a Provenc´ale, 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 Provenc´ale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were demanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time. *X181 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 innocnece, 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 an interview 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 re-opening 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 *X182 foibles. No matter] It was the one thing which he was resolved to do. He had two selves within him appparently, 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 *X183 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 galvinism 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 scinetific 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 grey-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 instumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably. *C16 *X184 *Mm All that in woman is adored In they fair self I find -- For the whole sex can but afford The handsome and the kind SIR CHARLES SEDLEY *M *L1 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 churchgoing; he would defend Mrs Strype the washerwoman against Stubb'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 neighbours' 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 *X185 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 weight 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 freedome 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 responsiblity 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 gentlmen 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 Spragye, who was considered the physician of most "weight", though Dr Minchin was usually said to have more *X186 "penetration", divested his large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wineglass 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 depreciated. 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 profesion, 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, judically. "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 favour 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 not better than an old woman at a ˛post-mortem˛ examination. How is he to know the action of a poison? *X187 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 ˛te´te-a>-te´te˛, 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 too volatile pink strings floating from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children, were certainly among the great attractions of the Vincy house -- attractions which made it all the easier to fall in *X188 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 neighbours." # 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 infantile 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. *X189 "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 naiµve 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 neighbours. 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 coulld 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." *X190 "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 unfavourable: 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 the 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 *X191 to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most country 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 grey 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 promist 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 he soon 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-humour, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for passing the time without any labour 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 fell 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. *X192 "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 reched 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 talk 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 very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may have his good reaons." 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." *X193 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 labour 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 *X194 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 bulgar 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, an 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 after-glow 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 stuipd 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 neighbours. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one *X195 can have the exclusive scientific life that outches 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 agreeable enough, and as he tok 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 ardour 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 of 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 *X196 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 litle 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, behaviour, 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 protraits 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 favourite 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 *X197 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. *C17 *X198 *Mm The clerkly person smiled and said, Promise was a pretty maid, But being poor she died unwed. *M *L1 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 seventh; 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 *X199 trifle milder and more silent, the chief talker being his mother, while he only put in a good-humoured 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 tea-cup 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 reasons 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; *X200 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 argument, 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." *X201 "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 Ludgate, "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 usualy 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. *X202 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˛ ˛brassica+e˛, 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 on the Book of Proverbs with the results of modern research. You don't mind my fumigating you?" Lydgate was more surprised at the opennness 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 *X203 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 freedome 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 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 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 eyeing that glass vase again. Do you want to make an exchange? You shall not have it without a fair barter." *X204 "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 humouring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humour?" 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 youself 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 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 wearning 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 quietyly." *X205 "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, 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 favourite 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 his 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 *X206 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 neighbours uncomfortable than to make them better. Their sustem is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcase 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. Your 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." *C18 *X207 *Mm 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. *M *L1 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 newcomer 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 *X208 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 likeable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavours which make half of us an afflication 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 *X209 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 to play, and winning money at it had always seemed a meannness 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. *X210 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 realy be his own convenience? Other people would say so, and would allege that he was currying favour 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 bankers 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 purpose, would find himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of which *X211 was repugnant to him. In his student's chambers, he had pre-arranged 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 neighbours call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions of texture which were also held favourable to the storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with thereputation 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 *X212 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 twon 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 *X213 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 ironmonger 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 diplacing the gentleman who has always discharged the function of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested to him by parites *X214 whose disposition it is to regard evey institution of this town as a machinery for carrying out their own views? I tax no man's motives: let them life 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 division in the Church and..." "Oh, damn the division]" 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." *X215 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 to 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 country. "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 Broke 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 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 *X216 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 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 not 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 meantime Mr Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter. "I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present," said *X217 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 practicaly 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 *X218 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 txe distaff, and at last wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one goood 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. *C19 *X219 *Mm ˛L'altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia˛ ˛Della sua palma, sospirando, letto˛. ˛Purgatorio˛, vii *M *L1 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 mangificent 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 *X220 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 grey 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 mangificent 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 fort of relation." *X221 "He is not my uncle. I tell you he is my second cousin," said Ladislaw, with some irritation. "˛Schoµn˛, ˛schoµn˛. 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-humour in his tone. "See now] My existence pre-supposes 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 is put 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 -- logicaly." Will could not resist this imperturbable *X222 temper, and the cloud in his face broke into sunshiny laughter. "Come now, my friend -- you will help?" said Naumann, in ain 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 fell that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured 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? *X223 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. *C20 *X224 *Mm 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. *M *L1 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 faulty 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 processing 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 *X225 view, had been shown the greatest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she 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 degneracy 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. *X226 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 busines. 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 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 minutia+e 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 *X227 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 ciritical 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? O 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 soom 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 favourite 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 *X228 in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms 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 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 or repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judicious Hooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr Casuabon'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 *X229 had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge. When he said, "Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it," -- it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, "Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescoes designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit." "But do you care about them?" was always Dorothea's question. # "They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome. He is the painter who has ben held to combine the most complete grace of form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of cognoscenti." This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew more about then the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy. On other subjects indeed Mr Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of enthusiasm, and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she dragged him away from it. But she was gradually ceasing to expect with her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening where she followed him. Poor Mr Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitted dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists' ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labours. *X230 With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight. These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr Casaubon, might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling -- if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection -- or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love. That was Dorothea's bent. With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr Casaubon's coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made his clerical toilette with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter. And by a sad contradiction Dorothea's ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating and lost in the warm floood of which they had been but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea] she was certainly troublesome -- to herself chiefly; but this morning for the first time she had been troublesome to Mr Casaubon. *X231 She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face all cheerful attention to her husband when he said, "My dear Dorothea, we much now think of all that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to our departure. I would fain have returned home earlier that we might have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my inquiries here have been protracted beyond their anticipated period. I trust, however, that the time here has not been passed unpleasantly to you. Among the sights of Europe, that of Rome has ever been held one of the most striking and in some respects edifying. I well remember that I considered it an epoch in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has been applied -- ""See Rome and die"": but in your case I would propose an emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live thenceforth as a happy wife." Mr Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and concluding with a smile. He had not found marriage a rapturous state, but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved to be. "I hope you are thorougly satisfied with our stay -- I mean, with the result so far as your studies are concerned," said Dorothea, trying to keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband. "Yes," said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative. "I have been led farther than I had foreseen, and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which, though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit. The task, notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from that too continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study which has been the snare of my solitary life." "I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you," said Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed that Mr Casaubon's mind had gone too *X232 deep during the day to be able to get to the surface again. I fear there was a little temper in her reply. "I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more into what interests you." "Doubtless, my dear," said Mr Casaubon, with a slight bow. "The notes I have here made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract them under my direction." "And all your notes," said Dorothea, whose heart had already burned within her on this subject so that now she could not help speaking with her tongue. "All those rows of volumes -- will you not now do what you used to speak of? -- will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use." Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly-feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full of tears. The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly diturbing to Mr Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea's words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. In Mr Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions -- how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness] And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife -- nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen scratches and amplitude of paper with theee uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everyting with a malign power *X233 of inference. Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagein more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism, -- that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them. For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr Casaubon face had a quick angry flush upon it. "My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other. And it were well if all such could be admonished to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter lies entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may be compassed by a narrow and superficial survey." This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual with Mr Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the ill-appreciated or desponding author. Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing everything in her except the desire to enter into some fellowship with her husband's chief interests? "My judgment ˛was˛ a very superficial one -- such as I am capable of forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no rehearsal. "You showed me the rows of notebooks -- you have often spoken of them -- you have often said that they wanted digesting. But I never heard you speak of the writing that is to be published. Those were very simple facts, and my *X234 judgment went no farther. I only begged you to let me be of some good to you." Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr Casaubon made no reply, taking up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it. Both were shocked at their mutual situation -- that each should have betrayed anger towards the other. If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbours, the clash would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively, and placed yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactorytory fulfilment even to the toughest minds. To Dorothea's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr Casaubon it was a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a more substantial presence? Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. have reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been a show of persistent anger which Dorothea's conscience shrank from, seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty. However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness. So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what was around her. She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would drive anywhere. It was when Mr Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann had first seen her, and he had *X235 entered the long gallery of sculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw, with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues, where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstractio which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads: and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow -- the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency. *C21 *X236 *Mm Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain, No contrefeted termes had she To semen wise. CHAUCER *M *L1 IT was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was securely alone. But she was presently roused by a knock at the door, which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in." Tantripp had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the lobby. The courier had told him that only Mrs Casaubon was at home, but he said he was a relation of Mr Casaubon's: would she see him? "Yes," said Dorothea, without pause; "show him into the salon." Her chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr Casaubon's generosity towards him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about his career. She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent -- to remind her of her husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds. She waited a minute or two, but when she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than usual. She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of goodwill which is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him. He was the elder by several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for his transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his male companion, while Dorothea became all the calmer with a wondering desire to put him at ease. "I was not aware that you and Mr Casaubon were in Rome, until this morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum," he said. "I knew you at once -- but -- I mean, that I concluded Mr Casaubon's address would be found at the Poste Restante, and *X237 I was anxious to pay my respects to him and you as early as possible." "Pray sit down. He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of you, I am sure," said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron. The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking. "Mr Casaubon is much engaged; but you will leave your address -- will you not? -- and he will write to you." "You are very good," said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had altered her face. "My address is on my card. But if you will allow me I will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr Casaubon is likely to be at home." "He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can hardly see him except by appointment. Especially now. We are about to leave Rome, and he is very busy. He is usually away almost from breakfast till dinner. But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us." Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments. He had never been fond of Mr Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat or erudition. But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamger, having first got this adoable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) -- this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective. For an instant he felt that the struggle was causing a queer contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile. Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from her face too. Will Ladislaw's smile was delightful, unless you were angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent sking as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel *X238 were touching them with a new charm, and banishing for ever the traces of moodiness. The reflection of that smile could not but have a little merriment in it too, even under dark eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, "Something amuses you?" "Yes," said Will, quick in finding resources. "I am thinking of the sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my poor sketch with your criticism." "My criticism?" said Dorothea, wondering still more. "Surely not. I always feel particularly ignorant about painting." "I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what was most cutting. You said -- I daresay you don't remember it as I do -- that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you. At least, you implied that." Will could laugh now as well as smile. "That was really my ignorance," said Dorothea, admiring Will's good humour. "I must have said so only because I never could see any beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought very fine. And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome. There are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy. At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescoes, or with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe -- like a child present at great ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself in the presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine the pictures one by one, the life goes out of them, or else is something violent and strange to me. It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that is is fine -- something like being blind, while people talk of the sky." "Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be acquired," said Will. (It was impossible now to doubt the directness of Dorothea's confession.) "Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing. I enjoy the art of all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to pieces I should find it *X239 made up of many different threads. There is something in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the process." "You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Dorothea, with a new direction of interest. "You mean to make painting your profession. Mr Casaubon will like to hear that you have chosen a profession." "No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness. "I have quite made up my mind against it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been seeing a great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with one of them. Some are fine, even brilliant fellows -- but I should not like to get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the studio point of view." "That I can understand," said Dorothea, cordially. "And in Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures. But if you have a genius for painting, would it not be right to take that as a guide? Perhaps you might do better things than these -- or different, so that there might not be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place." There was no mistaking this simplcity, and Will was won by it into frankness. "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that sort. I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it worth while. And I should never succeed in anything by dint of drudgery. If things don't come easily to me I never get them." "I have heard Mr Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience," said Dorothea, gently. She was rather shocked at this mode of taking all life as a holiday. "Yes, I know Mr Casaubon's opinion. He and I differ." The slight streak of contempt in his hasty reply offended Dorothea. She was all the more susceptible about Mr Casaubon because of her morning's trouble. "Certainly you differ," she said, rather proudly. "I did not think of comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labour as Mr Casaubon's is not common." Will saw that she was ofended, but this only gave an additional impulse to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr Casaubon. It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be *X240 worshipping this busnbad: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband i question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder. "No, indeed," he answered promptly. "And therefore it is a pity that it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world. If Mr Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble." "I do not understand you," said Dorothea, startled and anxious. "I merely mean," said Will, in an offhand way, "that the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in the woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads. When I was with Mr Casaubon I saw that he deafened himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by a German. I was very sorry." Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which Dorothea would be wounded. Young Mr Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings. Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labour of her husband's life might be void, which left her no energy to spare for the question whether this young relative who was so much obliged to him ought not to have repressed his observation. She did not even speak, but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in the piteousness of that thought. Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather ashamed, imagining from Dorothea's silence that he had offended her still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the tail-feathers from a benefactor. "I regretted it especially," he resumed, taking the usual course from detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude and respect towards my cousin. It would not signify so much in a man whose talents and character were less distinguished." Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and said, in her saddest recitative, "How I wish I had *X241 learned German when I was at Lausanne] There were plenty of German teachers. But now I can be of no use." There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in Dorothea's last words. The question how she had come to accept Mr Casaubon -- which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances -- was not now to be answered on any such short and easy method. Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously. The A+Eolian harp again came into his mind. She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage. And if Mr Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet. But he was somthing more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a benefactor with collective society at his back, and he was at that moment entering the room in all the unimpeachable correctness of his demeanour, while Dorothea was looking animated with a newly aroused alarm and regret, and Will was looking animated with his admiring speculation about her feelings. Mr Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but he did not swerve from his usualy politeness of greeting, when Will rose and explained his presence. Mr Casaubon was less happy than usual, and this perhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the effect might easily have been produced by the contrast of his young cousin's appearance. The first impression on seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing expression. Surely, his very features changed their form; his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis. When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless. As Dorothea's eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she *X242 was perhaps not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the realities of his lot and not by her own dreams. Yet it was a source of greater freedom to her that Will was there; his young equality was agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction. She felt an immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen any one who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand everything. Mr Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as well as pleasantly in Rome -- had thought his intention was to remain in South Germany -- but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he would converse more at large: at presnt he was somewhat weary. Ladislaw understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave. Dorothea's eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head and looked on the floor. A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she seated herself beside him, and said, "Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning. I was wrong. I fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome." # "I am glad that you feel that, my dear," said Mr Casaubon. He spoke quietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy feeling in his eyes as he looked at her. "But do you forigve me?" said Dorothea, with a quick sob. her need for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault. Would not love see retruning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it? "My dear Dorothea -- ""who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of neaven nor earth"". -- you do not think me worthy to be banished by that severe sentence," said Mr Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strong statement, and also to smile faintly. Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would insist on falling. "You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant consequences of too much mental disturbance," said Mr Casaubon. In fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have received young Ladislaw in his absence; *X243 but he abstained, partly from the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in other directions. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism. "I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch. They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what had passed on this day. But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own. We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emergy from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling -- an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects -- that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. *C22 *X244 *Mm ˛Nous causa´mes longtemps; elle ere˛ he met Mr Casaubon, and that gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure. "I have something to tell you about our cousin, Mr Ladislaw, which I think will heighten your opinion of him," said Dorothea to her husband in the course of the evening. She had mentioned immediately on his entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr Casaubon had said, "I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I believe," saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish for a further remark upon it. So Dorothea had waited. "What is that, my love?" said Mr Casaubon (he always said "my love", when his manner was the coldest). "He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up his dependence on your generosity. He means soon to go back to England, and work his own way. I thought you would consider that a good sign," said Dorothea, with an appealing look into her husband's neutral face. "Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would addict himself?" "No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him in your generosity. Of course he will write to you about it. Do you not think better of him for his resolve?" "I shall await his communication on the subject," said Mr Casaubon. "I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did for him was his own welfare. I remembered your goodness *X258 in what you said about him when I first saw him at Lowick, said Dorothea, putting her hand on her husband's. "I had a duty towards him," said Mr Casaubon, laying his other hand on Dorothea's in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance which he could not hinder from being uneasy. "The young man, I confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated." Dorothea did not mention Will again. WAITING FOR DEATH *C23 *X261 *M "Your horses of the Sun," he said, "And first-rate whip Apollo] Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head, But I will beat them hollow." *M *L1 FRED VINCY, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant- hearted young gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate. The creditor was Mr Bambridge, a horse-dealer of the neighbourhood, whose company was much sought in Middlemarch by young men understood to be "addicted to pleasure". During the vacations Fred had naturally required more amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr Bambridge had been accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at Billiards. The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds. Bambridge was in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Vincy had backers; but he had required something to show for it, and Fred had at first given a bill with his own signature. Three months later he had renewed this bill with the signature of Caleb Garth. On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent withour good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing. Fred felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of "swapping" he should *X262 gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a hundred at any moment -- "judgment" being always equivalent to an unspecified sum in hard cash. And in any case, even supposing negations which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fred had always (at that time) his father's pocket as a last resource, so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. Of what might be the capacity of his father's pocket. Fred had only a vague notion: was not trade elastic? And would not the deficiencies of one year be made up for by the surplus of another? The Vincys lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that their father might pay for anything if he would. Mr Vincy himself had expensive Middlemarch habits -- spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question of payment. But it was in the nature of fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors. He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty that it was transient; but in the meantime it was disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun; for Fred was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety's sake. The easier course, plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend's signature. Why not? With the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why he should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman. With a favour to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offences, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged *X263 being as communicable as other warmth. Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened that Fred checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position -- wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck under" in any sort of way -- was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature. And Fred winced under the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at once the poorest and the kindest -- namely, Caleb Garth. The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and Rosamond were litle ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight connection between the two families through Mr Featherstone's double marriage (the first to Mr Garth's sister, and the second to Mrs Vincy's) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the children rather than the parents the children drank tea together out of their toy tea-cups and spent whole days together in play. Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella. Through all the stages of his education he had kept his affection for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as a second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his family had long ceased. Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically. Since then Mr Garth had failed in the building business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and *X264 had been living narrowly, exerting himelf to the utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound. He had now achieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his honourable exertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service. Mrs Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs Garth, and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread -- meaning that Mrs Garth had been a teacher before her marriage; in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's ˛Questions˛ was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better off needed that sort of thing. And since Mary had been keeping Mr Featherstone's house, Mrs Vincy's want of liking for the Garths had been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents "lived in such a small way". Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing ardour of his affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her. Mr Garth had a small office in the twon, and to this Fred went with his request. He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount of painful experience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth cautious about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had not proved thsemselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of Fred, was "sure the lad would turn out well -- an open affectionate fellow, with a good bottom to his character -- you might trust him for anything". Such was Caleb's psychological argument. He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others. He had a certain shame about his neighbours' errors, and never spoke of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind from the best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order to preconceive those errors. If he had to blame any one, it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his pocket, *X265 before he could begin; and he would rather do other men's work than find fault with their doing. I fear he was a bad disciplinarian. # When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favourite's clear eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details for once -- you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth), and said in a comfortable tone -- "It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse's knees? And then, these exchanges, they don't answer when you have "cute jockies" to deal with. You'll be wiser another time, my boy." Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for whatever he did in the way of business he did well. He contemplated the large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fred, said "Good-bye," and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir James Chettam's new farm-buildings. Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb was more conscious, Mrs Garth remained ignorant of the affair. Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred's sky, which latered his view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone's present of money was of importance *X266 enough to make his colour come and go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a proportionate disappointment. His failure in passing his examination had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home. Mr Vincy had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with, Fred should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never yet quite recovered his good-humoured tone to his son, who had especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not "go on with that". Fred was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr Featherstone's heir; that old gentlman's pride in him, and apparent fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct -- just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips. In fact, tacit expectations of what would be done for him by Uncle Featherstone determined the angle at which most people viewed Fred Vincy in Middlemarch; and in his own consciousnes, what Uncle Featherstone would do for him in an emergency or what he would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable depth of aeµrial perspective. But that present of bank-notes, once made, was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt, showed a deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fred's "judgment" or by luckiin some other shape. For that little episode of the alleged borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting the Bulstrode certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for money towards meeting his actual debt. Fred was keen enought to foresee that anger would cofuse distinctions, and that his denial of having borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle's will would be taken as a falsehood. He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity. Now Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs; he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace *X267 at what he called Rosamond's fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he would even incur some trouble and self-restraint. It was under strong inward pressure of this kind that Fred had taken the wise step of depositing the eighty pounds with his mother. It was a pity that he had not at once given them to Mr Garth; but he meant to make the sume complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had kept twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which, planted by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than threefold -- a very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young gentleman's infinite soul, with all the numverals at command. Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it. Hopefulness has a pleasure in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as possible a share in the stake. Fred liked play, especially billiards, as he liked hunting or riding a steeplechase; and he only liked it the better because he wanted money and hoped to win. But the twenty pounds' worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green plot -- all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the roadside -- and Fred found himself close upon the term of payment with no money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with his mother. The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Featherstone: his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr Vincy's own habits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who was rather exasperating. This horse, then, was Fred's property, and in his anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a possession without *X268 which life would certainly be worth little. He made the resolution with a sense of heroism -- heroism forced on him by the dread of breaking his word to Mr Garth, by his love for Mary and awe of her opinion. He would start for Houndsley horsefair which was to be held the next morning, and -- simply sell his horse, bringing back the money by coach? -- Well, the horse would hardly fetch more than thirty pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen: it would be folly to balk himself of luck beforehand. It was a hundred to one that some good chance would fall in his way: the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemed that he should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he should not equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down. He would ride to Houndsley with Bambridge and with Horrock "the vet", and without asking them anything expressly, he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion. Before he set out, Fred got the eighty pounds from his mother. Most of those who saysaw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair, thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a gay young fellow. Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for the sustaining power *X269 of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit of these things was "gay". In Mr Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim, which took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin, seeming to follow his nat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humour -- too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust, -- and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate enough to know it, would be ˛the˛ thing and no other. It is a physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses. Mr Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock, turned sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it had been. The part thus played in dialogue by Mr Horrock was terribly effective. A mixture of passions was excited in Fred -- a mad desire to thrash Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that Horrock might say something quite invaluable at the right moment. Mr Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being "given to indulgence" -- chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green baytree. *X270 But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune, "Drops of brandy", gave you after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a slight infusion of Mr Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even among blacklegs, but the minute retentiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his hearers by solmenly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short, Mr Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion. Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent critics. It was not Mr Bambrige's weakness to be a gratuitous flatterer. He had never before been so much struck with the fact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it. "You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me, Vincy] Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that chestnut, and you gave him for this brute. If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said, ""Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in wind-instruments."" That was what I said. It went the round of the country, that joke did. But, what the hell] the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours." "Why, you said just now his was worse than mine," said Fred, more irritable than usual. *X271 "I said a lie, then," said Mr Bambridge, emphaticaly. "there wasn't a penny to choose between 'em." Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way. When they slcakened again, Mr Bambridge said -- "Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours." "I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know," said Fred, who required all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; "I say, his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?" Mr Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he had been a portrait by a great master. Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on reflection he saw that Bambridge's depreciation and Horrock's silence were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better of the horse than they chose to say. That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought he saw a favourable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in bringing with him his eighty pounds. A young farmer, acquainted with Mr Bambridge, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond, implying that it was a public character. For himself he only wanted a useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and to give up hunting. The hunter was in a friend's stable at some little distance; there was still time for gentlemen to see it before dark. The friend's stable had to be reached through a back street where you might as easily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim street of that unsanitary period. Fred was not fortified against disgust by brandy, as his companions were, but the hope of having at last seen the horse that would enable him to make money was exhilarating enough to lead him over the same ground again the first thing in the morning. He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress of circumstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond in a away that he never would have done (the horse being a friend's) if he had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal -- even Horrock -- was evidently *X272 impressed with its merit. To get all the advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally. The colour of the horse was a dappled grey, and Fred happened to know that Lord Medlicote's man was on the look-out for just such a horse. After all his running down, Bambridge let it out in the course of the evening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go for eighty pounds. Of course he contradicted himself twenty times over, but when you know what is likely to be true you can test a man's admissions. And Fred could not but reckon his own judgment of a horse was worth something. The farmer had paused over Fred's respectable though broken-winded steed long enough to show that he thought it worth consideration, and it seemed probable that he would take it, with five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond. In that case Fred, when he had parted with his new horse for at least eighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction, and would have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the bill; so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr Farth would at the utmost be twenty-five pounds. By the time he was hurrying on his clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance of not losing this rare chance, that if Bambridge and Horrock had both dissuaded him, he would not have been deluded into a direct interpretation of their purpose: he would have been aware that those deep hands held something else than a young fellow's interest. With regard to horses, distrust was your only clue. But scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another. Fredbelieved in the excellence of his bargain, and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the dappled grey, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in addition -- only five pounds more than he had expected to give. But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate, and without waiting for the further gaieties of the horsefair, he set out alone on his fourteen miles' journey, meaning to take it very quietly and keep his horse fresh. *C24 *X273 *M The offender's sorrow brings but small relief To him who wears the strong offence's cross. SHAKESPEARE: ˛Sonnets˛ *M *L1 I AM sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in his life before. Not that he had been disappointted as to the possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be concluded with Lord Medlicote's man, this Diamond, in which hope to the amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severly by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after marriage -- which of course old companions were aware of before the ceremony. For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual elasticity under this troke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be presented in five days. Evev if he had applied to his father on the plea that Mr Garth should be saved from loss, Fred felt smartingly that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr Garth from the consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit. He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to go straight to Mr Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him the fifty pounds, and getting that suem at least safely out of his own hands. His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater. He took his father's nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr Garth, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary. In fact, it is *X274 probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her, his conscience would have been much less active both in previoulsy urging the debt on his thought and in impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as directly and simply as he could. Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. "The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character. Mr Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house, which was a little way outside the town -- a homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farmhouse, but was now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen. We get the fonder of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends have. The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from which all the best furniture had long been sold. Fred liked it too, knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt hh smelt deliciously of apples and quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he should probably have to make his confession before Mrs Garth, of whom he was rather more in awe than of her husband. Not that she was inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Mary was. In her present matronly age at least, Mrs Garth never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth, and learned self-control. She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her husband's virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children's frilling, and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears of her *X275 feminine neighbours concerning Mr Garth's want of prudence and the sums he might have had if he had been like other men. Hence these fair neighbours thought her either proud or eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as "your fine Mrs Garth". She was not without her criticism of them in return, being more accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch, and -- where is the blameless woman? -- apt to be a little severe towards her own sex, which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate. On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural. Also, it must be admitted that Mrs Garth was a trifle too emphatic in her resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings. She had sometimes taken pupils in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders "without looking", -- that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone -- that, in short, she might possess "education" and other good things ending in "tion", and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll. When she made remarks to this edifying effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto. Certainly, the exemplary Mrs Garth had her droll aspects, but her character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavour of skin. Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have excused Mary for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex. But this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it the harder to Fred that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion. And the *X276 circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more unpleasant than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early to look at some repairs not far off. Mrs Garth at certain hours was always in the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations at once there -- making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite to her at the table with their books and slates before them. A tub and clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also going on. Mrs Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry -- applying her rolling pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervour what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or signifying many", was a sight agreeably amusing. She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin, a solid matronly figure, and a remarkable firmness of glance. In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm. Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry -- the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy -- "Such as I am, she will shortly be." "Now let us go through that once more," said Mrs Garth, pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson. " ""Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea"" -- tell me again what that means, Ben". (Mrs Garth, like more celebrated educators,had her favourite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her "Lindley Murray" above the waves.) "Oh -- it means -- you must think what you mean," said Ben, rather peevishly. "I hate grammar. What's the use of it?" "To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can *X277 be understood," said Mrs Garth, with severe precision. "should you like to speak as old Job does?" "Yes," said Ben, stoutly; "it's funnier. He says, ""Yo goo"" -- that's just as good as ""You go""." "But he says, ""A ship's in the garden"", instead of ""a sheep""," said Letty, with an air of superiority. "You might think he meant a ship off the sea." "No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly," said Ben. "How could a ship off the sea come there?" "These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of grammar," said Mrs Garth. "That apple peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pastry. Job has only to speak about very plain things. How do you think you would write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of grammar than he does? You would use wrong words, and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person. What would you do then?" "I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense that this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned. "I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs Garth, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clotheshorse, and said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about Cincinnatus." "I know] he was a farmer," said Ben. "Now, Ben, he was a Roman -- let ˛me˛ tell," said Letty, using her elbow contentiously. "You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing". # "Yes, but before that -- that didn't come first -- people wanted him," said Letty. "Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first," insisted Ben. "He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his advice. And he was a brave man, and could fight. And so could my father -- couldn't he, mother?" "Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us," said Letty, frowning. "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak." *X278 "Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the caps from the tub. "When your brother began, you ought to have waited to see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows] Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been story to see his daughter behave so." (Mrs Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) "Now, Ben." "Well -- oh -- well -- why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were all blockheads, and -- I can't tell it just how you told it -- but they wanted a man to be captain and king and everything --" "Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish to make her mother repent. "Very well, dictator]" said Ben, contemptuously. "But that isn't a good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates." "Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs Garth, carefully serious. "Hark, there is a knock at the door] Run, Letty, and open it." The knock was Fred's; and when Letty said that her father was not in yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative. He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs Garth in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there. He put his arm round Letty's neck silently, and led her into the kitchen without his usual jokes and caresses. Mrs Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise was not a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly continuing her work -- "You, Fred, so early in the day? You look quite pale. Has anything happened?" "I want to speak to Mr Garth," said Fred, not yet ready to say more -- "and to you also," he added, after a little pause, for he had no doubt that Mrs Garth knew everything about the bill, and he must in the end speak of it before her, if not to her solely. "Caleb will be in again in a few minutes," said Mrs Garth, who imagined some trouble between Fred and his father. "He is sure not to be long, because he has some work at his desk that must *X279 be done this morning. Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?" "But we needn't go on about Cincinnatus, need we?" said Ben, who had taken Fred's whip out of his hand, and was trying its efficiency on the cat. "No, go out now. But put that whip down. How very mean of you to whip poor old Tortoise] Pray take the whip from him, Fred." "Come, old boy, give it me," said Fred, putting out his hand. "Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up the whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it. "Not to-day -- another time. I am not riding my own horse." "Shall you see Mary to-day?" "Yes, I think so," said Fred, with an unpleasant twinge. "Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun." "Enough, enough, Ben] run away," said Mrs Garth, seeing that Fred was teased. "Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs Garth?" said Fred, when the children were gone and it was needful to say something that would pass the time. He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr Garth, or use any good opportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs Garth herself, give her the money and ride away. "One -- only one. Fanny Hackbutt comes at half-past eleven. I am not getting a great income now," said Mrs Garth, smiling. "I am at a low ebb with pupils. But I have saved my little purse for Alfred's premium: I have ninety-two pounds. He can go to Mr Harmmer's now; he is just at the right age." This did not lead well towards the news that Mr Garth was on the brink of losing ninety-two pounds and more. Fred was silent. "Young gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that, Mrs Garth innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border. "And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer: he wants to give the boy a good chance. There he is] I hear him coming in. We will go to him in the parlour, shall we?" When they entered the parlour Caleb had thrown down his hat and was seated at his desk. *X280 "What, Fred, my boy?" he said in a tone of mild surprise, holding his pen still undipped. "You are here betimes." But missing the usual expression of cheerful greeting in Fred's face, he immediately added, "Is there anything up at home? -- anything the matter?" "Yes, Mr Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give you a bad opinion of me. I am come to tell you and Mrs Garth that I can't keep m word. I can't find the money to meet the bill after all. I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty pounds towards the hundred and sixty". While Fred was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them on the desk before Mr Garth. He had burst forth at once with the plain fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources. Mrs Garth was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for an explanation. Caleb blushed, and after a little pause said -- "Oh, I didn't tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred; it was for a hundred and sixty pounds. He made sure he could meet it himself," There was an evident change in Mrs Garth's face, but it was like a change below the surface of water which remains smooth. She fixed her eyes on Fred, saying -- "I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money and he has refused you." "No," said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty; "but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use, I should not like to mention Mr Garth's name in the matter." "It has come at an unfortunate time," said Caleb, in his hestitating way, looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper, "Christmas upon us -- I'm rather hard up just now. You see, I have to cut out everything like a tailor with short measure. What can we do, Susan? I shall want every farthing we have in the bank. It's a hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it]" "I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for Alfred's premium," said Mrs Garth, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear might have discerned a slight tremor in some of the words. "And I have no doubt that Mary has twenty *X281 pounds saved from her salary by this time. She will advance it." Mrs Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively. Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could be better achieved by bitter remarks or expolosions. But she had made Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse. Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonourable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings. "I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs Garth --ultimately," he stammered out. "Yes, ultimately," said Mrs Garth, who having a special dislike to fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram. "But boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed at fifteen." She had never been so little inclined to make excuses for Fred. "I was the most in the wrong, Susan," said Caleb. "Fred made sure of finding the money. But I'd no business to be fingering bills. I suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?" he added fixing his merciful grey eyes on Fred. Caleb was too delicate to specify Mr Featherstone. "Yes, I have tried everything -- I really have. I should have had a hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which I was about to sell. My uncle had given me eight pounds, and I paid away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I was going to sell for eighty or more -- I meant to go without a horse -- but now it has turned out vicious and lamed itself. I wish I and the horses too had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you. There's no one else I *X282 care so much for: you and Mrs Garth have always been so kind to me. However, it's no use saying that. You will always think me a rascal now." Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was getting rather womanish, and feeling cofusedly that his being sorry was not of much use to the Garths. They could see him mount, and quickly pass through the gate. "I am disappointed in Fred Vincy," said Mrs Garth. "I would not have believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts. I knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could the least afford to lose." "I was a fool, Susan." "That you were," said the wife, nodding and smiling. "But I should not have gone to publish it in the market place. Why should you keep such things from me? It is just so with your buttons; you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging. If I had only known I might have been ready with some better plan." "You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan," said Caleb, looking feelingly at her. "I can't abide your losing the money you've scraped together for Alfred." "It is very well that I ˛had˛ scrpaed it together; and it is you who will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself. You must give up your bad habits. Some men take to drinking, and you have taken to working without pay. You must indulge yourself a little less in that. And you must ride over to Mary, and ask the child what money she has." Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his head slowly, and fitting his finger-tips together withhh much nicety. "Poor Mary]" he said. "Susan," he went on in a lowered tone, I'm afraid she may be fond of Fred." "Oh no] She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her in any other than a brotherly way." Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up his chair to the desk and said, "Deuce take the bill -- I wich it was at Hanover] These things are a sad interruption to business]" *X283 The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine. But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word "business", the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen. Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out, --- all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of "business"; and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of the special men inthe county. His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times. He divided them into "business, politics, preaching, learning, and amusement." He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with "business" as to get often honourably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, *X284 I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up all forms of his beloved "business" which required that talent. He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work wel, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the Garths were poor, and "lived in a small way". However, they did not mind it. *C25 *X285 *Mm Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell's despair. . . . . . . Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite. W. BLAKE: ˛Songs˛ ˛of˛ ˛Experience˛ *M *L1 FRED VINCY wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not expect him, and when his uncle was not down-stairs: in that case she might be sitting alone in the wainscoated parlour. He left his horse in the yard to avoid making a noise on the gravel in front, and entered the parlour without other notice than the noise on the door-handle. Mary was in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs Piozzi's recollections of Johnson, and looked up with the fun still in her face. It gradually faded as she saw Fred approach her without speaking, and stand before her with his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking ill. She too was silent, only raising her eyes to him inquiringly. "Mary," he began, "I am a good-for-nothing blackguard." "I should think one of those epithets would do at a time," said Mary, trying to smile, but feeling alarmed. "Iknow you will never think well of me any more.You will think me a liar. You will think me dishonest. You will think I didn't care for you, or your father and mother. You always do make the worst of me, I know." "I cannot deny that I shall think all that of you, Fred, if you give me good reasons. But please to tell me at once what you have done. I would rather know the painful truth than imagine it". "I owed money -- a hundred and sicty pounds. I asked your father to put his name to a bill. I thought itwould not signify to him. I made usre of paying the money myself, and I have *X286 tried as hard as I could. And now, I have been so unlucky -- a horse has turned out badly -- I can only pay fifty pounds. And I can't ask my father for the money: he would not give me a farthing. And my uncle gave me a hundred a little while ago. So what can I do? And now your father has no ready money to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-two pounds that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too. You see what a --" "Oh poor mother, poor father]" said Mary, her eyes filling with tears, and a little sob rising which she tried to repress. She looked straight before her and took no notice of Fred, all the consequences at home becoming present to her. He too remained silent for some moments, feeling more miserable than ever. "I wouldn't have hurt you so for the world, Mary," he said at last. "You can never forgive me." "What does it matter whether I forgive you?" said Mary passionately. "Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has been earning by lessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to Mr Hanmer's? Should you think all that pleasant enough if I forgave you?" "Say what you like, Mary. I deserve it all." "I don't want to say anything," said Mary, more quietly; "my anger is of no use." She dried her eyes, threw aside her book rose and fetched her sewing. Fred following her with his eyes, hoping that they wouod meet hers, and in that way find access for his imploring penitence. But no] Mary could easily avoid looking upward. "I do care about your mother's money going," he said, when she was seated again and sewing quickly. "I wanted to ask you, Mary -- don't you think that Mr Featherstone -- if you were to tell him -- tell him, I mean, about apprenticing Alfred -- would advance the money?" "My family is not fond of begging, Fred. We would rather work for our money. Besides, you say that Mr Featherstone has latel given you a hundred pounds. He rarely makes presents; he has never made presents to us. I am sure my father will not ask him for anything; and even if I chose to beg of him, it would be of no use." *X287 'I am so miserable, Mary -- if you knew how miserable I am, you would be sorry for me." "There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world: I see enough of that every day." "It is hardly fair to call me selfish. If you knew what things other young men do, you would think me a good way off the worst." "I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish. They are always thinking of what they can get for themselves, and not of what other peole may lose." "Any man may be unfortunate, Mary, and find himself unable to pay when he meant it. There is not a better man in the world than your father, and yet he got into trouble." "How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fred?" said Mary, in a deeep tone of indignation. "He never got into trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people. And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make good everybody's loss." "And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary. It is not generous to believe the worst of a man. When you have got any power over him, I think you might try and use it to make him better; but this is what you never do. However, I'm going," Fred ended, languidly. "I shall never speak to ˘ youabout anything again. I'm very sorry for all the trouble I've caused -- that's all." Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up. There is often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary's hard experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very different from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness. At Fred's last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which may lose itself and get harm. And when, looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties. *X288 "Oh, Fred, how ill you look? Sit down a moment. Don't go yet. Let me tell uncle that you are here. He has been wondering that he has not seen you for a whole week." Mary spoke hurriedly, saying the words that came first without knowing very well what they were, but saying them in a half-soothing, half-beseeching tone, and rising as if to go away to Mr Featherstone. Of course Fred felt as if the clouds had parted and a gleam had come: he moved and stood in her way. "Say one word, Mary, and I will do anything. Say you will not think the worst of me -- will not give me up altogether." "As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you," said Mary, in a mournful tone. "As if it were not very painful to me to see you an idle frivolous creature. How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done -- how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful? And with so much good in your disposition, Fred, -- you might be worth a great deal." "I will try to be anything you like, Mary, if you will say that you love me." "I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him. What will you be when you are forty? Like Mr Bowyer, I suppose -- just as idle, living in Mrs Beck's front parlour -- fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner -- spending your morning in learning a comic song -- oh no] learning a tune on the flute." Mary's lips had begun to curl with a smile as soon as she had asked that question about Freds future (young souls are mobile), and before she ended, her face had its full illumination of fun. To him it was like the cessation of an ache that Mary could laugh at him, and with a passive sort of smile he tried to reach her hand; but she slipped away quickly towards the door and said, "I shall tell uncle. You ˛must˛ see him for a moment or two." Fred secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the fulfilment of Mary's sarcastic prophecies, apart from that "anything" which he was ready to do if she would define it. He never dared in Mary's presence to approach the subject of his expectations from Mr Featherstone, and she always ifnored them, as *X289 if everything depended on himself. But if ever he actually came into the property, she must recognize the change in his position. All this passed through his mind somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle. He stayed but a little while, excusing himself on the ground that he had a cold; and Mary did not reappear before he left the house. But as he rode home, he began to be more conscious of being ill, than of being melancholy. When Caleb Garth arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Mary was not surprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit, and was not at all fond of having to talk with Mr Featherstone. The old man, on the other hand, felt himself ill at ease with a brother-in-law whom he could not annoy, who did not mind about being considered poor, had nothing to ask of him, and understood all kinds of farming and mining business better than he did. But Mary had felt sure that her parents would want to see her, and if her father had not come, she would have obtained leave to go home for an hour or two the next day. After discussing prices during tea with Mr Featherstone, Caleb rose to bid him good-bye, and said "I want to speak to you, Mary." She took a candle into another large parlour, where there was no fire, and setting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table, turned round to her father, and putting her arms round his neck kissed him with childish kisses which he delighted in, -- the expression of his large brows softening as the expression of a great beautiful dog softens when it is caressed. Mary was his favourite child, and whatever Susan might say, and right as she was on all other subjects, Caleb thought it natural that Fred or any one else should think Mary more lovable than other girls. "I've got something to tell you, my dear," said Caleb in his hesitating way. "No very good news; but then it might be worse." "About money, father? I think I know what it is." "Ay? how can that be? You see, I've been a bit of a fool again, and put my name to a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother has got to part with her savings, that's the worst of it, and even they won't quite make things even. We wanted *X290 a hundred and ten pounds: your mother has ninety-two and I have none to spare in the bank; and she thinkgs that you will have some savings." "Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds. I thought you would come, father, so I put it in my bag. See] beautiful white notes and gold." Mary took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into her father's hand. "Well, but how -- we only want eighteen -- here, put the rest back, child, -- but how did you know about it?" said Caleb, who, in his unconquerable indifference to money, was beginning to be chiefly concerned about the relation the affair might have to Mary's affections. "Fred told me this morning." "Ah] Did he come on purpose?" "Yes, I think so. He was a good deal distressed." "I'm afraid Fred is not to be trusted, Mary," said the father, with hesitating tenderness. "He means better than he acts, perhaps. But I should think it a pity for anybody's happiness to be wrapped up in him, and so would your mother." "And so should I father," said Mary, not looking up, but putting the back of her father's hand against her cheek. "I don't want to pry, my dear. But I was afraid there might be something betwen you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you. You see, Mary" -- here Caleb's voice became more tender; he had been pushing his hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he turned his eyes on his daughter -- "a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her. Your mother has had to put up with a good deal because of me." Mary turned the back of her father's hand to her lips and smiled at him. "Well, well, nobody's perfect, but" -- here Mr Garth shook his head to help out the inadequacy of words -- "what I am thinking of is -- what it must be for a wife when she's never sure of her husband, when he hasn't got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched. That's the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what *X291 life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear. However, you have more sense than most, and you haven't been kept in cotton-wool: there may be no occasion for me to say this, but a father trembles for his daughter, and you are all by yourself here." "Don't fear for me, father," said Mary, gravely meeting her father's eyes: "Fred has always been very good to me; he is kind-hearted and affectionate, and not false, I think, with all his self-indulgence. But I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will provide for him. You and my mother have taught me too much pride for that." "That's right -- that's right. Then I am easy," said Mr Garth, taking up his hat. "But it's hard to run away with your earnings, child." "Father]" said Mary, in her deepest tone of remonstrance. "Take pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home," was her last word before he closed the outer door on himsef. "I suppose your father wanted your earnings," said old Mr Featherstone, with his usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Mary returned to him. "He makes but a tight fit, I reckon. You're of age now; you ought to be saving for yourself." "I consider my father and mother the best part of myself, sir." said Mary, coldly. Mr Featherstone grunted: he could not deny that an ordinary sort of girl like her might be expected to be useful, so he thought of another rejoinder, disagreeable enough to be always apropos. "If Fred Vincy comes to-morrow, now, don't you keep him chattering: let him come up to me". *C26 *Mm He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction] would it were otherwise -- that I could beat him while he railed at me. ˛Troilus˛ ˛and˛ ˛Cressida˛ *M *L1 BUT Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were quite peremptory. From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a day or two had seemed mere depression and headache, but which got so much worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, going into the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to his mother's anxious question, said, "I feel very ill: I think you must send for Wrench." Wrench came but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a "slight derangement", and did not speak of coming again on the morrow. He had a due value for the Vincy's house, but the wariest men are apt to be a little dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer. Mr Wrench was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife, and seven children; and he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles' drive to meet Dr Minching on the other side of Tipton, the decease of Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch practice in that direction. Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men? Mr Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this time had black and drastic contents. Their effect was not alleviating to poor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was "in for an illness", rose at his usual hour the next morning and went downstairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in sitting and shivering by the fire. Mr Wrench was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds, and Mrs Vincy, seeing her darling's *X293 changed looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr Sprague. "Oh nonsense, mother] It's nothing," said Fred, putting out his hot dry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right. I must have taken cold in that nasty damp ride." "Mamma]" said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate), "there is Mr Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one. If I were you I would call him in. He has cured Ellen Bulstrode. They say he cures every one." Mrs Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking only of Fred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was only two yards off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him. In two minutes he was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was becoming. Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs Vincy's mind insisted with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially on what Mr Wrench had said and had not said about coming again. That there might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just the wrong medicines. He must go to bed immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and precautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular. Poor Mrs Vincy's terror at these indications of danger found vent in such words as came most easily. She thought it "very ill usage on the part of Mr Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr Peacock, though Mr Peacock was equally a friend. Why Mr Wrench should neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life of her understand. He had not neglected Mrs Larcher's when they had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs Vincy have wished that he should. And if anything should happen ..." Here poor Mrs Vincy's spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe-throat and good-humoured face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out of Fred's hearing, but Rosamond had opened the *X294 drawing-room door, and now came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr Wrench, said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginings: he would go immediately to the druggists and have a prescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr Wrench and tell him what had been done. "But you must come again -- you must go on attending Fred. I can't have my boy left to anybody who may come or not. I bear nobody ill-will, thank God, and Mr Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he's better have let me die -- if -- if" "I will meet Mr Wrench here, then, shall I?" said Lydgate, really believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case of this kind. "Pray make that arrangement, Mr Lydgate," said Rosamond, coming to her mother's aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away. When Mr Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go on now, whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have fever in the house. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on Thursday. And Pritchard needn't get up any wine: brandy was the best thing against infection. "I shall drink brandy," added Mr Vincy emphatically -- as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing with blank-cartridges. "He's an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred. He'd need have some luck by-and-by to make up for all this -- else I don't know who'd have an eldest son". "Don't say so, Vincy," said the mother, with a quivering lip, "if you don't want him to be taken from me." "It will worret you to death, Lucy; ˛that˛ I can see," said Mr Vincy, more mildly. "However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter." (What Mr Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about his -- the Mayor's -- family.) "I'm the last man to give in to the cry about new doctors or new parsons, either -- whether they're Bulstrode's men or not. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will." Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he *X295 could be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand. Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honour; and Mr Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs Vincy say -- "Oh, Mr Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so? -- To go away, and never to come again] And my boy might have been stretched a corpse]" Mr Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection, and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought. "I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor, who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes. -- "To let fever get unawares into a house like this. Thereare some things that ought be actionable, and are not so -- that's my opinion." But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate, inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact", Mr Wrench aferwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case. The house might be a good one, but Mr Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never got up by sound practitioners. This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only *X296 humiliating, but perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as much as Mr Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness. However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr Vincy had threatened Wrench, and that Mrs Vincy had accused him of poisoning her son. Others were of opinion that Mr Lydgate's passing by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many people believed that Lydgate's coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode; and Mrs Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it into her head that Mr Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode's, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen. She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs Farebrother, who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing -- "I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be sorry to think it of Mr Lydgate." "Why, mother," said Mr Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, "you know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never heard of Bulstrode before he came here." "That is satisfactory so far as Mr Lydgate is concerned, Camden," said the old lady, with an air of precision. "but as to Bulstrode -- the report may be true of some other son." *C27 *Mm Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man. *M *L1 AN eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo] the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent -- of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred's illness and Mr Wrench's mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr Lydgate thought the precaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred's illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma. Poor manna indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman; and Mr vincy, who doated on his wife, was more alarmed on her account than on Fred's. But for his insistence she would have taken no rest: her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights and sounds that used most *X298 to interest her. Fred's delirium, in which he seemed to be wandering out of her reach, tore her heart. After her first outburst against Mr Wrench she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to Lydgate. She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his arm moaning out, "Save my boy." Once she pleaded, "He has always been good to me, Mr Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother," -- as if poor Fred's suffering were an accusation against him. All the deepest fibres of the mother's memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born. "I have good hope, Mrs Vincy," Lydgate would say. "Come down with me and let us talk about the food." In that way he led her to the parlous where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising her into taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her. There was a constant understanding between him and Rosamond on these matters. He almost always saw her before going to the sick-room, and she appealed to him as to what she could do for mamma. Her presence of mind and adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it is not wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itself with his interest in the case. Especially when the critical stage was passed, and he began to feel confident of Fred's recovery. In the more doubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr Sprague (who, if he could, would rather have remained neutral on Wrench's account; but after two consultations, the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there was every reason to make him assiduous. Morning and evening he was at Mr Vincy's, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became simply feeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but conscious of it, so that Mrs Vincy felt as if after all the illness had made a festival for her tenderness. Both father and mother held it an added reason for god spirits, when old Mr Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred must make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not do without him, and missed his visits sadly. The old man himself was getting bedridden. Mrs Vincy told these messages to Fred when he could listen, and he turned *X299 towards her his delicate, pinched face, from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about Mary -- wondering what she felt about his illness. No word passed his lips; but "to hear with eyes belongs to love's rare wit", and the mother in the fulness of her heart not only divined Fred's longing, but felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him. "If I can only see my boy strong again," she said, in her loving folly; "and who knows? -- perhaps master of Stone Court] and he can marry anybody he likes then." "Not if they won't have me, mother," said Fred. The illness had made him childish, and tears came as he spoke. "Oh, take a bit of jelly, dear," said Mrs Vincy, secretly incredulous of any such refusal. She never left Fred's side when her husband was not in the house, and thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone. Lydgate, naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness. They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant, and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamon looked down, and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before. There was no help for this in science, and as Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed to be no help for it in folly. It was therefore a relief when neighbours no longer considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Rosamond alone were very much reduced. But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with. Talk about tthe weather and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollow device, and behaviour can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes a mutual fascination -- which of course need not mean anything deep or serious. This was the way in which Rosamond and Lydgate slid gracefully into ease, and made their intercourse *X300 lively again. Visitors came and went as usual, there was once more music in the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr Vincy's mayoralty returned. Lydgate, whenever he could, took his seat by Rosamond's side, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself her captive -- meaning, all the while, not to be her captive. The preposterousness of the notion that he could at once set up a satisfactory establishment as a married man was a sufficient guarantee against danger. This play at being a little in love was agreeable, and did not interfere with graver pursuits. Flirtation, after all, was not necessarily a singeing process. Rosamond, for her part, had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure of being admired by some one worth captivating, and she did not distinguish flirtation from love, either in herself or in another. She seemed to be sailing with a fair wind just whether she would go, and her thoughts were much occupied with a handsome house in Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant. She was quite determined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitors who were not agreeable to her at her father's; and she imagined the drawing-room in her favourite house with various styles of furniture. Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself; he seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so taht his enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant's, and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him. How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr Caius Larcher] Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listened to, bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he *X301 approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage. If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-emeinence without too precise a knoweldge of what it consisted in. But Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose behaviour is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had ben detected in that immodest prematureness -- indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clue to fact, why, they were not intended in that light -- they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs Lemon's favourite pupil, who by general consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability. Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third person need have been excluded. In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that *X302 they did nothing else. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time? Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr Farebrother, were great bores, and Lydgate did not care about commerical politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation? He was often invited to the Bulstrodes'; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs Bulstrode's naiµve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness. The Vincy's house, with all its faults, was the pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond -- sweet to look at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man. But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss Vincy. One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when several other visitors were there. The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in ˛te´te-a>te´te˛ with Rosamond. He had brought the last ˛Keepsake˛, the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting. Rosamond was gracious, and Mr Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium for "paying addresses" -- the very thing to please a nice girl. He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance. To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful. "I think the Honourable Mrs S. is something like you," said Mr Ned. He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it rather languishingly. "Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that," said Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young *X303 Plymdale' hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come. She went on with her tatting all the while. "I did not say she was as beautiful as you are," said Mr Ned, venturing to look from the portrait to its rival. "I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer," said Rosamond, feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time. But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached Rosamond's corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the other side of her, young Plymdale's jaw fell like a barometer towards the cheerless side of change. Rosamond enjoyed not only Lydgate's presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy. "What a late comer you are]" she said, as they shook hands. "Mamma had given you up a little while ago. How do you find Fred?" "As usual; going on well, but slowly. I want him to go away -- to Stone Court, for example. But your mamma seems to have some objection." "Poor fellow]" said Rosamond, prettily "You will see Fred so changed," she added, turning to the other suitor; "we have looked to Mr Lydgate as our guardian angel during his illness." Mr Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the ˛Keepsake˛ towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chin, as if in wonderment at human folly. "What are you laughing at so profanely?" said Rosamond, with bland neutrality. "I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest -- the engravings or the writing here," said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought. "Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a ""sugared invention"" -- as the Elizabethans used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land." "You are so severe, I am frightened at you," said Rosamond, keeping her amusement duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale *X304 had lingered with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred. "There are a great many celebrated people writing in the ˛Keepsake˛ at all events," he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid. "This is the first time I have heard it called silly." "I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth," said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. "I suspect you know nothing about Lady Blessington and L.E.L." Rosamond herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hit that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste. "But Sir Walter Scott -- I suppose Mr Lydgate knowns him," said young Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage. "Oh, I read no literature now," said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing it away. "I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life. I used to know Scott's poems by heart." "I should like to know when you left off," said Rosamond, "because then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know." "Mr Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing," said Mr Ned,purposely caustic. "On the contrary," said Lydgate, showing no smart, but smiling with exasperating confidence at Rosamond. "It would be worth knowing by the fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me." Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been his ill-fortune to mee. "How rash you are]" said Rosamond, inwardly delighted. "Do you see that you have given offence?" "What -- is it Mr Plymdale's book? I am sorry. I didn't thinkg about it." "I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came here -- that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds." "Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will. Don't I listen to her willingly?" To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as *X305 engaged. That they were some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her mind; and ideas, we know, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the necessary materials being at hand. It is true, Lydgate had the counter idea of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a shadow cast by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking. Circumstances was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond's idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate's lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it. That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual. The reveries from which it was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of something else than Rosamond's virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown. Moreover, he was beginning to feel some zest for the grwoing though half-suppressed feud between him and the other medical men, which was likely to become more manifest, now that Bulstrode's method of managing the new hospital was about to be declared; and there were various inspiriting signs that his non-acceptance by some of Peacock's patients might be counter-balanced by the impression he had produced in other quarters. Only a few days later, when he had happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road and had got down from his horse to talk by her side until he had quite protected her from a passing drove, he had been stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling him in to a house of some importance where Peacock had never attended; and it was the second instance of this kind. The servant was Sir James Chettam's, and the house was Lowick Manor. *C28 *X306 *Mm ˛lst˛ ˛Gent˛. All times are good to seek your wedded home Bringing a mutual delight. ˛2nd˛ ˛Gent˛. Why, true. The calendar hath not an evil day For souls made one by love, and even death Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves While they two clasped each other, and foresaw No life apart. *M *L1 MR AND MRS CASAUBON, returning from their wedding journey, arrived at Lowick Manor in the middle of January. A light snow was falling as they descended at the door, and in the morning, when Dorothea passed from her dressing-room into the blue-green boudoir that we know of, she saw the long avenue of limes lifting their trunks from a white earth, and spreading white branches against the dun and motionless sky. The distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness and law-hangig uniformity of cloud. The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before: the stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost in his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in the bookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books. The bright fire of dry oakboughs burning on the dogs seemed an incongruous renewal of life and glow -- like the figure of Dorothea herself as she entered carrying the red-leather cases containing the cameos for Celia. She was glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow; there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the out-door snow. As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in the bow-window, she *X307 unconsciously kpet her hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking out on the still, white enclosure which made her visible world. Mr Casaubon, who had risen early complaining of palpitation, was in the library giving audience to his curate Mr Tucker. By-and-by Celia would come in her quality of bridesmaid as well as sister, and through the next weeks there would be wedding visits received and given; all in continuance of that transitional life understood to correspond with the excitement of bridal felicity, and keeping up the sense of busy ineffectiveness, as of a dream which the dreamer begins to suspect. The duties of her married life, contemplated as so great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the white vapour-walled landscape. The clear heights where she expected to walk in full communion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the delicious repose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effort and alarmed with dim presentiment. when would the days begin of that active wifely devotion which was to strengthen her husband's life and exalt her own? Never perhaps, as she had preconceived them; but somehow -- still somehow. In this solemnly pledged union of her life, duty would present itself in some new form of inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love. Meanwhile there was the snow and the low arch of dun vapour -- there was the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid -- where the sense of connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming from without in claims that would have shaped her energies. -- "What shall I do?" "Whatever you please, my dear": that had been her brief history since she had left off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on the hated piano. Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness. Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, *X308 and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic word that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from the window she walked round the room. The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things. All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as un unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage -- of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now -- the deliate woman's face which yet had a head-strong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemd to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature] She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. Nay, the colours deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out lihgt, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted. The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea: she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her. But the smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said aloud -- "Oh, it was cruel to speak so] How sad -- how dreadful]" She rose quickly and went out of the room, hurrying along *X309 the corridor, with the irresistible impulse to go and see her husband and inquire if she could do anything for him. Perhaps Mrs Tucker was gone and Mr Casaubon was alone in the library. She felt as if all her morning's gloom would vanish if she could see her husbnnd glad because of her presence. But when she reached the head of the dark oak staircase, there was Celia coming up, and below there was Mr Brooke, exchanging welcomes and congratulations with Mr Casaubon. "Dodo]" sail Celia, in her quiet staccato; then kissed her sister, whose arms encircled her, and said no more. I think they both cried a little in a furtive manner, while Dorothea ran down-stairs to greet her uncle. "I need not ask how you are, my dear," said Mr Brooke, after kissing her forehead. "Rome has agreed with you, I see -- happiness, frescoes, the antique -- that sort of thing. Well, it's very pleasant to have you back again, and you understand all about art now, eh? But Casaubon is a little pale, I tell him -- a litle pale, you know. Studying hard in his holidays is carrying it rather too far. I overdid it at one time" -- Mr Brooks still held Dorothea's hand, but had turned his face to Mr Casaubon -- "about topography, ruins, temples -- I thought I had a clue, but I saw it would carry me too far, and nothing might have come of it. You may go any length in that sort of thing, and nothing may come of it, you know." Dorothea's eyes also were turned up to her husband's face with some anxiety at the idea that those who saw him afresh after absence might be aware of signs which she had not noticed. "Nothing to alarm you, my dear," said Mr Brooke, observing her expression. "A little English beef and mutton will soon make a difference. It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the portrait of Aquinas, you know -- we got your letter just in time. But Aquinas, now -- he was a little too subtle, wasn't he? Does anybody read Aquinas?" "He is not an author adapted to superficial minds," said Mr Casaubon, meeting these timely questions with dignified patience. "You would like coffee in your own rom, uncle?" said Dorothea, coming to the recue. *X310 "Yes; and you must go to Celia: she has great news to tell you, you know. I leave it all to her." The blue-green boudoir looked much more cheerful when Celia was seated there in a pelisse exactly like her sister's surveying the cameos with a placid satisfaction, while the conversation passed on to other topics. "Do you think it nice to go to Rome on a wedding journey?" said Celia, with her ready delicate blush which Dorothea was used to on the smallest occasion. "It would not suit all -- not you, dear, for example," said Dorothea quietly. No one would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey to Rome. "Mrs Cadwallder says it is nonsense, people going a long journey when they are married. She says that they get tired to death of each other, and can't quarrel comfortably, as they would at home. And Lady Chettam says she went to Bath." Celia's colour changed again and again -- seemed *Mm To come and go with tidings from the heart, As it a running messenger had been. *M *L1 It must mean more than Celia's blushing usually did. "Celia] has something happened?" said Dorothea, in a tone full of sisterly feeling. "Have you really any great news to tell me?" "It was because you went away, Dodo. Then there was nobody but me for Sir James to talk to," said Celia, with a certain roguishness in her eyes. "I understand. It is as I used to hope and believe," said Dorothea, taking her sister's face between her hands, and looking at her half anxiously. Celia's marriage seemed more serious than it used to do. "It was only three days ago," said Celia. "And Lady Chettam is very kind." "And you are very happy?" "Yes. We are not going to be married yet. Because everything is to be got ready. And I don't want to be married so very soon, because I think it is nice to be engaged. And we shall be married all our lives after." *X311 "I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty. Sir James is a good, honourable man," said Dorothea, warmly. "He has gone on with the cottages, Dodo. He will tell you about them when he comes. Shall you be glad to see him?" "Of course I shall. How can you ask me?" "Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned," said Celia, regarding Mr Casaubon's learning as a kind of camp which might in due time saturate a neighbouring body. *C29 *X312 *Mm I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort. GOLDSMITH *M *L1 ONE morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea -- but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. He had done nothing exceptional in marrying -- nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets. It had occurred to him that he must not any longer defer his intention of matrimony, and he had reflected that in taking a wife, a man of good position should expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady -- the younger the better, because more educable and submissive -- of a rank euqal to his own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and good understanding. On such a young lady he would make handsome settlements, and he would neglect no arrangement for her happiness: in return, he should receive family pleasures and leave behind him that copy of himself which seemed so urgently required of a man -- to the sonneteers of the sixteenth century. Times had altered since then, and no sonneteer had insisted on Mr Casaubon's leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key; but he had always intended to acquit himself by marriage, and the sense that he was fast leaving the years behind him, that the world was getting dimmer and that he felt lonely, was a reason to him for losing no more time in *X313 overtaking domestic delights before they too were left behind by the years. And when he had seen Dorothea be believed that he had found even more than he demanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him as would enable him to dispense with a hired secretary, an aid which Mr Casaubon had never yet employed and had a suspicious dread of. (Mr Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind.) Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the wife he needed. A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her husband's mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr Casaubon was an idea which could hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband] Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person] - When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was only natural; and Mr Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to begin. He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, on must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honour according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct these ends had been attained; but the difficulty of making his Key to all Mythologies *X314 unimpeachable weighed like lead upon hismmind; and the pamphlets -- or "Parerga" as he called them -- by which he tested his public and deposited small monumental records of his march, were far from having been seen in all their significance. He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brougt that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self -- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr Casaubon's uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control. To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, to sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr Casaubon had thought of annexing happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we have seen, he found himself under a new depression in the conciousness that the new bliss was not blissful to him. Inclination yearned back to its old, easier custom. And the deeper he went in domesticity the more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward requirement, *X315 and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably all requirements. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study, according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistence it might never have begun. But sh had succeeded in making it a matter of course that she should take her place at an early hour in the library and have work either of reading aloud or copying assigned her. The work had been easier to define because Mr Casaubon had adopted an immediate intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a small monograph on some lately-traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries whereby certain assertions ofWarburton's could be corrected. References were extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and sentences were actually to be written in the shape wherein they would be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity. These minor monumental productions were always exciting to Mr Casaubon: digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain. And from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which everything was uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to Carp: it was a poisonous regret to Mr Casaubon that he had once addressed a dedication to Carp in which he had numbered that member of the animal kingdom among the ˛viros nullo o+evo perituros˛, a mistake which would infallibly lay the dedicator open to ridicule in the next age, and might even be chuckled over by Pide and Tench in the present. Thus Mr Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to say a little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where he had breakfasted alone. Celia at this time was ona a second visit to Lowick, probably the last before her marriage, and was in the drawing-room expecting Sir James. Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband's mood, and she saw that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour. She was going silently to her desk when he said, in that distant tone which implied that he was discharging a disagreeable duty -- "Dorothea, here is a letter for you, which was enclosed in one addressed to me." *X316 It was a letter of two pages, and she immediately looked at the signature. "Mr Ladislaw] What can he have to say to me?" she exclaimed, in a tone of pleased surprise. "But," she added, looking at Mr Casaubon, "I can imagine what he has written to you about". "You can, if you please, read the letter," said Mr Casaubon, severly pointing to it with his pen, and not looking at her. "But I may as well say before hand, that I must decline the proposal it contains to pay a visit here. I trust I may be excused for desiring an internal of complete freedom from such distractions as have been hitherto inevitable, and especially from guests whose desultory vivacity makes their presence a fatigue." There had been no clashing of temper between Dorothea and her husband since that little explosion in Rome, which had left such strong traces in her mind that it had been easier ever since to quell emotion than to incur the consequnce of venting it. But this ill-tempered anticipation that she could desire visits which might be disagreeable to her husband, this gratitutous defence of himsefl against selfish complaing on her part, was too sharp a sting to be meditated on until after it had been resented. Dorothea had thought that she could have been patient with John Milton, but she had never imaged him behaving in this way; and for a moment Mr Casaubon seemed to be stupidly undiscerning and odiously unjust. Pity, that "newborn babe" which was by-and-by to rule many a storm within her, did not "stride the blast" on this occasion. With her first words, uttered in a tone that shook him, she startled Mr Casaubon into looking at her, and meeting the flash of her eyes. "Why do you attribute to me a wish for anything that would annoy you? You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against. Wait at least till I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from yours." "Dorothea, you are hasty," answered Mr Casaubon, nervously. Decidedly, this woman was too young to be on the formidable level of wifehood -- unless she had been pale and featureless and taken everything for granted. "I think it was you who were first hasty in your false suppositions about my feeling," said Dorothea, in the same tone. The *X317 fire was not dissipated yet, and she thought it was ignoble in her husband not to apologize to her. "We will, if you please, say no more on this subject, Dorothea. I have neither leisure nor energy for this kind of debate." Here Mr Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he would return to his writing, though his hand tremlbled so much that the words seemed to be written in an unknown character. There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy. Dorothea left Ladislaw's two letters unread on her husband's writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected of mean cupidity. She did not in the least divine the subtle sources of her husband's bad temper about these letters; she only knew that they had caused him to offend her. She began to work at once, and her hand did not tremble; on the contrary, in writing out the quotations which had been given to her the day before, she felt that she was forming her letters beautifully, and it seemed to her that she saw the construction of the Latin she was copying, and which she was beginning to understand, more clearly than usual. In her indignation there was a sense of superiority, but it went out for the present in firmness of stroke, and did not compress itself into an inward articulate voice pornouncing the once "affable archangel" a poor creature. There had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and Dorothea had not looked away from her own table, when she heard the loud bang of a book on the floor, and turning quickly saw Mr Casaubon on the library-steps clinging forward as if he were in some bodily distress. She started up and bounded towards him in an instant: he was evidently in great straits for breath. Jumping on a stool she got close to his elbow and said with her whole soul melted into tender alarm -- "Can you lean on me, dear?" He was still for two or three minutes, which seemed endless *X318 to her, unable to speak or move, gasping for breath. When at last he descended the three steps and fell backwards in the large chair which Dorothea had drawn close to the foot of the ladder, he no longer gasped but seemed helpless and about to faint. Dorothea rang the bell violently, and presntly Mr Casaubon was helped to the couch: he did not faint and was gradually reviving, when Sir James Chettam came in, having been met in the hall with the news that Mr Casaubon had "had a fit in the library". "Good God] this is just what might have been expected," was his immediate thought. If his prophetic soul had been urged to particularize, it seemed to him that "fits" would have been the definite expression alighted upon. He asked his informant, the butler, whether the doctor had been sent for. The butler never knew his master want the doctor before; but would it not be right to send for a physician? When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr Casaubon could make some signs of his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction from her first terror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side, now rose and herself proposed that some one should ride off for a medical man. "I recommend you to send for Lydgate," said Sir James. "My mother has called him in, and she has found him uncommonly clever. She has had a poor opinion of the physicians since my father's death." Dorothea appealed to her husband, and he made a silent sign of approval. So Mr Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon, for the messenger, who was Sir James Chettam's man and knew Mr Lydgate, met him leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his arm to Miss Vincy. Celia, in the drowing-room, had known nothing of the trouble till Sir James told her of it. After Dorothea's account, he no longer considered the illness a fit, but still something "of that nature". "Poor dear Dodo -- how dreadful]" said Celia, feeling as much grieved as her own perfect happines would allow. Her little hands were clasped, and enclosed by Sir James's as a bud is enfolded by a liberal calyx. "It is very schocking that Mr Casaubon should be ill; but I never did like him. And I think he is not half *X319 fond enough of Dorothea; and he ought to be, for I am sure no one else would have had him -- do you thing they would?" "I always thought it a horrible sacrifice of your sister," said Si James. "Yes. But poor Dodo never did do what other people do, and I think she never will." "She is a noble creature," said the loyal-hearted Sir James. had just had a fresh impression of this kind, as he had seen Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her husband's neck and looking at him with unspeakable sorrow. He did not know how much penitence there was in the sorrow. "Yes," said Celia, thinking it was very well for Sir James to say so, but ˛he˛ would not have been comfortable with Dodo. "Shall I go to her? Could I help her, do you think?" "I think it would be well for you just to go and see her before Lydgate comes," said Sir James, magnanimously. "Only don't stay long." While Celia was gone, he walked up and down remembering what he had originally felt about Dorothea's engagement, and feeling a revival of his disgust at Mr Brooke's indifference. If Cadwallader -- if every one else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done, the marriage might have been hindered. It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her. Sir James had long ceased to have any regerts on his own account: his heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia. But he had a chivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service of woman among the ideal glories of old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to bitterness; its death had made sweet odours - floating memories that clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea. He could remain her brotherly friend, interpreting her actions with generous trustfulness. *C30 *X320 *Mm ˛Qui veut de-te´te˛ with Lydgate, in which she passed from inquiries about Fred Vincy's health, and expressions of her sincere anxiety for her brother's large family, to general remarks on the dangers which lay before young people with regard to their settlement in life. Young men were often wild and disappointing, making little return for the money spent on them, and a girl was exposed to many circumstances which might interfere with her prospects. "Especially when she has great attractions, and her parents see much company," said Mrs Bulstrode. "Gentlemen pay her attention, and engross her all to themselves, for the mere pleasure of the moment, and that drives off others. I think it is a heavy responsibility, Mr Lydgate, to interfere with the prospects of any girl." Here Mrs Bulstrode fixed her eyes on him, with an unmistakable purpose of warning, if not of rebuke. "Clearly," said Lydgate, looking at her -- perhaps even staring a little in return. "On the other hand, a man must be a great coxcomb to go about with a notion that he must not pay attention to a young lady lest she should fall in love with him, or lest others should think she must." "Oh, Mr Lydgate, you know well what your advantages are. You know that our young men here cannot cope with you. Where you frequent a house it may militate very much against a girl's making a desirable settlement in life, and prevent her from accepting offers even if they are made." *X333 Lydgate was less flattered by his advantage over the Middlemarch Orlandos than he was annoyed by the perception of Mrs Bulstrode's meaning. She felt that she had spoken as impressively as it was necessary to do, and that in using the superior word "militate" she had thrown a noble drapery over a mass of particulars which were still evident enough. Lydgate was fuming a little, pushed his hair back with one hand, felt curiously in his waistcoat-pocket with the other, and then stooped to beckon the tiny black spaniel, which had the insight to decline his hollow caresses. It would not have been decent to go away, because he had been dining with other guests, and had just taken tea. But Mrs Bulstrode, having no doubt that she had been understood, turned the conversation. Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes. The next day Mr Farebrother, parting from Lydgate in the street, supposed that they should meet at Vincy's in the evening. Lydgate answered curtly, no -- he had work to do -- he must give up going out in the evening. "What, you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping your ears?" said the Vicar. "Well, if you don't mean to be won by the sirens, you are right to take precautions in time." A few days before, Lydgate would have taken no notice of these words as anything more than the Vicar's usual way of putting things. They seemed now to convey an innuendo which confirmed the impression that he had been making a fool of himself and behaving so as to be misunderstood: not, he believed, by Rosamond herself; she, he felt sure, took everything as lightly as he intended it. She had an exquisite tact and insight in relation to all points of manners; but the people she lived among were blunderers and busybodies. However, the mistake should go no farther. He resolved -- and kept his resolution -- that he would not go to Mr Vincy's except on business. Rosamond became very unhappy. The uneasiness first stirred by her aunt's questions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly come -- into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals. The *X334 world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden. She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful aerial buiding as she had been enjoying for the last six months. Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne -- as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach. There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage which is an apology for everything (in literature and the drama). Happily Rosamond did not think of committing any desperate act: she plaited her fair hair as beautifully as usual, and kept her self proudly calm. Her most cheerful supposition wat that her aunt Bulstrode had interfered in some way to hinder Lydgate's visits: everything was better than a spontaneous indifference in him. Any one who imagines ten days too short a time -- not for falling into leanness, lightness, or other measurable effects of passion, but -- for the whole spiritual circuit of alarmed conjecture and disappointment, is ignorant of what can go in the elegant leisure of a young lady's mind. On the eleventh day, however, Lydgate when leaving Stone Court was requested by Mrs Vincy to let her husband know that there was a marked change in Mr Featherstone's health, and that she wished him to come to Stone Court on that day. Now Lydgate might have called at the warehouse, or might have written a message on a leaf of his pocket-book and left it at the door. Yet these simple devices apparently did not occur to him, from which we may conclude that he had no strong objection to calling at the house at an hour when Mr Vincy was not at home, and leaving the message with Miss Vincy. A man may, from various motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would be gratified that nobody missed him. It would be a graceful, easy way of piecing on the new habits to the old, to have a few playful words with Rosamond about his resistance to dissipation, and his firm resolve to take long fasts even from sweet sounds. It must be confessed, also, that momentary speculations as to all the possible grounds for *X335 Mrs Bulstrode's hints had managed to get woven like slight clinging hairs into the more substantial web of his thoughts. Miss Vincy was alone, and blushed so deeply when Lydgate came in that he felt a corresponding embarrassment, and instead of any playfulness, he began at once to speak of his reason for calling, and to beg her, almost formally, to deliver the message to her father. Rosamond, who at the first moment felt as if her happiness were returning, was keenly hurt by Lydgate's manner; her blush had departed, and she assented coldly, without adding an unnecessary word, some trivial chain-work which she had in her hands enabling her to avoid looking at Lydgate higher than his chin. In all failures, the beginning certainly the half of the whole. After sitting two long moments while he moved his whip and could say nothing, Lydgate rose to go, and Rosamond, made nervous by her struggle between mortification and the wish not to betray it, dropped her chain as if startled, and rose too, mechanically. Lydgate instantaneouly stooped to pick up the chain. when he rose he was very near to a lovely little face set on a fair long neck which he had been used to see turning about under the most perfect management of self-contented grace. But as he raised his eyes now he saw a certain helpless quivering which touched him quite newly, and made him look at Rosamond with a questioning flash. At this moment she was as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old: she felt that her tears had risen, and it was no use to try to do anything else than let them stay like water on a blue flower or let them fall over her cheeks, even as they would. That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feathertouch: it shook flirtation into love. Remember that the ambitious man who was looking at those Forget-me-nots under the water was very warm-hearted and rash. He did not know where the chain went; and idea had thrilled throught the recesses within him which had a miraculous effect in raising the power of passionate love lying buried there in no sealed sepulchre, but under the lightest, easily pierced mould. His words were quite abrupt and awkward; but the tone made them sound like an ardent, appealing avowal. "What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me -- pray." Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before. I *X336 am not sure that she knew what the words were; but she looked at Lydgate and the tears fell over her cheeks. There could have been no more conplete answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature dependend on him for her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly -- he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering -- and kissed each of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way. Rosamond was not angry, but she moved backward a little in timid happiness, and Lydgate could now sit near her and speak less incompletely. Rosamond had to make her little confession, and he poured out words of gratitude and tenderness with impulsive lavishment. In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself. He came again in the evening to speak with Mr Vincy, who, just returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he heard of Mr Featherstone's demise. The felicitous word "demise", which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action. Considered as a demise, old Featherstone's death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr Vincy hated both solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe-struck about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real property? Mr Vincy was inclined to take a jovial view of all things that evening: he even observed to Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as ever again; and when his approbation of Rosamond's engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing facility, passing at once to general remarks on the desirablesness of matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducing from the whole the appropriateness of a little more punch. *C32 *X337 *Mm They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk. SHAKESPEARE: ˛Tempest˛ *M *L1 THE triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr Featherstone's insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts of the old man's blood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of the family tie and were more visibly numerous now that he had become bedridden. Naturally: for when "poor Peter" had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoated parlour, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook prepares boiling water could have been less welcome on a hearth which they had reasons for preferring, than those persons whose Featherstone blood was ill-nourished, not from penuriousness on their part, but from poverty. Brother Solomon and Sister Jane were rich, and the family candour and total abstinence from false politeness with which they were always received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the solemn act of making his will would overlook the superior claims of wealth. Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to banish from his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should have kept away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no shadow of such claims. They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good egg, and should be laid in a warm nest. But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha and all the needy exiles, held a different point of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will in fretwork or paperhangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination. To the poorer and least favoured it seemed likely that since Peter had done nothing for the in his life, he would remember them at the last. Jonah argued that men like to make a surprise of their wills, while Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he left the best part of his money to those who least expected it. Also it was not to be thought but that an *X338 own bother "lying there" with dropsy in his legs must come to feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn't alter his will, he might have money by him. At any rate some blood-relations should be on the premises and on the watch against those who were hardly relations at all. Such things had been known as forged wills and disputed wills, which seemed to have the golden-hazy advantage of somehow enabling non-legatees to live out of them. Again, those who were no blood-relations might be caught making away with things -- and poor Peter "lying there" helpless] Somebody should be on the watch. But in this conclusion they were at one with Solomon and Jane; also some nephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still greater subtilty as to what might be done by a man able to "will away" his property and give himself large treats of oddity, felt in a handsome sort of way that there was a family interest to be attended to, and thought of Stone Court as a place which it would be nothing but right for them to visit. Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs Cranch, living with some wheeziness in the Chalky flats, could not undertake the journey; but her son, as being poor Peter's own nephew, could represent her advantageously, and watch lest his uncle Jonah should make an unfair use of the improbable things which seemed likely to happen. In fact there was a general sense running in the Featherstone blood that everybody must watch everybody else, and that it would be well for everybody else to reflect that the Almighty was watching him. Thus Stone Court continually saw one or other blood-relation alighting or departing, and Mary Garth had the unpleasant task of carrying their messages to Mr Featherstone, who would see none of them, and sent her down with the still more unpleasant task of telling them so. As manager of the household she felt bound to ask them in good provincial fashion to stay and eat; but she chose to consult Mrs Vincy on the point of extra downstairs consumption now that Mr Featherstone was laid up. "Oh, my dear, you must do things handsomely where there's last illness and a property. God knowns, ˛I˛ don't grudge them every ham in the house -- only, save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses," said *X339 liberal Mrs Vincy, once more of cheerful note and bright plumage. But some of the visitors alighted and did not depart after the handsome treating to veal and ham. Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greater expense) -- Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in the world, was mainly supported by a calling which he was modest enough not to boast of, though it was much better than swindling either on exchange or turf, but which did not require his presence at Brassing so long as he had a good corner to sit in and a supply of food. He chose the kitchen-corner, partly because he liked it best, and partly because he did not want to sit with Solomon, concerning whom he had a strong brotherly opinion. Seated in a famous arm-chair and in his best suit, constantly within sight of good cheer, he had a comfortable consciousness of being on the premises, mingled with fleeting suggestions of Sunday and the bar at the Green Man; and he informed Mary Garth that he should not go out of reach of his brother Peter while that poor fellow was above ground. The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots. Jonah was the wit among the Featherstones, and joked with the maid-servants when they came about the hearth, but seemed to consider Miss Garth a suspicious character, and followed her with cold eyes. Mary would have borne this one pair of eyes with comparative ease, but unfortunately there was young Cranch, who, having come all the way from the Chalky Flats to represnt his mother and watch his uncle Jonah, also felt it his duty to stay and to sit chiefly in the kitchen to give his uncle company. Young Cranch was not exactly the balancing point between the wit and the idiot, -- verging slightly towards the latter type, and squinting so as to leave everything in doubt about his sentiments except that they were not of a forcible character. When Mary Garth entered the kitchen and Mr Jonah Featherstone began to follow her with his cold detective eyes, young Cranch turning his head in the same direction seemed to insist on it that she should remark how he was squinting, as if he did it with design, like the gypsies when Borrow read the New Testament *X340 to them. This was rather too much for poor Mary; sometimes it made her bilious, sometimes it upset her gravity. One day that she had an opportunity she could not resist describing the kitchen scene to Fred, who would not be hindered from immediately going to see it, affecting simply to pass through. But no sooner did he face the four eyes than he had to rush through the nearest door, which happened to lead to the dairy, and there under the high roof and among the pans he gave way to laughter which made a hollow resonance perfectly audible in the kitchen. He fled by another doorway, but Mr Jonah, who had not before seen Fred's white complexion, long legs, and pinched delicacy of face, prepared many sarcasms in which these points of appearance were wittily combined with the lowest moral attributes. "Why, Tom, ˛you˛ don't wear such gentlemanly trousers -- ˛you˛ haven't got half such fine long legs," said Jonah to his nephew, winking at the same time, to imply that there was something more in these statements than their undeniableness. Tom looked at his legs, but left it uncertain whether he preferred his moral advantages to a more vicious length of limb and reprehensible gentility of trouser. In the large wainscoated parlour too there were constantly pairs of eyes on the watch, and own relatives eager to be "sitters-up". Many came, lunched, and departed, but Brother Solomon and the lady who had been Jane Featherstone for twenty-five years before she was Mrs Waule found it good to be there every day for hours, without other calculable occupation than that of obseving the cunning Mary Garth (who was so deep that she could be found out in nothing) and giving occasional dry wrinkly indications of crying -- as if capable of torrents in a wetter season -- at the thought that they were not allowed to go into Mr Featherstone's room. For the old man's dislike of his own family seemed to get stronger as he got less able to amuse himself by saying biting things to them. Too languid to sting, he had the more venom refluent in his blood. Not fully believing the message sent through Mary garth, they had presented themselves together within the door of the bedroom, both in black -- Mrs Waule having a white handkerchief partially unfolded in her hand -- and both with faces in a sort *X341 of half-mourning purpose; while Mrs Vincy with her pink cheeks and pink ribbons flying was actually administering a cordial to their own brother, and the light-complexioned Fred, his short hair curling as might be expected in a gambler's, was lolling at his ease in a large chair. Old Featherstone no sooner caught sight of these funereal figures appearing in spite of his orders than rage came to strengthen him more successfully than the cordial. He was propped up on a bed-rest, and always had his gold-headed stick lying by him. He seized it now and swept it backwards and forwards in as large an area as he could, apparently to ban these ugly spectres, crying in a hoarse sort of screech -- "Back, back, Mrs Waule] Back, Solomon]" "Oh, Brother Peter," Mrs Waule began -- but Solomon put his hand before her repressingly. He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy, with small furtive eyes, and was not only of much blander temper but thought himself much deeper than his brother Peter; indeed not likely to be decieved in any of his fellow-men, inasmuch as they could not well be more greedy and deceitful than he suspected them of being. Even the invisible powers, he thought, were likely to be soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there -- coming from a man of property, who might have been as impious as others. "Brother Peter", he said, in a wheedling yet gravely official tone, "it's nothing but right I should speak to you about the Three Crofst and the Manganese. The Almighty knows what I've got on my mind ..." "Then He knows more than I want to know," said Peter, laying down his stick with a show of truce which had a threat in it too, for he reversed the stick so as to make the gold handle a club in case of closer fighting, and looked hard at Solomon's bald head. "There's things you might repent of, Brother, for want of speaking to me," said Solomon, not advancing, however. "I could sit up with you to-night, and Jane with me willingly, and you might take your own time to speak, or let me speak." "Yes, I shall take my own time -- you needn't offer me yours, said Peter. "But you can't take your own time to die in, Brother," began *X342 Mrs Waule, with her usual woolly tone. "And when you lie speechless you may be tired of having strangers about you, and you may think of me and my children --" but here her voice broke under the touching thought which she was attributing to her speechless brother; the mention of ourselves being naturally affecting. "No, I shan't" said old Featherstone, contradictiously. "I shan't think of any of you. I've made my will, I tell you, I've made my will." Here he turned his head towards Mrs Vincy, and swallowed some more of his cordial. "Some people would be ashamed to fill up a place belonging by rights to others," said Mrs Waule, turning her narrow eyes in the same direction. "Oh, Sister," said Solomon, with ironical softness, "you and me are not fine, and handsome, and clever enough: we must be humble and let smart people push themselves before us". Fred's spirit could not bear this: rising and looking at Mr Featherstone, he said, "Shall my mother and I leave the room, sir, that you may be alone with your friends?" "Sit down, I tell you," said old Featherstone, snappishly. "Stop where you are. Good-bye, Solomon," he added, trying to wield his stick again, but failing now that he had reversed the handle. "Good-bye, Mrs Waule. Don't you come again." "I shall be down-stairs, Brother, whether or no," said Solomon. "I shall do ˛my˛ duty, and it remains to be seen what the Almighty will allow." "Yes, in property going out of families," said Mrs Waule, in continuation, -- "and where there's steady young men to carry on. But I pity them who are not such, and I pity their mothers. Good-bye, Brother Peter." "Remember, I'm the eldest after you, Brother, and prospered from the first, just as you did, and have got land alreay by the name of Featherstone," said Solomon, relying much on that reflection, as one which might be suggested in the watches of the night. "But I bid you good-bye for the present." Their exit was hastened by their seeing old Mr Featherstone pull his wig on each side and shut his eyes with his mouth-widening grimace, as if he were determined to be deaf and blind. *X343 None the less they came to Stone Court daily and sat below at the post of duty, sometimes carrying on a slow dialogue in an undertone in which the observation and response were so far apart, that any one hearing them might have imagined himself listening to speaking automata, in some doubt whether the ingenious mechanism would really work, or wind itself up for a long time in order to stick and be silent. Solomon and Jane would have been sorry to be quick: what that led to might be seen on the other side of the wall in the person of Brother Jonah. But their watch in the wainscoated parlour was sometimes varied by the presence of other guests from far or near. Now that Peter Featherstone was up-stairs, his property could be discussed with all that local enlightenment to be found on the spot: some rural and Middlemarch neighbours expressed much agreement with the family and sympathy with their interest agasint the Vincys, and feminine visitors were even moved to tears, in conversation with Mrs Waule, when they recalled the fact that they themselves had been disappointed in times past by codicils and marriages for spite on the part of ungrateful elderly gentlemen, who, it might have supposed, had been spared for something better. Such conversation paused suddenly, like an organ when the bellows are let drop, if Mary Garth came into the room; and all eyes were turned on her as a possible legatee, or one who might get access to iron chests. But the younger men who were relatives or connections of the family, were disposed to admire her in this problematic light, as a girl who showed much conduct, and who among all the chances that were flying might turn out to be at least a moderate prize. Hence she had her share of compliments and polite attentions. Especially from Mr Borthrop Trumbull, a distinguished bachelor and auctioneer of those parts, much concerned in the sale of land and cattle: a public character, indeed, whose name was seen on widely distributed placards, and who might reasonably be sorry for those who did not know of him. He was second cousin to Peter Featherstone, and had ben treated by him with more amenity than any other relative, being useful in matters of business; and in that programme of his funeral which the old man had himself dictated, he had been named as a Bearer. There *X344 was no odious cupidity in Mr Borthrop Trumbull -- nothing more than a sincere sense of his own merit, which, he was aware, in case of rivalry might tell against competitors; so that if Peter Featherstone, who so far as he, Trumbull, was concerned, had behaved like as good a soul as ever breathed, should have done anything handsome by him, all he could say was, that he had never fished and fawned, but had advised him to the best of his experience, which now extended over twenty years from the time of his apprenticeship at fifteen, and was likely to yield a knowledge of no surreptitious kind. His admiration was far from being confined to himself, but was accustomed professionally as well as privately to delight in estimating things at a high rate. He was an amaetur of superior phrases, and never used poor language without immediately correcting himself -- which was fortunate, as he was rather loud, and given to predominate, standing or walking about frequently, pulling down his waistcoat with the air of a man who is very much of his own opinion, trimming himself rapidly with his forefinger, and marking each new series in these movements by a busy play with his large seals. There was occasionally a little fierceness in his demeanour, but it was directed chiefly against false opinion, of which there is so much to correct in the world that a man of some reading and experience necessarily has his patience tried. He felt that the Featherstone family generally was of limited understanding, but being a man of the world and a public character, took everything as a matter of course, and even went to converse with Mr Jonah and young Cranch in the kitchen, not doubting that he had impressed the latter greatly by his leading questions concerning the Chalky Flats. If anybody had observed that Mr Borthrop Trumbull, being an auctioneer, was bound to know the nature of everything, he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently with the sense that he came pretty near that. On the whole, in an auctioneering way, he was an honourable man, not ashamed of his business, and feeling that "the celebrated Peel, now Sir Robert", if introduceded to him, would not fail to recognize his importance. "I don't mind if I have a slice of that ham, and a glass of that ale, Miss Garth, if you will allow me," he said, coming into the parlour at half past eleven, after having had the exceptional *X345 privilege of seeing old Featherstone, and standing with his back to the fire between Mrs Waule and Solomon. "It's not necessary for you to go out; -- let me ring the bell." "Thank you," said Mary, "I have an errand." "Well, Mr Trumbull, you're highly favoured," said Mrs Waule. "What, seeing the old man?" said the auctioneer, playing with his seals dispassionately. "Ah, you see he has relied on me considerably." Here he pressed his lips together, and frowned meditatively. "Might anybody ask what their brother has been saying?" said Solomon, in a soft tone of humility, in which he had a sense of luxurious cunning, he being a rich man and not in need of it. "Oh yes, anybody may ask," said Mr Trumbull, with loud and good-humoured though cutting sarcasm. "Anybody may interrogate. Any one may give their remarks an interrogative turn," he continued, his sonorousness rising with his style. "This is constantly done by good speakers, even when they anticipate no answer. It is what we call a figure of speech - speech at a high figure, as one may say." The eloquent auctioneer smiled at his own ingenuity. "I shouldn't be sorry to hear he'd remembered ˛you˛, Mr Trumbull," said Solomon. "I never was against the deserving. It's the undeserving I'm against." "Ah, there it is, you see, there it is," said Mr Trumbull, significantly. "It can't be denied that undeserving people have been legatees, and even residuary legatees. It is so, with testamentary dispositions." Again he pursed up his lips and frowned a little "Do you mean to say for certain, Mr Trumbull, that my brother has left his land away from our family?" said Mrs Waule, on whom, as an unhopeful woman, those long words had a depressing effect. "A man might as well turn his land into charity land at once as leave it to some people," observed Solomon, his sister's question having drawn no naswer. "What, Blue-Coat land?" said Mrs Waule, again. "Oh, Mr Trumbull, you never can mean to say that. It would be flying in the face of the Almighty that's prospered him." While Mrs Waule was speaking, Mr Borthrop Trumbull *X346 walked away from the fireplace towards the window, patrolling with his forefinger round the inside of his stock, then along his whiskers and the curves of his hair. He now walked to Miss Garth's work-table, opened a book which lay there, and read the title aloud with pompous emphasis as if he were offering it for sale: "˛Anne˛ ˛of˛ ˛Geierstein˛ (pronounced Jeersteen) or the Maiden of the Mist, by the author of ˛Waverley˛." Then turnig the page ne began sonorously -- "The course of four centuries has well-nigh elapsed since the series of events which are related in the following chapters took place on the Continent." He pronounced the last truly admirable word with the accent on the last syllable, not as unaware of vulgar usage, but feeling that this novel delivery enhanced the sonorous beauty which his reading had given to the whole. And now the servant came in with the tray, so that the moments for answering Mrs Waule's question had gone by safely, while she and Solomon, watching Mr Trumbull's movements, were thinking that high learning interfered sadly with serious affairs. Mr Borthrop Trumbull really knew nothing about old Featherstone's will; but he could hardly have been brought to declare any ignorance unless he had been arrested for misprision of treason. "I shall take a mere mouthful of ham and a glass of ale," he said, reassuringly. "As a man with public business, I take a snack when I can. I will back this ham," he added, after swallowing some morsels with alarming haste, "against any ham in the three kingdoms. In my opinion it is better than the hams at Freshitt Hall -- and I think I am a tolerable judge." "Some don't like so much sugar in their hams," said Mrs Waule. "But my poor brother would always have sugar." "If any person demands better, he is at liberty to do so; but, God bless me, what an aroma] I should be glad to buy-in that quality, I know. There is some gratification to a gentleman" -- here Mr Trumbull's voice conveyed an emotional remonstrance -- "in having this kind of ham set on his table." He pushed aside his plate, poured out his glass of ale and drew his chair a little forward, profiting by the occasion to look at the inner side of his legs, which he stroked approvingly -- *X347 Mr Trumbull having all those less frivolous airs and gestures which distinguish the predominant races of the north. "Youhave an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth," he observed, when Mary re-entered. "It is by the author of ˛Waverley˛: that is Sir Walter Scott. I have bought one of his works myself -- a very nice thing, a very superior publication, entitled ˛Ivanhoe˛. You will not get any writer to beat him in a hurry, I think -- he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have just been reading a portion at the commencement of ˛Anne˛ ˛of˛ ˛Jeersteen˛. It commences well." (Things never began with Mr Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced, both in private life and on his handbills.) "You are a reader, I see. Do you subscribe to our Middlemarch library?" "No," said Mary. "Mr Fred Vincy brought this book." "I am a great bookman myself," returned Mr Trumbull. "I have no less than two hundred volumes in calf, and I flatter myself they are well selected. Also pictures by Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Titan, Vandyck, and others. I shall be happy to lend you any work you like to mention, Miss Garth." "I am much obliged," said Mary, hastening away again, "but I have little time for reading." "I should say my brother has done something for ˛her˛ in his will," said Mr Solomon, in a very low undertone, when she had shut the door behind her, pointing with his head towards the absent Mary. "His first wife was a poor match for him, though," said Mrs Waule. "She brought him nothing: and this young woman is only her niece. And very proud. And my brother has always paid her wage." "A sensible girl though, in my opinion," said Mr Trumbull, finishing his ale and starting up with an emphatic adjustment of his waistcoat. "I have observed her when she has been mixing medicine in drops. She minds what she is doing, sir. That is a great point in a woman, and a great point for our friend upstairs, poor deal old soul. A man whose life is of any value should think of his wife as a nurse: that is what I should do, if I married; and I believe I have lived single long enough not to make a mistake in that line. Some men must marry to elevate themselves a little, but when I am in need of that, I hope some *X348 one will tell me so -- I hope some individual will apprise me of the fact. I wish you good morning, Mrs Waule. Good morning, Mr Solomon. I trust we shall meet under less melancholy auspices." When Mr Trumbull had departed with a fine bow, Solomon, leaning forward, observed to his sister, "You may depend, Jane, my brother has left that girl a lumping sum." "Anybody would think so, from the way Mr Trumbull talks," said Jane. Then, after a pause, "He talks as if my daughters wasn't to be trusted to give drops." "Auctioneers talk wild," said Solomon. "Not but what Trumbull has made money." *Mm Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close; And let us all to meditation. ˛2 Henry VI˛ *M *L1 THAT night after twleve o'clock Mary Garth relieved the watch in Mr Featherstone's room, and sat there alone through the small hours. She often chose this task, in which she found some pleasure, notwithstanding the old man's testiness whenever he demanded her attentions. There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims. She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illustions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy. Yet there were some illusions under Mary's eyes which were not quite comic to her. She was secretly convinced, though she had no other grounds than her close observation of old Featherstone's *X350 nature, that in spite of his fondness for having the Vincys about him, they were as likely to be disappointed as any of the relations whom he kept at a distance. She had a good deal of disdain for Mrs Vincy's evident alarm lest she and Fred should be alone together, but it did not hinder her from thinking anxiously of the way in which Fred would be affected, if it should turn out that his uncle had left him as poor as ever. She could make a butt of Fred when he was present, but she did not enjoy his follies when he was absent. Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind no overbalanced by passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its own powers with interest. Mary had plenty of merriment within. Her thought was not veined by any solemnity or pathos about the old man on the bed: such sentiments are easier to affect than to feel about an aged creature whose life is not visibly anything but a remnant of vices. She had always seen the most disagreeable side of Mr Featherstone: he was not proud of her, and she was only useful to him. To be anxious about a soul that is always snapping at you must be left to the saints of the earth; and Mary was not one of them. She had never returned him a harsh word, and had waited on him faithfully: that was her utmost. Old Featherstone himself was not in the least anxious about his soul, and had declined to see Mr Tucker on the subject. To-night he had not once snapped, and for the first hour or two he lay remarkably still, until at last Mary heard him rattling his bunch of keys against the tin box which he always kept in the bed beside him. About three o'clock he said, with remarkable distinctness, "Missy, come here]" Mary obeyed and found that he had already drawn the tin box from under the clothes, though he usually asked to have this done for him; and he had selected the key. He now unlocked the box, and, drawing from it another key, looked straight at her with eyes that seemed to have recovered all their sharpness and said, "How many of 'em are in the house?" "You mean of your own relations, sir," said Mary, well used to the old man's way of speech. He nodded slightly and she went on. *X351 "Mr Jonah Featherstone and young Cranch are sleeping here." "Oh ay, they stick, do they? and the rest -- they come every day, I'll warrant -- Solomon and Jane, and all the young uns? They come peeping, and counting and casting up?" "Not all of them every day. Mr Solomon and Mrs Waule are here every day, and the others come often." The old man listened with a grimace while she spoke, and then said, relaxing his face, "The more fools they. You hearken, Missy. It's three o'clock in the morning and I've got all my faculties as well as ever I had in my life. I know all my property, and where the money's put out, and everything. And I've made everything ready to change my mind, and do as I like at the last. Do you hear, Missy? I've got my faculties." "Well, sir?" said Mary, quietly. He now lowered his tone with an air of deeper cunning. "I've made two wills, and I'm going to burn one. Now you do as I tell you. This is the key of my iron chest, in the closet there. You push well at the side of the brass plate at the top, till it goes like a bolt: then you can put the key in the front lock and turn it. See and do that; and take out the topmost paper -- Last Will and Testament -- big printed." "No, sir," said Mary, in a firm voice, "I cannot do that." "Not do it? I tell you, you must," said the old man, his voice beginning to shake under the shock of this resistance. "I cannot touch your iron chest or your will. I must refuse to do anything that might lay me open to suspicion." "I tell you, I'm in my right mind. Shan't do as I like at the last? I made two wills on purpose. Take the key, I say." "No, sir, I will not," said Mary, more resolutely still. Her repulsion was getting stronger. "I tell you, there's no time to lose." "I cannot help that, sir. I will not let the close of your life soil the beginning of mine. I will not touch your iron chest or your will." She moved to a little distance from the bedside. The old man paused with a blank stare for a little while, holding the one key erect on the ring; then with an agitated jerk he began to work with his bony left hand at emptying the tin box before him. "Missy," he began to say, hurriedly, "look here] take the *X352 money -- the notes and gold -- look here -- take it -- you shall have it all -- do as I tell you." He made an effort to stretch out the key towards her as far as possible, and Mary again retreated. "I will not touch your key or your money, sir. Pray don't ask me to do it again. If you do, I must go and call your brother." He let his hand fall, and for the first time in her life Mary saw old Peter Featherstone begin to cry childishly. She said, in as gentle a tone as she could command, "Pray put up your money, sir"; and then went away to her seat by the fire, hoping this would help to convince him that it was useless to say more. Presently he rallied and said eagerly -- "Look here, then. Call the young chap. Call Fred Vincy." Mary's heart began to beat more quickly. Various ideas rushed through her mind as to what the burning of a second will might imply. She had to make a difficult decision in a hurry. "I will call him, if you will let me call Mr Jonah and others with him." "Nobody else, I say. The young chap. I shall do as I like." "Wait till broad daylight, sir, when every one is stirring. Or let me call Simmons now, to go and getch the lawyer. He can behere in less than two hours." "Lawyer? What do I want with the lawyer? Nobody shall know -- I say, nobody shall know. I shall do as I like." "Let me call some one else, sir," said Mary, persuasively. She did not like her position -- alone with the old man, who seemed to show a strange flaring of nervous energy which enabled him to speak again and again without falling into his usual cough; yet she desired not to push unnecessarily the contradiction which agitated him. "Let me, pray, call some one else." "You let me alone, I say. Look here, Missy. Take the money. You'll never have the chance again. It's pretty nigh two hundred -- there's more in the box, and nobody knows how much there was. Take it and do as I tell you." Mary, standing by the fire, saw its red light falling on the old man, propped up on his pillows and bed-rest, with his bony hand holding out the key, and the money lying on the quilt before him. She never forgot that vision of a man wanting to do as he liked at the lst. But the way in which he had put the *X353 offer of the money urged her to speak with harder resolution than ever. "It is of no use, sir. I will not do it. Put up your money. I will not touch your money. I will do anyting else I can to comfort you; but I will not touch your keys or your money." "Anything else -- anything else]" said old Featherstone, with hoarse rage, which, as if in a nightmare, tried to be loud, and yet was only just audible. "I want nothing else. You come here -- you come here." Mary approached him cautiously, knowing him too well. She saw him dropping his keys and trying to grasp his stick, while he looked at her like an aged hyena, the muscles of his face getting distorted with the effort of his hand. She paused at a safe distance. "Let me give you some cordial," she said, quietly, "and try to compose yourself. You will perhaps go to sleep. And to-morrow by daylight you can do as you like." He lifted the stick, in spite of her being beyond his reach, and threw it with a hard effort which was but impotence. It fell, slipping over the foot of the bed. Mary let it lie, and retreated to her chair by the fire. By-and-by she would go to him with the coridal. Fatigue would make him passive. It was getting towards the chillest moment of the morning, the fire had got law, and she could see through the chink between the moreen window-curtains the light whitened by the blind. Having put some wood on the fire and thrown a shawl over her, she sat down, hoping that Mr Featherstone might now fall asleep. If she went near him the irritation might be kept up. He had said nothing after throwing the stick, but she had seen him taking his keys again and laying his right hand on the money. He did not put it up, however, and she thought that he was dropping off to sleep. But Mary herself began to be more agitated by the remembrance of what she had gone through, than she had been by the reality -- questioning those acts of hers which had come imperatively and excluded all question in the critical moment. Presently the dry wood sent out a flame which illuminated every crevice, and Mary saw that the old man was lying quietly with his head turned a little on one side. She went towards him *X354 with inaudible steps, and thought that his face looked strangely motionless; but the next moment the movement of the flame communicating itself to all objects made her uncertain. The violent beating of her heart rendered her perceptions so doubtful that even when she touched him and listened for his breathing, she could not trust her conclusions. She went to the window and gently propped aside the curtain and blind, so that the still light of the sky fell on the bed. The next moment she ran to the bell and rang it energetically. In a very little while there was no longer any doubt that Peter Featherstone was dead, with his right hand clasping the keys, and his left hand lying on the heap of notes and gold. *X355 *B4 THREE LOVE PROBLEMS *X356 *C34 *X357 *M ˛lst Gent˛. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws, Carry no weight, nor force. ˛2nd Gent˛. But levity Is casual too, and makes the sum of weight. For power finds its place in lack of power; Advance is cession, and the driven ship May run aground because the helmsman's thought Lacked force to balance opposites. *M *L1 IT was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried. In the prosaic neighbourhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny, and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds of Lowick churchyard. Swiftly-moving clouds only now and then allowed a gleam to light up any object, whether ugly or beautiful, that happened to stand within its golden shower. In the churchyard the objects were remarkably various, for there was a little country crowd waiting to see the funeral. The news had spread that it was to be a "big burying"; the old gentleman had left written directions about everything, and meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters". This was true; for old Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his *X358 personal acquaintance. In any case, he had been bent on having a handsome funeral, and on having persons "bid" to it who would rather have stayed at home. He had even desired that female relatives should follow him to the grave, and poor sister Martha had taken a difficult journey for this purpose from the Chalky Flats. She and Jane would have beeen altogether cheered (in a tearful manner) by this sign that a brother who disliked seeing them while he wa living had been prospectively fond of their presence when he should have become a testator, if the sign had not been made equivocal by being extended to Mrs Vincy, whose expense in handsome crape seemed to imply the most presumptuous hopes, aggravated by a bloom of complexion which told pretty plainly that she was not a blood-relation, but of that generally objectionable class called wife's kin. We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion. In writing the programme for his burial he certainly did not make clear to himself that his pleasure in the little drama of which it formed a part was confined to anticipation. In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousness with that livid stagnant presence, and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of gratification inside his coffin. Thus old Featherstone was imaginative, after his fashion. However, the three mourning-coaches were filled according to the written orders of the deceased. There were pall-bearers on horse-back, with the richest scarves and hatbands, and even the under-bearers had trappings of woe which were of a good well-priced quality. The black procession, when dismounted, looked the larger for the smallness of the churchyard; the heavy human faces and the black draperies shivering in the wind seemed to tell of a world strangely incongruous with the lightly-droppig blossoms and the gleams of sunshine on the daisies. The clergyman who met the procession was Mr Cadwallader -- also according to the request of Peter Featherstone, prompted as usual by peculiar reasons. Having a contempt for *X359 curates, whom he always called understrappers, he was resolved to be buried by a beneficed clergyman. Mr Casaubon was out of the question, not merely because he declined duty of this sort, but because Featherstone had an especial dislike to him as the rector of his own parish, who had a lien on the ln-cand in the shape of tithe, also as the deliverer of morning sermons, which the old man, being in his pew and not at all sleepy, had been obliged to sit through with an inward snarl. He had an objection to a parson stuck up above his head preaching to him. Buthis relations with Mr Cadwallader had been of a different kind : the trout-stream which ran through Mr Casaubon's land took its course through Featherstone's also, so that Mr Cadwallader was a parson who had had to ask a favour instead of preaching. Moreover, he was one of the high gentry living four miles away from Lowick, and was thus exalted to an equal sky with the sheriff of the county and other dignities vaguely regarded as necessary to the system of things. There would be a satisfaction in being buried by Mr Cadwallader, whose very name offered a fine opportunity for pronouncing wrongly if you liked. This distinction conferred on the Rector of Tipton and Freshitt was the reason why Mrs Cadwallader made one of the group that watched old Featherstone's funeral from an upper window of the manor. She was not fond of visiting that house, but she liked, as she said, to see collections of strange animals such as there would be at this funeral; and she had persuaded Sir James and the young Lady Chettam to drive the Rector and herself to Lowick in order that the visit might be altogether pleasant. "I will go anywhere with you, Mrs Cadwallader," Celia had said; "but I don't like funerals." "Oh, my dear, when yoy have a clerguman in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them." "No, to be sure not," said the Dowager Lady Chettam, with stately emphasis. The upper window from which the funeral could be well seen was in the room occupied by Mr Casaubon when he had *X360 been forbidden; but he had resumed nearly his habitual style of life now in spite of warnings and prescriptions, and after politely welcmoning Mrs Cadwallader had slipped again into the library to chew a cud of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim. But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the library, and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone's funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life, always afterwars came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive points in memory, just as the vision of St Peter's at Rome was inwoven with moods of despondency. Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea's nature. The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below. And Dorothea was not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of that height. "I shall not look any more," said Celia, after the train had entered the church, placing herself behind her husband's elbow so that she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek. "I daresay Dodo likes it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people." "I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among," said Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the interest of a monk on his holiday tour. "It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbours, unless they are cottagers. One is contantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library." "Quite right to feel obliged to me," said Mrs Cadwallader. "Your rich Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I daresay you don't half see them at churh. They are quite *X361 different from your uncle's tenants or Sir James's -- monsters -- farmers without landlords -- one can't tell how to class them." "Most of these followers are not Lowick people," said Sir James; "I suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch. Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well as land." "Think of that now] when so many younger sons can't dine at their own expense," said Mrs Cadwallader. "Ah," turning round at the sound of the opening door, "here is Mr Brooke. I felt that we were incomplete before, and here is the explanation. You are come to see this odd funeral, of course?" "No, I came to look after Casaubon -- to see how he goes on, you know. And to bring a little news -- a little news, my dear," said Mr Brooke, nodding at Dorothea as she came towards him. "I looked into the library, and I saw Casaubon over his books. I told him it wouldn't do: I said, ""This will never do, you know: think of your wife, Casaubon."" And he promised me to come up. I didn't tell him my news: I said, he must come up." "Ah, now they are coming out of church," Mrs Cadwallader exclaimed. "Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set] mr Lydgate as doctor, I suppose. But that is really a good-looking woman, and the fair young man must be her son. Who are they, Sir James, do you know?" "I see Vincy the mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife and son," said Sir James, looking interrogatively at Mr Brooke, who nodded and said -- "Yes, a very decent family -- a very good fellow is Vincy; a credit to the manufacturing interest. You have seen him at my house, you know." "Ah, yes: one of your secret committee," said Mrs Cadwallader, provokingly. "A coursing fellow, though," said Sir James, with a fox-hunter's disgust. "And one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek," said Mrs Cadwallader. "Those dark, purple-faced people are an excellent foil. Dear me, they are like a set of jugs] Do look at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering above them in his white surplice." *X362 "It's a solemn thing, though, a funeral, "said Mr Brooke, "if you take it in that light, you know." "But I am not taking it in that light. I can't wear my solemnity too often, else it will go to rags. It was time the old man died, and none of these people are sorry." "How piteous]" said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning. I cannot bear to think that any one should die and leave no love behind." She was going to say more, but she saw her husband enter and seat himself a little in the background. The difference his presence made to her was not always a happy one: she felt that he often inwardly objected to her speech. "Positively," exclaimed Mrs Cadwallader, "there is a new face come out from behind that broad man queerer than any of them: a little round head with bulging eyes -- a sort of frog-face -- do look. He must be of another blood, I think." "Let me see]" said Celia, with awakened curiosity, standing behind Mrs Cadwallader and leaning forward over her head. "Oh, what an odd face]" Then with a quick change to another sort of surprised expression, she added, "Why, Dodo, you never told me that Mr Ladislaw was come again]" Dorothea felt a shock of alarm: every one noticed her sudden paleness as she looked up immediately at her uncle, while Mr Casaubon looked at her. "He came with me, you know; he is my guest -- puts up with me at the Grange," said Mr Brooke, in his easiest tone, nodding at Dorothea, as if the announcement were just what she might have expected. "And we have brought the picture at the top of the carriage. I knew you would be pleased with the surprise, Casaubon. There you are to the very life -- as Aquinas, you know. Quite the right sort of thing. And you will hear young Ladislaw talk about it. He talks uncommonly well -- points out this, that, and the other -- knwos art and everything of that kind -- companionable, you know -- is up with you in any track -- what I've been wanting a long while." Mr Casaubon bowed with cold politeness, mastering his irritation, but only so far as to be silent. He remembered Will's letter quite as well as Dorothea did; he had noticed that it was *X363 not among the letters which had been reserved for him on his recovery, and secretly concluding that Dorothea had sent word to Will not to come to Lowick, he had shrunk with proud sensitiveeness from ever recurring to the subject. He now inferred that she had asked her uncle to invite Will to the Grange; and she felt it impossible at that moment to enter into any explanation. Mrs Cadwallader's eyes diverted from the churchyard, saw a good deal of dumb show which was not so intelligible to her as she could have desired, and could not repress the question, "Who is Mr Ladislaw?" "A young relative of Mr Casaubon's," said Sir James, promptly. His good-nature often made him quick and clear-seeing in personal matters, and he had divined from Dorothea's glance at her husband that there was some alarm in her mind. "A very nice young fellow -- Casaubon has done everything for him," explained Mr Brooke. "He repays your expense in him Casaubon," he went on, nodding encouragingly. "I hope he will stay with me a long while and we shall make something of my documents. I have plenty of ideas and facts, you know, and I can see he is just the man to put them into shape -- remembers what the right quotations are, ˛omne tulit punctum˛, and that sort of thing -- gives subjects a kind of turn. I invited him some time ago when you were ill, Casaubon: Dorothea said you couldn't have anybody in the house, you know, and she asked me to write." Poor Dorothea felt that every word of her uncle's was about as pleasant as a grain of sand in the eye of Mr Casaubon. It would be altogether unfitting now to explain that she had not wished her uncle to invite Will Ladislaw. She could not in the least make clear to herself the reasons for her husband's dislike to his presence -- a dislike painfully impressed on her by the scene in the library; but she felt the unbecomingness of saying anything that might convey a notion of it to others. Mr Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge. But he wished to repress outward signs, and only Dorothea could discern the changes in her husband's face before he *X364 observed with more of dignified bending and sing-song than usual -- "You are exceedingly hospitable, my dear sir; and I owe you acknowledgments for exercising your hospitality towards a relative of mine." The funeral was ended now, and the church yard was being cleared. "Now you can see him, Mrs Cadwallader," said Celia. "He is just like a miniature of Mr Casaubon's aunt that hans in Dorothea's boudoir -- quite nice-looking." "A very pretty sprig," said Mrs Cadwallader, dryly. "What is your nephew to be, Mr Casaubon?" "Pardon me, he is not my nephew. He is my cousin." "Well, you know," interposed Mr Brooke, "he is trying his wings. He is just the sort of young fellow to rise. I should be glad to give him an opportunity. He would make a good secretary, now, like Hobbes, Milton, Swift -- that sort of man." "I understand," said Mrs Cadwallader. "One who can write speeches." "I'll fetch him in now, eh, Casaubon?" said Mr Brooke. "He wouldn't come in till I had announced him, you know. And we'll go down and look at the picture. There you are to the life: a deep subtle sort of thinker with his forefinger on the page, while Saint Bonaventure or somebody else, rather fat and florid, is looking up at the Trinity. Everything is symbolical, you know -- the higher style of art: I like that up to a certain point, but not too far -- it's rather straining to keep up with, you know. But you are at home in that, Casaubon. And your painter's flesh is good -- solidity, transparency, everything of that sort. I went into that a great deal at one time. However, I'll go and fetch Ladislaw." *C35 *X365 *Mm ˛Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir˛ ˛Que de voir d'he pales, es de l'autre monde.˛ REGNARD: ˛Le˛ ˛Le-te´te˛ without her bringing away from it some new troublesome impression, and the last interview that Mr Casaubon was aware of (Dorothea, on returning from Freshitt Hall, had for the first time been silent about having seen Will) had led to a scene which roused an angrier feeling against them both than he had ever known before. Dorothea's outpouring of her notions about money, in the darkness of the night, had nothing but bring a mixture of more odious foreboding into her husband's mind. And there was the shock lately given to his health always sadly present with him. He was certainly much revived; he had recovered all his usual power of work: the illness might have been mere fatigue, and there might still be twenty years of achievement before him, which would justify the thirty years of preparation. That prospect was made the sweeter by a flavour of vengeance against the hasty sneers of Carp & Company; for even when Mr Casaubon was carrying his taper among the tombs of the past, those modern figures came athwart the dim light, and interrupted his diligent exploration. To convince Carp of his mistake, so that he would have to eat his own words with a good deal of indigestion, would be an agreeable accident of triumphant authorship, which the prospect of living to future ages on earth and to all eternity in heaven could not exclude from contemplation. Since, thus, the prevision of his own unending bliss could not nullify the bitter savours of irritated jealousy and vindictiveness, it is the less surprising that the probability of transient earthly bliss for other persons, when he himself should have entered into glory, had not a potently sweetening effect. If the truth should be that some undermining disease was at work within him, there might be large opportunity for some people to be the happier when he was gone; and if one of those people should be Will Ladislaw, Mr Casaubon objected so strongly that it seemed as if the annoyance would make part of his disembodied existence. This is a very bare and therefore a very incomplete way of putting the case. The human soul moves in many channels, *X458 and Mr Casaubon, we know, had a sense of rectitude and an honourable pride in satisfying the requirements of honour, which compelled him to find other reasons for his conduct than those of jealousy and vindictiveness. The way in which Mr Casaubon put the case was this:-- "In marrying Dorothea Brooke I had to care for her wellbeing in case of my death. But wellbeing is not to be secured by ample, independent possession of property; on the contrary, occasions might arise in which such possession might expose her to the more danger. She is ready prey to any man who knows how to play adroitly either on her affectionate ardour or her Quixotic enthusiasm; and a man stands by with that very intention in his mind -- a man with no other principle than transient caprice, and who has a personal animosity towards me -- I am sure of it -- an animosity which is fed by the consciousness of his ingratitude, and which he has constantly vented in ridicule of which I am as well assured as if I had heard it. Even if I live I shall not be without uneasiness as to what he may attempt through indirect influence. This man has gained Dorothea's ear: he has fascinated her attention; he has evidently tries to impress her mind with the notion that he has claims beyond anything I have done for him. If I die -- and he is waiting here on the watch for that -- he will persuade her to marry him. That would be calamity for her and sucess for him. ˛She˛ would not think it calamity: he would make her believe anything; she has a tendency to immoderate attachment which she inwardly reproaches me for not responding to, and already her mind is occupied with his fortunes. He thinks of an easy conquest and of entering into my nest. That I will hinder] Such a marriage would be fatal to Dorothea. Has he ever persisted in anything except from contradiction? In knowledge, he has always tried to be showy at small cost. In religion he could be, as long as it suited him, the facile echo of Dorothea's vagaries. When was sciolism ever dissociated from laxity? I utterly distrust his morals, and it is my duty to hinder to the utmost the fulfilment of his designs. The arrangements made by Mr Casaubon on his marriage left strong measures open to him, but in ruminating on them his mind inevitably dwelt so much on the probabilities of his own *X459 life that the longing to get the nearest possible calculation had at last overcome his proud reticence, and had determined him to ask Lydgate's opinion as to the nature of his illness. He had mentioned to Dorothea that Lydgate was coming by appointment at half-past three, and in answer to her anxious question, whether he felt ill, replied,-- "No, I merely wish to have his opinion concerning some habitual symptoms. You need not see him, my dear. I shall give orders that he may be sent to me in the Yew-Tree Walk, where I shall be taking my usual exercise." When Lydgate entered the Yew-Tree Walk he saw Mr Casaubon slowly receding with his hands behind him according to his habit, and his head bent forward. It was a lovely afternoon; the leaves from the lofty limes were falling silently across the sombre evergreens, while the lights and shadows slept side by side: there was no sound but the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge. Lydgate, conscious of an energetic frame in its prime, felt some compassion when the figure which he was likely soon to overtake turned round, and in advancing towards him showed more markedly than ever the signs of premature age -- the student's bent shoulders, the emaciated limbs, and the melancholy lines of the mouth. "Poor fellow," he thought, "some men with his years are like lions; one can tell nothing of their age except that they are full grown." "Mr Lydgate," said Mr Casaubon, with his invariably polite air, "I am exceedingly obliged to you for your punctuality. We will, if you please, carry on our conversation in walking to and fro." "I hope your wish to see me is not due to the return of unpleasant symptoms," said Lydgate, filling up a pause. "Not immediately -- no. In order to account for that wish I must mention -- what it were otherwise needless to refer to -- that my life, on all collateral accounts insignificant, derives a possible importance from the incompleteness of labours which have extended through all its best years. In short, I have long had on hand a work which I would fain leave behind me in such a state, at least, that it might be committed to the press by -- others. Were I assured that this is the utmost I can reasonably *X460 expect, that assurance would be a useful circumscription of my attempts, and a guide in both the positive and negative determination of my course." Here Mr Casaubon paused, removed one hand from his back and thrust it between the buttons of his single-breasted coat. To a mind largely instructed in the human destiny hardly anything could be more interesting than the inward conflict implied in his formal measured address, delivered with the usual sing-song and motion of the head. Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life -- a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them? But there was nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little amusement mingling with his pity. He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer. "You refer to the possible hindrances from want of health?" he said, wishing to help forward Mr Casaubon's purpose, which seemed to be clogged by some hesitation. "I do. You have not implied to me that the symptoms which -- I am bound to testify -- you watched with scrupulous care, were those of a fatal desease. But were it so, Mr Lydgate, I should desire to know the truth without reservation, and I appeal to you for an exact statement of your conclusions: I request it as a friendly service. If you can tell me that my life is not threatened by anything else than ordinary casualties, I shall rejoice, on grounds which I have already indicated. If not, knowledge of the truth is even more important to me." "Then I can no longer hesitate as to my course," said Lydgate; "but the first thing I must impress on you is that my conclusions are doubly uncertain -- uncertain not only because of my fallibility, but because diseases of the heart are eminently difficult to found predictions on. In any case, one can hardly increase appreciably the tremendous uncertainty of life." Mr Casaubon winced perceptibly, but bowed. "I believe that you are suffering from what is called fatty *X461 degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience -- a more lengthened observation -- is wanted on the subject. But after what you have said, it is my duty to tell you that death from this disease is often sudden. At the same time, no such result can be predicted. Your condition may be consistent with a tolerably comfortable life for another fifteen years, or even more. I could add no more information to this, beyond anatomical or medical details, which would leave expectation at precisely the same point." Lydgate's instinct was fine enough to tell him that plain speech, quite free from ostentatious caution, would be felt by Mr Casaubon as a tribute of respect. "I thank you, Mr Lydgate," said Mr Casaubon, after a moment's pause. "One thing more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you have now told me to Mrs Casaubon?" "Partly -- I mean, as to the possible issues." Lydgate was going to explain why he had told Dorothea, but Mr Casaubon, with an unmistakable desire to end the conversation, waved his hand slightly, and said again, "I thank you," proceeding to remark on the rare beauty of the day. Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death -- who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a common-place, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die -- and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the *X462 first. To Mr Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onwards in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward -- perhaps with the divine calm of benificence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion. What was Mr Casaubon's bias his acts will give us a clue to. He held himself to be, with some private scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and hopes of the future. But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. And Mr Casaubon's immediate desire was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places. Dorothea had been aware when Lydgate had ridden away, and she had stepped into the garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband. But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardour, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder; and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him, and might have represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hours remaining should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief. His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increase; yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm. Mr Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm. There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation of their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness -- calling their denial knowledge. You may ask why, *X463 in the name of manliness, Mr Casaubon should have behaved in that way. Consider that his was a mind which shrank from pity: have you ever watched in such a mind the effect of a suspicion that what is pressing it as a grief may be really a source of contentment, either actual or future, to the being who already offends by pitying? Besides, he knew little of Dorothea's sensations, and had not reflected that on such an occasion as the present they were comparable in strength to his own sensibilities about Carp's criticisms. Dorothea did not withdraw her arm, but she could not venture to speak. Mr Casaubon did not say, "I wish to be alone", but he directed his steps in silence towards the house, and as they entered by the glass door on this eastern side, Dorothea withdrew her arm and lingered on the matting, that she might leave her husband quite free. He entered the library and shut himself in, alone with his sorrow. She went up to her boudoir. The opne bow-window let in the serene glory of the afternoon lying in the avenue, where the lime-trees cast long shadows. But Dorothea knew nothing of the scene. She threw herself on a chair, not heeding that she was in the dazzling sun-rays: if there were discomfort in that, how could she tell that it was not part of her inward misery? She was in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage. Instead of tears there came words: -- "What have I done -- what am I -- that he should treat me so? He never knows what is in my mind -- he never cares. What is the use of anything I do? He wishes he had never married me." She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness. Like one who has lost his way and is weary, she sat and saw as in one glance all the paths of her young hope which she should never find again. And just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her husband's solitude -- how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have surveyed him -- never have said, "Is he worth living for?" but would have felt him simply a part of her own life. Now she said bitterly,"It is his fault, not mine." In the jar of her whole being, Pity was overthrown. Was it her fault that she had believed in him -- had *X464 believed in his worthiness? -- And what, exactly, was he? -- She was able enough to estimate him -- she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate. The sun was low when Dorothea was thinking that she would not go down again, but would send a message to her husband saying that she was not well and preferred remaining up-stairs. She had never deliberately allowed her resentment to govern her in this way before, but she believed now that she could not see him again without telling him the truth about her feeling, and she must wait till she could do it without interruption. He might wonder and be hurt at her message. It was good that he should wonder and be hurt. Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her -- that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. She had determined to ring her bell, when there came a rap at the door. Mr Casaubon had sent to say that he would have his dinner in the library. He wished to be quite alone this evening, being much occupied. "I shall not dine, then, Tantripp." "Oh, madam, let me bring you a little something?" "No; I am not well. Get everything ready in my dressing-room, but pray do not disturb me again." Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle, while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike. The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a resolved submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet her husband -- her conviction that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work, and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger with sad remonstrance. It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows -- but the resolved submission did come; and when the house was still, and she knew that it was *X465 near the time when Mr Casaubon habitually went to rest, she opened her door gently and stood outside in the darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs with a light in his hand. If he did not come soon she thought that she would go down and even risk incurring another pang. She would never again expect anything else. But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking. "Dorothea]" he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. "Were you waiting for me?" "Yes, I did not like to disturb you." "Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching." When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea's ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband's, and they went along the broad corridor together. *B5 *C43 *X469 *Mm This figure hath high price: "twas wrought with love Ages ago in finest ivory; Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines Of generous womanhood that fits all time. That too is costly ware; majolica Of deft design, to please a lordly eye: The smile, you see, is perfect -- wonderful As mere Faience] a table ornament To suit the richest mounting. *M *L1 Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally drive into Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity such as occur to every lady of any wealth when she lives within three miles of a town. Two days after that scene in the Yew-Tree Walk, she determined to use such an opportunity in order if possible to see Lydgate and learn from him whether her husband had really felt any depressing change of symptoms which he was concealing from her, and whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost about himself. She felt almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another, but the dread of being without it -- the dread of that ignorance which would make her unjust or hard -- overcame every scruple. That there had been some crisis in her husband's mind she was certain: he had the very next day begun a new method of arranging his notes, and had associated her quite newly in carrying out his plan. Poor Dorothea needed to lay up stores of patience. It was about four o'clock when she drove to Lydgate's house in Lowick Gate, wishing, in her immediate doubt of finding him at home, that she had written beforehand. And he was not at home. "Is Mrs Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea, who had never, that she knew of, seen Rosamond, but now remembered the fact of the marriage. Yes, Mrs Lydgate was at home. "I will go in and speak to her, if she will allow me. Will you ask her if she can see me -- see Mrs Casaubon, for a few minutes?" *X470 When the servant had gone to deliver that message, Dorothea could hear sounds of music through an open window -- a few notes from a man's voice and then a piano bursting into roulades. But the roulades broke off suddenly, and then the servant came back saying that Mrs Lydgate would be happy to see Mrs Casaubon. When the drawing-room door opened and Dorothea entered, there was a sort of contrast not infrequent in country life when the habits of the different ranks were less blunt than now. Let those who know, tell us exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days of mild autumn -- that thin white woollen stuff soft to the touch and soft to the eye. It always seemed to have been lately washed, and to smell of the sweet hedges -- was always in the shape of a pelisse with sleeves hanging all out of the fashion. Yet if she had entered before a still audience as Imogene or Cato's daughter, the dress might have seemed right enough: the grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her simply parted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then in the fate of women, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold trencher we call a halo. By the present audience of two persons, no dramatic heroine could have been expected with more interest than Mrs Casaubon. To Rosamond she was one of those county divinities not mixing with Middlemarch mortality, whose slightest marks of manner or appearance were worthy of her study; moreover, Rosamond was not without satisfaction that Mrs Casaubon should have an opportunity of studying ˛her˛. What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen by the best judges? and since Rosamond had received the highest compliments at Sir Godwin Lydgate's, she felt quite confident of the impression she must make on people of good birth. Dorothea put out her hand with her usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate's lovely bride -- aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance, but seeing him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle. The gentleman was too much occupied with the presence of the one woman to reflect on the contrast between the two -- a contrast that would certainly have been striking to a calm observer. They were both tall, and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond's infantine blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her *X471 pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large embroidered collar which it was to be hoped all beholders would know the price of, her small hands duly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity. "Thank you very much for allowing me to interrupt you," said Dorothea, immediately. "I am anxious to see Mr Lydgate, if possible, before I go home, and I hoped that you might possibly tell me where I could find him, or even allow me to wait for him, if you expect him soon." "He is at the New Hospital," said Rosamond; "I am not sure how soon he will come home. But I can send for him." "Will you let me go and fetch him?" said Will Ladislaw, coming forward. He had already taken up his hat before Dorothea entered. She coloured with surprise, but put out her hand with a smile of unmistakable pleasure, saying -- "I did not know it was you; I had no thought of seeing you here." "May I go to the Hospital and tell Mr Lydgate that you wish to see him?" said Will. "It would be quicker to send the carriage for him," said Dorothea, "if you will be kind enough to give the message to the coachman." Will was moving to the door when Dorothea, whose mind had flashed in an instant over many connected memories, turned quickly and said, "I will go myself, thank you. I wish to lose no time before getting home again. I will drive to the Hospital and see Mr Lydgate there. Pray excuse me, Mrs Lydgate, I am very much obliged to you." Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she left the room hardly conscious of what was immediately around her -- hardly conscious that Will opened the door for her and offerred her his arm to lead her to the carriage. She took the arm but said nothing. Will was feeling rather vexed and miserable, and found nothing to say on his side. He handed her into the carriage in silence, they said good-bye, and Dorothea drove away. In the five minutes" drive to the Hospital she had time for *X472 some reflections that were quite new to her. Her decosion to go, and her preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate was a matter of concealment. That was all that had been explicitly in her mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort. Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man's voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband's absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact? But Will was Mr Casaubon's relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr Casaubon did not like his cousin's visits during his own absence. "Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things," said poor Dorothea to herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly. She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled. But the carriage stopped at the gate of the Hospital. She was soon walking round the grass plots with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong bent which had made her seek for this interview. Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it clearly enough. His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here for the first time there had come a chance which had set him at a disadvantage. It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen him under circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely occupied with her. He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life. But that was not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town, he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position requiring that he should know everybody and everything. Lydgate was *X473 really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighbourhood, and he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling upon. Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper. It was mortifying. Will was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome and Britain. Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr Casaubon; but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle -- solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness. And Will was of a temperament to feel keenly the presence of subtleties: a man of clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, that for the first time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him had sprung up in Dorothea's mind, and that their silence, as he conducted her to the carriage, had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and jealousy, had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her socially. Confound Casaubon] Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking irritated as he advanced towards Mrs Lydgate, who had seated herself at her work-table, said -- "It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May I come another day and just finish about the rendering of "Lungi del caro bene""?" "I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond. "But I am sure you admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite envy your acquaintance with Mrs Casaubon. Is she very clever? She looks as if she were." "Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily. "That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you are with Mrs Casaubon?" "Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs Lydgate. "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her attributes -- one is conscious of her presence." *X474 "I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond, dimpling, and speaking with aeµry lightness. "He will come back and think nothing of me." "That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto. Mrs Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with her." "You are a devout worshipper, I perceive. You often see her, I suppose." "No," said Will, almost pettishly. "Worship is usually a matter of theory rather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess just at this moment -- I must really tear myself away." "Pray come again some evening: Mr Lydgate will like to hear the music, and I cannot enjoy it so well without him." When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands, "Mr Ladislaw was here singing with me when Mrs Casaubon came in. He seemed vexed. Do you think he disliked her seeing him at our house? Surely your position is more than equal to his -- whatever may be his relation to the Casaubons." "No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed. Ladislaw is a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella." "Music apart, he is not always very agreeable. Do you like him?" "Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and ˛bric-a>-brac˛, but likeable." "Do you know, I think he adores Mrs Casaubon." "Poor devil]" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears. Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering -- what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in bygone costumes -- that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at Mrs Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with a woman's whole *X475 mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side -- himself in fact a subject -- while the captives look up for ever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better] But Rosamond's romance turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and it was enough to enjoy his assured subjection. When he said, "Poor devil]" she asked, with playful curiosity -- "Why so?" "Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills." I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's quarrel; and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope and phials. Confess you like those things better than me." "Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate, letting his hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking at her with affectionate gravity. "I shall make you learn my favourite bit from an old poet -- Why should our pride make such a stir to be And be forgot? What good is like to this, To do worthy the writing, and to write Worthy the reading and the world's delight? What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,-- and to write out myself what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet." "Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch. You cannot say that I ever tried to hinder you from working. But we cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented with me, Tertius?" "No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented." *X476 "But what did Mrs Casaubon want to say to you?" "Merely to ask about her husband's health. But I think she is going to be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred a-year." *Mm I would not creep along the coast, but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars. *M *L1 When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs of change in Mr Casaubon's bodily condition beyond the mental sign of anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was silent for a few moments, wondering whether she had said or done anything to rouse this new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to let slip an opportunity of furthering a favourite purpose, ventured to say -- "I don't know whether your or Mr Casaubon's attention has been drawn to the needs of our New Hospital. Circumstances have made it seem rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault; it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other medical men. I think you are generally interested in such things, for I remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you at Tipton Grange before your-marriage you were asking me some questions about the way in which the health of the poor was affected by their miserable housing." "Yes, indeed," said Dorothea, brightening. "I shall be quite grateful to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things a little better. Everything of that sort has slipped away from me since I have been married. I mean," she said, after a moment's hesitation, "that the people in our village are tolerably comfortable, and my mind has been too much taken up for me to inquire further. But here -- in such a place as Middlemarch -- there must be a great deal to be done." "There is everything to be done," said Lydgate, with abrupt energy. "And this Hospital is a capital piece of work, due entirely to Mr Bulstrode's exertions, and in a great degree to his money. But one man can't do everything in a scheme of this sort. Of course he looked forward to help. And now there's a *X478 mean, petty feud set up against the thing in the town, by certain persons who want to make it a failure." "What can be their reasons?" said Dorothea, with naiµve surprise. "Chiefly Mr Bulstrode's unpopularity, to begin with. Half the town would almost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him. In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set. I had no connection with Bulstrode before I came here. I look at him quite impartially, and I see that he has some notions -- that he has set things on foot -- which I can turn to good public purpose. If a fair number of the better educated men went to work with the belief that their observations might contribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see a change for the better. That's my point of view. I hold that by refusing to work with Mr Bulstrode I should be turning my back on an opportunity of making my profession more generally serviceable." "I quite agree with you," said Dorothea, at once fascinated by the situation sketched in Lydgate's words. "But what is there against Mr Bulstrode? I know that my uncle is friendly with him." "People don't like his religious tone," said Lydgate, breaking off there. "That is all the stronger reason for despising such an opposition," said Dorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of the great persecutions. "To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:-- he is masterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade, which has complaints of its own that I know nothing about. But what has that to do with the question whether it would not be a fine thing to establish here a more valuable hospital than any they have in the county? The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands. Of course I am glad of that. It gives me an opportunity of doing some good work,-- and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me. But the consequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set themselves tooth and nail against the Hospital, *X479 and not only refuse to co-operate themselves, but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder subscriptions." "How very petty]" exclaimed Dorothea, indignantly. "I suppose one must expect to fight one's way: there is hardly anything to be done without it. And the ignorance of people about here is stupendous. I don't lay claim to anything else than having used some opportunities which have not come within everybody's reach; but there is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer, and happening to know something more than the old inhabitants. Still, if I believe that I can set going a better method of treatment -- if I believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries which may be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base truckler if I allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me. And the course is all the clearer from there being no salary in question to put my persistence in an equivocal light." "I am glad you have told me this, Mr Lydgate," said Dorothea, cordially. "I feel sure I can help a little, I have some money, and don't know what to do with it -- that is often an uncomfortable thought to me. I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose like this. How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do great good] I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning. There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly see the good of]" There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea's voice as she spoke these last words. But she presently added, more cheerfully, "Pray come to Lowick and tell us more of this. I will mention the subject to Mr Casaubon. I must hasten home now." She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to subscribe two hundred a-year -- she had seven hundred a-year as the equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage. Mr Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the sum might be disproportionate in relation to other good objects, but when Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced. He did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctant to give it. If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through the medium of another passion than the love of material property. Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the The soul of man," said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head which always came when he used this phrase -- "the soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof." It was one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of *X480 gist of her conversation with him about the Hospital. Mr Casaubon did not question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what had passed between Lydgate and himself. "She knows that I know," said the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit knowledge only thrust further off any confidence between them. He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust? *C45 *Mm It is the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the communtiy of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times. SIR THOMAS BROWNE: ˛Pseudodoxia˛ ˛Epidemica˛ *M *L1 That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different lights. He regraded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunder-headed prejudice. Mr Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay representative -- a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of human action. These might be called the ministerial views. But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw for ever on the vasts of ignorance. What the opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody shall not be an originator; but there were differences which represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane. Mrs Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration, that Doctor Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted to cut up Mrs Goby, as respectable *X482 a woman as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage -- a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs Dollop wished to know what was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters -- such a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch] And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic public-house -- the original Tankard known by the name of Dollop's -- was the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to the vote whether its long-standing medical man, "Doctor Gambit", should not be cashiered in favour of "this Doctor Lydgate", who was capable of performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether given up by other practitioners. But the balance had been turned against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal recommendation, and might interfere with providential favours. In the course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop's was an index. A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided, depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence. Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn threadbare, like old Featherstone's, had been at once inclined to try him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor's bills, thought agreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him without stint if the children's temper wanted a dose, occasions when the old practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined to employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some *X483 considered that he might do more than others "where there was liver";-- at least there would be no harm in getting a few bottles of "stuff" from him, since if these proved useless it would still be possible to return to the Purifying PIlls, which kept you alive, if they did not remove the yellowness. But these were people of minor importance. Good Middlemarch families were of course not going to change their doctor without reason shown; and everybody who had employed Mr Peacock did not feel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor, objecting that he was "not likely to equal to Peacock". But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a note of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man -- what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles] "Oxygen] nobody knows what that may be -- is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there are people who say quarantine is no good]" One of the facts quickly rumoured was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs. This was offensive both to physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have counted on having the law on their side against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to Mr Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one of his patients, questioned him in affable manner on the subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his reasons, pointing out to Mr Mawmsey that it must lower the character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures. "It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come *X484 to be almost as mischievous as quacks," said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly. "To get their own bread they must overdose the king's lieges; and that's a bad sort of treason, Mr Mawmsey -- undermines the constitution in a fatal way." Mr Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical point of view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid, and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging kind -- jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence from letting out the full force of his mind. It was Mr Mawmsey's friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of Lydgate's reply. But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong. Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the stirrup, and Mr Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had known who the king's lieges were, giving his "Good morning, sir, good morning, sir" with the air of one who saw everything clearly enough. But in truth his views were perturbed. For years he had been paying bills with strictly-made items, so that for every half-crown and eighteenpence he was certain something measurable had been delivered. He had done this with satisfaction, including it among his responsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill than usual as a dignity worth mentioning. Moreover, in addition to the massive benefit of the drugs to "self and family", he had enjoyed the pleasure of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so as to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr Gambit -- a practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr Mawmsey had the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring, he was wont to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them. Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the *X485 shop, when they were recited to Mrs Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as a fertile mother,-- generally under attendance more or less frequent from Mr Gambit, and occasionally having attacks which required Dr Minchin. "Does this Mr Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?" said Mrs Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. "I should like him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn't take strengthening medicine for a month beforehand. Think of what I have to provide for calling customers, my dear]"-- here Mrs Mawmsey turned to an intimate female friend who sat by --"a large veal pie -- a stuffed fillet -- a round of beef -- ham, tongue, ˛et˛ cetera, ˛et˛ cetera] But what keeps me up best is the pink mixture, not the brown. I wonder, Mr Mawmsey, with ˛your˛ experience, you could have patience to listen. ˛I˛ should have told him at once that I knew a little better than that." "No, no, no," said Mr Mawmsey; "I was not going to tell him my opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto. But he didn't know who he was talking to. I was not to be turned on ˛his˛ finger. People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well say, "Mawmsey, you're a fool." But I smile at it: I humour everybody's weak place. If physic had done harm to self and family, I should have found it out by this time." The next day Mr Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic was of no use. "Indeed]" said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise. (He was a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) "How will he cure his patients then?" "That is what ˛I˛ say," returned Mrs Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight to her speech by loading her pronouns. "Does ˛he˛ suppose that people will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?" Mrs Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr Gambit, including very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare time and personal narrative had never been charged for. So he replied, humorously -- "Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know." *X486 "Not one that ˛I˛ would employ," said Mrs Mawmsey. "˛Others˛ may do as they please." Hence Mr Gambit could go away from the chief grocer's without fear of rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own honesty, and that it might be worth some people's while to show him up. Mr Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments to a balance. And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate up until he knew how. He had not indeed great resources of education, and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the breathing apparatus "longs". Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr Toller shared the highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family: there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line of retail trade. Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest way in the world of taking things which might be supposed to annoy him, being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept a good house, was very fond of a little sporting when he could get it, very friendly with Mr Hawley, and hostile to Mr Bulstrode. It may seem odd that with such pleasant habits he should have been given to the heroic treatment, bleeding and blistering and starving his with a dispassionate disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favoured the opinion of his ability among his patients, who commonly observed that Mr Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you could desire:-- no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came he ˛did˛ something. He was a great favourite in his own circle, and whatever he implied to any one's disadvantage told doubly from his careless ironical tone. He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, "Ah]" when he was told that Mr Peacock's successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and Mr Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr Toller said, laughingly, "Dibbitts will *X487 get rid of his stale drugs, then. I'm fond of little Dibbitts -- I'm glad he's in luck." "I see your meaning, Toller," said Mr Hackbutt, "and I am entirely of your opinion. I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that effect. A medical man should be responsible for the quality of the drugs consumed by his patients. That is the ˛rationale˛ of the system of charging which has hitherto obtained; and nothing is more offensive than this ostentation of reform, where there is no real amelioration." "Ostentation, Hackbutt?" said Mr Toller, ironically. "I don't see that. A man can't very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes in. There's no reform in the matter: the question is, whether the profit on the drugs is paid to the medical man by the druggist or by the patient, and whether there shall be extra pay under the name of attendance." "Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug," said Mr Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr Wrench. Mr Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a party, getting the more irritable in consequence. "As to humbug, Hawley," he said, "that's an word easy to fling about. But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn't be a gentleman. I throw back the imputation with scorn. I say, the most ungentlemanly trick a man can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with innovations which are a libel on their time-honoured procedure. That is my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who contradicts me." Mr Wrench's voice had become exceedingly sharp. "I can't oblige you there, Wrench," said Mr Hawley, thrusting his hands into his trouser-pockets. "My dear fellow," said Mr Toller, striking in pacifically, and looking at Mr Wrench, "the physicians have their toes trodden on more than we have. If you come to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague." "Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these infringements?" said Mr Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer his lights. "How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?" "Nothing to be done there," said Mr Hawley. "I looked into it *X488 for Sprague. You'd only break your nose against a damned judge's decision." "Pooh] no need of law," said Mr Toller. "So far as practice is concerned the attempt is an absurdity. No patient will like it -- certainly not Peacock's, who have been used to depletion. Pass the wine." Mr Toller's prediction was partly verified. If Mr and Mrs Mawmsey, who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did "use all the means he might use" in the case. Even good Mr Powderell, who in his constant charity of interpretation was inclined to esteem Lydgate the more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit of a better plan, had his mind disturbed with doubts during his wife's attack of erysipelas, and could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr Peacock on a similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which were not otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in a remarkably hot August. At last, indeed, in the conflict between his desire not to hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no "means" should be lacking, he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon's Purifying Pills, an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood. This co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate, and Mr Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hoping that it might be attended with a blessing. But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped by what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody -- cures which may be called fortune's testimonials, and deserve as much credit as the written or printed kind. Various patients got well while Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death. The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave precisely the sort of prestige which an *X489 incompetent and unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and "good fortune" insisted on using those interpretations. Mrs Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr Minchin called, asked him to see her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary; whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of tumour, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy, calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the staymaker and his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr Minchin's paper, and by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the neighbouring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumour at first declared to be as large and hard as a duck's egg, but later in the day to be about the size of "your fist". Most hearers agreed that it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of "squitchineal" as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body when taken enough of into the inside -- the oil by gradually "soopling" the squitchineal by eating away. Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary it happened to be one of Lydgate's days there. After questioning and examining her, Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, "It's not tumour: it's cramp." He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was in need of good food. But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the supposed tumour having indeed given way to the blister, but only wandered to another region with angrier pain. The staymaker's wife went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went to work again. But the case continued to be described as one of tumour in Churchyard *X490 Lane and other streets -- nay, by Mrs Larcher also; for when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr Minchin, he naturally did not like to say, "The case was not one of tumour, and I was mistaken in describing it as such," but answered, "Indeed] ah] I saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind." He had been inwardly annoyed, however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he had recommended two days before, to hear from the house-surgeon, a youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general practitioner to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner, and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such rectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equal qualifications. But report took up this amazing case of tumour, not clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate's method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumour both hard and obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield. How could Lydgate help himself? It is offensive to tell a lady when she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement. And to have entered into the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical propriety. Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality. In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr Borthrop Trumbull, Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an everyday doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he won. The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having been a patient of Mr Peacock's, sent for Lydgate, whom he had expressed his intention to patronize. Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a good subject for trying the expectant theory upon -- watching the course of an interesting disease when left as much as possible *X491 to itself, so that the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would like to be taken into his medical man's confidence, and be represented as a partner in his own cure. The auctioneer heard, without much surprise, that his was a constitution which(always with due watching) might be left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he probably had the rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test of a rational procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary functions a general benefit to society. Mr Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science. "Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether ignorant of the ˛vis˛ ˛medicatrix˛," said he, with his usual superiority of expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing. And he went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough to indulge him with a little technical talk. It may be imagined that Mr Trumbull rose from his couch with a disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of patient he had to deal with. The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man, and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it. He had caught the words "expectant method", and rang chimes on this and other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew a thing or two more than the rest of the doctors -- was far better versed in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers." This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy's illness had given to Mr Wrench's enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground. The new-comer already threatened to be *X492 a nuisance in the shape of rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions. His practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the first the report of his high family had led to his being pretty generally invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the best houses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed always to end in mutual attachment. There was hardly ever so much unanimity among them as in the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant young fellow, and yet ready for the sake of ultimatley predominating to show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode. That Mr Farebrother, whose name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother's unaccountable way of fighting on both sides. Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust at the announcement of the laws Mr Bulstrode was laying down for the direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote having refused help towards the building, on the ground that they preferred giving to the Old Infirmary. Mr Bulstrode met all the expenses, and had ceased to be sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out his notions of improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had had to spend large sums and the building had lingered. Caleb Garth had undertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the interior fittings were begun had retired from the management of the business; and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however Bulstrode might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry and masonry, and had a notion both of drains and chimneys. In fact, the Hospital had become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode, and he would willingly have continued to spare a yearly sum that he might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another favourite object which also required money for its accomplishment: he wished to buy some land in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch, and therefore he wished to get considerable *X493 contributions towards maintaining the Hospital. Meanwhile he framed his plan of management. The Hospital was to be reserved fro fever in all its forms; Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free authority to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies, particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to contravene Lydgate's ultimate decisions; and the general management was to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors associated with Mr Bulstrode, who were to have votes in the ratio of their contributions, the Board itself filling up any vacancy in its numbers, and no mob of small contributors being admitted to a share of government. There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital. "Very well," said Lydgate to Mr Bulstrode, "we have a capital house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we'll get Webb from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them, to come over twice a-week, and in case of any exceptional operation, Protheroe will come from Brassing. I must work the harder, that's all, and I have given up my post at the Infirmary. The plan will flourish in spite of them, and then they'll be glad to come in. Things can't last as they are: there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then young fellows may be glad to come and study here." Lydgate was in high spirits. "I shall not flinch, you may depend on it, Mr Lydgate," said Mr Bulstrode. "While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigour, you shall have my unfailing support. And I have humble confidence that the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts against the spirit of evil in this town will not be withdrawn. Suitable directors to assist me I have no doubt of securing. Mr Brooke of Tipton has already given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he has not specified the sum -- probably not a great one. But he will be a useful member of the Board." A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate nothing, and always vote with Mr Bulstrode. The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now. *X494 Neither Dr Sprague nor Dr Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate's knowledge, or his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was his arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable. They implied that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan. The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop. In those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr St John Long, "noblemen and gentlemen" attesting his extraction of a fluid like mercury from the temples of a patient. Mr Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs Taft, that "Bulstrode had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure to like other sorts of charlatans." "Yes, indeed, I can imagine," said Mrs Taft, keeping the number of thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; "there are so many of that sort. I remember Mr Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked." "No, no", said Mr Toller, "Cheshire was all right -- all fair and above board. But there's St John Long -- that's the kind of fellow we call a charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about; a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get quicksilver out of it." "Good gracious] what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions]" said Mrs Taft. After this it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and sevens of hospital patients. Especially it was to be expected, as the landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their dead bodies. For Lydgate having attended Mrs Goby, who died apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body, and thus gave an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where that lady had long resided on an income such as made this association of her *X495 body with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her memory. Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the Hospital to Dorothea. We see that he was bearing enmity and silly misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by his good share of success. "They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially in Mr Farebrother's study. "I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends I most care about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our wants. By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no seductions now away from home and work. And I am more and more convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others are on the same track, and I have been losing time." "I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr Farebrother, who had been puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; "but as to the hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you are prudent." "How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes before me to do. I can't help people's ignorance and spite, any more than Vesalius could. It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly conclusions which nobody can foresee." "Quite true; I didn't mean that. I meant only two things. One is, keep yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course you can go on doing good work of your own by his help; but don't get tied. Perhaps it seems like personal feeling in me to say so -- and there's a good deal of that, I own -- but personal feeling is not always in the wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an opinion." "Bulstrode is nothing to me," said Lysgate, carelessly, "except on public grounds. As to getting very closely united to him, I am not fond enough of him for that. But what was the other thing you meant?" said Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and feeling in no great need of advice. "Why, this. Take care -- ˛experto˛ ˛credo˛ -- take care not to get hampered about money matters. I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you don't like my playing at cards so much for money. You are right enough there. But try and keep clear of *X496 wanting small sums that you haven't got. I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and sermonizing on it." Lydgate took Mr Farebrother's hints very cordially, though he would hardly have borne them from another man. He could not help remembering that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable, and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way. The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the stock of wine for a long while. Many thoughts cheered him at that time -- and justly. A man conscious of enthusaism for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping. At home, that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr Farebrother, he had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and his hands clasped behind it according to his favourite ruminating attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he was]) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious sea-breezes. There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement. In his dark eyes and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the fulness of contemplative thought -- the mind not searching, but beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is left behind it. Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close to the sofa and opposite her husband's face. "Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands before her and putting on a little air of meekness. "Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes and resting them on her, but otherwise not moving. Rosamond's presence at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake, and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull. "What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing her face nearer to his. *X497 He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders. "I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy." "I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head. "We used to play at guessing historical characters at Mrs Lemon's, but not anatomists." "I'll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of execution." "Oh]" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, "I am very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find some less horrible way than that." "No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much notice of her answer. "He could only get complete skeleton by snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of night." "I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond, half-playfully, half-anxiously, "esle I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St Peter's churchyard. You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs Goby. You have enemies enough already." "So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them." "And what happened to him afterwards?" said Rosamond, with some interest. "Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably." There was a moment's pause before Rosamond said, "Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man." *X498 "Nay, Rosy, don't say that," said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him. "That is like saying you wish you had marries another man." Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession." "The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil]" said Lydgate with scorn. "It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort to you." "Still," said Rosamond. "I don ˛not˛ think it is a nice profession, dear." We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion. "It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond," said Lydgate, gravely. "And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don't like its flavour. Don't say that again, dear, it pains me." "Very well, Doctor Grave-face," said Rosy, dimpling, "I will declare in future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying miserably." "No, no, not so bad as that," said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and petting her resignedly. *C46 *X499 *Mm ˛Pues˛ ˛no˛ ˛podemos˛ ˛haber˛ ˛aquello˛ ˛que˛ ˛queremos˛, ˛queramos˛ ˛aquello˛ ˛que˛ ˛podremos˛. Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get. ˛Spanish˛ ˛Proverb˛ *M *L1 While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command, felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national struggle for another kind of Reform. By the time that Lord John Russell's measure was being debated in the House of Commons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch, and a new definition of parties which might show a decided change of balance if a new election came. And there were some who already predicted this event, declaring that a Reform Bill would never be carried by the actual Parliament. This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on to Mr Brooke as a reason for congratulation that he had not yet tried his strength at the hustings. "Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year," said Will. "The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question of Reform has set in. There is likely to be another election before long, and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its head. What we have to work at now is the ˛Pioneer˛ and political meetings." "Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here," said Mr Brooke. "Only I want to keep myself independent about Reform, you know: I don't want to go too far. I want to take up Wilberforce's and Romilly's line, you know, and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal Law -- that kind of thing. But of course I should support Grey." If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take what the situation offers," said Will. "If everybody pulled for his own bit against everybody else, the whole question would go to tatters." *X500 "Yes, yes, I agree with you -- I quite take that point of view. I should put it in that light. I should support Grey, you know. But I don't want to change the balance of the constitution, and I don't think Grey would." "But that is what the country wants," said Will. "Else there would be no meaning in political unions or any other movement that knows what it's about. It wants to have a House of Commons which is not weighted with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives of the other interests. And as to contending for a reform short of that, it is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already begun to thunder." "That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it. Write that down, now. We must begin to get documents about the feeling of the country, as well as the machine-breaking and general distress." "As to documents," said Will, "a two-inch card will hold plenty. A few rows of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will show the rate at which the political determination of the people is growing." "Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw. That is an idea, now: write it out in the ˛Pioneer˛. Put the figures and deduce the misery, you know; and put the other figures and deduce -- and so on. You have a way of putting things. Burke, now:-- when I think of Burke, I can't help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough to give you, Ladislaw. You'd never get elected, you know. And we shall always want talent in the House: reform as we will, we shall always want talent. That avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a little like Burke. I want that sort of thing -- not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them." "Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing," said Ladislaw, "if they were always in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke at hand." Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison, even from Mr Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing one's self better than others and never to have it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying. Will felt that his literary refinements were usually beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception; *X501 nevertheless, he was beginning thoroughly to like the work of which when he began he had said to himself rather languidly, "Why not?" -- and he studied the political situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to poetic metres or mediaevalism. It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticizing English statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy "bits" from old pictures, leaving off because they were "no good", and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference. Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worhty of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the easily-stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit. In spite of Mr Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for practical purposes, and making the ˛Pioneer˛ celebrated as far as Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth). Mr Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life. "Shift the pegs a little," he said to himself, " and Mr Brooke might be in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern. I am better here than in the sort of life Mr Casaubon would have trained me for, where the *X502 doing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I don't care for prestige or high pay." As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went. That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his irritation had gone out towards Mr Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose caste. "I never had any caste," he would have said, if that prophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone like breath in his transparent skin. But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences. Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the ˛Pioneer˛ was tending to confirm Mr Casaubon's view. Will's relationship in that distinguished corner did not, like Lydgate's high connections, serve as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumoured that young Ladislaw was Mr Casaubon's nephew or cousin, it was also rumoured that "Mr Casaubon would have nothing to do with him." "Brooke has taken him up," said Mr Hawley, "because that is what no man in his senses could have been expected. Casaubon has devilish good reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young fellow whose bringing-up he paid for. Just like Brooke -- one of those fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse." And some oddities of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support Mr Keck, the editor of the ˛Trumpet˛, in asserting that Ladislaw if the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained, which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his speech when he got on to a platform -- as he did whenever he had an opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid Englishmen generally. It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip of a fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the hour against institutions "which had existed when he was in his cradle." And in a leading article of the ˛Trumpet˛, Keck characterized Ladislaw's speech at a Reform meeting as "the violence of *X503 an energumen -- a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge which was of the cheapest and most recent description." "That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck," said Dr Sprague, with sarcastic intentions. "But what is an energumen?" "Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution," said Keck. This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other habits which became matter of remark. He had a fondness, half artistic, half affectionate, for little children -- the smaller they were on tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better Will liked to surprise and please them. We know that in Rome he was given to ramble about among the poor people, and the taste did not quit him in Middlemarch. He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys with their galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out, little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him, and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven. This troop he had led out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time, and since the cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear day to gather sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside, where he drew out a small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised a Punch-and-Judy drama with some private home-made puppets. Here was one oddity. Another was, that in houses where he got friendly, he was given to stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity. But Will's articles and speeches naturally recommended him in families which the new strictness of party division had marked off on the side of Reform. He was invited to Mr Bulstrode's; but here he could not lie down on the rug, and Mrs Bulstrode felt that his mode of talking about Catholic countries, as if there were any truce with Antichrist, illustrated the usual tendency to unsoundness in intellectual men. At Mr Farebrother's, however, whom the irony of events had brought on the same side with Bulstrode in the national *X504 movement, Will became a favourite with the ladies; especially with little Miss Noble, whom it was one of his oddities to escort when he met her in the street with her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of the town, and insisting on going with her to pay some call where she distributed her small filchings from her own share of sweet things. But the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was Lydgate's. The two men were not at all alike, but they agreed none the worse. Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his susceptibilities on those who took no notice of them. With Rosamond, on the other hand, he pouted and was wayward -- nay, often uncomplimentary, much to her inward surprise; nevertheless he was gradually becoming necessary to her entertainment by his companionship in her music, his varied talk, and his freedom from the grave preoccupation which, with all her husband's tenderness and indulgence, often made his manners unsatisfactory to her, and confirmed her dislike of the medical profession. Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the people in the efficacy of "the bill", while nobody cared about the low state of pathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions. One evening in March, Rosamond in her cherry-coloured dress with swansdown trimming about the throat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate, lately come in tired from his outdoor work, was seated sideways on an easy-chair by the fire with one leg over the elbow, his brow looking a little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columns of the ˛Pioneer˛, while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed, avoided looking at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself had not a moody disposition. Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug contemplating the curtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low the notes of "When first I saw thy face"; while the house spaniel, also stretched out with small choice of room, looked from between his paws at the usurper of the rug with silent but strong objection. Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper, and said to Will, who had started up and gone to the table -- *X505 "It's no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the ˛Trumpet˛." "No matter; those who read the ˛Pioneer˛ don't read the ˛Trumpet˛," said Will, swallowing his tea and walking about. "Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion? We should have a witches" brewing with a vengeance then -- "Mingle, mingle, mingle, mingle. You that mingle may" -- and nobody would know which side he was going to take." "Farebrother says, he doesn't believe Brooke would get elected if the opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment." "There's no harm in trying. It's good to have resident members." "Why?" said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient word in a curt tone. "They represent the local stupidity better," said Will, laughing, and shaking his curls; "and they are kept on their best behaviour in the neighbourhood. Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good things on his estate that he never would have done but for this Parliamentary bite." "He's not fitted to be a public man," said Lydgate, with contemptuous decision. "He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see that at the Hospital. Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives him." "That depends on how you fix your standard of public men," said Will. "He's good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man -- they only want a vote." "That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw -- crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing." "Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land without knowing it," said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when he had not thought of a question beforehand. "That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry *X506 to swallow it whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus." "That's very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere, and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with. Look what Stanley said the other day -- that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents -- fiddlestick] The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text -- which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong." "That general talk about a particular case is mere question-begging, Ladislaw. When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn't follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout." "I am not begging the question we are upon -- whether we are to try for nothing till we find immaculate men to work with. Should you go on that plan? If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better motive or even the better brains?" "Oh, of course," said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move which he had often used himself, "if one did not work with such men as are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion in the town about Bulstrode were a true one, that would not make it less true that he has the sense and the resolution to do what I think ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about; but that is the only ground on which I go with him," Lydgate added rather proudly, bearing in mind Mr Farebrother's remarks. "He is nothing to me otherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground -- I would keep clear of that." "Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?" *X507 said Will Ladislaw, nettled, and turning sharp round. For the first time he felt offended with Lydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr Brooke. "Not at all," said Lydgate, "I was simply explaining my own action. I meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal independence, and that he is not working for his private interest -- either place or money." "Then, why don't you extend your liberality to others?" said Will, still nettled. "My personal independence is as important to me as yours is to you. You have no more reason to imagine that I have personal expectations from Brooke, than I have to imagine that you have personal expectations from Bulstrode. Motives are points of honour, I suppose -- nobody can prove them. But as to money and place in the world," Will ended, tossing back his head, "I think it is pretty clear that I am not determined by considerations of that sort." "You quite mistake me, Ladislaw," said Lydgate, surprised. He had been preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what Ladislaw might infer on his own account. "I beg your pardon for unintentionally annoying you. In fact, I should rather attribute to you a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests. On the political question, I referred simply to intellectual bias." "How very unpleasant both you are this evening]" said Rosamond. "I cannot conceive why money should have been referred to. Politics and medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon. You can both of you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each other on those two topics." Rosamond looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring the bell, and then crossing to her work-table. "Poor Rosy]" said Lydgate, putting out his hand to her as she was passing him. "Disputation is not amusing to cherubs. Have some music. Ask Ladislaw to sing with you." When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, "What put you out of temper this evening, Tertius?" "Me? It was Ladislaw who was out of temper. He is like a bit of tinder." *X508 "But I mean, before that. Something had vexed you before you came in, you looked cross. And that made you begin to dispute with Mr Ladislaw. You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius." "Do I? Then I am a brute," said Lydgate, caressing her penitently. "What vexed you?" "Oh, outdoor things -- business." It was really a letter insisting on the payment of a bill for the furniture. But Rosamond was expecting to have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation. *C47 *X509 *Mm Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain. No art can make it: it must spring Where elements are fostering. So in heaven's spot and hour Springs the little native flower, Downward root and upward eye, Shapen by the earth and sky. *M *L1 It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr Brooke. Hesitations before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came his heat towards Lydgate -- a heat which still kept him restless. Was he not making a fool of himself? -- and at a time when he was more than ever conscious of being something better than a fool? And for what end? Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions -- and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions -- does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread. But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the roadway": he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have thought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision of which Mr Casaubon suspected him -- namely, that Dorothea might become a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might turn into acceptance of him *X510 as a husband -- had no tempting, arresting power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our practical heaven. It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of ingratitude -- the latent consciousness of many other barriers between himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped to turn away his imagination from specultaing on what might befall Mr Casaubon. And there were yet other reasons. Will, we know, could not bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change which must somehow change her. Do we not shun the street version of a fine melody?-- or shrink from the news that the rarity -- some bit of chiselling or engraving perhaps -- which we have dwelt on even with exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an everyday possession? Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy. Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that -- Queens hereafter might be glad to live Upon the alms of her superfluous praise. But this result was questionable. And what else could he do for Dorothea? What was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible *X511 to tell. He would not go out of her reach. He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him. She had once said that she would like him to stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her. This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations. But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve. He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be, and this was always associated with the other ground of irritation -- that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her. Whereupon, not being able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, "I am a fool." Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea, he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see her. He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational morning light, Objection said -- "That will be a virtual defiance of Mr Casaubon's prohibition to visit Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased." "Nonsense]" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous for him to hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring morning. And Dorothea will be glad." "It will be clear to Mr Casaubon that you have come either to annoy him or to see Dorothea." "It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see Dorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be always comfortable? Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do. I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew." Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and skirting the woods, where the sunlight fell *X512 broadly under the budding boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church. Will easily felt happy when nothing crossed his humour, and by this time the thought of vexing Mr Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine on the water -- though the occasion was not exemplary. But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves. Will went along with a small book under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out. He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising. The words were not exactly a hymn, but they O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon] A touch, a ray, that is not here, A shadow that is gone: A dream of breath that might be near, An inly-echoed tone, The thought that one may think me dear, The place where one was known, The tremor of a banished fear, An ill that was not done -- O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon] Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air -- a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises. The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into the curate's pew before anyone else arrived there. But he was still left alone in it when the congregation had assembled. The curate's pew was opposite the rector's at the *X513 entrance of the small chancel, and Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots. Mr Rigg's frog-face was something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of the Powderells in their pews side by side; Brother Samuel's cheek had the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters generally -- the smaller children regarding Mr Casaubon, who wore the black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all betters, and the one most awful if offended. Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon. The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church in former days, and no one took much note of him except the quire, who expected him to make a figure in the singing. Dorothea did at last appear in this quaint background, walking up the short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and grey cloak -- the same she had worn in the Vatican. Her face being, from her entrance, towards the chancel, even her short-sighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow as she passed him. To his own surprise Will felt suddenly uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each other. Two minutes later, when Mr Casaubon came out of the vestry, and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felt his paralysis more complete. He could look nowhere except at the quire in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps pained, and he had made a wretched blunder. It was no longer amusing to vex Mr Casaubon, who had the advantage probably of watching him and seeing that he dared not turn his head. Why had he not imagined this beforehand?-- but he could not expect that he should sit in that square pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from Lowick altogether, for a *X514 new clergyman was in the desk. Still he called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be impossible for him to look towards Dorothea -- nay, that she might feel his coming an impertinence. There was no delivering himself from his cage, however; and Will found his places and looked at his book as if he had been a schoolmistress, feeling that the morning service had never been so immeasurably long before, that he was uterly ridiculous, out of temper, and miserable. This was what a man got by worshipping the sight of a woman] The clerk observed with surprise that Mr Ladislaw did not join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he might have a cold. Mr Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one rose. It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters" to go out first. With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will looked straight at Mr Casaubon. But that gentleman's eyes were on the button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and following her immediately without raising his eyelids. Will's glance had caught Dorothea's as she turned out of the pew, and again she bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were repressing tears. Will walked out after them, but they went on towards the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never looking round. It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in the morning. The lights were all changed for him both without and within. *C48 *Mm Surely the golden hours are turning grey And dance no more, and vainly strive to run: I see their white locks streaming in the wind -- Each face is haggard as it looks at me, Slow turning in the constant clasping round Storm-driven. *M Dorothea's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly from the perception that Mr Casaubon was determined not to speak to his cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served to mark more strongly the alienation between them. Will's coming seemed to her quite inexcusable, nay, she thought it an amiable movement in him towards a reconciliation which she herself had been constantly wishing for. He had probably imagined, as she had, that if Mr Casaubon and he could meet easily, they would shake hands and friendly intercourse might return. But now Dorothea felt quite robbed of that hope. Will was banished further than ever, for Mr Casaubon must have been newly embittered by this thrusting upon him of a presence which he refused to recognize. He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some difficulty in breathing, and had not preached in consequence; she was not surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent at luncheon, still less that he made no allusion to Will Ladislaw. For her own part she felt that she could never again introduce that subject. They usually spent apart the hours between luncheon and dinner on a Sunday; Mr Casaubon in the library dozing chiefly, and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy herself with some of her favourite books. There was a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window -- of various sorts, from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr Casaubon, to her old companion Pascal, and Keble's ˛Christian˛ ˛Year˛. But to-day she opened one after another, and could read none of them. Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus -- Jewish antiquities -- oh dear]-- *X516 devout epigrams -- the sacred chime of favourite hymns -- all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood: even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully: even the sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions. It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that poor Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual effort demanded by her married life. She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was. The thing that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have, seemed to be always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted and not shared by her husband it might as well have been denied. About Will Ladislaw there had been a difference between them from the first, and it had ended, since Mr Casaubon had so severely repulsed Dorothea's strong feeling about his claims on the family property, by her being convinced that she was in the right and her husband in the wrong, but that she was helpless. This afternoon the helplessnes was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear. She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light. To-day she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship -- turning his face towards her as he went. Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use. It was Sunday, and she could not have the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby. There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache. After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud, Mr Casaubon proposed that they should go into the library, where, he said, he had ordered a fire and lights. He seemed to have revived and to be thinking intently. In the library Dorothea observed that he had newly arranged *X517 a row of his note-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand a well-known volume, which was a table of contents to all the others. "You will oblige me, my dear," he said, seating himself, "if instead of other reading this evening, you will go through this aloud, pencil in hand, and at each point where I say "mark", will make a cross with your pencil. This is the first step in a sifting process which I have long had in view, and as we go on I shall be able to indicate to you certain principles of selection whereby you will, I trust, have an intelligent participation in my purpose." This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his memorable interview with Lydgate, that Mr Casaubon's original reluctance to let Dorothea work with him had given place to the contrary disposition, namely, to demand much interest and labour from her. After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, "We will take the volume up-stairs -- and the pencil, if you please -- and in case of reading in the night, we can pursue this task. It is not wearisome to you, I trust, Dorothea?" "I prefer always reading what you like best to hear," said Dorothea, who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in reading or anything else which left him as joyless as ever. It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics in Dorothea impressed those around her, that her husband, with all his jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of her promises, and her power of devoting herself to her idea of the right and best. Of late he had begun to feel that these qualities were a peculiar possession for himself, and he wanted to engross them. The reading in the night did come. Dorothea in her young weariness had slept soon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light, which seemed to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a steep hill: she opened her eyes and saw her husband wrapped in his warm gown seating himself in the arm-chair near the fire-place where the embers were still glowing. He had lit two candles, expecting that Dorothea would awake, but not liking to rouse her by more direct means. *X518 "Are you ill, Edward?" she said, rising immediately. "I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture. I will sit here for a time." She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up, and said, "You would like me to read to you?" "You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Dorothea," said Mr Casaubon, with a shade more meekness than usual in his polite manner. "I am wakeful: my mind is remarkably lucid." "I fear that the excitement may be too great for you," said Dorothea, remembering Lydgate's cautions. "No, I am not conscious of undue excitement. Thought is easy." Dorothea dared not insist, and she read for an hour or more on the same plan as she had done in the evening, but getting over the pages with more quickness. Mr Casaubon's mind was more alert, and he seemed to anticipate what was coming after a very slight verbal indication, saying, "That will do -- mark that" or "Pass on to the next head -- I omit the second excursus on Crete." Dorothea was amazed to think of the bird-like speed with which his mind was surveying the ground where it had been creeping for years. At last he said -- "Close the book now, my dear. We will resume our work tomorrow. I have deferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed. But you observe that the principle on which my selection is made, is to give adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each of the theses enumerated in my introduction, as at present sketched. You have perceived that distinctly, Dorothea?" "Yes", said Dorothea, rather tremulously. She felt sick at heart. "And now I think that I can take some repose," said Mr Casaubon. He lay down again and begged her to put out the lights. When she had lain down too, and there was a darkness only broken by a dull glow on the hearth, he said -- "Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea." "What is it?" said Dorothea, with a dread in her mind. "It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire." Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had *X519 been leading her to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part which might make a new yoke for her. She did not answer immediately. "You refuse?" said Mr Casaubon, with more edge in his tone. "No, I do not yet refuse," said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need of freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn -- I think it is not right -- to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to." Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising." "But you would use your own judgement: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse." "No, dear, no]" said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears. "But may I wait and reflect a little while? I desire with my whole soul to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge suddenly -- still less a pledge to do I know not what." "You cannot then confide in the nature of my wishes?" "Grant me till to-morrow," said Dorothea beseechingly. "Till to-morrow then," said Mr Casaubon. Soon she could hear that he was sleeping, but there was no more sleep for her. While she constrained herself to lie still lest she should disturb him, her mind was carrying on a conflict in which imagination ranged its forces first on one side and then on the other. She had no presentiment that the power which her husband wished to establish over her future action had relation to anything else than his work. But it was clear enough to her that he would expect her to devote herself to sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful. The poor child had become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition and the labour of her husband's life. It was not wonderful that, in spire of her small instruction, her judgement in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiased comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked all his egoism. And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins -- sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child. *X520 Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound, until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make her life worthier] She could understand well enough now why her husband had come to cling to her, as possibly the only hope left that his labours would ever take a shape in which they could be given to the world. At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even her aloof from any close knowledge of what he was doing; but gradually the terrible stringency of human need -- the prospect of a too speedy death -- And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her husband's past -- nay, to his present struggle with a lot which had grown out of that past: the lonely labour, the ambition breathing hardly under the pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs; and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him] And had she not wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labour? -- But she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake. Was it right, even to soothe his grief -- would it be possible, even if she promised -- to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly? And yet, could she deny him? Could she say "I refuse to content this pining hunger?" It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was almost sure to do for him living. If he lived, as Lydgate said he might, for fifteen years or more, her life would certainly be spent in helping him and obeying him. *X521 Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living, and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead. While he lived, he could claim nothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate against, and even to refuse. But -- the thought passed through her mind more than once, though she could not believe in it -- might he not mean to demand something more from her than she had been able to imagine, since he wanted her pledge to carry out his wishes without telling her exactly what they were? No; his heart was bound up in his work only: that was the end for which his failing life was to be eked out by hers. And now, if she were to say, "No] if you die, I will put no finger to your work" -- it seemed as if she would be crushing that bruised heart. For four hours Dorothea lay in this conflict, till she felt ill and bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely. Helpless as a child which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late morning sleep, and when she waked Mr Casaubon was already up. Tantripp told her that he had read prayers, breakfasted, and was in the library. "I never saw you look so pale, madam," said Tantripp, a solid-figured woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne. "Was I ever high-coloured, Tantripp?" said Dorothea, smiling faintly. "Well, not to say high-coloured, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose. But always smelling those leather books, what can be expected? Do rest a little this morning, madam. Let me say you are ill and not able to go into that close library." "Oh no, no] let me make haste," said Dorothea. "Mr Casaubon wants me particularly." When she went down she felt sure that she should promise to fulfil his wishes; but that would be later in the day -- not yet. As Dorothea entered the library, Mr Casaubon turned round from the table where he had been placing some books, and said -- "I was waiting for your appearance, my dear. I had hoped to set to work at once this morning, but I find myself under some indisposition, probably from too much excitement yesterday. I *X522 am going now to take a turn in the shrubbery, since the air is milder." "I am glad to hear that," said Dorothea. "Your mind, I feared, was too active last night." "I would fain have it set at rest on the point I last spoke of, Dorothea. You can now, I hope, give me an answer." "May I come out to you in the garden presently?" said Dorothea, winning a little breathing space in that way. "I shall be in the Yew-Tree Walk for the next half-hour," said Mr Casaubon, and then he left her. Dorothea, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring her some wraps. She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to say "Yes" to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely. She sat still and let Tantripp put on her bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was unusual with her, for she liked to wait on herself. "God bless you, madam]" said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet. This was too much for Dorothea's highly-strung feeling, and she burst into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm. But soon she checked herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the shrubbery. "I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for your master," said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the breakfast-room. She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as we know; and she always declined to call Mr Casaubon anything but "your master", when speaking to the other servants. Pratt laughed. He liked his master very well, but he liked Tantripp better. When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause. Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she *X523 dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank. Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to this -- only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage. She saw clearly enough the whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul that entreated hers. If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak. But the half-hour was passing, and she must not delay longer. When she entered the Yew-Tree Walk she could not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden. It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house, towards hich the path diverged a little. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to a stone table. His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening his face on each side. "He exhausted himself last night," Dorothea said to herself, thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a place to rest in. But then she remembered that of late she had seen him take that attitude when she was reading to him, as if he found it easier than any other; and that he would sometimes speak, as well as listen, with his face down in that way. She went into the summer-house and said, "I am come, Edward; I am ready." He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready]" Still he was motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned down to him, took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to his head, crying in a distressed tone, "Wake, dear, wake] Listen to me. I am come to answer." But Dorothea never gave her answer. Later in the day, Lydgate was seated by her bedside, and she was talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone through her mind the night before. She knew him, and called him by his name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain everything to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain everything to her husband. *X524 "Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise. Only, thinking about it was so dreadful -- it has made me ill. Not very ill. I shall soon be better. Go and tell him." But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken. *C49 A task too strong for wizard spells This squire had brought about; "Tis easy dropping stones in wells, But who shall get them out? *M *L1 "I wish to God we could hinder Dorothea from knowing this," said Sir James Chettam, with the little frown on his brow, and an expression of intense disgust about his mouth. He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Grange, and speaking to Mr Brooke. It was the day after Mr Casaubon had been buried, and Dorothea was not yet able to leave her room. "That would be difficult, you know, Chettam, as she is an executrix, and she likes to go into these things -- property, land, that kind of thing. She has her notions, you know," said Mr Brooke, sticking his eye-glasses on nervously, and exploring the edges of a folded paper which he held in his hand; "and she would like to act -- depend upon it, as an executrix Dorothea would want to act. And she was twenty-one last December, you know. I can hinder nothing." Sir James looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then lifting his eyes suddenly fixed them on Mr Brooke, saying, "I will tell you what we can do. Until Dorothea is well, all business must be kept from her, and as soon as she is able to be moved she must come to us. Being with Celia and the baby will be the best thing in the world for her, and will pass away the time. And meanwhile you must get rid of Ladislaw: you must send him out of the country." Here Sir James's look of disgust returned with all its intensity. Mr Brooke put his hands behind him, walked to the window and straightened his back with a little shake before he replied: "That is easily said, Chettam, easily said, you know." "My dear sir," persisted Sir James, restraining his indignation within respectful forms, "it was you who brought him here, and *X526 you who keep him here -- I mean by the occupation you give him." "Yes, but I can't dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons, mty dear Chettam. Ladislaw has been invaluable, most satisfactory. I consider that I have done this part of the country a service by bringing him -- by bringing him, you know." Mr Brooke ended with a nod, turning round to give it. "It's a pity this part of the country didn't do without him, that's all I have to say about it. At any rate, as Dorothea's brother-in-law, I feel warranted in objecting strongly to his being kept here by any action on the part of her friends. You admit, I hope, that I have a right to speak about what concerns the dignity of my wife's sister?" Sir James was getting warm. "Of course, my dear Chettam, of course. But you and I have different ideas -- different --" "Not about this action of Casaubon's, I should hope," interrupted Sir James. "I say that he has most unfairly compromised Dorothea. I say that there was never a meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this -- a codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family -- a positive insult to Dorothea]" "Well, you know, Casaubon was a little twisted about Ladislaw. Ladislaw has told me the reason -- dislike of the bent he took, you know -- Ladislaw didn't think much of Casaubon's notions, Thoth and Dagon -- that sort of thing: and I fancy that Casaubon didn't like the independent position between them, you know. Poor Casaubon was a little buried in books -- he didn't know the world." "It's all very well for Ladislaw to put that colour on it," said Sir James. "But I believe Casaubon was only jealous of him on Dorothea's account, and the world will suppose that she gave him some reason; and that is what makes it so abominable -- coupling her name with this young fellow's." "My dear Chettam, it won't lead to anything, you know," said Mr Brooke, seating himself and sticking on his eye-glass again. "It's all of a piece with Casaubon's oddity. This paper, now, "Synoptical Tabulation" and so on, "for the use of Mrs *X527 Casaubon", it was locked up in the desk with the will. I suppose he meant Dorothea to publish his researches, eh? and she'll do it, you know; she has gone into his studies uncommonly." "My dear sir," said Sir James, impatiently, "that is neither here not there. The question is, whether you don't see with me the propriety of sending young Ladislaw away?" "Well, no, not the urgency of the thing. By-and-by, perhaps, it may come round. As to gossip, you know, sending him away won't hinder gossip. People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for," said Mr Brooke, becoming acute about the truths that lay on the side of his own wishes. "I might get rid of Ladislaw up to a certain point -- take away the ˛Pioneer˛ from him, and that sort of thing; but I couldn't send him out of the country if he didn't choose to go -- didn't choose, you know." Mr Brooke, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing the nature of last year's weather, and nodding at the end with his usual amenity, was an exasperating form of obstinacy. "Good God]" said Sir James, with as much passion as he ever showed, "let us get him a post; let us spend money on him. If he could go in the suite of some Colonial Governor] Grampus might take him -- and I could write to Fulke about it." "But Ladislaw won't be shipped off like a head of cattle, my dear fellow; Ladislaw has his ideas. It's my opinion that if he were to part from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country. With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are few men who could come up to him as an agitator -- and agitator, you know." "Agitator]" said Sir James, with bitter emphasis, feeling that the syllables of this word properly repeated were a sufficient exposure of its hatefulness. "But be reasonable, Chettam. Dorothea, now. As you say, she had better go to Celia as soon as possible. She can stay under your roof, and in the meantime things may come round quietly. Don't let us be firing off our guns in a hurry, you know. Standish will keep our counsel, and the news will be old before it's known. Twenty things may happen to carry off Ladislaw -- without my doing anything, you know." "Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?" *X528 "Decline, Chettam? -- no -- I don't say decline. But I really don't see what I could do. Ladislaw is a gentleman." "I am glad to hear it]" said Sir James, his irritation making him forget himself a little. "I am sure Casaubon was not." "Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder her from marrying again at all, you know." "I don't know that," said Sir James. "It would have been less indelicate." "One of poor Casaubon's freaks] That attack upset his brain a little. It all goes for nothing. She doesn't ˛want˛ to marry Ladislaw." "But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she did. I don't believe anything of the sort about Dorothea," said Sir James -- then frowningly, "but I suspect Ladislaw. I tell you frankly, I suspect Ladislaw." "I couldn't take any immediate action on that ground, Chettam. In fact, if it were possible to pack him off -- send him to Norfolk Island -- that sort of thing -- it would look all the worse for Dorothea to those who knew about it. It would seem as if we distrusted her -- distrusted her, you know." That Mr Brooke had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to soothe Sir James. He put out his hand to reach his hat, implying that he did not mean to contend further, and said, still with some heat -- "Well, I can only say that I think Dorothea was sacrificed once, because her friends were too careless. I shall do what I can, as her brother, to protect her now." "You can't do better than get her to Freshitt as soon as possible, Chettam, I approve that plan altogether," said Mr Brooke, well pleased that he had won the argument. It would have been highly inconvenient to him to part with Ladislaw at that time, when a dissolution might happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of the course by which the interests of the country would be best served. Mr Brooke sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the nation. *C50 *X529 *Mm "This Loller here wol prechen us somewhat." "Nay by my father's soule] that schal he nat," Sayde the Schipman, "here schal he not preche, He schal no gospel glosen here ne teche. We leven all in the gret God," quod he. He wolden sowen some diffcultee. ˛Canterbury˛ ˛Tales˛ *M *L1 Dorothea had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had asked any dangerous questions. Every morning now she sat with Celia in the prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small conservatory -- Celia all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets, watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse. Dorothea sta by in her widow's dress, with an expression which rather provoked Celia, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite well, but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while he lived, and besides that had -- well, well] Sir James, of course, had told Celia everything, with a strong representation how important it was that Dorothea should not know it sooner than was inevitable. But Mr Brooke had been right in predicting that Dorothea would not long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the purport of her husband's will made at the time of their marriage, and her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it. One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Dorothea said -- "Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have *X530 the living at Lowick. After Mr Tucker had been provided for, I never heard my husband say that he had any clergyman in his mind as a successor to himself. I think I ought to have the keys now and go to Lowick to examine all my husband's papers. There may be something that would throw light on his wishes." "No hurry, my dear," said Mr Brooke, quietly. "By-and-by, you know, you can go, if you like. But I cast my eyes over things in the desks and drawers -- there was nothing -- nothing but deep subjects, you know -- besides the will. Everything can be done by-and-by. As to the living, I have had an application for interest already -- I should say rather good. Mr Tyke has been strongly recommended to me -- I had something to do with getting him an appointment before. An apostolic man, I believe -- the sort of thing that would suit you, my dear." "I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge for myself, if Mr Casaubon has not left any expression of his wishes. He has perhaps made some addition to his will -- there may be some instructions for me," said Dorothea, who had all the while this conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband's work. "Nothing about the rectory, my dear -- nothing," said Mr Brooke, rising to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces: "nor about his researches, you know. Nothing in the will." Dorothea's lip quivered. "Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear. By-and-by, you know." "I am quite well now, uncle: I wish to exert myself." "Well, well, we shall see. But I must run away now -- I have no end of work now -- it's a crisis -- a political crisis, you know. And here is Celia and her little man -- you are an aunt, you know, now, and I am a sort of grandfather," said Mr Brooke, with placid hurry, anxious to get away and tell Chettam that it would not be his (Mr Brooke's) fault if Dorothea insisted on looking into everything. Dorothea sank back into her chair when her uncle had left the room, and cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands. "Look, Dodo] look at him] Did you ever see anything like that?" said Celia in her comfortable staccato. *X531 "What, Kitty?" said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently. "What? Why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he meant to make a face. Isn't it wonderful] He may have his little thoughts. I wish nurse were here. Do look at him." A large tear, which had been for some time gathering, rolled down Dorothea's cheek, as she looked up and tried to smile. "Don't be sad, Dodo; kiss baby. What are you brooding over so? I am sure you did everything, and a great deal too much. You should be happy now." "I wonder if Sir James would drive me to Lowick. I want to look over everything -- to see if there were any words written for me." "You are not to go till Mr Lydgate says you may go. And he has not said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual, Dodo -- I can see that: it vexes me." "Where am I wrong, Kitty?" said Dorothea, quite meekly. She was almost ready now to think Celia wiser than herslef, and was really wondering with some fear what her wrong notion was. Celia felt her advantage, and was determined to use it. manage her. Since Celia's baby was born, she had had a new that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and manage her. Since Celia's baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom. It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force. "I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo," said Celia. "You are wanting to find out of there is anything uncomfortable for you to do now, only because Mr Casaubon wished it. As if you had not been uncomfortable enough before. And he doesn't deserve it, and you will find that out. He has behaved very badly. James is as angry with him as can be. And I had better tell you, to prepare you." "Celia," said Dorothea, entreatingly, "you distress me. Tell me at once what you mean." It glanced through her mind that Mr Casaubon had left the property away from her -- which would not be so very distressing. "Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to go away from you if you married -- I mean --" *X532 "That is of no consequence," said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously. "But if you married Mr Ladislaw, not anybody else," Celia went on with persevering quietude. "Of course that is of no consequence in one way -- you never ˛would˛ marry Mr Ladislaw; but that only makes it worse of Mr Casaubon." The blood rushed to Dorothea's face and neck painfully. But Celia was administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact. It was taking up notions that had done Dodo's health so much harm. So she went on in her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby's robes. "James says so. He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And there never ˛was˛ a better judge than James. It is as if Mr Casaubon wanted to make people belive that you would wish to marry Mr Ladislaw -- which is ridiculous. Only James says it was to hinder Mr Ladislaw from wanting to marry you for your money -- just as if he ever would think of making you an offer. Mrs Cadwallader said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice] But I must go and look at baby," Celia added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light shawl over her, and tripping away. Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them -- and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of *X533 the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light -- that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility, -- and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not soon to be solved. It seemed a long while -- she did not know how long --before she heard Celia saying, "That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now. You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room." "What I think, Dodo," Celia went on, observing nothing more than that Dorothea was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, "is that Mr Casaubon was spiteful. I never did like him, and James never did. I think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful. And now he has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to make yourself uncomfortable about him. If he has been taken away, that is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful. ˛We˛ should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make -- you didn't know what: -- in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form. At this crisis Lydgate was announced, and one of the first things he said was, "I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs Casaubon; have you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse." Dorothea's hand was of a marble coldness. "She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers," said Celia. "She ought not, ought she?" Lydgate did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, looking at Dorothea, "I hardly know. In my opinion Mrs Casaubon should do what would give her the most repose of mind. That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act." "Thank you," said Dorothea, exerting herslef, "I am sure that is wise. There are so many things which I ought to attend to. Why should I sit here idle?" Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with her agitation, she added, abruptly, "You know every one in Middlemarch, I think, Mr Lydgate. I shall ask you to tell me a great deal. I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away. You know Mr Tyke and all the --" But Dorothea's effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs. *X534 Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal-volatile. "Let Mrs Casaubon do as she likes," he said to Sir James, whom he asked to see before quitting the house. "She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription." His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released. Lydgate's advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about the will. There was no help for it now -- no reason for any further delay in the execution of necessary business. And the next day Sir James complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick. "I have no wish to stay there at present," said Dorothea; "I could hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia. I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance. And I should like to be at the Grange a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the people in the village." "Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are better out of the way of such doings," said Sir James, who at that moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw's. But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible. Sir James was shy, even with men, about diagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband's injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw's moral claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her, that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about. Also, *X535 it must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will's sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of Mr Casaubon's charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs Cadwallader seemed like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger. At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer -- searched all her husband's places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed especially to her, except that "Synoptical Tabulation" which was probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her guidance, in carrying out this bequest of labour to Dorothea, as in all else, Mr Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Dorothea's competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a trust for himself out of Dorothea's nature: she could do what she resolved to do: and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tomb with his name upon it. (Not that Mr Casaubon called the future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp on Dorothea's life. The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgement whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness which is a supreme use. But now her judgement, instead of being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion. The living, suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded his scrupulous care for his own charcter, and made him defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honour. As for the property which was the sign of *X536 that broken tie, she would have been glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to ownership, which she ought not to flinch from. About this property many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw -- but was it not now impossible now for her to do that act of justice? Mr Casaubon had taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of his purpose revolted her. After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine she locked up again the desks and drawers -- all empty of personal words for her -- empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken. Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her of. Lydgate's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience. "Instead of telling you anything about Mr Tyke," he said, "I should like to speak of another man -- Mr Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph's. His living is a poor one, and gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family. His mother, aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him. I believe he has never married because of them. I never heard such good preaching as his -- such plain, easy eloquence. He would have done to preach at St Paul's Cross after old Latimer. His talk is just as good about all subjects: original, simple, clear. I think him a remarkable fellow; he ought to have done more than he has done." "Why has he not done more?" said Dorothea, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention. "That's a hard question," said Lydgate. "I find myself that it's uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are *X537 so many strings pulling at once. Farebrother often hints that he has got into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on. He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position. He has no money to spare -- hardly enough to use; and that has led him into card-playing -- Middlemarch is a great place for whist. He does play for money, and wins a good deal. Of course that takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew. He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more correct outside." "I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit," said Dorothea; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off." "I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things." "My uncle says that Mr Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man," said Dorothea, meditatively. She was wishing it were possible to restore the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr Farebrother with a strong desire to rescue hin from his chance-gotten money. "I don't pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic," said Lydgate. "His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better. Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut the principal figure. I see something of that in Mr Tyke at the Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably aware of him. Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick] -- he ought to think, as St Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the birds." "True," said Dorothea. "It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our farmers and labourers get from their teaching. I have been looking onto a volume of sermons by Mr Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at Lowick -- I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have *X538 always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I can find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest -- I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much. But I should like to see Mr Farebrother and hear him preach." "Do," said Lydgate; "I trust to the effect of that. He is very much beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them. And that money-winning business is really a blot. You don't, of course, see many Middlemarch people: but Mr Ladislaw, who is constantly seeing Mr Brooke, is a great friend of Mr Farebrother's old ladies, and would be glad to sing the Vicar's parises. One of the old ladies -- Miss Noble, the aunt -- is wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Ladislaw gallants her about sometimes. I met them one day in a back street: you know Ladislaw's look -- a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this little old maid reaching up to his arm -- they looked like a couple dropped out of a romantic comedy. But the best evidence about Farebrother is to see him and hear him." Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this conversation occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate's innocent introduction of Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual with him in matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond's remark that she thought Will adored Mrs Casaubon. At that moment he was only caring for what would recommend the Farebrother family; and he had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the Vicar, in order to forestall objections. In the weeks since Mr Casaubon's death he had hardly seen Ladislaw, and he had heard no rumour to warn him that Mr Brooke's confidential secretary was a dangerous subject with Mrs Casaubon. When he was gone, his picture of Ladislaw lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the Lowick living. What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her? Would he hear of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And how would he feel when he heard it?-- But she could see *X539 as well as possible how he smiled down at the little old maid. An Italian with white mice]-- on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance. *C51 *X540 *Mm Party is Nature too, and you shall see By force of Logic how they both agree: The Many in the One, the One in Many; All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any: Genus holds species, both are great or small; One genus highest, one not high at all; Each species has its differentia too, This is not That, and He was never You, Though this and that are AYES, and you and he Are like as one to one, or three to three. *M *L1 No gossip about Mr Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw: the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament, and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice of. The famous "dry election" was at hand, in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink. Will Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time; and though Dorothea's widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject, that when Lydgate sought him out to tell him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly -- "Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs Casaubon, and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt. I never go there. It is Tory ground, where I and the ˛Pioneer˛ are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun." The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing that Mr Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible. This was a shuffling concession of Mr Brooke's to Sir James Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hurt in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from the Grange on Dorothea's account. Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion? Their fears were quite *X541 superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favour of a rich woman. Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and Dorothea -- until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on the other side. He began, not without some inward rage, to think of going away from the neighbourhood: it would be impossible for him to show any further interest in Dorothea without subjecting himself to disagreeable imputations -- perhaps even in her mind, which others might try to poison. "We are for ever divided," said Will. "I might as well be at Rome; she would be no farther from me." But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. There were plenty of reasons why he should not go -- public reasons why he should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr Brooke in the lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on. Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority. To coach Mr Brooke and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr Farebrother's prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled, neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society, nor any other power on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus for interference while there was a second reforming candidate like Mr Brooke, who might be returned at his own expense; and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member, Bagster, the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only. Mr Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr Brooke's success must depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes. The latter means, of course, would be preferable. *X542 This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will Ladislaw much trouble. "You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr Brooke; "meeting people half-way -- tempering your ideas -- saying, "Well now, there's something in that", and so on. I agree with you that this is a peculiar occasion -- the country with a will of its own -- political unions -- that sort of thing -- but we sometimes cut with rather too sharp a knife, Ladislaw. These ten-pound householders, now: why ten? Draw the line somewhere -- yes: but why just ten? That's a difficult question, now, if you go into it." "Of course it is," said Will, impatiently, "But if you are to wait till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a revolutionist, and then Middlemarch would not elect you, I fancy. As for trimming, this is not a time for trimming." Mr Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still appeared to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn into using them with much hopefulness. At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech, introducing other orators, or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing. He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr Mawmsey, a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the borough -- willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing *X543 respectable people whose names were on his books. He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr Brooke of Tipton; but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a great weight of grocery on their side. Mr Mawmsey thinking that Mr Brooke, as not too "clever in his intellects", was the more likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his back parlour. "As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably. "Will it support Mrs Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more? I put the question ˛fictitiously˛, knowing what must be the answer. Very well, sir. I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when gentlemen come to me and say, "Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere; when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintaining tradesmen of the right colour." Those very words have been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting. I don't mean by your honourable self, Mr Brooke." "No, no, no -- that's narrow, you know. Until my butler complains to me of your goods, Mr Mawmsey," said Mr Brooke, soothingly, "until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices -- that sort of thing -- I shall never order him to go elsewhere." "Sir, I am you humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr Mawmsey, feeling that politics were clearing up a little. "There would be some pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honourable manner." "Well, you know, Mr Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put yourself on our side. This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by -- a thoroughly popular measure -- a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest can follow. I quite agree with you that you've got to look at the thing in a family light: but public spirit, now. We're all one family, you know -- it's all one cupboard. Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may help to make men's fortunes at the Cape -- there's no knowing what may be the effect of a vote," Mr Brooke ended, with a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable. But Mr Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check. his share in bringing Mr Brooke through would be quite innocent. # But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him. He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to perceive that Mr Brooke's mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it *X545 drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again. To collect documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents of the document is another. No] the only way in which Mr Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took up all the room in his brain. But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand. Mr Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking. However, Ladislaw's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test, for before the day of nomination Mr Brooke was to explain himself to the worthy electors of Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart, which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area in front and two converging streets. It was a fine May morning and everything seemed hopeful: there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster's committee and Brooke's, to which Mr Bulstrode, Mr Standish as a Liberal lawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr Plymdale and Mr Vincy, gave a solidity which almost counterbalanced Mr Hawley and his associates who sat for Pinkerton at the Green Dragon. Mr Brooke, conscious of having weakened the blasts of the ˛Trumpet˛ against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the last half year, and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town, felt his heart tolerably light under his buff-coloured waistcoat. But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last. "This looks well, eh?" said Mr Brooke as the crowd gathered. "I shall have a good audience, at any rate. I like this, now -- this kind of public made up of one's own neighbours, you know." The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr Mawmsey, had never thought of Mr Brooke as a neighbour, and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London. But they listened without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced the candidate, though one of them -- a political personage from Brassing, who came to tell Middlemarch its duty -- spoke so fully, that it was alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him. Meanwhile the crowd became denser, and as the political personage neared the *X546 end of his speech, Mr Brooke felt a remarkable change in his sensations while he still handled his eye-glass, trifled with documents before him, and exchanged remarks with his committee, as a man to whom the moment of summons was indifferent. "I'll take another glass of sherry, Ladislaw," he said, with an easy air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed him the supposed fortifier. It was ill-chosen; for Mr Brooke was an abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry quickly at no great interval from the first was a surprise to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of collecting them. Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds] whereas Mr Brooke wished to serve his country by standing for Parliament -- which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying. It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr Brooke was at all anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope. Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was alarming. "And questions, now," hinted the demon just waking up in his stomach, "somebody may put questions about the schedules -- Ladislaw," he continued, aloud, "just hand me the memorandum of the schedules." When Mr Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, "This looks dangerous, by God] Hawley has got some deeper plan than this." Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable than Mr Brooke, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy. He began with some confidence. "Gentlemen -- Electors of Middlemarch]" This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural. *X547 "I'm uncommonly glad to be here -- I was never so proud and happy in my life -- never so happy, you know." This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away -- even couplets from Pope may be put but "fallings from us, vanishings", when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas. Ladislaw, who stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, "It's all up now. The only chance is that, since the best thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once." Mr Brooke, meanwhile, having lost other clues, fell back on himself and his qualifications -- always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate. "I am a close neighbour of yours, my good friends -- you've known me on the bench a good while -- I've always gone a good deal into public questions -- machinery, now, and machine-breaking -- you're many of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately. It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on -- trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples -- that kind of thing -- since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe: -- "Observation with extensive view", must look everywhere "from China to Peru", as somebody says -- Johnson, I think, ˛The˛ ˛Rambler˛, you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point -- not as far as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home -- I saw it wouldn't do. I've been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go -- and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now." Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr Brooke might have got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy. At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself; buff-coloured waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners. The most *X548 innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook. By the time it said, "The Baltic, now", the laugh which had been running through the audience became a general shout, and but for the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which the entanglement of things had identified with "Brooke of Tipton", the laugh might have caught his committee. Mr Bulstrode asked, reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted. Mr Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person who had not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the image of himself. Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say. Mr Brooke heard the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance, and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling, stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from the Baltic. "That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket, with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know -- but we never want a precedent for the right thing -- but there is Chatham, now; I can't say I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt -- he was not a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know." "Blast your ideas] we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice from the crowd below. Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed Mr Brooke, repeated, "Blast your ideas] we want the Bill]" The laugh was louder than ever, and for the first time Mr Brooke, being himself silent, heard distinctly the mocking echo. But it seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light was encouraging; so he replied with amenity -- "There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we meet for but to speak our minds -- freedom of *X549 opinion, freedom of the press, liberty -- that kind of thing? The Bill, now -- you shall have the Bill" -- here Mr Brooke paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass and take paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being practical and coming to particulars. The invisible Punch followed :-- "You shall have the Bill, Mr Brooke, per electioneering contest, and a seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven shillings, and fourpence." Mr Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself, which had come nearer. The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with eggs. His spirit rose a little, and his voice too. "Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth -- all that is very well" -- here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr Brooke's shoulder, as the echo said, "All that is very well"; then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by chance. There was a stream of new men pushing among the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater hubbub because there was no shouting and struggling to put them down. No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr Brooke, disagreeably annointed, stood his ground no longer. The frustration would have been less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper reporter "can aver that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs", or can respectfully bear witness to "the soles of the gentleman's boots having been visible above the railing", has perhaps more consolations attached to it. Mr Brooke re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly as he could, "This is a little too bad, you know. I should have got the ear of the people by-and-by -- but they didn't give me time. I should have gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know", he added, glancing at Ladislaw. "However, things will all come right at the nomination." But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the politiacal personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new devices. *X550 "It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr Standish, evasively. "I know it as well as if he had been advertised. He's uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God] Hawley has been having him to dinner lately; there's a fund of talent in Bowyer." "Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would have invited him to dine," said poor Mr Brooke, who had gone through a great deal of inviting for the good of his country. "There's not a more paltry fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer," said Ladislaw, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows were always to turn the scale." Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his "principal", and he went to shut himself up in his rooms with a half-formed resolve to throw up the ˛Pioneer˛ and Mr Brooke together. Why should he stay? If the impassable gulf between himself and Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Brooke's. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do -- in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking Dorothea to step down to him. Five years:-- if he could only be sure that she cared for him more than for others; if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he could tell his love without lowering himself -- then he could go away easily, and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful. He could speak and he could write; he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardour. Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of the crowd, and feel that he had won that eminenece well? Without doubt he would leave Middlemarch, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity by "eating his dinners." But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed *X551 between him and Dorothea. He could not be satisfied until she knew why, even if he were the man she would choose to marry, he would not marry her. Hence he must keep his post and bear with Mr Brooke a little longer. But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr Brooke had anticipated him in the wish to break up their connection. Deputations without and voices within had concurred in inducing that philanthropist to take a stronger measure than usual for the good of mankind; namely, to withdraw in favour of another candidate, to whom he left the advantages of his canvassing machinery. He himself called this a strong measure, but observed that his health was les capable of sustaining excitement than he had imagined. "I have felt uneasy about the chest -- it won't do to carry that too far," he said to Ladislaw in explaining the affair. "I must pull up. Poor Casaubon was a warning, you know. I've made some heavy advances, but I've dug a channel. It's rather coarse work -- this electioneering, eh, Ladislaw? I daresay you are tired of it. However, we have dug a channel with the ˛Pioneer˛ -- put things in a track, and so on. A more ordinary man than you might carry it on now -- more ordinary, you know." "Do you wish me to give it up?" said Will, the quick colour coming in his face, as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn of three steps with his hands in his pockets. "I am ready to do so whenever you wish it." "As to wishing, my dear Ladislaw, I have the highest opinion of your powers, you know. But about the ˛Pioneer˛, I have been consulting a little with some of the men on our side, and they are inclined to take it into their hands -- indemnify me to a certain extent -- carry it on, in fact. And under the circumstances, you might like to give up -- might find a better field. These people might not take that high view of you which I have always taken, as an ˛alter˛ ˛ego˛, a right hand -- though I always looked forward to your doing something else. I think of having a run into France. But I'll write you any letters, you know -- to Althorpe and people of that kind. I've met Althorpe." "I am exceedingly obliged to you," said Ladislaw proudly. "Since you are going to part with the ˛Pioneer˛, I need not trouble *X553 you about the steps I shall take. I may choose to continue here for the present." After Mr Brooke had left him Will said to himself, "The rest of the family have been urging him to get rid of me, and he doesn't care now about my going. I shall stay as long as I like. I shall go of my own movement, and not because they are afraid of me." *C52 *X553 *Mm His heart The lowliest duties on itself did lay. WORDSWORTH *M *L1 On that June evening when Mr Farebrother knew that he was to have the Lowick living, there was joy in the old-fashioned parlour, and even the portraits of the great lawyers seemed to look on with satisfaction. His mother left her tea and toast untouched, but sat with her usual pretty primness, only showing her emotion by that flush in the cheeks and brightness in the eyes which give an old woman a touching momentary identity with her far-off youthful self, and saying decisively -- "The greatest comfort, Camden, is that you have deserved it." "When a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must come after," said the son, brimful of pleasure, and not trying to conceal it. The gladness in his face was of that active kind which seems to have energy enough not only to flash outwardly, but to light up busy vision within: one seemed to see thoughts, as well as delight, in his glances. "Now, aunt," he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Noble, who was making tender little beaver-like noises, "there shall be sugar-candy always on the table for you to steal and give to the children, and you shall have a great many new stockings to make presents of, and you shall darn your own more than ever]" Miss Noble nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh, conscious of having already dropped an additional lump of sugar into her basket on the strength of the new preferment. "As for you, Whinny" -- the Vicar went on -- "I shall make no difficulty about your marrying any Lowick bachelor -- Mr Solomon Featherstone, for example, as soon as I find you are in love with him." Miss Winifred, who had been looking at her brother all the while and crying heartily, which was her best way of rejoicing, *X554 smiled through her tears and said, "You must set me the example, Cam: ˛you˛ must marry now." "With all my heart. But who is in love with me? I am a seedy old fellow," said the Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away and looking down at himself. "What do you say, mother?" "You are a handsome man, Camden: though not so fine a figure of a man as your father," said the old lady. "I wish you would marry Miss Garth, brother," said Miss Winifred. "She would make us so lively at Lowick." "Very fine] You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me," said the Vicar, not caring to specify. "We don't want everybody," said Miss Winifred. "But ˛you˛ would like Miss Garth, mother, shouldn't you?" "My son's choice shall be mine," said Mrs Farebrother, with majestic discretion, "and a wife would be most welcome, Camden. You will want your whist at home when we go to Lowick, and Henrietta Noble never was a whist-player." (Mrs Farebrother always called her tiny old sister by that magnificent name.) "I shall do without whist now, mother." "Why so, Camden? In my time whist was thought an undeniable amusement for a good churchman," said Mrs Farebrother, innocent of the meaning that whist had for her son, and speaking rather sharply, as at some dangerous countenancing of new doctrine. "I shall be too busy for whist; I shall have two parishes," said the Vicar, preferring not to discuss the virtues of that game. He had already said to Dorothea, "I don't feel bound to give up St Botolph's. It is protest enough against the pluralism they want to reform if I give somebody else most of the money. The stronger thing is not to give up power, but to use it well." "I have thought of that," said Dorothea. "So far as self is concerned. I think it would be easier to give up power and money than to keep them. It seems very unfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I felt that I ought not to let it be used by some one else instead of me." "It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power," said Mr Farebrother. His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more *X555 active when the yoke of life ceases to gall them. He made no display of humility on the subject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed that his conduct had shown laches which others who did not get benefices were free from. "I used often to wish I had been something else than a clergyman," he said to Lydgate, "but perhaps it will be better to try and make as good a clergyman out of myself as I can. That is the well-beneficed point of view, you perceive, from which difficulties are much simplified," he ended, smiling. The Vicar did feel then as if his share of duties would be easy. But Duty has trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates. Hardly a week later, Duty presented itself in his study under the disguise of Fred Vincy, now returned from Omnibus College with his bachelor's degree. "I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr Farebrother," said Fred, whose fair open face was propitiating, "but you are the only friend I can consult. I told you everything once before, and you were so good that I can't help coming to you again." "Sit down, Fred, I'm ready to hear and do anything I can," said the Vicar, who was busy packing some small objects for removal, and went on with his work. "I wanted to tell you --" Fred hesitated an instant and then went on plungingly, "I might go into the Church now; and really, look where I may, I can't see anything else to do. I don't like it, but I know it's uncommonly hard on my father to say so, after he has spent a good deal of money in educating me for it." Fred paused again an instant, and then repeated, "and I can't see anything else to do." "I did talk to your father about it, Fred, but I made little way with him. He said it was too late. But you have got over one bridge now: what are your other difficulties?" "Merely that I don't like it. I don't like divinity, and preaching, and feeling obliged to look serious. I like riding across country, and doing as other men do. I don't mean that I want to be a bad fellow in any way; but I've no taste for the sort of thing people expect of a clergyman. And yet what else am I to do? My father can't spare me any capital, else I might go *X556 into farming. And he has no room for me in his trade. And of course I can't begin to study for law or physic now, when my father wants me to earn something. It's all very well to say I'm wrong to go into the Church; but those who say so might as well tell me to go into the backwoods." Fred's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, and Mr Farebrother might have been inclined to smile if his mind had not been too busy in imagining more than Fred told him. "Have you any difficulties about doctrines -- about the Articles?" he said, trying hard to think of the question simply for Fred's sake. "No, I suppose the Articles are right. I am not prepared with any arguments to disprove them, and much better, cleverer fellows than I go in for them entirely. I think it would be rather ridiculous in me to urge scruples of that sort, as if I were a judge," said Fred, quite simply. "I suppose, then, it has occurred to you that you might be a fair parish priest without being much of a divine?" "Of course, if I am obliged to be a clergyman, I shall try and do my duty, though I mayn't like it. Do you think anybody ought to blame me?" "For going into the Church under the circumstances? That depends on your conscience, Fred -- how far you have counted the cost, and seen what your position will require of you. I can only tell you about myself, that I have always been too lax, and have been uneasy in consequence." "But there is another hindrance," said Fred, colouring. "I did not tell you before, though perhaps I may have said things that made you guess it. There is somebody I am very fond of: I have loved her ever since we were children." "Miss Garth, I suppose?" said the Vicar, examining some labels very closely. "Yes. I shouldn't mind anything if she would have me. And I know I could be a good fellow then." "And you think she returns the feeling?" "She never will say so; and a good while ago she made me promise not to speak to her about it again. And she has set her mind especially against my being a clergyman; I know that. But I can't give her up. I do think she cares about me. I saw Mrs *X557 Garth last night and she said that Mary was staying at Lowick Rectory with Miss Farebrother." "Yes, she is very kindly helping my sister. Do you wish to go there?" "No, I want to ask a great favour of you. I am ashamed to bother you in this way; but Mary might listen to what you said, if you mentioned the subject to her -- I mean about my going into the Church." "That is rather a delicate task, my dear Fred. I shall have to presuppose your attachment to her; and to enter on the subject as you wish me to do, will be asking her to tell me whether she returns it." "That is what I want her to tell you," said Fred, bluntly. "I don't know what to do, unless I can get at her feeling." "You mean that you would be guided by that as to your going into the Church?" "If Mary said she would never have me I might as well go wrong in one way as another." "That is nonsense, Fred. Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness." "Not my sort of love: I have never been without loving Mary. If I had to give her up, it would be like beginning to live on wooden legs." "Will she not be hurt at my intrusion?" "No, I feel sure she will not. She respects you more than any one, and she would not put you off with fun as she does me. Of course I could not have told any one else, or asked any one else to speak to her, but you. There is no one else who could be such a friend to both of us." Fred paused a moment, and then said, rather complainingly, "And she ought to acknowledge that I would exert myself for her sake." There was a moment's silence before Mr Farebrother laid down his work, and putting out his hand to Fred said -- "Very well, my boy. I will do what you wish." That very day Mr Farebrother went to Lowick parsonage on the nag which he had just set up. "Decidedly I am an old stalk," he thought, "the young growths are pushing me aside." He found Mary in the garden gathering roses and sprinkling *X558 the petals on a sheet. The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across the grassy walks where Mary was moving without bonnet or parasol. She did not observe Mr Farebrother's approach along the grass, and had just stooped down to lecture a small black-and-tan terrier, which would persist in walking on the sheet and smelling at the rose-leaves as Mary sprinkled them. She took his forepaws in one hand, and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled his brows and looked embarrassed. "Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you," Mary was saying in a grave contralto. "This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman." "You are unmerciful to young gentlemen, Miss Garth," said the Vicar, within two yards of her. Mary started up and blushed. "It always answers to reason with Fly," she said, laughingly. "But not with young gentlemen?" "Oh, with some, I suppose; since some of then turn into excellent men." "I am glad of that admission, because I want at this very moment to interest you in a young gentleman." "Not a silly one, I hope," said Mary, beginning to pluck the roses again, and feeling her heart beat uncomfortably. "No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point, but rather affection and sincerity. However, wisdom lies more in those two qualities than people are apt to imagine. I hope you know by those marks what young gentleman I mean." "Yes, I think I do," said Mary, bravely, her face getting more serious, and her hands cold; "it must be Fred Vincy." "He has asked me to consult you about his going into the Church. I hope you will not think that I consented to take a liberty in promising to do so." "On the contrary, Mr Farebrother," said Mary, giving up the roses, and folding her arms, but unable to look up, "whenever you have anything to say to me I feel honoured." "But before I enter on that question, let me just touch a point on which your father took me into confidence; by the way, it was that very evening on which I once before fulfilled a mission from Fred, just after he had gone to college. Mr Garth told me what happened on the night of Featherston's death -- how you *X559 refused to burn the will; and he said that you had some heart-prickings on that subject, because you had been the innocent means of hindering Fred from getting his ten thousand pounds. I have kept that in mind, and I have heard something that may relieve you on that score -- may show you that no sin-offering is demanded from you there." Mr Farebrother paused a moment and looked at Mary. He meant to give Fred his full advantage, but it would be well, he thought, to clear her mind of any superstitions, such as women sometimes follow when they do a man the wrong of marrying him as an act of atonement. Mary's cheeks had begun to burn a little, and she was mute. "I mean, that your action made no real difference to Fred's lot. I find that the first will would not have been legally good after the burning of the last; it would not have stood if it had been disputed, and you may be sure that it would have been disputed. So, on that score, you may feel your mind free." "Thank you, Mr Farebrother," said Mary, earnestly. "I am grateful to you for remembering my feelings." "Well, may I go on. Fred, you know, has taken his degree. He has worked his way so far, and now the question is, what is he to do? That question is so difficult that he is inclined to follow his father's wishes and enter the Church, though you know better than I do that he was quite set against that formerly. I have questioned him on the subject and I confess I see no insuperable objection to his being a clergyman, as things go. He says that he could turn his mind to doing his best in that vocation, on one condition. If that condition were fulfilled I would do my utmost in helping Fred on. After a time -- not, of course, at first -- he might be with me as my curate, and he would have so much to do that his stipend would be nearly what I used to get as vicar. But I repeat that there is a condition without which all this cannot come to pass. He has opened his heart to me, Miss Garth, and asked me to plead for him. The condition lies entirely in your feeling." Mary looked so much moved, that he said after a moment, "Let us walk a little"; and when they were walking he added. "To speak quite plainly, Fred will not take any course which would lessen the chance that you would consent to be his wife; but *X560 with that prospect, he will try his best at anything you approve." "I cannot possibly say that I will ever be his wife, Mr Farebrother: but I certainly never will be his wife if he becomes a clergyman. What you say is most generous and kind; I don't mean for a moment to correct your judgement. It is only that I have my girlish, mocking way of looking at things," said Mary, with a returning sparkle of playfulness in her answer which only made its modesty more charming. "He wishes me to report exactly what you think," said Mr Farebrother. "I could not love a man who was ridiculous," said Mary, not choosing to go deeper. "Fred has sense and knowledge enough to make him respectable, if he likes, in some good worldly business, but I can never imagine him preaching and exhorting and pronouncing blessings, and praying by the sick, without feeling as if I were looking at a caricature. His being a clergyman would be only for gentility's sake, and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility. I used to think that of Mr Crowse, with his empty face and neat umbrella, and mincing little speeches. What right have such men to represent Christianity -- as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly -- as if --" Mary checked herself. She had been carried along as if she had been speaking to Fred instead of Mr Farebrother. "Young women are severe; they don't feel the stress of action as men do, though perhaps I ought to make you an exception there. But you don't put Fred Voncy on so low a level as that?" "No, indeed; he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it as a clergyman. He would be a piece of professional affectation." "Then the answer is quite decided. As a clergyman he could have no hope?" Mary shook her head. "But if he braved all the difficulties of getting his bread in some other way -- will you give him the support of hope? May he count on winning you?" "I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already said to him," Mary answered, with a slight resentment *X561 in her manner. "I mena that he ought not to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it." Mr Farebrother was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they turned and paused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy walk, said, "I understand that you resist my attempt to fetter you, but either your feeling for Fred Vincy excludes your entertaining another attachment, or it does not: either he may count on your remaining single until he shall have earned your hand, or he may in any case be disappointed. Pardon me, Mary -- you know I used to catechize you under that name -- but when the state of a woman's affections touches the happiness of another life -- of more lives than one -- I think it would be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open." Mary in her turn was silent, wondering not at Mr Fareborther's manner but at his tone, which had a grave restrained emotion in it. When the strange idea flashed across her that his words had reference to himself, she was incredulous and ashamed of entertaining it. She had never thought that any man could love her except Fred, who had espoused her with the umbella ring, when she wore socks and little strapped shoes; still less that she could be of any importance to Mr Farebrother, the cleverest man in her narrow circle. She had only time to feel that all this was hazy and perhaps illusory; but one thing was clear and determined -- her answer. "Since you think it my duty, Mr Farebrother, I will tell you that I have too strong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any one else. I should never be quite happy if I thought he was unhappy for the loss of me. It has taken such deep root in me -- my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker. I should like better than anything to see him worthy of every one's respect. But please tell him I will not promise to marry him till then; I should shame and grieve my father and mother. He is free to choose some one else." "Then I have fulfilled my commission thoroughly," said Mr Farebrother, putting out his hand to Mary, "and I shall ride back *X562 to Middlemarch forthwith. With this prospect before him, we shall get Fred into the right niche somehow, and I hope I shall live to join your hands. God bless you]" "Oh, please stay, and let me give you some tea," said Mary. Her eyes filled with tears, for something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr Farebrother's manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father's hands trembling in a moment of trouble. "No, my dear, no. I must get back." In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation of whist, or even the writing of penitential meditations. *X563 *C53 *Mm It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders call inconsistency -- putting a dead mechanism of "ifs" and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought into mutual sustainment. *M *L1 Mr Bulstrode, when he was hoping to acquire a new interest in Lowick, had naturally had an especial wish that the new clergyman should be one whom he thoroughly approved; and he believed it to be a chastisement and admonition directed to his own shortcomings and those of the nation at large, that just about the time when he came in possession of the deeds which made him the proprietor of Stone Court, Mr Farebrother "read himself" into the quaint little church and preached his first sermon to the congregation of farmers, labourers, and village artisans. It was not that Mr Bulstrode intended to frequent Lowick Church or to reside at Stone Court for a good while to come: he had bought the excellent farm and fine homestead simply as a retreat which he might gradually enlarge as to the land and beautify as to the dwelling, until it should be conducive to the divine glory that he should enter on it as a residence, partially withdrawing from his present exertions in the administration of business, and throwing more conspicuously on the side of Gospel truth the weight of local landed proprietorship, which Porvidence might increase by unforeseen occasions of purchase. A strong leading in this direction seemed to have been given in the surprising facility of getting Stone Court, when every one had expected that Mr Rigg Featherstone would have clung to it as the Garden of Eden. That was what poor old Peter himself had expected; having often, in imagination, looked up through the sods above him, and, unobstructed by perspective, seen his frog-faced legatee enjoying the fine old place to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors. But how little we know what would make paradise for our *X564 neighbours] We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs. The cool and judicious Joshua Rigg had not allowed his parent to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than a chief good in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own. But as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold. He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a money-changer. From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport, he had looked through the windows of the money-changers as other boys look through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination had wrought itself gradually into a deep special passion; he meant, when he had property, to do many things, one of them being to marry a genteel young person; but these were all accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with. The one joy after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a much-frequented quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice. The strength of all that passion had been a power enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it. And when others were thinking that he had settled at Stone Court for life, Joshua himself was thinking that the moment now was not far off when he should settle on the North Quay with the best appointments in safes and locks. Enough. We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg's sale of his land from Mr Bulstrode's point of view, and he interpreted it as a cheering dispensation conveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose which he had for some time entertained without external encouragement; he interpreted it thus, but not too confidently, offering up his thanksgiving in guarded phraseology. His doubts did not arise from the possible relations of the event to Joshua Rigg's destiny, which belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under the providential government, except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but they arose *X565 from reflecting that this dispensation too might be a chastisement for himself, as Mr Farebrother's induction to the living clearly was. This was not what Mr Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of deceiving him: it was what he said to himself -- it was as genuinely his mode of explaining events as any theory of yours may be, if you happen to disagree with him. For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief. However, whether for sanction or for chastisement, Mr Bulstrode, hardly fifteen months after the death of Peter Featherston, had become the propietor of Stone Court, and what Peter would say "if he were worthy to know", had become an inexhaustible and consolatory subject of conversation to his disappointed relatives. The tables were now turned on that dear brother departed, and to contemplate the frustration of his cunning by the superior cunning of things in general was a cud of delight to Solomon. Mrs Waule had a melancholy triumph in the proof that it did not answer to make false Featherstones and cut off the genuine; and Sister Martha receiving the news in the Chalky Flats said, "Dear, dear] then the Almighty could have been none so pleased with the alms-houses after all." Affectionate Mrs Bulstrode was particularly glad of the advantage which her husband's health was likely to get from the purchase of Stone Court. Few days passed without his riding thither and looking over some part of the farm with the bailiff, and the evenings were delicious in that quiet spot, when the new hay-ricks lately set up were sending forth odours to mingle with the breath of the rich old garden. One evening, while the sun was still above the horizon and burning in golden lamps among the great walnut boughs, Mr Bulstrode was pausing on horse-back outside the front gate waiting for Caleb Garth, who had met him by appointment to give an opinion on a question of stable drainage, and was now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard. Mr Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a *X566 total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. At this moment Mr Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury. And he would willingly have had that service of exhortation in prospect now. The texts were there still, and so was his own facility in expounding them. His brief reverie was interrupted by the return of Caleb Garth, who also was on horseback, and was just shaking his bridle before starting, when he exclaimed -- "Bless my heart] what's this fellow in black coming along the lane? He's like one of those men one sees after the races." Mr Bulstrode turned his horse and looked along the lane, but made no reply. The comer was our slight acquaintance Mr Raffles, whose appearance presented no other change than such as was due to a suit of black and a crape hat-band. He was within three yards of the horsemen now, and they could see the flash of recognition in his face as he whirled his stick upward, looking all the while at Mr Bulstrode, and at last exclaiming:-- "By Jove, Nick, it's you] I couldn't be mistaken, though the five-and-twenty years have played old Bogey with us both] How are you, eh? you didn't expect to see ˛me˛ here. Come, shake us by the hand." To say that Mr Raffles's manner was rather excited would be only one mode of saying that it was evening. Caleb Garth could see that there was a moment of struggle and hesitation in Mr Bulstrode, but it ended in his putting out his hand coldly to Raffles and saying -- "I did not indeed expect to see you in this remote country place." "Well, it belongs to a stepson of mine," said Raffles, adjusting himself in a swaggering attitude. "I came to see him here before. I'm not so surprised at seeing you, old fellow, because I picked *X567 up a letter -- what you may call a providential thing. It's uncommonly fortunate I met you, though; for I don't care about seeing my stepson: he's not affectionate, and his poor mother's gone now. To tell the truth, I came out of love for -- look here]" Raffles drew a crumpled paper from his pocket. Almost any other man than Caleb Garth might have been tempted to linger on the spot for the sake of hearing all he could about a man whose acquaintance with Bulstrode seemed to imply passages in the banker's life so unlike anything that was known of him in Middlemarch that they must have the nature of a secret to pique curiosity. But Caleb was peculiar: certain human tendencies which are commonly strong were almost absent from his mind; and one of these was curiosity about personal affairs. Especially if there was anything discreditable to be found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred not to know it: and if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil doings were discovered, he was more embarrassed than the culprit. He now spurred his horse, and saying, "I wish you good evening, Mr Bulstrode; I must be getting home," set off at a trot. "You didn't put your full address to this letter," Raffles continued. "That was not like the first-rate man of business you used to be. "The Shrubs",-- they may be anywhere: you live near at hand, eh?-- have cut the London concern altogether -- perhaps turned country squire -- have a rural mansion to invite me to. Lord, how many years it is ago] The old lady must have been dead a pretty long while -- gone to glory without the pain of knowing how poor her daughter was, eh? But, by Jove] you're very pale and pasty, Nick. Come, if you're going home, I'll walk by your side." Mr Bulstrode's usual paleness had in fact taken an almost deathly hue. Five minutes before, the expanse of his life had been submerged in its evening sunshine which shone backward to its remembered morning: sin seemed to be a question of doctrine and inward penitence, humiliation an exercise of the closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and conceptions of the divine purposes. And now, as if by some hideous magic, this *X568 loud red figure had arisen before him in unmanageable solidity -- an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination of chastisements. But Mr Bulstrode's thought was busy, and he was not a man to act or speak rashly. "I was going home," he said, "but I can defer my ride a little. And you can, if you please, rest here." "Thank you," said Raffles, making a grimace. "I don't care now about seeing my stepson. I'd rather go home with you." "Your stepson, if Mr Rigg Featherstone was he, is here no longer. I am master here now." Raffles opened wide eyes, and gave a long whistle of surprise, before he said, "Well, then, I've no objection. I've had enough walking from the coach-road. I never was much of a walker, or rider either. What I like is a smart vehicle and a spirited cob. I was always a little heavy in the saddle. What a pleasant surprise it must be to you to see me, old fellow]" he continued, as they turned towards the house. "You don't say so; but you never took your luck heartily -- you were always thinking of improving the occasion -- you'd such a gift for improving your luck." Mr Raffles seemed greatly to enjoy his own wit, and swung his leg in a swaggering manner which was rather too much for his companion's judicious patience. "If I remember rightly," Mr Bulstrode observed, with chill anger, "our acquaintance many years ago had not the sort of intimacy which you are now assuming, Mr Raffles. Any services you desire of me will be the more readily rendered if you will avoid a tone of familiarity which did not lie in our former intercourse, and can hardly be warranted by more than twenty years of separation." "You don't like being called Nick? Why, I always called you Nick in my heart, and though lost to sight, to memory dear. By Jove] my feelings have ripenes for you like fine old cognac. I hope you've got some in the house now. Josh filled my flask well the last time." Mr Bulstrode had not yet fully learned that even the desire for cognac was not stronger in Raffles than the desire to torment, and that a hint of annoyance always served him as a fresh cue. But it was at least clear that further objection was useless, and Mr Bulstrode, in giving orders to the housekeeper *X569 for the accommodation to the guest, had a resolute air of quietude. There was the comfort of thinking that his housekeeper had been in the service of Rigg also, and might accept the idea that Mr Bulstrode entertained Raffles merely as a friend of her former master. When there was food and drink spread before his visitor in the wainscoated parlour, and no witness in the room, Mr Bulstrode said -- "Your habits and mine are so different, Mr Raffles, that we can hardly enjoy each other's society. The wisest plan for both of us will therefore be to part as soon as possible. Since you say that you wished to meet me, you probably considered that you had some business to contract with me. But under the circumstances I will invite you to remain here for the night, and I will myself ride over here early to-morrow morning -- before breakfast, in fact, when I can receive any communication you have to make to me." "With all my heart," said Raffles, "this is a comfortable place -- a little dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night, with this good liquor and the prospect of seeing you again in the morning. You're a much better host than my step-son was; but Josh owed me a bit of a grudge for marrying his mother; and between you and me there was never anything but kindness." Mr Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and sneering in Raffles's manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words upon him. But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be permanently counted on with this man. It was inevitable that he should wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be regarded as lying outside the divine plan. The spirit of evil might have sent him to threaten Mr Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a chastisement of a new kind. It was an hour of anguish for him very different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were pardoned and his services accepted. Those misdeeds, *X570 even when committed -- had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divine scheme? And was he after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a rock of offence? For who would understand the work within him? Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had espoused in one heap of obloquy? In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr Bulstrode's mind clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman ends. But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day. And now within all the automatic succeccion of theoretic phrases -- distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract pain -- was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbours and of his own wife. For the pain, as well as the public estimate of disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession. To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace. But Mr Bulstrode had aimed at being an eminent Christian. It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again reached Stone Court. The fine old place never looked more like a delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were in flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew, were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all around had a heart of peace within them. But everything was spoiled for the owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited the descent of Mr Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast. It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscaoted parlour over their tea and toast, which was as much as Raffles cared to take at that early hour. The difference between his morning and evening self was not so great as his companion had imagined that it might be; the delight in tormenting was perhaps even the stronger because his spirits were rather less highly pitched. Certainly his manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light. *X571 "As I have little time to spare, Mr Raffles," said the banker, who could hardly do more than sip his tea and break his toast without eating it, "I shall be obliged if you will mention at once the ground on which you wished to meet with me. I presume that you have a home elsewhere and will be glad to return to it." "Why, if a man has got any heart, doesn't he want to see an old friend, Nick?-- I must call you Nick -- we always did call you young Nick when we knew you meant to marry the old widow. Some said you had a handsome family likeness to old Nick, but that was your mother's fault, calling you Nicholas. Aren't you glad to see me again? I expected an invite to stay with you at some pretty place. My own establishment is broken up now my wife's dead. I've no particular attachment to any spot; I would as soon settle hereabout as anywhere." "May I ask why you returned from America? I considered that the strong wish you expressed to go there, when an adequate sum was furnished, was tantamount to an engagement that you would remain there for life." "Never knew that a wish to go to a place was the same thing as a wish to stay. But I did stay a matter of ten years; it didn't suit me to stay any longer. And I'm not going again, Nick." Here Mr Raffles winked slowly as he looked at Mr Bulstrode. "Do you wish to be settled in any business? What is your calling now?" "Thank you, my calling is to enjoy myself as much as I can. I don't care about working any more. If I did anything it would be a little travelling in the tobacco line -- or something of that sort, which takes a man into agreeable company. But not without an independence to fall back upon. That's what I want: I'm not so strong as I was, Nick, though I've got more colour than you. I want an independence." "That could be supplied to you, if you would engage to keep at a distance," said Mr Bulstrode, perhaps with a little too much eagerness in his undertone. "That must be as it suits my convenience," said Raffles, coolly. "I see no reason why I shouldn't make a few acquaintances hereabout. I'm not ashamed of myself as company for anybody. I dropped my portmanteau at the turnpike when I got down -- *X572 change of linen -- genuine -- honour bright]-- more than fronts and wristbands; and with this suit of mourning, straps and everything, I should do you credit among the nobs here." Mr Raffles had pushed away his chair and looked down at himself, particularly at his straps. His chief intention was to annoy Bulstrode, but he really thought that his appearance now would produce a good effect, and that he was not only handsome and witty, but clad in a mourning style which implied solid connections. "If you intend to rely on me in any way, Mr Raffles," said Bulstrode, after a moment's pause, "you will expect to meet my wishes." "Ah, to be sure," said Raffles, with a mocking cordiality. "Didn't I always do it? Lord, you made a pretty thing out of me, and I got but little. I've often thought since, I might have done better by telling the old woman that I'd found her daughter and her grandchild: it would have suited my feelings better; I've got a soft place in my heart. But you've buried the old lady by this time, I suppose -- it's all one to her now. And you've got your fortune out of that profitable business which had such a blessing on it. You've taken to being a nob, buying land, being a country bashaw. Still in the Dissenting line, eh? Still godly? Or taken to the Church as more genteel?" This time Mr Raffles's slow wink and slight protrusion of his tongue was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery. Mr Bulstrode felt a shuddering nausea, and did not speak, but was considering diligently whether he should not leave Raffles to do as he would, and simply defy him as a slanderer. The man would soon show himself disreputable enough to make people disbelieve him. "But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about ˛you˛," said discerning consciousness. And again: it seemed no wrong to keep Raffles at a distance, but Mr Bulstrode shrank from the direct falsehood of denying true statements. It was one thing to look back on forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax customs, and another to enter deliberately on the necessity of falsehood. But since Bulstrode did not speak, Raffles ran on, by way of using time to the utmost. "I've not had such fine luck as you, by Jove] Things went *X573 confoundedly with me in New York; those Yankees are cool hands, and a man of gentlemanly feelings has no chance iwith them. I marries when I came back -- a nice woman in the tobacco trade -- very fond of me -- but the trade was restricted, as we say. She had been settled there a good many years by a friend; but there was a son too much in the case. Josh and I never hit it off. However, I made the most of the position, and I've always taken my glass in good company. It's been all on the square with me; I'm as open as the day. You won't take it ill of me that I didn't look you up before; I've got a complaint that makes me a little dilatory. I thought you were trading and praying away in London still, and didn't find you there. But you see I was sent to you, Nick -- perhaps for a blessing to both of us." Mr Raffles ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect more superior to religious cant. And if the cunning which calculates on the meanest feelings in men could be called intellect, he had his share, for under the blurting rallying tone with which he spoke to Bulstrode, there was an evident selection of statements, as if they had been so many moves at chess. Meanwhile Bulstrode had determined on his move, and he said, with gathered resolution -- "You will do well to reflect, Mr Raffles, that it is possible for a man to overreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage. Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply you with a regular annuity -- in quarterly payments -- so long as you fulfil a promise to remain at a distance from this neighbourhood. It is in your power to choose. If you insist on remaining here, even for a short time, you will get nothing from me. I shall decline to know you." "Ha ha]" said Raffles, with an affected explosion, "that reminds me of a droll dog of a thief who declined to know the constable." "Your allusions are lost on me, sir," said Bulstrode, with white heat; "the law has no hold on me either through your agency or any other." "You can't understand a joke, my good fellow. I only meant that I should never decline to know you. But let us be serious. Your quarterly payment won't quite suit me. I like my freedom." Here Raffles rose and stalked once or twice up and down the *X574 room, swinging his leg , and assuming an air of masterly meditation. At last he stopped opposite Bulstrode, and said, "I'll tell you what] Give us a couple of hundreds -- come, that's modest -- and I'll go away -- honour bright]-- pick up my portmanteau and go away. But I shall not give up my liberty for a dirty annuity. I shall come and go where I like. Perhaps it may suit me to stay away, and correspond with a friend; perhaps not. Have you the money with you?" "No, I have one hundred," said Bulstrode, feeling the immediate riddance too great a relief to be rejected on the ground of future uncertainties. "I will forward you the other if you will mention an address." "No, I'll wait here till you bring it," said Raffles. "I'll take a stroll, and have a snack, and you'll be back by that time." Mr Bulstrode's sickly body, shattered by the agitations he had gone through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of this loud invulnerable man. At that moment he snatched at a temporary repose to be won on any terms. He was rising to do what Raffles suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if with a sudden recollection -- "I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't tell you; I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman. I didn't find her, but I found out her husband's name, and I made a note of it. But hang it, I lost my pocket-book. However, if I heard it, I should know it again. I've got my faculties as if I was in my prime, but names wear out, by Jove] Sometimes I'm no better than a confounded tax-paper before the names are filled in. However, if I hear of her and her family, you shall know, Nick. You'd like to do something for her, now she's your step-daughter." "Doubtless," said Mr Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his light-grey eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you." As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back, and then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away -- virtually at his command. His lips first curled with a smile and then opened with a short triumphant laugh. "But what the deuce ˛was˛ the name?" he presently said, half aloud, scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows *X575 horizontally. He had not really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until it had occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Bulstrode. "It began with L; it was almost all l's, I fancy," he went on, with a sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name. But the hold was too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase; for few men were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of making themselves continually heard than Mr Raffles. He preferred using his time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff and the housekeeper, from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know about Mr Bulstrode's position in Middlemarch. After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed relieving with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone with these resources in the wainscoated parlour, he suddenly slapped his knee, and exclaimed, "Ladislaw]" That action of memory which he had tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort -- a common experience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value. Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book and wrote down the name, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of not being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it. He was not going to tell Bulstrode: there was no actual good in telling, and to a mind like that of Mr Raffles there is always probable good in a secret. He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that day he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the coach, relieving Mr Bulstrode's eyes of an ugly black spot on the landscape at Stone Court, but not relieving him of the dread that the black spot might reappear and become inseparable even from the vision of his hearth. *B6 THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE *C54 *X579 *Mm ˛Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;˛ ˛Per che si fa gentil cio> ch'ella mira:˛ ˛Ov'ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,˛ ˛E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.˛ ˛Sicche>, bassando il viso, tutto smore,˛ ˛E d'ogni suo difetto allor sospira:˛ ˛Fuggon dinanzi a lei Superbia ed Ira:˛ ˛Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore.˛ ˛Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile˛ ˛Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente;˛ ˛Ond' e> beato chi prima la vide.˛ ˛Quel ch'ella par quand' un poco sorride,˛ ˛Non si puo> dicer, ne> tener a mente,˛ ˛Si e> nuovo miracolo gentile.˛ DANTE: ˛La Vita Nuova˛ *M *L1 By that delightful morning when the hayricks at Stone Court were scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr Raffles had been a guest worthy of finest incense, Dorothea had again taken up her abode at Lowick Manor. After three months Freshitt had become rather opressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking rapturously at Celia's baby would not do for many hours in the day, and to remain in that momentous babe's presence with persistent disregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a childless sister. Dorothea would have been capable of carrying baby joyfully for a mile if there had been need, and of loving it the more tenderly for that labour; but to an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behaviour is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him inexhaustible. This possibility was quite hidden from Celia, who felt that Dorothea's childless widowhood fell in quite prettily with the birth of little Arthur (baby was named after Mr Brooke). "Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of her own -- children or anything]" said Celia to her husband. *X580 "And if she had had a baby, it could never have been such a dear as Arthur. Could it, James?" "Not if it had been like Casaubon," said Sir James, conscious of some indirectness in his answer, and of holding a strictly private opinion as to the perfections of his first-born. "No] just imagine? Really it was a mercy," said Celia; "and I think it is very nice for Dodo to be a widow. She can be just as fond of our baby as if it were her own, and she can have as many notions of her own as she likes." "It is a pity she was not a queen," said the devout Sir James. "But what should we have been then? We must have been something else," said Celia, objecting to so laborious a flight of imagination. "I like her better as she is." Hence, when she found that Dorothea was making arrangements for her final departure to Lowick, Celia raised her eyebrows with disappointment, and in her quiet unemphatic way shot a needle-arrow of sarcasm. "What will you do at Lowick, Dodo? You say yourself there is nothing to be done there: everybody is so clean and well off, it makes you quite melancholy. And here you have been so happy going all about Tipton with Mr Garth into the worst backyards. And now Uncle is abroad, you and Mr Garth can have it all your own way; and I am sure James does everything you tell him." "I shall often come here, and I shall see how baby grows all the better," said Dorothea. "But you will never see him washed," said Celia: "and that is quite the best part of the day." She was almost pouting: it did seem to her very hard in Dodo to go away from the baby when she might stay. "Dear Kitty, I will come and stay all night on purpose," said Dorothea: "But I want to be alone now, and in my own home. I wish to know the Farebrothers better, and talk to Mr Farebrother about what there is to be done in Middlemarch." Dorothea's native strength of will was no longer all converted into resolute submission. She had a great yearning to be at Lowick, and was simply determined to go, not feeling bound to tell all her reasons. But every one around her disapproved. Sir James was much pained, and offered that they should all *X581 migrate to Cheltenham for a few months with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle: at that period a man could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenham were rejected. The Dowager Lady Chettam, just returned from a visit to her daughter in town, wished, at least, that Mrs Vigo should be written to, and invited to accept the office of companion to Mrs Casaubon: it was not credible that Dorothea as a young widow would think of living alone in the house at Lowick. Mrs Vigo had been reader and secretary to royal personages, and in point of knowledge and sentiments even Dorothea could have nothing to object to her. Mrs Cadwallader had said, privately, "You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I daresay you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people around you who wouldn't believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine." "I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did," said Dorothea, stoutly. "But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear," said Mrs Cadwallader, "and that is a proof of sanity." Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her. "No," she said, "I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion." Mrs Cadwallader said no more on that point to Dorothea, but to her husband she remarked, "It will be well for her to marry again as soon as it is proper, if one could get her among the right people. Of course the Chettams would not wish it. But I see clearly a husband is the best thing to keep her in order. If we were not so poor I would invite Lord Triton. He will be *X582 marquis some day, and there is no denying that she would make a good marchioness: she looks handsomer than ever in her mourning." "My dear Elinor, do let the poor woman alone. Such contrivances are of no use," said the easy Rector. "No use? How are matches made, except by bringing men and women together? And it is a shame that her uncle should have run away and shut up the Grange just now. There ought to be plenty of eligible matches invited to Freshitt and the Grange. Lord Triton is precisely the man: full of plans for making the people happy in a soft-headed sort of way. That would just suit Mrs Casaubon." "Let Mrs Casaubon choose for herself, Elinor." "That is the nonsense you wise men talk] How can she choose if she has no variety to choose from? A woman's choice usually means taking the only man she can get. Mark my words, Humphrey. If her friends don't exert themselves, there will be a worse business than the Casaubon business yet." "For heaven's sake don't touch on that topic, Elinor] It is a very sore point with Sir James. He would be deeply offended if you entered on it to him unnecessarily." "I have never entered on it," said Mrs Cadwallader, opening her hands. "Celia told me all about the will at the beginning, without any asking of mine." "Yes, yes; but they want the thing hushed up, and I understand that the young fellow is going out of the neighbourhood." Mrs Cadwallader said nothing, but gave her husband three significant nods, with a very sarcastic expression in her dark eyes. Dorothea quietly persisted in spite of remonstrance and persuasion. So by the end of June the shutters were all opened at Lowck Manor, and the morning gazed calmly into the library, shining on the rows of note-books as it shines on the weary waste planted with huge stones, the mute memorial of a forgotten faith; and the evening laden with roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoir where Dorothea chose oftenest to sit. At first she walked into every room, questioning the eighteen months of her married life, and carrying on her thoughts as if they were a speech to be heard by her husband. Then, she *X583 lingered in the library and could not be at rest till she had carefully ranged all the note-books as she imagined that he would wish to see them, in orderly sequence. The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her life with him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated with him in indignant thought and told him that he was unjust. One little act of hers may perhaps be smiled at as superstitious. The "Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs Casaubon", she carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope, ˛I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my˛ ˛soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in? --˛ ˛Dorothea˛. Then she deposited the paper in her own desk. That silent colloquy was perhaps only the more earnest because underneath and through it all there was always the deep longing which had really determined her to come to Lowick. The longing was to see Will Ladislaw. She did not know any good that could come of their meeting: she was helpless: her hands had been tied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot. But her soul thirsted to see him. How could it be otherwise? If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy. It was true that Dorothea wanted to know the Farebrothers better, and especially to talk to the new rector, but also true that remembering what Lydgate had told her about Will Ladislaw and little Miss Noble, she counted on Will's coming to Lowick to see the Farebrother family. The very first Sunday, ˛before˛ she entered the church, she saw him as she had seen him the last time she was there, alone in the clergyman's pew; but ˛when˛ she entered his figure was gone. In the week-days when she went to see the ladies at the *X584 Rectory, she listened in vain for some word that they might fall about Will; but it seemed to her that Mrs Farebrother talked of every one else in the neighbourhood and out of it. "Probably some of Mr Farebrother's Middlemarch hearers may follow him to Lowick sometimes. Do you not think so?" said Dorothea, rather despising herself for having a secret motive in asking the question. "If they are wise they will, Mrs Casaubon," said the old lady. "I see that you set a right value on my son's preaching. His grandfather on my side was an excellent clergyman, but his father was in the law:-- most exemplary and honest nevertheless, which is a reason for our never being rich. They say Fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman and gives to those who merit, which has been the case with you, Mrs Casaubon, who have given a living to my son." Mrs Farebrother recurred to her knitting with a dignified satisfaction in her neat little effort at oratory, but this was not what Dorothea wanted to hear. Poor thing] she did not even know whether Will Ladislaw was still at Middlemarch, and there was no one whom she dared to ask, unless it were Lydgate. But just now she could not see Lydgate without sending for him or going to seek him. Perhaps Will Ladislaw, having heard of that strange ban against him left by Mr Casaubon, had felt it better that he and she should not meet again, and perhaps she was wrong to wish for a meeting that others might find many good reasons against. Still "I do wish it" came at the end of those wise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath. And the meeting did happen, but in a formal way quite unexpected by her. One morning, about eleven, Dorothea was seated in her boudoir with a map of the land attached to the manor and other papers before her, which were to help her in making an exact statement for herself of her income and affairs. She had not yet applied herself to her work, but was seated with her hands folded on her lap, looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields. Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease -- motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action. The *X585 widow's cap of those times made an oval frame for the face, and had a crown standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candour of her eyes. Her reverie was broken by Tantripp, who came to say that Mr Ladislaw was below, and begged permission to see Madam if it were not too early. "I will see him," said Dorothea, rising immediately. "Let him be shown into the drawing-room." The drawing-room was the most neutral room in the house to her -- the one least asssociated with the trials of her married life: the damask matched the wood-work, which was all white and gold; there were two tall mirrors and tables with nothing on them -- in brief, it was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another. It was below the boudoir, and had also a bow-window looking out on the avenue. But when Pratt showed Will Ladislaw into it the window was open; and a winged visitor, buzzing in and out now and then without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal and uninhabited. "Glad to see you here again, sir," said Pratt, lingering to adjust a blind. "I am only come to say good-bye, Pratt," said Will, who wished even the butler to know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs Casaubon now she was a rich widow. "Very sorry to hear it, sir," said Pratt, retiring. Of course, as a servant who was to be told nothing, he knew the fact of which Ladislaw was still ignorant, and had drawn his inferences; indeed had not differed from his betrothed Tantripp when she said, "˛Your˛ master was as jealous as a fiend -- and no reason. Madam would look higher than Mr Ladislaw, else I don't know her. Mrs Cadwallader's maid says there's a lord coming who is to marry her when the mourning's over." There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat in his hand before Dorothea entered. The meeting was very different from that first meeting in Rome when Will had been embarrassed and Dorothea calm. This time he felt miserable but determined, while she was in a state of agitation which *X586 could not be hidden. Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting was after all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her, the deep blush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness. Neither of them knew how it was, but neither of them spoke. She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on another opposite. Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like Dorothea that the mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a change in her manner of receiving him; and he knew of no other condition which could have affected their previous reltaion to each other -- except that, as his imagination had once told her, her friends might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicions of him. "I hope I have not presumed too much in calling," said Will; "I could not bear to leave the neighbourhood and begin a new life without seeing you to say good-bye." "Presumed? Surely not. I should have thought it unkind if you had not wished to see me," said Dorothea, her habit of speaking with perfect genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation. "Are you going away immediately?" "Very soon, I think. I intend to go to town and eat my dinners as a barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all public business. There will be a great deal of political work to be done by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it. Other men have managed to win an honourable position for themselves without family or money." "And that will make it all the more honourable," said Dorothea, ardently. "Besides, you have so many talents. I have heard from my uncle how well you speak in public, so that every one is sorry when you leave off, and how clearly you can explain things. And you care that justice should be done to every one. I am so glad. When we were in Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art, and the things that adorn life for us who are well off. But now I know you think about the rest of the world." While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment and had become like her former self. She looked at Will with a direct glance, full of delighted confidence. *X587 "You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again till I have made myslef of some mark in the world?" said Will, trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea. She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had turned her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be away. This was not judicious behaviour. But Dorothea never thought of studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad necessity which divided her from Will. Those first words of his about his intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her: he knew, she supposed, all about Mr Casaubon's final conduct in relation to herself. He had never felt more than friendship for her -- had never had anything in his mind to justify what she felt to be her husband's outrage on the feelings of both: and that friendship he still felt. Something which may be called an inward silent sob had gone on in Dorothea before she said with a pure voice, just trembling in the last words as if only from its liquid flexibility -- "Yes, it must be right for you to do as you say. I shall be very happy when I hear that you have made your value felt. But you must have patience. It will perhaps be a long while." Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet, when the "long while" came forth with its gentle tremor. He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force. He sat still, however, and only said -- "I shall never hear from you. And you will forget all about me." "No," said Dorothea, "I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten any one whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so. And I have a great deal of space for memory at Lowick, haven't I?" She smiled. "Good God]" Will burst out passionately, rising with his hat still in his hand, and walking to a marble table, where he suddenly turned and leaned his back against it. The blood had *X588 mounted to his face and neck, and he looked almost angry. It had seemed to him as if they were two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning. But there was no help for it. It should never be true of him that in this meeting to which he had come with bitter resolution he had ended by a confession which might be interpreted into asking for her fortune. Moreover, it was actually true that he was fearful of the effect which such confessions might have on Dorothea herself. She looked at him from that distance in some trouble, imagining that there might have been an offence in her words. But all the while there was a current of thought in her about his probable want of money, and the impossibility of her helping him. If her uncle had been at home, something might have been done through him] It was this preoccupation with the hardship of Will's wanting money, while she had what ought to have been his share, which led her to say, seeing that he remained silent and looked away from her -- "I wonder whether you would like to have that miniature which hangs up-stairs -- I mean that beautiful miniature of your grandmother. I think it is not right for me to keep it, if you would wish to have it. It is wonderfully like you." "You are very good," said Will, irritably. "No; I don't mind about it. It is not very consoling to have one's own likeness. It would be more consoling if others wanted to have it." "I thought you would like to cherish her memory -- I thought"-- Dorothea broke off in an instant, her imagination suddenly warning her away from Aunt Julia's history -- "you would surely like to have the miniature as a family memorial." "Why should I have that, when I have nothing else] A man with only a portmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head." Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance; it was a little too exasperating to have his grandmother's portrait offered him at that moment. But to Dorothea's feeling his words had a peculiar sting. She rose and said with a touch of indignation as well as hauteur -- "You are much the happier of us two, Mr Ladislaw, to have nothing." *X589 Will was startled. Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed like a dismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked a little way towards her. Their eyes met, but with a strange questioning gravity. Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to conjecture what was in the other. Will had never really thought of himself as having a claim of inheritance on the property which was held by Dorothea, and would have requires a narrative to make him understand her present feeling. "I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now," he said. "But poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for." The words cut Dorothea to the heart, and made her relent. She answered in a tone of sad fellowship. "Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that -- I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, but I have almost given it up," she ended, smiling playfully. "I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it," said Will. He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of contradictory desires and resolves -- desiring some unmistakable proof that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which such a proof might bring him. "The thing one most longs for may be surrounded with conditions that would be intolerable." At this moment Pratt entered and said, "Sir James Chettam is in the library, madam." "Ask Sir James to come in here," said Dorothea, immediately. It was as if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will. Each of them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other, while they awaited Sir James's entrance. After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible to Ladislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards Dorothea, said -- "I must say good-bye, Mrs Casaubon; and probably for a long while." *X590 Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-bye cordially. The sense that Sir James was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him, roused her resolution and dignity: there was no touch of confusion in her manner. And when Will had left the room, she looked with such calm self-possession at Sir James, saying, "How is Celia?" that he was obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him. And what would be the use of behaving otherwise] Indeed, Sir James shrank with so much dislike from the association even in thought of Dorothea with Ladislaw as her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an outward show of displeasure which would have recognized the disagreeable possibility. If any one had asked him why he shrank in that way, I am sure that he would at first have said anything fuller or more precise than "˛that˛ Ladislaw]"-- though on reflection he might have urged that Mr Casaubon's codicil, barring Dorothea's marriage with Will, except under a penalty, was enough to cast unfitness over any relation at all between them. His aversion was all the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere. But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through which Will's pride became a repellant force, keeping him asunder from Dorothea. *C55 *X591 *Mm Hath she her faults? I would you had them too. They are the fruity must of soundest wine Or say, they are regenerating fire Such as hath turned the dense black element Into a crystal pathway for the sun. *M *L1 If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come. To Dorothea, still in that time of youth when the eyes with their long full lashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied as a freshly-opened passion-flower, that morning's parting with Will Ladislaw seemed to be the close of their personal relations. He was going away into the distance of unknown years, and if he ever came back he would be another man. The actual state of his mind -- his proud resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion that he play the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman -- lay quite out of her imagination, and she had interpreted all his behaviour easily enough by her supposition that Mr Casaubon's codicil seemed to him, as it did to her, a gross and cruel interdict on any active friendship between them. Their young delight in speaking to each other, and saying what no one else would care to hear, was for ever ended, and became a treasure of the past. For this very reason she dwelt on it without inward check. That unique happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent chamber she might vent the passionate grief which she herself wondered at. For the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and kept it before her, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly judged with the grandson whom her own heart and judgement defended. Can any one who has rejoiced in woman's *X592 tenderness think it a reproach to her that she took the little oval picture in her palm and made a bed for it there, and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would soothe the creature who had suffered unjust condemnation? She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings -- that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day. She only felt that there was something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the future were the more readily shapen into resolve. Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their own visions. One day that she went to Freshitt to fulfil her promise of staying all night and seeing baby washed, Mrs Cadwallader came to dine, the Rector being gone on a fishing excursion. It was a warm evening, and even in the delightful drawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped from the open window towards a lilied pool and well-planted mounds, the heat was enough to make Celia in her white muslin and light curls reflect with pity on what Dodo must feel in her black dress and close cap. But this was not until some episodes with baby were over, and had left her mind at leisure. She had seated herself and taken up a fan for some time before she said, in her quiet guttural -- "Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap. I am sure your dress must make you feel ill." "I am so used to the cap -- it has become a sort of shell," said Dorothea, smiling. "I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off." "I ˛must˛ see you without it; it makes us all warm," said Celia, throwing down her fan, and going to Dorothea. It was a pretty picture to see this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow's cap from her more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair. Just as the coils and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free, Sir James entered the room. He looked at the released head, and said, "Ah]" in a tone of satisfaction. "It was I who did it, James," said Celia. "Dodo need not make such a slavery of her mourning; she need not wear that cap any more among her friends." *X593 "My dear Celia," said Lady Chettam, " a widow must wear her mourning at least a year." "Not if she marries again before the end of it," said Mrs Cadwallader, who had some pleasure in startling her good friend the Dowager. Sir James was annoyed, and leaned forward to play with Celia's Maltese dog. "That is very rare, I hope," said Lady Chettam, in a tone intended to guard against such events. "No friend of ours ever committed herself in that way except Mrs Beevor, and it was very painful to Lord Grinsell when she did so. Her first husband was objectionable, which made it the greater wonder. And severely she was punished for it. They said Captain Beevor dragged her about by the hair, and held up loaded pistols at her." "Oh, if she took the wrong man]" said Mrs Cadwallader, who was in a decidedly wicked mood. "Marriage is always bad then, first or second. Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he got no other. I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first." "My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you," said Lady Chettam. "I am sure you would be the last woman to marry again prematurely, if our dear Rector were taken away." "Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy. It is lawful to marry again, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos instead of Christians. Of course if a woman accepts the wrong man, she must take the consequences, and one who does it twice deserves her fate. But if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery -- the sooner the better." "I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen," said Sir James, with a look of disgust. "Suppose we change it." "Not on my account, Sir James," said Dorothea, determined not to lose the opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to excellent matches. "If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal to me than second marriage. It is no more to me than if you talked of women going fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not, I shall not follow them. Pray let Mrs Cadwallader amuse herself on that subject as much as on any other." "My dear Mrs Casaubon, " said Lady Chettam, in her stateliest *X594 way, "you do not, I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my mentioning Mrs Beevor. It was only an instance that occurred to me. She was step-daughter to Lord Grinsell: he married Mrs Teveroy for his second wife. There could be no possible allusion to you." "Oh no," said Celia. "Nobody chose the subject; it all came out of Dodo's cap. Mrs Cadwallader only said what was quite true. A woman could not be married in a widow's cap, James." "Hush, my dear]" said Mrs Cadwallader. "I will not offend again. I will not even refer to Dido or Zenobia. Only what are we to talk about? I, for my part, object to the discussion of Human Nature, because that is the nature of rectors' wives." Later in the evening, after Mrs Cadwallader was gone, Celia said privately to Dorothea, "Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made you like yourself again in more ways than one. You spoke up just as you used to do, when anything was said to displease you. But I could hardly make out whether it was James that you thought wrong, or Mrs Cadwallader." "Neither," said Dorothea. "James spoke out of delicacy to me, but he was mistaken in supposing that I minded what Mrs Cadwallader said. I should only mind if there were a law obliging me to take any piece of blood and beauty that she or anybody else recommended." "But you know, Dodo, if you ever did marry, it would be all the better to have blood and beauty," said Celia, reflecting that Mr Casaubon had not been richly endowed with those gifts, and that it would be well to caution Dorothea in time. "Don't be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life. I shall never marry again," said Dorothea, touching her sister's chin, and looking at her with indulgent affection. Celia was nursing her baby, and Dorothea had come to say good-night to her. "Really -- quite?" said Celia. "Not anybody at all -- if he were very wonderful indeed?" Dorothea shook her head slowly. "Not anybody at all. I have delightful plans. I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their friend. I am going to have *X595 great consultations with Mr Garth: he can tell me almost everything I want to know." "Then you ˛will˛ be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo," said Celia. "Perhaps little Arthur will like plans when he grows up, and then he can help you." Sir James was informed that same night that Dorothea was really quite set against marrying anybody at all, and was going to take to "all sorts of plans", just like what she used to have. Sir James made no remark. To his secret feeling, there was something repulsive in a woman's second marriage, and no match would prevent him from feeling it a sort of desecration for Dorothea. He was aware that the world would regard such a sentiment as preposterous, especially in relation to a woman of one-and-twenty; the practice of "the world" being to treat of a young widow's second marriage as certain and probably near, and to smile with meaning if the widow acts accordingly. But if Dorothea did choose to espouse her solitude, he felt that the resolution would well become her. *C56 *X596 *Mm How happy is he born and taught, That serveth not another's will? Whose armour is his honest thought, And simple truth his only skill? . . . . . This man is freed from servile bands Of hope to rise, or fear to fall: Lord of himself, though not of lands, And having nothing, yet hath all. SIR HENRY WOTTON *M *L1 Dorothea's confidence in Caleb Garth's knowledge, which had begun on her hearing that he approved of her cottages, had grown fast during her stay at Freshitt, Sir James having induced her to take rides over the two estates in company with himself and Caleb, who quite returned her admiration, and told his wife that Mrs Casaubon had a head for business most uncommon in a woman. It must be remembered that by "business" Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labour. "Most uncommon]" repeated Caleb. "She said a thing I often used to think myself when I was a lad:-- "Mr Garth, I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great many good cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it." Those were the very words: she sees into things in that way." "But womanly, I hope," said Mrs Garth, half suspecting that Mrs Casaubon might not hold the true principle of subordination. "Oh, you can't think]" said Caleb, shaking his head. "You would like to hear her speak, Susan. She speaks in such plain words, and a voice like music. Bless me] it reminds me of bits in the ˛Messiah˛ --"and straightway there appeared a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying"; it has a tone with it that satisfies your ear." *X597 Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went to hear an oratorio that came within his reach, returning from it with a profound reverence for this mighty structure of tones, which made him sit meditatively, looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable language into his outstretched hands. With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Dorothea asked Mr Garth to undertake any business connected with the three farms and the numerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed, his expectation of getting work for two was being fast fulfilled. As he said, "Business breeds." And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him. The submarine railway may have its difficulties; but the bed of the sea is not divided among various landed proprietors with claims for damages not only measurable but sentimental. In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders. Women both old and young regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it by saying that nothing should induce them to get into a railway carriage; while proprietors, differing from each other in their arguments as much as Mr Solomon Featherstone differed from Lord Medlicote, were yet unanimous in the opinion that in selling land, whether to the Enemy of mankind or to a company obliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made to pay a very high price to landowners for permission to injure mankind. But the slower wits, such as Mr Solomon and Mrs Waule, who both occupied land of their own, took a long time to arrive at this conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it would be to cut the Big Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered bits, which would be "nohow"; while *X598 accommodation-bridges and high payments were remote and incredible. "The cows will all cast their calves, Brother," said Mrs Waule, in a tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close; and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal. It's a poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away, and the law say nothing to it. What's to hinder 'em from cutting right and left if they begin? It's well known, I can't fight." "The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring," said Solomon. "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can understand. It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their being forced to take one away. Let 'em go cutting in another parish. And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot of ruffians to trample your crops. Where's a company's pocket?" "Brother Peter, God forgive him, got money out of a company," said Mrs Waule. "But that was for the manganese. That wasn't for railways to blow you to pieces right and left." "Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr Solomon concluded, lowering his voice in a cautious manner --"the more spokes we put in their wheel, the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they must come whether or not." This reasoning of Mr Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than he imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course of railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or catarrh of the solar system. But he set about acting on his views in a thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion. His side of Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the houses of the labouring people were either lone cottages or were collected in a hamlet called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pits made a little centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry. In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that suspicion was the only wise attitude with *X599 regard to it. Even the rumour of Reform had not yet excited any millenial expectations in Frick, there bing no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales" who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the three neighbouring farmers to raise wages during winter. And without distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing with the bragging of pedlars, which was a hint for distrust to every knowing person. The men of Frick were not ill-fed, and were less given to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion; less inclined to believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven, than to regard heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in -- a disposition observable in the weather. Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr Solomon Featherstone to work upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the same order, with a suspicion of heaven and earth which was better fed and more entirely at leisure. Solomon was overseer of the roads at that time, and on his slow-paced cob often took his rounds by Frick to look at the workmen getting the stones there, pausing with a mysterious deliberation, which might have misled you into supposing that he had some other reason for staying than the mere want of impulse to move. After looking for a long while at any work that was going on, he would raise his eyes a little and look at the horizon; finally he would shake his bridle, touch his horse with the whip, and get it to move slowly onward. The hour-hand of a clock was quick by comparison with Mr Solomon, who had an agreeable sense that he could afford to be slow. He was in the habit of pausing for a cautious, vaguely-designing chat with every hedger or ditcher on his way, and was especially willing to listen even to news which he had heard before, feeling himself at an advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them. One day, however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a waggoner, in which he contributed information. He wished to know whether Hiram had seen fellows with staves and instruments spying about: they called themselves railroad people, but there was no telling what they were, or what they meant to do. The least they pretended was that they were going to cut Lowick Parish into sixes and sevens. *X600 "Why, there'll be no stirring from one pla-ace to another," said Hiram, thinking of his waggon and horses. "Not a bit," said Mr Solomon. "And cutting up fine land such as this parish] Let 'em go into Tipton, say I. But there's no knowing what there is at the bottom of it. Traffick is what they put for'ard; but it's to do harm to the land and the poor man in the long-run." "Why, they're Lunnon chaps, I reckon," said Hiram, who had a dim notion of London as a centre of hostility to the country. "Ay, to be sure. And in some parts against Brassing, by what I've heard say, the folks fell on 'em when they were spying and broke their peep-holes as they carry, and dorve 'em away, so as they knew better than come again." "It war good foon, I'd be bound," said Hiram, whose fun was much restricted by circumstances. "Well, I wouldn't meddle with 'em myself," said Solomon. "But some say this country's seen its best days, and the sign is, as it's being overrun with these fellows trampling right and left, and wanting to cut it up into railways; and all for the big traffic to swallow up the little, so as there shan't be a team left on the land, nor a whip to crack." "I'll crack ˛my˛ whip about their ear'n, afore they bring it to that, though," said Hiram, while Mr Solomon, shaking his bridle, moved onward. Nettle-seed needs no digging. The ruin of this country-side by railroads was discussed, not only at the "Weights and Scales", but in the hay-field, where the muster of working hands gave opportunities for talk such as were rarely had through the rural year. One morning, not long after that interview between Mr Farebrother and Mary Garth, in which she confessed to him her feeling for Fred Vincy, it happened that her father had some business which took him to Yoddrell's farm in the direction of Frick: it was to measure and value an outlying piece of land belonging to Lowick Manor, which Caleb expected to dispose of advantageously for Dorothea (it must be confessed that his bias was towards getting the best possible terms from railroad companies). He put up his gig at Yoddrell's, and in walking with his assistant and measuring-chain to the scene of his work, he *X601 encountered the party of the company's agents, who were adjusting their spirit-level. After a little chat he left them, observing that by-and-by they would reach him again where he was going to measure. It was one of those grey mornings after light rains, which become delicious about twelve o'clock, when the clouds part a little, and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the hedgerows. The scent would have been sweeter to Fred Vincy, who was coming along the lanes on horseback, if his mind had not been worried by unsuccessful efforts to imagine what he was to do, with his father on one side expecting him straightway to enter the Church, with Mary on the other threatening to forsake him if he did enter it, and with the working-day world showing no eager need whatever of a young gentleman without capital and generally unskilled. It was the harder to Fred's disposition because his father,satisfied that he was no longer rebellious, was in good humour with him, and had sent him on this pleasant ride to see after some greyhounds. Even when he had fixed on what he should do, there would be the task of telling his father. But it must be admitted that the fixing, which had to come first, was the more difficult task:-- what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an "appointment") which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge? Riding along the lanes by Frick in this mood, and slackening his pace while he reflected whether he should venture to go round by Lowick Parsonage to call on Mary, he could see over the hedges from one field to another. Suddenly a noise roused his attention, and on the far side of a filed on his left he could see six or seven men in smock-frocks with hay-forks in their hands making an offensive approach towards four railway agents who were facing them, while Caleb Garth and his assistant were hastening across the field to join the threatened group. Fred, delayed a few moments by having to find the gate, could not gallop up to the spot before the party in smock-frocks, whose work of turning the hay had not been too pressing after swallowing their mid-day beer, were driving the men in coats before them with their hay-forks; while Caleb Garth's assistant, a lad of seventeen, who had snatched up the spirit-level at Caleb's *X602 order, had been knocked down and seemed to be lying helpless. The coated men had the advantage as runners, and Fred covered their retreat by getting in front of the smock-frocks and charging them suddenly enough to throw their chase into confusion. "What do you confounded fools mean?" shouted Fred, pursuing the divided group in a zig-zag, and cutting right and left with his whip. "I'll swear to every one of you before the magistrate. You've knocked the lad down and killed him, for what I know. You'll every one of you be hanged at the next assizes, if you don't mind," said Fred, who afterwards laughed heartily as he remembered his own phrases. The labourers had been driven through the gateway into their hay-field, and Fred had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford, observing himself at a safe challenging distance, turned back and shouted a defiance which he did not know to be Homeric. "Yo're a coward, yo are. Yo git off your horse, young measter, and I'll have a round wi' ye, I wull. Yo daredn't come on wi'out your hoss an' whip. I'd soon knock the breath out on ye, I would." "Wait a minute, and I'll come back presently, and have a round with you all in turn, if you like," said Fred, who felt confidence in his power of boxing with his dearly-beloved brethren. But just now he wanted to hasten back to Caleb and the prostrate youth. The lad's ankle was strained, and he was in much pain from it, but was no further hurt, and Fred placed him on the horse that he might ride to Yoddrell's and be taken care of there. "Let them put the horse in the stable, and tell the surveyors they can come back for their traps," said Fred. "The ground is clear now." "No, no," said Caleb, "here's a breakage. They'll have to give up for to-day, and it will be as well. Here, take the things before you on the horse, Tom. They'll see you coming, and they'll turn back." "I'm glad I happened to be here at the right moment, Mr Garth," said Fred, as Tom rode away. "No knowing what might have happened if the cavalry had not come up in time." "Ay, ay, it was lucky," said Caleb, speaking rather absently, *X603 and looking towards the spot where he had been at work at the moment of interruption. "But -- deuce take it -- this is what comes of men being fools -- I'm hindered of my day's work. I can't get along without somebody to help me with the measuring chain. However]" He was beginning to move towards the spot with a look of vexation, as if he had forgotten Fred's presence, but suddenly he turned round and said quickly, "What have you got to do to-day, young fellow?" "Nothing, Mr Garth. I'll help you with pleasure -- can I?" said Fred, with a sense that he should be courting Mary when he was helping her father. "Well, you mustn't mind stooping and getting hot." "I don't mind anything. Only I want to go first and have a round with that hulky fellow who turned to challenge me. It would be a good lesson for him. I shall not be five minutes." "Nonsense]" said Caleb, with his most peremptory intonation. "I shall go and speak to the men myself. It's all ignorance. Somebody has been telling them lies. The poor fools don't know any better." "I shall go with you, then," said Fred. "No, no; stay where you are. I don't want your young blood. I can take care of myself." Caleb was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear of hurting others and the fear to have to speechify. But he felt it his duty at this moment to try and give a little harangue. There was a striking mixture in him -- which came from his having always been a hard-working man himself -- of rigorous notions about workmen and practical indulgence towards them. To do a good day's work and to do it well, he held to be part of their welfare, as it was the chief part of his own happiness; but he had a strong sense of fellowship with them. When he advanced towards the labourers they had not gone to work again, but were standing in that form of rural grouping which consists in each turning a shoulder towards the other, at a distance of two or three yards. They looked rather sulkily at Caleb, who walked quickly with one hand in his pocket and the other thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, and had his everyday mild air when he paused among them. "Why, my lads, how's this?" he began, talking as usual to brief *X604 phrases, which seemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts lying under them, like the abundant roots of a plant that just manages to peep above the water. "How came you to make such a mistake as this] Somebody has been telling you lies. You thought those men up there wanted to do mischief." "Aw]" was the answer, dropped at intervals by each according to his degree of unreadiness. "Nonsense] No such thing] They're looking out to see which way the railroad is to take. Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you'll get yourselves into trouble. The law gives those men leave to come here on the land. The owner has nothing to say against it, and if you meddle with them you'll have to do with the constable and Justice Blakesly, and with the handcuffs and Middlemarch jail. And you might be in for it now, if anybody informed against you." Caleb paused here, and perhaps the greatest orator could not have chosen either his pause or his images better for the occasion. "But come, you didn't mean any harm. Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway's a good thing." "Aw] good for the big folks to make money out on," said old Timothy Cooper, who had stayed behind turning his hay while the others had been on their spree;-- "I'n seen lots o' things turn up sin' I war a young un -- the war an' the peace, and the canells, an' the oald King George, an' the Regen', an' the new King George, an' the new un as has got a new ne-ame -- an' it's been all aloike to the poor mon. What's the canells been t'him? They'n brought him neyther me-at nor be-acon, nor wage to lay by, if he didn't save it wi' clemmin' his own inside. Times ha' got wusser for him sin' I war a young un. An' so it'll be wi' the railroads. They'll only leave the poor mon furder behind. But them are fools as meddle, and so I told the chaps here. This is the big folks's world, this is. But yo're for the big folks, Muster Garth, yo are." Timothy was a wiry old labourer, of a type lingering in those *X605 times -- who had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of the feudal spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the Rights of Man. Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly-carved argument for a social benefit which they do ˛not˛ feel. Caleb had no cant at command, even if he could have chosen to use it; and he had been accustomed to meet all such difficulties in no other way than by doing his "business" faithfully. He answered -- "If you don't think well of me, Tim, never mind; that's neither here nor there now. Things may be bad for the poor man -- bad they are; but I want the lads here not to do what will make things worse for themselves. The cattle may have a heavy load, but it won't help 'em to throw it over into the roadside pit, when it's partly for their own fodder." "We war on'y for a bit o' foon," said Hiram, who was beginning to see consequences. "That war all we war arter." "Well, promise me not to meddle again, and I'll see that nobody informs against you." "I'n ne'er meddled, an' I'n no call to promise," said Timothy. "No, but the rest. Come I'm as hard at work as any of you to-day, and I can't spare much time. Say you'll be quiet without the constable." "Aw, we wooant meddle -- they may do as they loike for oos' -- were the forms in which Caleb got his pledges; and then he hastened back to Fred, who had followed him, and watched him in the gateway. They went to work, and Fred helped vigorously. His spirits had risen, and he heartily enjoyed a good slip in the moist earth under the hedgerow, which soiled his perfect summer trousers. Was it this successful onset which had elated him, or the satisfaction of helping Mary's father? Something more. The accidents of the morning had helped his frustrated imagination to shape an employment for himself which had several attractions. I am not sure that certain fibres in Mr Garth's mind had not resumed *X606 their old vibration towards the very end which now revealed itself to Fred. For the effective accident is but the touch of fire where there is oil and tow; and it always appeared to Fred that the railway brought the needed touch. But they went on in silence except when their business demanded speech. At last, when they had finished and were walking away, Mr Garth said -- "A young fellow needn't be a B.A. to do this sort of work, eh, Fred?" "I wish I had taken to it before I had thought of being a B.A.," said Fred. He paused a moment, and then added, more hesitatingly, "Do you think I am too old to learn your business, Mr Garth?" "My business is of many sorts, my boy," said Mr Garth, smiling. "A good deal of what I know can only come from experience: you can't learn it off as you learn things out of a book. But you are young enough to lay a foundation yet." Caleb pronounced the last sentence emphatically, but paused in some uncertainty. He had been under the impression lately that Fred had made up his mind to enter the Church. "You do think I could do some good at it, if I were to try?" said Fred, more eagerly. "That depends," said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. "You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that -- if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is -- I wouldn't give twopence for him"-- here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers -- "whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do." "I can never feel that I should do that in being a clergyman," said Fred, meaning to take a step in the argument. "Then let it alone, my boy," said Caleb, abruptly, "else you'll never be easy. Or, if you ˛are˛ easy, you'll be a poor stick." *X607 "That is very nearly what Mary thinks about it," said Fred, colouring. "I think you must know what I feel for Mary, Mr Garth: I hope it does not displease you that I have always loved her better than any one else, and that I shall never love any one as I love her." The expression of Caleb's face was visibly softening while Fred spoke. But he swung his head with a solemn slowness, and said -- "That makes things more serious, Fred, if you want to take Mary's happiness into your keeping." "I know that, Mr Garth," said Fred, eagerly, "and I would do anything for ˛her˛. She says she will never have me if I go into the Church; and I shall be the most miserable devil in the world if I lose all hope of Mary. Really, if I could get some other profession, business -- anything that I am at all fit for, I would work hard, I would deserve your good opinion. I should like to have to do with outdoor things. I know a good deal about land and cattle already. I used to believe, you know -- though you will think me rather foolish for it -- that I should have land of my own. I am sure knowledge of that sort would come easily to me, especially if I could be under you in any way." "Softly, my boy," said Caleb, having the image of "Susan" before his eyes. "What have you said to your father about all this?" "Nothing yet; but I must tell him. I am only waiting to know what I can do instead of entering the Church. I am very sorry to disappoint him, but a man ought to be allowed to judge for himself when he is four-and-twenty. How could I know when I was fifteen, what it would be right for me to do now? My education was a mistake." "But hearken to this, Fred," said Caleb. "Are you sure Mary is fond of you, or would ever have you?" "I asked Mr Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden me -- I didn't know what else to do," said Fred, apologetically. "And he says that I have every reason to hope, if I can put myself in an honourable position -- I mean, out of the Church. I daresay you think it unwarrantable in me, Mr Garth, to be troubling you and obtruding my own wishes about Mary, before I have done anything at all for myself. Of course I have *X608 not the least claim -- indeed, I have already a debt to you which will never be discharged, even when I have been able to pay it in the shape of money." "Yes, my boy, you have a claim," said Caleb, with much feeling in his voice. "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward. I was young myself once and had to do without much help; but help would have been welcome to me, if it had been only for the fellow-ffeling's sake. But I must consider. Come to me to-morrow at the office, at nine o'clock. At the office, mind." Mr Garth would take no important step without consulting Susan, but it must be confessed that before he reached home he had taken his resolution. With regard to a large number of matters about which other men are decided or obstinate, he was the most easily manageable man in the world. He never knew what meat he would choose, and if Susan had said that they ought to live in a four-roomed cottage, in order to save, he would have said, "Let us go", without inquiring into details. But where Caleb's feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, he was a ruler; and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every one about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he was absolute. He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on some one else's behalf. On ninety-nine points Mrs Garth decided, but on the hundredth she was often aware that she would have to perform the singularly difficult task of carrying out her own principle, and to make herself subordinate. "It is come round as I thought, Susan," said Caleb, when they were seated alone in the evening. He had already narrated the adventure which had brought about Fred's sharing in his work, but had kept back the further result. "The children ˛are˛ fond of each other -- I mean, Fred and Mary." Mrs Garth laid her work on her knee, and fixed her penetrating eyes anxiously on her husband. "After we'd done our work, Fred poured it all out to me. He can't bear to be a clergyman, and Mary says she won't have him if he is one; and the lad would like to be under me and give his mind to business. And I've determined to take him and make a man of him." *X609 "Caleb]" said Mrs Garth, in a deep contralto, expressive of resigned astonishment. "It's a fine thing to do," said Mr Garth, settling himself firmly against the back of his chair, and grasping the elbows. "I shall have trouble with him, but I think I shall carry it through. The lad loves Mary, and a true love for a good woman is a great thing, Susan. It shapes many a rough fellow." "Has Mary spoken to you on the subject?" said Mrs Garth, secretly a little hurt that she had to be informed on it herself. "Not a word. I asked her about Fred once; I gave her a bit of a warning. But she assured me she would never marry an idle, self-indulgent man -- nothing since. But is seems Fred set on Mr Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden him to speak himself, and Mr Farebrother has found out that she is fond of Fred, but says he must not be a clergyman. Fred's heart is fixed on Mary, that I can see: it gives me a good opinion of the lad -- and we always liked him, Susan." "It is a pity for Mary, I think," said Mrs Garth. "Why -- a pity?" "Because, Caleb, she might have had a man who is worth twenty Fred Vincys." "Ah?" said Caleb, with surprise. "I firmly believe that Mr Farebrother is attached to her, and meant to make her an offer; but of course now that Fred has used him as an envoy, there is an end to that better prospect." There was a severe precision in Mrs Garth's utterance. She was vexed and disappointed, but she was bent on abstaining from useless words. Caleb was silent for a few moments under a conflict of feelings. He looked at the floor and moved his head and hands in accompaniment to some inward argumentation. At last he said -- "That would have made me very proud and happy, Susan, and I should have been glad for your sake. I've always felt that your belongings never have been on a level with you. But you took me, though I was a plain man." "I took the best and cleverest man I had ever known," said Mrs Garth, convinced that ˛she˛ would never have loved any one who came short of that mark. "Well, perhaps others thought you might have done better. *X610 But it would have been worse for me. And that is what touches me close about Fred. The lad is good at bottom, and clever enough to do, if he's put in the right way; and he loves and honours my daughter beyond anything, and she has given him a sort of promise according to what he turns out. I say, that young man's soul is in my hand; and I'll do the best I can for him, so help me God] It's my duty, Susan." Mrs Garth was not given to tears, but there was a large one rolling down her face before her husband had finished. It came from the pressure of various feelings, in which there was as much affection and some vexation. She wiped it away quickly, saying -- "Few men besides you would think it a duty to add to their anxieties in that way, Caleb." "That signifies nothing -- what other men think. I've got a clear feeling inside me, Susan, in making everything as light as can be to Mary, poor child." Caleb, leaning back in his chair, looked with anxious appeal towards his wife. She rose and kissed him, saying, "God bless you, Caleb] Our children have a good father." But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression of her words. She felt sure that her husband's conduct would be misunderstood, and about Fred she was rational and unhopeful. Which would turn out to have the more foresight in it -- her rationality or Caleb's ardent generosity? # When Fred went to the office the next morning, there was a test to be gone through which he was not prepared for. "Now, Fred," said Caleb, "you will have some desk-work. I have always done a good deal of writing myself, but I can't do without help, and as I want you to understand the accounts and get the values into your head, I mean to do without another clerk. So you must buckle to. How are you at writing and arithmetic?" Fred felt an awkward movement of the heart; he had not thought of desk-work; but he was in a resolute mood, and not going to shrink. "I'm not afraid of arithmetic, Mr Garth: it always came easily to me. I think you know my writing." *X611 "Let us see," said Caleb, taking up a pen, examining it carefully and handing it, well dipped, to Fred with a sheet of ruled paper. "Copy me a line or two of that valuation, with the figures at the end." At that time the opinion existed that is was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line -- in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means. As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the paper passionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this dispelled all Caleb's mildness. "The deuce]" he exclaimed, snarlingly. "To think that this is a country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this]" Then in a more pathetic tone, pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, "The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can't put up with this]" "What can I do, Mr Garth?" said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low, not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of himself as liable to be ranked with office-clerks. "Do? Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line. What's the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?" asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. "Is there so little business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country? But that's the way people are brought up. I should lose no end of time with the letters some people send me, if Susan did not make them out for me. It's disgusting." Here Caleb tossed the paper from him. Ant stranger peeping into the office at that moment might have wondered what was the drama between the indignant man of business, and the fine-looking young fellow whose bland complexion was getting rather patchy as he bit his lip with mortification. Fred was struggling with many thoughts. Mr Garth had been so kind and encouraging at the beginning of *X612 their interview, that gratitude and hopefulness had been at a high pitch, and the downfall was proportionate. He had not thought of desk-work -- in fact, like the majority of young gentlemen, he wanted an occupation which should be free from disagreeables. I cannot tell what might have been the consequences if he had not distinctly promised himself that he would go to Lowick to see Mary and tell her that he was engaged to work under her father. He did not like to disappoint himself there. "I am very sorry," were all the words that he could muster. But Mr Garth was already relenting. "We must make the best of it, Fred," he began , with a return to his usual quiet tone. "Every man can learn to write. I taught myself. Go at it with a will, and sit up at night if the day-time isn't enough. We'll be patient, my boy. Callum shall go on with the books for a bit, while you are learning. But now I must be off," said Caleb, rising. "You must let your father know our agreement. You'll save me Callum's salary, you know, when you can write; and I can afford to give you eighty pounds for the first year, and more after." When Fred made the necessary disclosure to his parents, the relative effect on the two was a surprise which entered very deeply into his memory. He went straight from Mr Garth's office to the warehouse, rightly feeling that the most respectful way in which he could behave to his father, was to make the painful communication as gravely and formally as possible. Moreover, the decision would be more certainly understood to be final, if the interview took place in his father's gravest hours, which were always those spent in his private room at the warehouse. Fred entered on the subject directly, and declared briefly what he had done and was resolved to do, expressing at the end his regret that he should be the cause of disappointment to his father, and taking the blame on his own deficiencies. The regret was genuine, and inspired Fred with strong, simple words. Mr Vincy listened in profound surprise without uttering even an exclamation, a silence which in his impatient temperament was a sign of unusual emotion. He had not been in good spirits about trade that morning, and the slight bitterness in his lips *X613 grew intense as he listened. When Fred had ended, there was a pause of nearly a minute, during which Mr Vincy replaced a book in his desk and turned the key emphatically. Then he looked at his son steadily, and said -- "So you've made up your mind at last, sir?" "Yes, father." "Very well; stick to it. I've no more to say. You've thrown away your education, and gone down a step in life, when I had given you the means of rising, that's all." "I am very sorry that we differ, father. I think I can be quite as much of a gentleman at the work I have undertaken, as if I had been a curate. But I am grateful to you for wishing to do the best for me." "Very well; I have no more to say. I wash my hands of you. I only hope, when you have a son of your own he will make a better return for the pains you spend on him." This was very cutting to Fred. His father was using that unfair advantage possessed by us all when we are in a pathetic situation and see our own past as if it were simply part of the pathos. In reality, Mr Vincy's wishes about his son had had a great deal of pride, inconsiderateness, and egoistic folly in them. But still the disappointed father held a strong lever; and Fred felt as if he were being banished with a malediction. "I hope you will not object to my remaining at home, sir?" he said, after rising to go; "I shall have a sufficient salary to pay for my board, as of course I should wish to do." "Board, be hanged]" said Mr Vincy, recovering himself in his disgust at the notion that Fred's keep would be missed at his table. "Of course your mother will want you to stay. But I shall keep no horse for you, you understand; and you will pay your own tailor. You will do with a suit or two less, I fancy, when you have to pay for 'em." Fred lingered; there was still something to be said. At last it came. "I hope you will shake hands with me, father, and forgive me the vexation I have caused you." Mr Vincy from his chair threw a quick glance upward at his son, who had advanced near to him, and then gave his hand, saying hurriedly, "Yes, yes, let us say no more." *X614 Fred went through much more narrative and explanation with his mother, but she was inconsolable, having before her eyes what perhaps her husband had never thought of, the certainty that Fred would marry Mary Garth, that her life would henceforth be spoiled by a perpetual infusion of Garths and their ways, and that her darling boy, with his beautiful face and stylish air "beyond anybody else's son in Middlemarch", would be sure to get like that family in plainness of appearance and carelessness about his clothes. To her it seemed that there was a Garth conspiracy to get possession of the desirable Fred, but she dared not enlarge on this opinion, because a slight hint of it made him "fly out" at her as he had never done before. Her temper was too sweet for her to show any anger; but she felt that her happiness had received a bruise, and for several days merely to look at Fred made her cry a little as if he were the subject of some baleful prophecy. Perhaps she was the slower to recover her usual cheerfulness because Fred had warned her that she must not reopen the sore question with his father, who had accepted his decision and forgiven him. If her husband had been vehement against Fred, she would have been urged into defence of her darling. It was the end of the fourth day when Mr Vincy said to her -- "Come, Lucy, my dear, don't be so down-hearted. You have always spoiled the boy, and you must go on spoiling him." "Nothing ever did cut me so before, Vincy," said the wife, her fair throat and chin beginning to tremble again, "only his illness." "Pooh, pooh, never mind] We must expect to have trouble with our children. Don't make it worse by letting me see you out of spirits." "Well, I won't," said Mrs Vincy, roused by this appeal and adjusting herself with a little shake as of a bird which lays down its ruffles plumage. "It won't do to go making a fuss about one," said Mr Vincy, wishing to combine a little grumbling with domestic cheerfulness. "There's Rosamond as well as Fred." "Yes, poor thing. I'm sure I felt for her being disappointed of her baby; but she got over it nicely." "Baby, pooh] I can see Lydgate is making a mess of his *X615 practice, and getting into debt too, by what I hear. I shall have Rosamond coming to me with a pretty tale one of these days. But they'll get no money from me, I know. Let ˛his˛ family help him. I never did like that marriage. But it's no use talking. Ring the bell for lemons, and don't look dull any more, Lucy. I'll drive you and Louisa to Riverston to-morrow." *C57 *X616 *Mm They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain, lake, and scaur, And larger yet with wonder, love, belief Toward Walter Scott, who living far away Sent them his wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran, They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan. *M *L1 The evening that Fred Vincy walked to Lowick Parsonage (he had begun to see that this was a world in which even a spirited young man must sometimes walk for want of a horse to carry him) he set out at five o'clock and called on Mrs Garth by the way, wishing to assure himself that she accepted their new relations willingly. He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple-tree in the orchard. It was a festival with Mrs Garth, for her eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a short holiday -- Christy, who held it the most desirable thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother. Christy himself, a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother not much higher than Fred's shoulder -- which made it the harder that he should be held superior -- was always as simple as possible, and thought no more of Fred's disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe's wishing that he himself were more of the same height. He was lying on the ground now by his mother's chair, with his straw-hat laid flat over his eyes, while Jim on the other side was *X617 reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many young lives. The volume was ˛Ivanhoe˛, and Jim was in the great archery scene at the tournament, but suffered much interruption from Ben, who had fetched his own old bow and arrows, and was making himself dreadfully diagreeable, Letty thought, by begging all present to observe his random shots, which no one wished to do except Brownie, the active-minded but probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled Newfoundland lying in the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality of extreme old age. Letty herself, showing as to her mouth and pinafore some slight signs that she had been assisting at the gathering of cherries which stood in a coral-heap on the tea-table, was now seated on the grass, listening open-eyed to the reading. But the centre of interest was changed for all by the arrival of Fred Vincy. When, seating himself on a garden-stool, he said that he was on his way to Lowick Parsonage, Ben, who had thrown down his bow, and snatched up a reluctant half-grown kitten instead, strode across Fred's outstretched leg and said, "Take me]" "Oh, and me too," said Letty. "You can't keep up with Fred and me," said Ben. "Yes, I can. Mother, please say that I am to go," urged Letty, whose life was much checkered by resistance to her depreciation as a girl. "˛I˛ shall stay with Christy," observed Jim; as much as to say that he had the advantage of these simpletons; whereupon Letty put up her hand to her head and looked with jealous indecision from the one to the other. "Let us all go and see Mary," said Christy, opening his arms. "No, my dear child, we must not go in a swarm to the parsonage. And that old Glasgow suit of yours would never do. Besides, your father will come home. We must let Fred go alone. He can tell Mary that you are here, and she will come back to-morrow." Christy glanced at his own threadbare knees, and then Fred's beautiful white trousers. Certainly Fred's tailoring suggested the advantage of an English university, and he had a graceful *X618 way even of looking warm and of pushing his hair back with his handkerchief. "Children, run away," said Mrs Garth; "it is too warm to hang about your friends. Take your brother and show him the rabbits." The eldest understood, and led off the children immediately. Fred felt that Mrs Garth wished to give him an opportunity of saying anything that he had to say, but he could only begin by observing -- "How glad you must be to have Christy here]" "Yes; he come sooner than I expected. He got down from the coach at nine o'clock, just after his father went out. I am longing for Caleb to come and hear what wonderful progress Christy is making. He has paid his expenses for the last year by giving lessons, carrying on hard study at the same time. He hopes soon to get a private tutorship and go abroad." "He is a great fellow, Said Fred, to whom these cheerful truths had a medicinal taste, "and no trouble to anybody." After a slight pause, he added, "But I fear you will think that I am going to be a great deal of trouble to Mr. Garth." "Caleb likes taking trouble: he is one of those men who always do more than any one would have thought of asking them to do," answered Mrs. Garth. She was knitting, and could either look at Fred or not, as she chose -- always an advantage when one is bent on loading speech with salutary meaning; and though Mrs. Garth intended to be duly reserved, she did wish to say something that Fred might be the better for. "I know you think me very undeserving, Mrs. Garth, and with good reason," said Fred, his spirit rising a little at the perception of something like a disposition to lecture him. "I happen to have behaved just the worst to the people I can't help wishing for the most from. But while two men like Mr. Garth and Mr. Farebrother have not given me up, I don't see why I should give myself up." Fred thought it might be well to suggest these masculine examples to Mrs. Garth. "Assuredly," said she, with gathering emphasis. "A young man for whom two such elders devoted themselves would indeed be culpable if he threw himself away and made their sacrifices vain." Fred wondered a little at this strong language, but only said, "I *X619 hope it will not be so with me, Mrs. Garth, since I have some encouragement to believe that I may win Mary. Mr. Garth has told you about that? You were not surprised, I daresay?" Fred ended, innocently referring only to his own love as probably evident enough. "Not surprised that Mary has given you encouragement?" returned Mrs. Garth, who thought it would be well for Fred to be more alive to the fact that Mary's friends could not possible have wished this beforehand, whatever the Vincys might suppose. "Yes, I confess I ˛was˛ surprised." "She never did give me any - not the least in the world, when I talked to her myself," said Fred, eager to vindicate Mary. "But when I asked Mr. Farebrother to speak for me, she allowed him to tell me there was a hope." The power of admonition which had begun to stir in Mrs. Garth had not yet discharged itself. It was a little too provoking even for ˛her˛ self-control that this blooming youngster should flourish on the disappointments of sadder and wiser people - making a meal of a nightingale and never knowing it - and that all the while his family should suppose that hers was in eager need of this sprig; and her vexation had fermented the more actively because of its total repression towards her husband. Exemplary wives will sometimes find scape-goats in this way. She now said with energetic decision. "You made a great mistake, Fred, in asking Mr Farebrother to speak for you." "Did I?" said Fred, reddening instantaneously. He was alarmed, but at a loss to know what Mrs Garth meant, and added, on an apologetic tone, "Mr.Farebrother has always been such a friend of ours; and Mary, I knew, would listen to him gravely; and he took it on himself quite readily." "Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others," said Mrs Garth. She did not mean to go beyond this saslutary general doctrine, and threw her indignation into a needless unwinding of her worsted, knitting her brow at it with a grand air. "I cannot conceive how it could be any pain to Mr Farebrother," said Fred, who nevertheless felt that surprising conceptions were beginning to form themselves. *X620 "Precisely; you cannot conceive," said Mrs Garth, cutting her words as neatly as possible. For a moment Fred looked at the horizon with a dismayed anxiety, and then turning with a quick movement said almost sharply- "Do you mean to say, Mrs Garth, that Mr Farebrother us in love with Mary?" "And if it were so, Fred, I think you are the last person who ought to be surprised," returned Mrs Garth, laying her knitting down beside her and folding her arms. It was an unwonted sign of emotion in her that she should put her work out of her hands. In fact her feelings were divided between the satisfaction of giving Fred his discipline and the sense of having gone a little too far. Fred took his hat and stick and rose quickly. "Then you think I am standing in his way, and in Mary's too?" he said, in a tone which seemed to demand an answer. Mrs Garth could not speak immediately. She had brought herself into the unpleasant position of being called on to say what she really felt, yet what she knew there were strong reasons for concealing. And to her the conciousness of having exceeded in words was peculiarly mortifying. Besides, Fred had given out unexpected electricity, and he now added, "Mr Garth seemed pleased that Mary should be attached to me. He could not have known anything og this." Mrs Garth felt a severe twinge at this mention of her husband, the fear that Caleb might think her in the wrong not being easily endurable. She answered, wanting to check unintended consequences- "I spoke from inference only. I am not aware that Mary knows anything of the matter." But she hesitated to beg that he would keep entire silence on a subject which she had herself unnecessarily mentioned, not being used to stoop in that way; and while she was hesitating there was already a rush of unintended consequences under the apple-tree where the tea-things stood. Ben, bouncing across the grass with Brownie at his heels, and seeing the kitten dragging the knitting by a lengthening line of wool, shouted and clapped his hands; Brownie barked, the kitten, desperate, jumped on the tea-table and upset the milk, then jumped down again and *X621 swept half the cherries with it; and Ben, snatching up the half-knitted sock-top, fitted it over the kitten's head as a new source of madness, while Larry arriving cried out to her mother against this cruelty -- it was a history as full of sensation as "This is the house that Jack built." Mrs Garth was obliged to interfere, the other young ones came up and the ˛te´te˛-˛a>˛-te´te˛ with Fred was ended. He got away as soon as he could, and Mrs Garth could only imply some retraction of her severity by saying "God bless you" when she shook hands with him. She was unpleasantly conscious that she had been on the verge of speaking as "one of the foolish women speaketh" - telling first and entreating silence after. But she had not entreated silence, and to prevent Caleb's blame she determined to blame herself and confess all to him that very night. It was curious what an awful tribunal the mild Caleb's was to her, whenever he set it up. But she meant to point out to him that the revelation might do Fred Vincy a great deal of good. No doubt it was having a strong effect on him as he walked to Lowick. Fred's light hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a bruise as from this suggestion that if he had been out of the way Mary might have made a thoroughly good match. Also he was piqued that he had been what he called such a stupid lout as to ask that intervention from Mr Farebrother. But it was not in a lover's nature-it was not in Fred's- that the new anxiety raised about Mary's feeling should not surmount every other. Notwithstanding his trust in Mr Farebrother's genorisity, notwithstanding what Mary had said to him, Fred could not help feeling he had a rival: it was a new consciousness, and he objected to it extremely, not being in the least ready to give up Mary for her good, being ready rather to fight for her with any man whatsoever. But the fighting with Mr Farebrother must be of a metaphorical kind, which was much more difficult to Fred than the muscular. Certainly this experience was a discipline for Fred hardly less sharp than his disappointment about his uncle's will. The iron had not entered his soul, but he had begun to imagine what the sharp edge would be. It did not once occur to Fred that Mrs Garth might be mistaken about Mr Farebrother, but he suspected that she might be wrong about Mary. Mary had been staying at the parsonage *X622 lately, and her mother might know very little of what had been passing in her mind. He did not feel easier when he found her looking cheerful with the three ladies in the drawing-room. They were in animated discussion on some subject which was dropped when he entered, and Mary was copying the labels from a heap of shallow cabinet drawers, in a minute handwriting which she was skilled in. Mr Farebrother was somewhere in the village, and the three ladies knew nothing of Fred's peculiar relation to Mary : it was impossible for either of them to propose that they should walk round the garden, and Fred predicted to himself that he should have to go away without saying a word to her in private. He told her first of Christy's arrival and then of his own engagement with her father; and he was comforted by seeing that this latter news touched her keenly. She said hurriedly, "I am so glad," and then bent over her writing to hinder any one from noticing her face. But here was a subject which Mrs Farebrother could not let pass. "You don't mean, my dear Miss Garth, that you are glad of a young man giving up the Church for which he has educated; you only mean tht things being so, you are glad that he should be under an excellent man like your father." "No, really, Mrs Farebrother, I am glad of both, I fear," said Mary, cleverly getting rid of one rebellious tear. "I have a dreadfully secular mind. I never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr Farebrother." "Now why, my dear?" said Mrs Farebrother, pausing on her large wooden knitting-needles and looking at Mary. "You have always a good reason for your opinions, but this astonishes me. of course I put out of the question those who preach new doctrine. But why should you dislike clergymen?" "Oh dear," said Mary, her face breaking into merriment as she seemed to consider a moment. "I don't like their neckcloths." "Why, you don't like Camden's, then," said Miss Winifred, in some anxiety. "Yes, I do," said Mary. "I don't like the other clergymen's neckcloths, because it is they who wear them." "How very puzzling]" said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect was probably deficient. *X623 "My dear, you are joking. You would have better reasons than these for slighting so respectable a class of men," said Mrs Farebrother, majestically. "Miss Garth has such severe notions of what people should be that it is difficult to satisfy her." said Fred. "Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favour of my son," said the old lady. Mary was wondering at Fred's piqued tone, when Mr Farebrother came in and had to hear the news about the engagement under Mr Garth. At the end he said with quiet satisfaction, "˛That˛ is right;" and then bent to look at Mary's labels and praise her handwriting. Fred felt horribly jealous -- was glad, of course, that Mr Farebrother was so estimable, but wished that he had been ugly and fat as men at forty sometimes are. It was clear what the end would be, since Mary openly placed Farebrother above everybody, and these women were all evidently encouraging the affair. He was feeling sure that he should have no chance of speaking to Mary, when Mr Farebrother said-- "Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study -- you have never seen my fine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth. I want you to see a stupendous spider I found this morning. Mary at once saw the Vicar's intention. He had never since the memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her, and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep. Mary was accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable, and if a belief flattered her vanity she felt warned to dismiss it as ridiculous, having early had much exercise in such dismissals. It was as she had foreseen: when Fred had been asked to admire the fittings of the study, and she had been asked to admire the spider, Mr Farebrother said -- "Wait here a minute or two. I am going to look out an engraving which Fred is tall enough to hang for me. I shall be back in a few minutes." And then he went out. Nevertheless, the first word Fred said to Mary was -- "It is of no use, whatever I do, Mary. You are sure to marry Farebrother at last." There was some rage in his tone. "What do you mean, Fred?" Mary exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply, and surprised out of all her readiness in reply. *X624 "It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough -- you who see everything." "I only see that you are behaving very ill, Fred, in speaking so of Mr Farebrother after he has pleaded your cause in every way. How can you have taken up such an idea?" Fred was rather deep, in spite of his irritation. If Mary had really been unsuspicious, there was no good in telling her what Mrs Garth had said. "It follows as a matter of course," he replied. "When you are continually seeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom you set up above everybody, I can have no fair chance." "You are very ungrateful, Fred," said Mary. "I wish I had never told Mr Farebrother that I cared for you in the least." "No, I am not ungrateful; I should be the happiest fellow in the world if it were not for this. I told your father everything, and he was very kind; he treated me as if I were his son. I could go at the work with a will, writing and everything, if it were not for this." "For this? for what?" said Mary, imagining now that something specific must have been said or done. "This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Farebrother." Mary was appeased by her inclination to laugh. "Fred," she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were sulkily turned away from her, "you are too delightfully ridiculous. If you were not such a charming simpleton, what a temptation this would be to play the wicked coquette, and let you suppose that somebody besides you made love to me." "Do you really like me best, Mary?" said Fred, turning eyes full of affection on her, and trying to take her hand. "I dont't like you at all at this moment," said Mary, retreating, and putting her hands behind her. "I only said that no mortal ever made love to me besides you. And that is no argument that a very wise man ever will," she ended, merrily. "I wish you would tell me that you could not possibly ever think of him," said Fred. "Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fred," said Mary, getting serious again. "I don't know whether it is more stupid or ungenerous in you not to see that Mr Farebrother has left us *X625 together on purpose that we might speak freely. I am disappointed that you should be so blind to his delicate feeling." There was no time to say any more before Mr Farebrother came back with the engraving; and Fred had to return to the drawing-room still with a jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from Mary's words and manner. The result of the conversation was on the whole more painful to Mary: inevitably her attention had taken a new attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations. She was in a position in which she seemed to herself to be slighting Mr Farebrother, and this, in relation to a man who is much honoured, is always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman. To have a reason for going home the next day was a relief, for Mary earnestly desired to be always clear that she loved Fred best. When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constantcy as we can over other treasures. "Fred has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this," Mary said to herself, with a smile curling her lips. It was impossible to help fleeting visions of another kind - new dignities and an acknowledged value of which she often felt the absence. But these things with Fred outside them, Fred forsaken and looking sad for the want of her, could never tempt her deliberate thought. *X626 *C58 For there can live no hatred in thine eye, Therefore in that I cannot know thy change: In many's looks the false heart's history Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange; But Heaven in thy creation did decree That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell; Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be, Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell. SHAKESPEARE : ˛Sonnets˛ At the time when Mr Vincy uttered that presentiment about Rosamund, she herself had never had the idea that she should be driven to make the sort of appeal which he foresaw. She had not yet had any anxiety about ways and means, although her domestic life had been expensive as well as eventful. Her baby had been born prematurely, and all the embroidered robes and caps had to be laid by in darkness. This misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted in going out on horseback one day when her husband had desired her not to do so; but it must not be supposed that she had shown temper on the occasion, or rudely told him that she would do as she liked. What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from Captain Lydgate, the baronet's third son, who, I am sorry to say, was detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop "parting his hair from brow to nape in a despicable fashion" (not followed by Tertius himself), and showing an ignorant security that he knew the proper thing to say on every topic. Lydgate inwardly cursed his own folly that he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go to his uncle's on the wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable to Rosamund by saying so in private. For to Rosamund this visit was a source of unprecedented but gracefully-concealed exultation. She was so intensely conscious of having a cousin who was a baronet's son staying in the house, that she imagined the knowledge of what was implied by his presence to be diffused through all other *X627 minds; and when she introduced Captain Lydgate to her guests, she had a placid sense that his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odour. The satisfaction was enough for the time to melt away some disappointment in the conditions of marriage with a medical man even of good birth: it seemed not that her marriage was visible as well as ideally floating her above the Middlemarch level, and the future looked bright with letters and visits to and from Quallingham, and vague advancement in consequence for Tertius. Especially, as, probably at the Captain's suggestion, his married sister, Mrs Mengan, had come with her maid, and stayed two nights on her way from town. Hence it was clearly worth while for Rosamund to take pains with her music and the careful selection of her lace. As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose bent on one side, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been disadvantageous in any young gentleman who had not a military bearing and moustache to give him what is doated on by some flower-like blond heads as "style". He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms. Rosamund delighted in his admiration now even more than she had done at Quallingham, and he found it easy to spend several hours of the day in flirting with her. The visit altogether was one of the pleasantest larks he had ever had, not the less so perhaps because he suspected that his queer cousin Tertius wished him away : though Lydgate, who would rather (hyperbolically speaking) have died than have failed in polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike, and only pretended generally not to hear what the gallant officer said, consigning the task of answering him to Rosamund. For he was not at all a jealous husband, and preferred leaving a feather-headed young gentleman alone with his wife to bearing him company. "I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius," said Rosamund, one evening when the important guest was gone to Loamford to see some brother officers stationed there. "You really look so absent sometimes - you seem to be seeing through his head into something behind it, instead of looking at him." "My dear Rosy, you don't expect me to talk much to such a *X628 conceited ass as that, I hope," said Lydgate, brusquely. "If he got his head broken, I might look at it with interest, not before." "I cannot conceive why you should speak of your cousin so contemptuously," said Rosamund, her fingers moving at her work while she spoke with a mild gravity which had a touch of disdain in it. "Ask Ladislaw if he doesn't think your Captain the greatest bore he ever met with. Ladislaw has almost foresaken the house since he came." Rosamund thought she knew perfectly well why Mr Ladislaw disliked the Captain : he was jealous, and she liked his being jealous. "It is impossible to say what will suit eccentric persons," she answered, "but in my opinion Captain Lydgate is a thorough gentleman, and I think you ought not, out of respect to Sir Godwin, to treat him with neglect." "No, dear; but we have had dinners for him. And he comes in and goes out as he likes. He doesn't want me." "Still, when he is in the room, you might show him more attention. He may not be a phoenix of cleverness in your sense; his profession is different; but it would be all the better for you to talk a little on his subjects. I think his conversation is quite agreeable. And he is anything but an unprincipled man." "The fact is, you would wish me to be a little more like him, Rosy," said Lydgate, in a sort of resigned murmur, with a smile which was not exactly tender, and certainly not merry. Rosamund was silent and did not smile again; but the lovely curves of her face looked good-tempered enough without smiling. Those words of Lydgate's were like a sad milestone marking how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamund Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone. He had begun to distinguish between that imagined adoration and the attraction towards a man' talent because it gives him prestige, and is like an order in his button-hole or an Honourable before his name. *X629 It might have been supposed that Rosamund had travelled too, since she had found the pointless conversation of Mr Ned Plymdale perfectly wearisome; but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable - else, indeed, what would become of social bonds? Captain Lydgate's stupidity was delicately scented, carried itself with "style", talked with a good accent, and was closely related to Sir Godwin. Rosamund found it quite agreeable and caught many of its phrases. Therefore, since Rosamund, as we know, was fond of horseback, there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding with Captain Lydgate, who had ordered his man with two horses to follow him and put up at the Green Dragon, begged her to go out on the grey which he warranted to be gentle and trained to carry a lady - indeed he had bought it for his sister, and was taking it to Quallingham. Rosamund went out the first time without telling her husband, and came back before his return; but the ride had been so thorough a success, and she declared herself so much the better in consequence, that he was informed of it with full reliance on his consent that she should go riding again. On the contrary Lydgate was more than hurt - he was utterly confounded that she had risked herself on a strange horse without referring the matter to his wish. After the first almost thundering exclamations of astonishment, which sufficiently warned Rosamund of what was coming, he was silent for some moments. "However, you have come back safely, he said, at last, in a decisive tone. "You will not go again, Rosy; that is understood. If it were the quietest, most familiar horse in the world, there would always be the chance of accident. And you know very well that I wished you to give up riding the roan on that account." "But there is the chance of accident indoors, Tertius." "My darling, don't talk nonsense," said Lydgate, in an imploring tone; "surely I am the person to judge for you. I think it is enough that I say you are not to go again." Rosamund was arranging her hair before dinner, and the reflection of her head in the glass showed no change in its *X630 loveliness except a little turning aside of the long neck. Lydgate had been moving about with his hands in his pockets, and now paused near her, as if he awaited some assurance. "I wish you would fasten up my plaits, dear," said Rosamund, letting her arms fall with a little sigh, so as to make a husband ashamed of standing there like a brute. Lydgate had often fastened the plaits before, being among the deftest of men with his large finely-formed fingers. He swept up the soft festoons of plaits and fastened in the tall comb (to such uses do men come]); and what could he do then but kiss the exquisite nape which was shown in all its delicate curves? But when we do what we have done before, it is often with a difference. Lydgate was still angry, and had not forgotten his point. "I shall tell the Captain that he ought to have known better than offer you his horse," he said, as he moved away. "I beg you will not do anything of the kind, Tertius," said Rosamund, looking at him with something more marked than usual in her speech. "It will be treating me as if I were a child. Promise that you will leave the subject to me." There did seem to be some truth in her objection. Lydgate said, "Very well," with a surly obedience, and thus the discussion ended with his promising Rosamund, and not with her promising him. In fact, she had been determined not to promise. Rosamund had that victorious obstinacy which never wastes its energy in impetuous resistance. What she liked to do was to her the right thing and all her cleverness was directed to getting the means of doing it. She meant to go out riding again on the grey, and she did go on the next opportunity of her husband's absence, not intending that he should know until it was late enough not to signify to her. The temptation was certainly great: she was very fond of the exercise, and the gratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate, Sir Godwin's son, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met in this position by any one but her husband, was something as good as her dreams before marriage: moreover, she was riveting the connection with the family at Quallingham, which must be a wise thing to do. But the gentle grey, unprepared for the crash of a tree that was being felled on the edge of Halsell Wood, took fright, and *X631 caused a worse fright to Rosamund, leading finally to the loss of her baby. Lydgate could not show his anger towards her, but he was rather bearish to the Captain, whose visit naturally soon came to an end. In all future conversations on the subject, Rosamund was mildly certain that the ride had made no difference, and that if she had stayed at home the same symptoms would have come on and would have ended in the same way, because she had felt something like them before. Lydgate could only say, "Poor, poor darling]" but he secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamund. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamund's cleverness as precisely the receptive kind which became a woman. He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was -- what was the shape into which it had run as into a close network aloof and independent. No one quicker than Rosamund to see causes and effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests : she had seen clearly Lydgate's pre-eminence in Middlemarch society, and could go on imaginatively tracing still more agreeable social effects when his talent should have advanced him; but for her, his professional and scientific ambition had no other relation to these desirable effects than if they had been the fortunate discovery of an ill-smelling oil. And that oil apart, with which she had nothing to do, of course she believed in her own opinion more than she did in his. Lydgate was astounded to find in numberless trifling matters, as well as in this last serious case of the riding, that affection did not make her compliant. He had no doubt that the affection was there, and had no presentiment that he had done anything to repel it. For his own part he said to himself that he loved her as tenderly as ever, and could make up his mind to her negations; but -- well] Lydgate was much worried, and conscious of new elements in his life as noxious to him as an inlet of mud to a creature that has been used to breathe and bathe and dart after its illuminated prey in the clearest of waters. *X632 Rosamund was soon looking lovlier than ever at her work-table, enjoying drives in her father's phaeton and thinking it likely that she might be invited to Quallingham. She knew that she was a much more exquisite ornament to the drawing-room there than any daughter of the family, and in reflecting that the gentlemen were aware of that, did not perhaps sufficiently consider whether the ladies would be eager to see themselves surpassed. Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she inwardly called his moodiness -- a name which to her covered his thoughtful preoccupation with other subjects than herself, as well as that uneasy look of the brow and distaste for all ordinary things as if they were mixed with bitter herbs, which really made a sort of weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding. These latter states of mind had one cause amongst others, which he had generously but mistakenly avoided mentioning to Rosamund, lest it should affect her health and spirits. Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other's mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamund; bearing her little claims and interruptions without impatience, and above all, bearing without betrayal of bitterness to look through less and less of interfering illusion at the blank unreflecting surface her mind presented to his ardour for the more impersonal ends of his profession and his scientific study, an ardour which he had fancied that the ideal wife must somehow worship as sublime, though not in the least knowing why. But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included. It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us. Lydgate was aware that his concessions to Rosamund were often little more than the lapse of slackening resolution, the creeping paralysis apt to seize an enthusiasm which is out of adjustment to a constant portion of our lives. And on Lydgate's enthusiasm there was constantly pressing not *X633 a simple weight of sorrow, but the biting presence of a petty degrading care, such as casts the blight of irony over all higher effort. This was the care which he had hitherto abstained from mentioning to Rosamund; and he believed, with some wonder, that it had never entered her mind, though certainly no difficulty could be less mysterious. It was an interference with a conspicuous handle to it, and had been easily drawn by indifferent observers, that Lydgate was in debt; and he could not succeed in keeping out of his mind for long together that he was every day getting deeper into that swamp, which tempts man towards it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure. It is wonderful how soon a man gets up to his chin there -- in a condition in which, in spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had a scheme of the universe in his soul. Eighteen months ago Lydgate was poor, but had never known the eager want of small sums, and felt rather a burning contempt for any who descended a step in order to gain them. He was now experiencing something worse than a simple deficit; he was assailed by the vulgar hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great many things which might have been done without, and which he is unable to pay for, though the demand for payment has become pressing. How this came about may be easily seen without much arithmetic or knowledge of prices. When a man in setting up a house and preparing for marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses come to between four and five hundred pounds more than he has capital to pay for; when at the end of the year it appears that his household expenses, horses and et ca+eteras, amount to nearly a thousand, while the proceeds of the practice reckoned from the old books to be worth eight hundred per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly five hundred chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether he minds or not, he is in debt. Those were less expensive times than our own, and provincial life was comparatively modest; but the ease with which a medical man who had lately bought a practice, who thought that he was obliged to keep two horses, whose table was supplied without stint, and who paid an insurance on his life and a high rent for house and *X634 garden might find his expenses doubling his receipts, can be conceived by any one who does not think these details beneath his consideration. Rosamund, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagent household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything -- nothing else "answered"; and Lydgate supposed that "if things were done at all, they must be done properly" -- he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that "it could hardly come to much", and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article -- for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear -- it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamund, even without such an occasion as Captain Lydgate's visit, was fond of giving invitations. and Lydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not interfere. The sociability seemed a necessary part of professional prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable. It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting prescritions of diet to their small means; but, dear me] has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable -- is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other? Expenditure -- like ugliness and errors -- becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others. Lydgate believed himself to be careless about his dress, and he despised a man who calculated the effects of his costume; it seemed to him only a matter of course that he had abundance of fresh garments -- such things were naturally ordered in sheaves. It must be remembered that he had never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, and he walked by habit, not by self-criticism. But the check had come. Its novelty made it the more irritating. He was amazed, disgusted that conditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully disconnected with the objects he cared to occupy himself with. should have lain in ambush and clutched him when he was unaware. And there was not only the actual debt; there was the certainty that in his present position he must go on deepening *X635 it. Two furnishing tradesmen at Brassing, whose bills had been incurred before his marriage, and whom uncalculated current expenses had ever since prevented him from paying, had repeatedly sent him unpleasant letters which had forced themselves on his attention. This could hardly have been more galling to any disposition than to Lydgate's, with his intense pride -- his dislike of asking a favour or being under an obligqtion to any one. He had scorned even to form conjectures about Mr Vincy's intentions on money matters, and nothing but extremity could have induced him to apply to his father-in-law, even if he had not been made aware in various indirect ways since his marriage that Mr Vincy's own affairs were not flourishing, and that the expectation of help from would be resented. Some men easily trust in the readiness of friends; it had never in the former part of his life occurred to Lydgate that he should need to do so: he had never thought what borrowing would be to him; but now that the idea had entered his mind, he felt that he would rather incur any other hardship. In the meantime he had no money or prospects of money; and his practice was not getting more lucrative. No wonder that Lydgate had been unable to suppress all signs of inward trouble during the last few months, and now that Rosamund was regaining brilliant health, he meditated taking her entirely into confidence on his difficulties. New conversance with tradesmen's bills had forced his reasoning into a new channel of comparison: he had begun to consider from a new point of view what was necessary and unnecessary in goods ordered, and to see that there must be some change of habits. How could such a change be made without Rosamund's concurrence? The immediate occasion of opening the disagreeable fact on her was forced upon him. Having no money, and having privately sought advice as to what security could possible be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered the one good security in his power to the less peremptory creditor, who was a silversmith and jeweller, and who consented to take on himself the upholsterer's credit also, accepting interest for a given term. The security necessary was a bill of sale on the furniture of his house, which might make a creditor easy for a reasonable time about a debt amounting to *X636 less than four hundred pounds; and the silversmith, Mr Dover, was willing to reduce it by taking back a portion of the plate and any other article which was as good as new. "Any other article" was a phrase delicately implying jewellery, and more particularly some purple amethysts costing thirty pounds, which Lydgate had bought as a bridal present. Opinions may be divided as to his wisdom in making this present; some may think that it was a graceful attention to be expected from a man like Lydgate, and that the fault of any troublesome consequences lay in the pinched narrowness of provincial life at that time, which offered no conveniences for professional people whose fortune was not proportioned to their tastes; also, in Lydgate's ridiculous fastidiousness about asking his friends for money. However, it had seemed a question of no moment to him on that fine morning when he went to give a final order for plate: in the presence of other jewels enormously expensive, and as an addition to orders of which the amount had not been exactly calculated, thirty pounds for ornaments exquisitely suited to Rosamund's neck and arms could hardly appear excessive when there was no ready cash for it to exceed. But at this crisis Lydgate's imagination could not help dwelling on the possibility of letting the amethysts take their place again among Mr Dover's stock, though he shrank from the idea of proposing this to Rosamund. Having been roused to discern consequences which he had never been in the habit tracing, he was preparing to act on this discernment with some of the rigour (by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment. He was nerving himself to this rigour as he rode from Brassing, and meditated on the representations he must make to Rosamund. It was evening when he got home. He was intensely miserable, this strong man of nine-and-twenty and of many gifts. He was not saying angrily within himself that he had made a profound mistake; but the mistake was at work in him like a recognized chronic disease, mingling its uneasy importunities with every prospect, and enfeebling every thought. As he went along the passage to the drawing-room, he heard the piano and singing. Of course, Ladislaw was there. It was some weeks since Will had parted from Dorothea, yet he was still at the old post *X637 in Middlemarch. Lydgate had no objection in general to Ladislaw's coming, but just now he was annoyed that he could not find his hearth free. When he opened the door the two singers went on towards the keynote, raising their eyes and looking at him indeed, but not regarding his entrance as an interruption. To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has still pains in store. His face, already paler than usual, took on a scowl as he walked across the room and flung himself into a chair. The singers, feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had had only three bars to sing, now turned around. "How are you, Lydgate?" said Will, coming forward to shake hands. Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak. "Have you dined, Tertius? I expected you much earlier," said Rosamund, who had already seen that her husband was in a "horrible humour". She seated herself in her usual place as she spoke. "I have dined. I should like some tea, please," said Lydgate, curtly, still scowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched out before him. Will was too quick to need more. "I shall be off," he said reaching his hat. "Tea is coming," said Rosamund; "pray don't go." "Yes, Lydgate is bored," said Will, who had more comprehension of Lydgate than Rosamund had, and was not offended by his manner, easily imagining outdoor causes of annoyance. "There is the more need for you to stay," said Rosamund, playfully, and in her lightest accent; "he will not speak to me all the evening." "Yes, Rosamund, I shall," said Lydgate, in his strong baritone. "I have some serious business to speak to you about." No introduction of the business could have been less like that which Lydgate had intended; but her indifferent manner had been too provoking. "There] you see," said Will. "I'm going to the meeting about the Mechanics' Institute. Good-bye;" and he went quickly out of the room. *X638 Rosamund did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her place before the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never seen him so disagreeable. Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners. For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness. His mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamund, he said inwardly, "Would ˛she˛ kill me because I wearied her?" and then, "It is the way with all women." But this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals, was immediately thwarted by Lydgate's memory of wondering impressions from the behaviour of another woman -- from Dorothea's looks and tones of emotion about her husband when Lydgate began to attend him -- from her passionate cry to be taught what would best comfort that man for whose sake it seemed as if she must quell every impulse in her except the yearnings of faithfulness and compassion. These revived impressions succeeded each other quickly and dreamily in Lydgate's mind while the tea was being brewed. He had shut his eyes in the last instant reverie while he heard Dorothea saying, "Advise me -- think what I can do -- he has been all his life labouring and looking forward. He minds about nothing else -- and I mind about nothing else." That voice of deep-souled womanhood had remained within him as the enkindling conceptions of dead and sceptred genius had remained within him (is there not a genius for feeling nobly which also reigns over human spirits and their conclusions?): the tones were a music from which he was falling away -- he had really fallen into a momentary doze, when Rosamund said in her silvery neutral way, "Here is your tea, Tertius," setting it on the small table by his side, and then moved back to her place without looking at him. Lydgate was too hasty in attributing insensibility to her; after her own fashion, she was sensitive enough, and took lasting impressions. Her impression now was *X639 one of offence and repulsion. But then, Rosamund had no scowls and had never raised her voice: she was quite sure that no one could justly find fault with her. Perhaps Lydgate and she had never felt so far off each other before; but there were strong reasons for not deferring his revelation, even if he had not already begun it by that abrupt announcement; indeed some of the angry desire to rouse her into more sensibility on his account which had prompted him to speak prematurely, still mingled with his pain in the prospect of her pain. But he waited till the tray was gone, the candles were lit, and the evening quiet might be counted on: the interval had left time for repelled tenderness to return into the old course. He spoke kindly. "Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come and sit by me," he said, gently, pushing away the table, and stretching out his arm to draw a chair near his own. Rosamund obeyed. As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent faintly-tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful; as she sat down by him and laid one hand on the elbow of his chair, at last looking at him and meeting his eyes, her delicate neck and cheek and purely-cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness. It touched Lydgate now, and mingled the early moments of his love for her with all the other memories which had stirred in this crisis of deep trouble. He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying -- "Dear]" with the lingering utterance which affection gives to the word. Rosamund too was still under the power of that same past, and her husband was still in part the Lydgate whose approval had stirred delight. She put his hair lightly away from his forehead, then laid her other hand on his, and was conscious of forgiving him. "I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy. But there are things which husband and wife must think of together. I daresay it has occured to you already that I am short of money." Lydgate paused; but Rosamund turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece. "I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before *X640 we were married, and there have been expenses since which I have been obliged to meet. The consequence is, there is a large debt at Brassing -- three hundred and eighty pounds -- which has pressing on me a good while, and in fact we are getting deeper every day, for people don't pay me the faster because others want the money. I took pains to keep it from you while you were not well; but now we must think together about it, and you must help me." "What can ˛I˛ do, Tertius?" said Rosamund, turning her eyes on him again, That little speech of four words, like so many others in all languages, is capable by varied vocal inflexions of expressing all states of mind from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative perception, from the completest self-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness. Rosamund's thin utterance threw into the words :"What can ˛I˛ do]" as much neutrality as they could hold. They fell like a mortal chill on Lydgate's roused tenderness. He did not storm in indignation -- he felt too sad a sinking of the heart. And when he spoke again it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to fulfil a task. "It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security for a time, and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture." Rosamund coloured deeply. "Have you not asked papa for money?" she said, as soon as she could speak. "No." "Then I must ask him]" she said, releasing her hands from Lydgate's and rising to stand at two yards distance from him. "No, Rosy," said Lydgate, decisively. "It is too late to do that. The inventory will be begun tomorrow. Remember it is a mere security: it will make no difference: it is a temporary affair. I insist upon it that your father shall not know, unless I choose to tell him," added Lydgate, with a more peremptory emphasis. This certainly was unkind, but Rosamund had thrown him back on evil expectation as to what she would do in the way of quiet steady disobedience. The unkindness seemed unpardonable to her: she was not given to weeping and disliked it, but now her chin and lips began to tremble and the tears welled up. Perhaps it was not possible for Lydgate, under the double stress *X641 of outward material difficulty and of his own proud resistance to humiliating consequences, to imagine fully what this sudden trial was to a young creature who had know nothing but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been of new indulgence, more exactly to her taste. But he did wish to spare her as much as he could, and her tears cut him to the heart. He could not speak again immediately; but Rosamund did not go on sobbing: she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away her tears, continuing to look before her at the mantelpiece. "Try not to grieve, darling," said Lydgate, turning his eyes towards her. That she had chosen to move away from him in this moment of her trouble made everything harder to say, but he must absolutely go on. "We must brace ourselves to do what is necessary. It is I who have been in fault: I ought to have seen that I could not afford to live in this way. But many things have told against me in my practice, and it really just now has ebbed to a low point. I may recover it, but in the meantime we must pull up -- we must change our way of living. We shall weather it. When I have given this security I shall have time to look about me; and you are so clever that if you turn your mind to managing you will school me into carefulness. I have been a thoughtless rascal about squaring prices -- but come, dear, sit down and forgive me." Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yolk like a creature who had talons, but who had Reason too, which often reduces us to meekness. When he had spoken the last words in an imploring tone, Rosamund returned to the chair by his side. His self-blame gave her some hope that he would attend to her opinion, and she said -- "Why can you not put off having the inventory made? You can send the men away to-morrow when they come." "I shall not send them away," said Lydgate, the peremptoriness rising again. Was it of any use to explain? "If we left Middlemarch, there would of course be a sale, and that would do as well." "But we are not goin to leave Middlemarch." "I am sure, Tertius, it would be much better to do so. Why can we not go to London? Or near Durham, where your family is known?" *X642 "We can go nowhere without money, Rosamund." "Your friends would not wish you to be without money. And surely these odious tradesmen might be made to understand that, and to wait, if you would make proper representations to them." "This is idle, Rosamund," said Lydgate angrily. "You must learn to take my judgement on questions you don't understand. I have made necessary arrangements, and they must be carried out. As to friends, I have no expectations whatever from them, and shall not ask them for anything." Rosamund sat perfectly still. The thought in her mind was that if she had know how Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him. "We have no time to waste now on unnecessary words, dear," said Lydgate, trying to be gently again. "There are some details that I want to consider with you. Dover says he will take a good deal of the plate back again, and any of the jewellery we like. He really behaves very well." "Are we to go without spoons and forks then?" said Rosamund, whose very lips seemed to get thinner with the thinness of her utterance. She was determined to make no further resistance or suggestions. "Oh no, dear]" said Lydgate. "But look here," he continued, drawing a paper from his pocket and opening it; "here is Dover's account. See, I have marked a number of articles, which if we returned them would reduce the amount by thirty pounds and more. I have not marked any of the jewellery." Lydgate had really felt this point of the jewellery very bitter to himself. but he had overcome the feeling by severe argument. He could not propose to Rosamund that she return any particular present of his, but he had told himself that he was bound to put Dover's offer before her, and her inward prompting might make the affair easy. "It is useless for me to look, Tertius," said Rosamund, calmly; "you will return what you please." She would not turn her eyes on the paper, and Lydgate, flushing up to the roots of his hair, drew it back and let it fall on his knee. Meanwhile Rosamund quietly went out of the room, leaving Lydgate helpless and wondering. Was she not coming back? It seemed that she had *X643 no more identified herself with him than if they had been creatures of different species and opposing interests. He tossed his head and thrust his hands deep into his pockets with a sort of vengeance. There was still science -- there were still good objects to work for. He must give a tug still -- all the stronger because other satisfactions were going. But the door opened and Rosamund re-entered. She carried the leather box containing the amethysts, and a tiny ornamental basket which contained other boxes, and laying them on the chair where she had been sitting, she said, with perfect propriety in her air -- "This is all the jewellery you ever gave me. You can return what you like of it, and of the plate also. You will not, of course, expect me to stay at home to-morrow. I shall go to papa's." To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the distance she was placing between them. "And when shall you come back again?" he said, with a bitter edge on his accent. "Oh, in the evening. Of course I shall not mention the subject to mamma." Rosamund was convinced that no woman could behave more irreproachably than she was behaving; and she went to sit down at her work-table. Lydgate sat meditating a minute or two, and the result was that he said, with some of the old emotion in his tone -- "Now we have been united, Rosy, you should not leave me to myself in the first trouble that has come." "Certainly not," said Rosamund; "I shall do everything it becomes me to do." "It is not right that the thing should be left to servants, or that I should have to speak to them about it. And I shall be obliged to go out -- I don't know how early. I understand your shrinking from the humiliation of these money affairs. But, my dear Rosamund, as a question of pride, which I fell just as much as you can, it is surely better to manage the thing ourselves, and let the servants see as little of it as possible; and since you are my wife, there is no hindering your share in my disgraces -- if there were disgraces." *X644 Rosamund did not answer immediately, but at last she said, "Very well, I will stay at home." "I shall not touch these jewels Rosy. Take them away again. But I will write out a list of plate that we may return, and that can be packed up and sent at once." "The servants will know ˛that˛," said Rosamund, with the slightest touch of sarcasm. "Well, we must meet some disagreeables as necessities. Where is the ink, I wonder?" said Lydgate, rising, and throwing the account on the larger table where he meant to write. Rosamund went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table was going to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by, put his arm round her and drew her towards him, saying, "Come, darling, let us make the best of things. It will only be for a time, I hope, that we shall have to be stingy and particular. Kiss me." His native warm-heartedness took a great deal of quenching, and it is a part of manliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact that an inexperienced girl has got into trouble by marrying him. She received his kiss and returned it faintly, and in this way an appearance of accord was recovered for the time. But Lydgate could not help looking forward with dread to the inevitable future discussions about expenditure and the necessity for a complete change in their way of living. *X645 *C59 They said of old the Soul had human shape, But smaller, subtler than the fleshly self, So wandered forth for airing when it pleased. And see] beside her cherub-face there floats A pale-lipped form aerial whispering Its promptings in that little shell her ear. NEWS is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar. This fine comparison has reference to Fred Vincy, who on that evening at Lowick Parsonage heard a lively discussion among the ladies on the news which their old servant had got from Tantripp concerning Mr Casaubon's strange mention of Mr Ladislaw in a codicil to his will made not long before his death. Miss Winifred was astounded to find that her brother had known the fact before, and observed that Camden was the most wonderful man for knowing things and not telling them; whereupon Mary Garth said that the codicil had perhaps got mixed up with the habits of spiders, which Miss Winifred never would listen to. Mrs Farebrother considered that the news had something to do with their having only once seen Mr Ladislaw at Lowick, and Miss Noble made many small compassionate mewings. Fred knew little and cared less about Ladislaw and the Lasaubons, and his mind never recurred to that discussion till one day calling on Rosamund at his mother's request to deliver a message as he passed, he happened to see Ladislaw going away. Fred and Rosamund had little to say to each other now that marriage had removed her from collision with the unpleasantness of brothers, and especially now that he had taken what she held the stupid and even reprehensible step of giving up the Church to take to such a business as Mr Garth's. Hence Fred talked by preference of what he considered indifferent news, and "˛a>˛ ˛propos˛ of that young Ladislaw" mentioned what he had heard at Lowick Parsonage. *X646 Now Lydgate, like Mr Farebrother, knew a great deal more than he told, and when had once been set thinking about the relation between Will and Dorothea his conjectures had gone beyond the fact. He imagined that there was a passionate attachment on both sides, and this struck him as much too serious to gossip about. He remembered Will's irritability when he had mentioned Mrs Casaubon, and was the more circumspect. On the whole his surmises, in addition to what he knew of the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance towards Ladislaw, and made him understand the vacillation which kept him at Middlemarch after he had said that he should go away. It was significant of the separateness between Lydgate's mind and Rosamund's that he had no impulse to speak to her on the subject; indeed, he did not quite trust her reticence towards Will. And he was right there; though he had no vision of the way in which her mind would act in urging her to speak. When she had repeated Fred's news to Lydgate, he said, "Take care you don't drop the faintest hint to Ladislaw, Rosy. He is likely to fly out as if you insulted him. If course it is a painful affair." Rosamund turned her neck and patted her hair, looking the image of placid indifference. But the next time Will came when Lydgate was away, she spoke archly about his not going to London as he had threatened. "I know all about it. I have a confidential little bird," said she, showing very pretty airs of her head over the bit of work held high between her active fingers. "There is a powerful magnet in this neighbourhood." "To be sure there is. Nobody knows that better than you," said Will, with light gallantry, but inwardly prepared to be angry. "It is really the most charming romance: Mr Casaubon jealous, and foreseeing that there was no one else whom Mrs Causabon would like so much to marry, and no one who would so much like to marry her as a certain gentleman and then laying a plan to spoil all by making her forfeit her property if she did marry that gentleman -- and then -- and then -- and then -- oh, I have no doubt the end will be thoroughly romantic." *X647 "Great God] what do you mean?" said Will, flushing over face and ears, his features seeming to change as if he had had a violent shake. "Don't joke; tell me what you mean." "You don't really know?" said Rosamund, no longer playful, and desiring nothing better than to tell in order that she might evoke effects. "No]" he returned, impatiently. "Don't know that Mr Casaubon has left it in his will that if Mrs Casaubon marries you she is to forfeit all her property?" "How do you know that it is true?" said Will, eagerly. "My brother Fred heard it from the Farebrothers." Will started up from his chair and reached his hat. "I daresay she likes you better than the property," said Rosamund, looking at him from a distance. "Pray don't say any more about it," said Will, in a hoarse undertone extremely unlike his usual light voice. "It is a foul insult to her and to me." Then he sat down absently, looking before him, but seeing nothing. "Now you are angry with ˛me˛," said Rosamund. "It is too bad to bear ˛me˛ malice. You ought to be obliged to me for telling you." "So I am," said Will, abruptly, speaking with that kind of double soul which belongs to dreamers who answer questions. "I expect to hear of the marriage," said Rosamund, playfully. "Never] You will never hear of the marriage]" With those words uttered impetuously, Will rose, put out his hand to Rosamund, still with the air of a somnambulist, and went away. When he was gone, Rosamund left her chair and walked to the other end of the room, leaning when she got there against a ˛chiffonnie>re˛, and looking out of the window wearily. She was oppressed by ennui, and by that dissatisfaction which in women's minds is continually turning into a trivial jealousy. referring to no real claims, springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness of egoism, and yet capable of impelling action as well as speech. "There really is nothing to care for much," said poor Rosamund inwardly, thinking of the family *X648 at Quallingham, who did not write to her; and that perhaps Tertius when he came home would tease her about expenses. She had already secretly disobeyed him by asking her father to help them, and he had ended decisively by saying, "I am more likely to want help myself." *X649 *C60 Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. JUSTICE SHALLOW A few days afterwards -- it was already the end of August -- there was an occasion which caused some excitement in Middlemarch: the public, if it chose, was to have the advantage of buying, under the distinguished auspices of Mr Borthrop Trumbull, the furniture, books, and pictures, which anybody might see by the handbills to be the best in every kind, belonging to Edwin Larcher, Esq. This was not one of the sales indicating the depression of trade; on the contrary, it was due to Mr Larcher's great success in the carrying business, which warranted his purchase of a mansion near Riverston already furnished in high style by an illustrious Spa physician -- furnished indeed with such large framefuls of expensive flesh-painting in the dining-room, that Mrs Larcher was nervous until reassured by finding the subjects to be Scriptural. Hence the fine opportunity to purchasers which was well pointed out in the hand-bills of Mr Borthrop Trumbull, whose acquaintance with the history of art enabled him to state that the hall furniture, to be sold without reserve, comprised a piece of carving by a contemporary of Gibbons. At Middlemarch in those times a large sale was regarded as a kind of festival. There was a table spread with the best cold eatables, as at a superior funeral; and facilities were offered for that generous drinking of cheerful glasses which might lead to generous and cheerful bidding for undesirable articles. Mr Larcher's sale was the more attractive in the fine weather because the house stood just at the end of town, with a garden and stables attached, in that pleasant issue from Middlemarch called the London Road, which was also the road to the New Hospital and to Mr Bulstrode's retired residence, known as The Shrubs. In short, the auction was as good as a fair, and drew all classes with leisure to command: to some, who risked making bids in order simply to raise prices, it was almost equal to *X650 betting at the races. The second day, when the best furniture was to be sold, "everybody" was there; even Mr Thesiger, the rector of St Peter's, had looked in for a short time, wishing to buy the carved table, and had rubbed elbows with Mr Bambridge and Mr Horrock. There was a wreath of Middlemarch ladies accommodated with tables round the large table in the dining-room, where Mr Borthrop Trumbull was mounted with desk and hammer; but the rows chiefly of masculine faces behind were often varied by incomings and outgoings both from the door and the large bow-window opening on to the lawn. "Everybody" that day did not include Mr Bulstrode, whose health could not well endure crowds and draughts. But Mrs Bulstrode had particularly wished to have a certain picture -- a Supper at Emmaus, attributed in the catalogue to Guido, and at the last moment before the day of the sale Mr Bulstrode had called at the office of the ˛Pioneer˛, of which he was now one of the proprietors, to beg of Mr Ladislaw as a great favour that he would obligingly use his remarkable knowledge of pictures on behalf of Mrs Bulstrode, and judge of the value of this particular painting -- "if," added the scrupulously polite banker, "attendance at the sale would not interfere with the arrangements for your departure, which I know is imminent." This proviso might have sounded rather satirically in Will's ear if he had been in a mood to care about such satire. It referred to an understanding entered into many weeks before with the proprietors of the paper, that he should be at liberty any day he pleased to hand over the management to the sub-editor whom he had been training; since he wished finally to quit Middlemarch. But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still -- very wonderful things have happened] Will did not confess this weakness to himself, but he lingered. What was the use of going to London at that time of the year? The Rugby men who would remember him were not there; and so far as political writing was concerned, he would rather for *X651 a few weeks go on with the ˛Pioneer˛. At the present moment, however, when Mr Bulstrode was speaking to him, he had both a strengthened resolve to go and an equally strong resolve not to go till he had once more seen Dorothea. Hence he replied that he had reasons for deferring his departure a little, and would be happy to go to the sale. Will was in a defiant mood, his consciousness being deeply stung with the thought that the people who looked at him probably knew a fact tantamount to an accusation against him as a fellow with low designs which were to be frustrated by a disposal of property. Like most people who assert their frredom with regard to conventional distinction, he was prepared to be sudden and quick at quarrel with any one who might hint that he had personal reasons for that assertion -- that there was anything in his blood, his bearing, or his character to which he gave the mask of an opinion. When he was under an irritating impression of this kind he would go about for days with a defiant look, the colour changing in his transparent skin as if he were on the ˛qui˛ ˛vive˛, watching for something which he had to dart upon. This expression was peculiarly noticeable in him at the sale, and those who had only seen him in his moods of gentle oddity or of bright enjoyment would have been struck with a contrast. He was not sorry to have this occasion for appearing in public before the Middlemarch tribes of Toller, Hackbutt, and the rest, who looked down on him as an adventurer, and were in a state of brutal ignorance about Dante -- who sneered at his Polish blood, and were themselves of a breed very much in need of crossing. He stood in a conspicuous place not far from the auctioneer, with a forefinger in each side-pocket and his head thrown backward, not caring to speak to anybody, though he had been cordially welcomed as a connois˛sure˛ by Mr Trumbull, who was enjoying the utmost activity of his great faculties. And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit their powers of speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial auctioneer keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his encyclopa+edic knowledge. Some saturine, sour-blooded persons might object to be constantly insisting on the merits of all articles from bootjacks to "Berghems"; but Mr Borthrop *X652 Trumbull had a kindly liquid in his veins; he was an admirer by nature, and would have liked to have the universe under his hammer, feeling that it would go at a higher figure for his recommendation. Meanwhile Mrs Larcher's drawing-room furniture was enough for him. When Will Ladislaw had come in, a second fender, said to have been forgotten in its right place, suddenly claimed the auctioneer's enthusiasm, which he distributed on the equitable principle of praising those things most which were most in need of praise. The fender was of polished steel, with much lancet-shaped open-work and a sharp edge. "Now, ladies," said he, "I shall appeal to you. Here is a fender, which at any other sale would hardly be offered without reserve, being, as I may say, for quality of steel and quaintness of design, a kind of thing" -- here Mr Trumbull dropped his voice and became slightly nasal, trimming his outlines with his left finger -- "that might not fall in with ordinary tastes. Allow me to tell you that by-and-by this style of workmanship will be the only one in vogue -- half-a-crown, you said? thank you -- going at half-a-crown, this characteristic fender; and I have particular information that the antique style is very much sought after in high quarters. Three shillings -- three-and-sixpence -- hold it well up, Joseph. Look, ladies, at the chastity of the design -- I have no doubt myself that it was turned out in the last century] Four shillings, Mr Mawmsey? -- four shillings." "It's not a thing I would put in ˛my˛ drawing-room," said Mrs Mawmsey, audibly, for the warning of the rash husband. "I wonder ˛at˛ Mrs Larcher. Every blessed child's head that fell against it would be cut in two. The edge is like a knife." "Quite true," rejoined Mr Trumbull, quickly, "and most uncommonly useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather shoetie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand: many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him down. Gentlemen, here's a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time -- with astonishing celerity -- four-and-sixpence -- five -- five-and-sixpence -- an appropriate thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guest a little out of his mind -- six shillings -- thank you, Mr Clintup -- *X653 going at six shillings -- going -- gone]" The auctioneer's glance, which had been searching round him with a preternatural susceptibility to all signs of bidding, here dropped on the paper before him, and his voice too dropped into a tone of indifferent despatch as he said, "Mr Clintup. Be handy, Joseph." "It was worth six shillings to have a fender you could always tell that joke on," said Mr Clintup, laughing low and apologetically to his next neighbour. He was a diffident though distinguished nurseryman, and feared that the audience might regard his bid as a foolish one. Meanwhile Joseph had brought a trayful of small articles. "Now, ladies," said Mr Trumbull, taking up one of the articles, "this tray containes a very recherchy lot -- a collection of trifles for the drawing-room table -- and trifles make the sum of human things -- nothing more important than trifles -- (yes, Mr Ladislaw, yes, by-and-by) -- but pass the tray around, Joseph -- these bijoux must be examined, ladies. This I have in my hand is an ingenious contrivance -- a sort of practical rebus I may call it: here, you see, it looks like an elegant heart-shaped box, portable -- for the pocket; there, again, it becomes like a splendid double flower - an ornament for the table; and now" -- Mr Trumbull allowed the flower to fall alarmingly into strings of heart-shaped leaves -- "a book of riddles] No less than five hundred printed in a beautiful red. Gentlemen, if I had less of a conscience, I should not wish you to bid high for this lot -- I have a longing for it myself. What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle? -- it hinders profane language, and attaches a man to the society of refined females. This ingenious article itself, without the elegant domino-box, card-basket, &c, ought alone to give a high price to the lot. Carried in the pocket it might make an individual welcome in any society. Four shillings, sir? -- four shillings for this remarkable collection of riddles with the et ca+eteras. Here is a sample: "How must you spell honey to make it catch lady-birds? Answer -- money." " You hear? -- lady-birds -- honey -- money. This is an amusement to sharpen the intellect; it has a sting -- it has what we call satire, and wit without indecency. Four-and-sixpence -- five shillings." The bidding ran on with warming rivalry. Mr Bowyer was a *X654 bidder, and this was too exasperating. Bowyer couldn't afford it, and only wanted to hinder every other man from making a figure. The current carried even Mr Horrock with it, but this committal of himself to an opinion fell from him with so little sacrifice of his neutral expression, that the bid might not have been detected as his but for the friendly oaths of Mr Bambridge, who wanted to know what Horrock would do with the blasted stuff only fit for haberdashers given over to that state of perdition which the horse-dealer so cordially recognized in the majority of earthly existences. The lot was finally knocked down to a guinea to Mr Spilkins, a young Slender of the neighbourhood, who was reckless with his pocket-money and felt his want of memory for riddles. "Come, Trumbull, this is too bad -- you've been putting some old maid's rubbish into the sale," murmured Mr Toller, getting close to the auctioneer. "I want to see how the prints go, and I must be off soon." "Immediately, Mr Toller. It was only an act of benevolence which your noble heart would approve. Joseph] quick with the prints -- Lot 235. Now, gentlemen, you who are connoiss˛ures˛, you are going to have a treat. Here is an engraving of the Duke of Wellington surrounded by his staff on the Field of Waterloo; and notwithstanding recent events which have, as it were, enveloped our great Hero in a cloud, I will be bold to say -- for a man in my line must not be blown about by political winds -- that a finer subject -- of the modern order, belonging to our own time and epoch -- the understanding of man could hardly conceive: angels might, perhaps, but not men, sirs, not men." "Who painted it?" said Mr Powderell, much impressed. "It is a proof before the letter, Mr Powderell -- the painter is not known," answered Trumbull, with a certain gaspingness in his last words, after which he pursed up his lips and stared round him. "I'll bid a pound]" said Mr Powderell, in a tone of resolved emotion, as of a man ready to put himself in the breach. Whether from awe or pity, nobody raised the price on him. Next came two Dutch prints which Mr Toller had been eager for, and after he had secured them he went away. Other prints, and afterwards some paintings, were sold to leading *X655 Middlemarchers who had come with a special desire for them, and there was a more active movement of the audience in and out; some who had bought what they wanted, going away, others coming in either quite newly or from a temporary visit to the refreshments which were spread under the marquee on the lawn. It was this marquee that Mr Bambridge was bent on buying, and he appeared to like looking inside it frequently, as a foretaste of its possession,. On the last occasion of his return from it he was observed to bring with him a new companion, a stranger to Mr Trumbull and every one else, whose appearance, however, led to the supposition that he might be a relative of the horse-dealer's -- also "given to indulgence". His large whiskers, imposing swagger, and swing of the leg, made him a striking figure; but his suit of black, rather shabby at the edges, caused the prejudicial inference that he was not able to afford himself as much indulgence as he liked. "Who is it you've picked up, Bam?" said Mr Horrock, aside. "Ask him yourself," returned Mr Bambridge. "He said he'd just turned in from the road." Mr Horrock eyed the stranger, who was leaning back against his stick with one hand, using his toothpick with the other, and looking about him with a certain restlessness apparently under the silence imposed on him by circumstances. At length the ˛Supper˛ ˛at˛ ˛Emmaus˛ was brought forward, to Will's immense relief, for he was getting so tired of the proceedings that he had drawn back a little and leaned his shoulder against the wall just behind the auctioneer. He now came forward again, and his eye caught the conspicuous stranger, who, rather to his surprise, was staring at him markedly. But Will was immediately appealed to by Mr Trumbull. "Yes, Mr Ladislaw, yes; this interests you as a connoiss˛ure˛, I think. It is some pleasure," the auctioneer went on with a rising fervour, "to have a picture like this to show to a company of ladies and gentlemen -- a picture worth any sum to an individual whose means were on a level with his judgement. It is a painting of the Italian school -- by the celebrated ˛Guydo˛, the greatest painter in the world, the chief of the Old Masters, as they are called - I take it, because they were up to a thing or two beyond most of us -- in possession of secrets now lost to the bulk of *X656 mankind. Let me tell you gentlemen, I have seen a great many pictures by the Old Masters, and they are not all up to this mark -- some of them are darker than you might like, and not family subjects. But here is a ˛Guydo˛ -- the frame alone is worth pounds -- which any lady might be proud to hang up-- a suitable thing for what we calla refectory in a charitable institution, if any gentlemen of the Corporation wished to show his munifi˛cence˛. Turn it a little, sir? yes. Joseph, turn it a little to Mr Ladislaw -- Mr Ladislaw, having been abroad, understands the merit of these things, you observe." All eyes were for a moment turned towrds Will, who said, coolly, "Five pounds." The auctioneer burst out in deep remonstrance -- "Ah] Mr Ladislaw] the frame alone is worth that. Ladies and gentlemen, for the credit of the town] Suppose it should be discovered hereafter that a gem of art has been amongst us in this town, and nobody in Middlemarch awake to it. Five guineas -- five seven-six -- five ten. Still, ladies, still] It is a gem, and ""Full many a gem"", as the poet says, has been allowed to go at a nominal price because the public knew no better, because it was offered in circles where there was - I was going to say a low feeling, but no] -- Six pounds -- six guineas -- a ˛Guydo˛ of the first order going at six guineas -- it is an insult to religion, ladies; it touches us all as Christians, gentlemen, that a subject like this should go at such a low figure - six pounds ten -- seven --". The bidding was brisk, and Will continued to share in it, remembering that Mrs Bulstrode had a strong wish for the picture, and thinking that he might stretch the price to twelve pounds. But it was knocked down to him at ten guineas, where-upon he pushed his way towards the bow-window and went out. He chose to go under the marquee to get a glass of water, being hot and thirsty: it was empty of other visitors, and he asked the woman in attendance to fetch him some fresh water; but before she was well gone he was annoyed to see entering the florid stranger who had stared at him. It struck Will at this moment that the man might be one of those political parasitic insects of the bloated kind who had once or twice claimed acquaintance with him as having heard him speak on the Reform *X657 question, and who might think of getting a shilling by news. In this light his person, already rather heating to behold on a summer's day appeared the more disagreeable, and Will, half-seated on the elbow of a garden-chair, turned his eyes carefully away from the corner. But this signified little to our acquaintance Mr Raffles, who never hesitated to thrust himself on unwilling observation, if it suited his purpose to do so. He moved a step or two till he was in front of Will, and said with full-mouthed haste, "Excuse me, Mr Ladislaw -- was your mother's name Sarah Dunkirk?" Will, starting to his feet, moved backward a step, frowning and saying with some fierceness, "Yes, sir, it was. And what is that to you?" It was in Will's nature that the first spark it threw out was a direct answer of the question and a challenge of the consequences. To have said, "What is that to you?" in the first instance, would have seemed like shuffling -- as if he minded who knew anything about his origin] Raffles on his side had not the same eagerness for a collision which was implied in Ladislaw's threatening air. The slim young fellow with his girl's complexion looked like a tiger-cat ready to spring on him. Under such circumstances Mr Raffle's pleasure in annoying his company was kept in abeyance. "No offence, my good sir, no offence; I only remember your mother -- knew her when she was a girl. But it is your father that you feature, sir. I had the pleasure of seeing your father too. Parents alive, Mr Ladislaw?" "No]" thundered Will, in the same attitude as before. "Should be glad to do you a service, Mr Ladislaw -- by Jove, I should] Hope to meet again." Hereupon Raffles, who had lifted his hat with the last words, turned himself round with a swing of his leg and walked away. Will looked after him a moment, and could see that he did not re-enter the auction room, but appeared to be walking towards the road. For an instant he thought that he had been foolish not to let the man go on talking; -- but no] on the whole he preferred doing without knowledge from that source. Later in the evening, however, Raffles overtook him in the street, and appearing either to have forgotten the roughness of *X658 his former reception or to intend avenging it by a forgiving familiarity, greeted him jovially and walked by his side, remarking at first on the pleasantness of the town and neighbourhood. Will at first suspected that the man had been drinking and was considering how to shake him off when Raffles said -- "I've been abroad myself, Mr Ladislaw -- I've seen the world -- used to parley-vous a little. It was at Boulogne I saw your father -- a most uncommon likeness you are of himm by Jove] mouth -- nose -- eyes -- hair turned off your brow just like this -- a little in the foreign style. John Bull doesn't do much of that. But your father was very ill when I saw him. Lord,lord] hands you might see through. You were a small youngster, then. Did he get well?" "No," said Will, curtly. "Ah] Well] I've often wondered what became of your mother. She ran away from her friends when she was a young lass -- a proud-spirited lass, and pretty, by Jove. ˛I˛ knew the reason why she ran away," said Raffles, winking slowly as he looked sideways at Will. "You know nothing dishonourable of her sir," said Will, turning on him rather savagely. But Mr Raffles just now was not sensitive to shades of manner. "Not a bit]" said he, tossing his head decisively. "She was a little too honourable to like her friends -- that was it]" Here Raffles again winked slowly. "Lord bless you, I knew all about 'em -- a little in what you may call the respectable thieving line -- the high style of receiving-house -- none of your holes and corners -- first-rate. Slap-up shop, high profits and no mistake. But Lord] Sarah would have known nothing about it -- a dashing young lady she was -- fine boarding-school -- fit for a lord's wife -- only Archie Duncan threw it at her out of spite, because she would have nothing to do with him. And so she ran away from the whole concern. I travelled for 'em, sir, in a gentlemanly way -- at a high salary. They didn't mind her running away at first -- godly folk, sir, very godly -- and she was for the stage. The son was alive then, and the daughter was at a discount. Hallo] here we are at the Blue Bull. What do you say, Mr Ladislaw? shall we turn in and have a glass?" "No, I must say good evening," said Will; dashing up a passage which led to Lowick Gate, and almost running to get out of Raffle's reach. He walked a long while on the Lowick Road away from the town, glad of the starlit darkness when it came. He felt as if he had had dirt cast on him amidst shouts of scorn. There was this to confirm the fellow's statement -- that his mother never would tell him the reason why she had run away from her family. Well] what was he, Will Ladislaw, the worse, supposing the truth about that family to be the ugliest? His mother had braved hardship in order to separate herself from it. But if Dorothea's friends had known this story -- if the Chettams had known it -- they would have had a fine colour to give their suspicions, a welcome ground for thinking him unfit to come near her. However, let them suspect what they pleased, they would find themselves in the wrong. They would find out that the blood in his veins was as free from the taint of meanness as theirs. *C61 "Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true." RASSELAS The same night, when Mr Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him into his private sitting-room. "Nicholas," she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, "there has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you -- it has made me quite uncomfortable." "What kind of man, my dear?" said Mr Bulstrode, dreadfully certain of the answer. "A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner. He declared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be sorry not to see him. He wanted to wait for you here, but I told him he could see you at the Bank to-morrow. Most impudent he was] -- stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives. I don't believe he would have gone away if Blucher had not happened to break his chain and come running round on the gravel -- for I was in the garden; so I said, "You'd better go away -- the dog is very fierce, and I can't hold him." Do you really know anything of such a man?" "I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Bulstrode, in his usual subdued voice, "an unfortunate, dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much in days gone by. However, I presume you will not be troubled by him again. He will probably come to the Bank -- to beg, doubtless." No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr Bulstrode had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner. His wife, not sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and staring absently at the ground. He started nervously and looked up as she entered. "You look very ill, Nicholas. Is there anything the matter?" "I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr Bulstrode, *X661 who was so frequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this cause of depression. "Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar." Physically Mr Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the affectionate attention soothed him. Though always polite, it was his habit to receive such services with marital coolness, as his wife's duty. But to-day, while she was bending over him, he said, "You are very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something new in it to her ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was, but her woman's solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he might be going to have an illness. "Has anything worried you?" she said. "Did that man come to you at the Bank?" "Yes; it was as I had supposed. He is a man who at one time might have done better. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature." "Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs Bulstrode, anxiously; but for certain reasons she refrained from adding, "it was very disagreeable to hear him calling himself a friend of yours." At that moment she would not have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with her own. Not that she knew much about them. That her husband had at first been employed in a bank, that he had afterwards entered into what he called city business and gained a fortune before he was three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much older than himself -- a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that disadvantageous quality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired into with the dispassionate judgement of a second -- was almost as much as she had cared to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr Bulstrode's narrative occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his inclination to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and philanthropic efforts. She believed in him as an excellent man whose piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose influence had turned her own mind towards seriousness, and whose share of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position. But she also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy; whose family *X662 was undeniable in a Middlemarch light -- a better light surely than any thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting chapel-yards. The unreformed provincial mind distrusted London; and was convinced that to be saved in the Church was more respectable. She so much wished to ignore towards others that her husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him. He was quite aware of this; indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this ingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were equally sincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had married out of a thorough inclination still subsisting. But his fears were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife as from every one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to him. When she said -- "Is he quite gone away?" "Oh, I trust so," he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober unconcern into his tone as possible. But in truth Mr Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust. In the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed. He had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come to Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighbourhood would suit him to live in. He had certainly had a few debts to pay more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet: a cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present. What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached. By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay. This time Raffles declined to be "seen off the premises", as he expressed it -- declined to quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode's eyes. He meant to go by coach the next day -- if he chose. Bulstrode felt himself helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing could avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise. On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles -- unless providence sent death to hinder him -- *X663 would come back to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty was a terror. It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgement of his neighbours and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobium of the religion with which he had diligently associated himself. The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay: but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworth past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame. Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees. The successive events inward and outward were there in one view: though each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the consciousness. Once more he saw himself the young banker's clerk, with an agreeable person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of theological definition: an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking experience in conviction of sin and sense of pardon. Again he heard himself called for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings, speaking on religious platforms, preaching in private houses. Again he felt himself thinking of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclined towards missionary labour. That was the happiest time of his life: that was the spot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream. The people *X664 among whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very few, but they were very near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the more; his power stretched through a narrow space, but he felt its effect the more intensely. He believed without effort in the peculiar work of grace within him, and in the signs that God intended him for special instrumentality. Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion he had when he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school, was invited to a fine villa belonging to Mr Dunkirk, the richest man in the congregation. Soon he became an intimate there, honoured for his piety by the wife, marked out for his ability by the husband, whose wealth was due to a flourishing city and west-end trade. That was the setting-in of a new current for his ambition, directing his prospects of "instrumentality" towards the uniting of distinguished religious gifts with successful business. By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate partner died, and nobody seemed to the principle so well fitted to fill the severely-felt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode, if he would become confidential accountant. The offer was accepted. The business was a pawnbroker's, of the most magnificent sort both in extent and profits; and on a short acquaintance with it Bulstrode became aware that one source of magnificent profit was the easy reception of any goods offered without strict inquiry as to where they came from. But there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness or dinginess to give suggestions of shame. He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer. The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one? The profits made out of lost souls -- where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God's way of saving His chosen? "Thou knowest," -- the young Bulstrode had said then, as the older Bulstrode was saying now -- "Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from these things -- how I view them all as implements for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness." *X665 Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual experiences were not wanting which at last made the retention of his position seem a service demanded of him: the vista of a fortune had already opened itself, and Bulstrode's shrinking remained private. Mr Dunkirk had never expected that there would be any shrinking at all: he had never conceived that trade had anything to do with the scheme of salvation. And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on two distinct lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible with his business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible. Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same pleas -- indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them into intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying, his soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything for God's sake, being indifferent to it for his own. And yet -- if he could be back in that far-off spot with his youthful poverty -- why, then he would choose to be a missionary. But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on. There was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury. Years before, the only daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage; and now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr Dunkirk died also. The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often adore their priest or "man-made" minister. It was natural that after a time marriage should have been thought of between them. But Mrs who had long been regarded as lost both to God and her parents. It was known that the daughter had married, but she was utterly gone out of sight. The mother, having lost her boy, imagined a grandson and wished in a double sense to reclaim her daughter. If she were found, there would be a channel for property -- perhaps a wide one, in the provision for several grandchildren. Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs Dunkirk would marry again. Bulstrode concurred; but after advertisement as well as other *X666 modes of inquiry had been tried, the mother believed that her daughter was not to be found, and consented to marry without reservation of property. The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew it, and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away. That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the rigid outline with which acts present themselves to onlookers. But for himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion. Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness, had come, and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words -- "Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you]" The events were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there -- namely, that they were in favour of his own ends. It was easy for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring what were God's intentions with regard to himself. Could it be for God's service that this fortune should in any considerable proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality -- people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences? Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, "The daughter shall not be found" -- nevertheless when the moment came he kept her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed the mother with concolation in the probability that the unhappy young woman might be no more. There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was unrighteous; but how could he go back? He had mental exercises, called himself nought, laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of instrumentality. And after five years Death again came to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the business, which was carried *X667 on for thirteen years afterwards before it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was becoming provincially, solidly important -- a banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr Vincy's silk. And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years -- when all that preceded it had long laid benumbed in the consciousness -- that past had risen and immersed his thoughts as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being. Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his longings and terrors. There, he thought, lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue. The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind. The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers. Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them? Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause? And to Mr Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies, who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence. Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince *X668 of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant. This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men. But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought -- a vessel to be consecrated by use -- but use me]" -- had been the mould into which he had constrained his immense need of being something important and predominating. And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in danger of being broken and utterly cast away. What if the acts he had reconciled himself to, because they made him a stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory? If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he was cast out from the temple as one who had brought unclean offerings. He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But to-day a repentance had come which was of a bitter flavour, and a threatening Providence urged him to a kind of propitation which was not simply a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect for him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must bring restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that Bulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a great dread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shame wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day, while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust -- by what sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion can only change when the emotions *X669 which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage. He had seen Raffles actually going away on the Brassing coach, and this was a temporary relief; it removed the pressure of an immediate dread, but did not put an end to the spiritual conflict and the need to win protection. At last he came to a difficult resolve, and wrote a letter to Will Ladislaw, begging him to be at The Shrubs that evening for a private interview at nine o'clock. Will had felt no particular surprise at the request, and connected it with some new notions about the ˛Pioneer˛; but when he was shown into Mr Bulstrode's private room, he was struck with the painfully worn look on the banker's face, and was going to say, "Are you ill?" when, checking himself in that abruptness, he only inquired after Mrs Bulstrode, and her satisfaction with the picture bought for her. "Thank you, she is quite satisfied; she has gone out with her daughters this evening. I begged you to come, Mr Ladislaw, because I have a communication of a very private -- indeed, I will say, of a sacredly confidential nature, which I desire to make to you. Nothing, I daresay, has been farther from your thoughts than that there had been important ties in the past which could connect your history with mine." Will felt something like an eletric shock. He was already in a state of keen sensitiveness and hardly allayed agitation on the subject of ties in the past, and his presentiments were not agreeable. It seemed like the fluctuations of a dream -- as if the action begun by that loud bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed sickly-looking piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib formality of speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him as their remembered contrast. He answered, with a marked change of colour -- "No, indeed, nothing." "You see before you, Mr Ladislaw, a man who is deeply stricken. But for the urgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am before the bar of One who seeth not as man seeth, I should be under no compulsion to make the disclosure which has been my object in asking you to come here to-night. So far as human laws go, you have no claim on me whatever." Will was even more uncomfortable than wondering. Mr *X670 Bulstrode had paused, leaning his head on his hand, and looking at the floor. But he now fixed his examining glance on Will and said -- "I am told that your mother's name was Sarah Dunkirk, and that she ran away from her friends to go on the stage. Also, that your father was at one time much emaciated by illness. May I ask if you can confirm these statements?" "Yes, they are all true," said Will, struck with the order in which an inquiry had come, that might have been expected to be preliminary to the banker's hints. But Mr Bulstrode had tonight followed the order of his emotions; he entertained no doubt that the opportunity for restitution had come, and he had an overpowering impulse towards the penitential expression by which he was deprecating chastisement. "Do you know any particulars of your mother's family?" he continued. "No; she never liked to speak of them. She was a very generous, honourable woman," said Will, almost angrily. "I do not wish to allege anything against her. Did she never mention her mother to you at all?" "I have heard her say that she thought her mother did not know the reason of her running away. She said ""poor mother"" in a pitying tone." "That mother became my wife," said Bulstrode, and then paused a moment before he added, "you have a claim on me, Mr Ladislaw: as I said before, not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes. I was enriched by that marriage -- a result which would probably not have taken place -- certainly not to the same extent -- if your grandmother could have discovered her daughter. That daughter, I gather, is no loner living]" "No," said Will, feeling suspicion and repugnance rising so strongly within him, that without quite knowing what he did, he took his hat from the floor and stood up. The impulse within him was to reject the disclosed connection. "Pray, be seated, Mr Ladislaw," said Bulstrode, anxiously. "Doubtless you are startled by the suddenness of this discovery. But I entreat your patience with one who is already bowed down by inward trial." *X671 Will reseated himself, feeling some pity which was half contempt for this voluntary self-abasement of an elderly man. "It is my wish, Mr Ladislaw, to make amends for the deprivation which befell your mother. I know that you are without fortune, and I wish to supply you adequately from a store which would have probably already been yours had your grandmother been certain of your mother's existence and been able to find her." Mr Bulstrode paused. He felt that he was performing a striking piece of scrupulosity in the judgement of his auditor, and a penitential act in the eyes of God. He had no clue to the state of Will Ladislaw's mind, smarting as it was from the clear hint of Raffles, and with its natural quickness in construction stimulated by the expectation of discoveries which he would have been glad to conjure back into darkness. Will made no answer for several moments, till Mr Bulstrode, who at the end of his speech had cast his eyes on the floor, now raised them with an examining glance, which Will met fully, saying -- "I suppose you did know of my mother's existence, and knew where she might have been found." Bulstrode shrank -- there was a visible quivering in his face and hands. He was totally unprepared to have his advances met in this way, or to find himself urged into more revelation than he had beforehand set down as needful. But at that moment he dared not tell a lie, and he felt suddenly uncertain of his ground which he had trodden with some confidence before. "I will not deny that you conjecture rightly," he answered, with a faltering in his tone. "And I wish to make atonement to you as the one still remaining who has suffered a loss through me. You enter, I trust, into my purpose, Mr Ladislaw, which has a reference to higher than merely human claims, and as I have already said, is entirely independent of any legal compulsion. I am ready to narrow my own resources and the prospects of my family by binding myself to allow you five hundred pounds at my death -- nay, to do still more, if more should be definitely necessary to any laudable project on your part." Mr Bulstrode had gone on to particulars in the expectation that these would *X672 work strongly on Ladislaw, and merge other feelings in grateful acceptance. But Will was looking as stubborn as possible, with his lip pouting and his fingers in his side-pockets. He was not in the least touched, and said firmly -- "Before I make any reply to your proposition, Mr Bulstrode, I must beg you to answer a question or two. Were you connected with the business by which that fortune you speak of was originally made?" Mr Bulstrode's thought was, "Raffles has told him." How could he refuse to answer when he had volunteered what drew forth the question? He answered, "Yes." "And was that business -- or was it not -- a thoroughly dishonourable one -- nay, one that, if its nature had been made public, might have ranked those concerned in it with thieves and convicts?" Will's tone had a cutting bitterness: he was moved to put his question as nakedly as he could. Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger. He had been prepared for a scene of self-abasement, but his intense pride and his habit of supremacy overpowered penitence, and even dread, when this young man, whom he had meant to benefit, turned on him with the air of a judge. "The business was established before I became acquainted with it, sir; nor is it for you to institute an inquiry of that kind." he answered, not raising his voice, but speaking with quick defiantness. "Yes, it is," said Will, starting up again with his hat in his hand. "It is eminently mine to ask such questions, when I have to decide whether I will have transactions with you and accept your money. My unblemished honour is important to me. It is important to me to have no stain on my birth and connections. And now I find there is a stain which I can't help. My mother felt it, and tried to keep as clear of it as she could, and so will I. You shall keep your ill-gotten money. If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to any one who could disprove what you have told me. What I have to thank you for is that you kept the money till now, when I can refuse it. It ought to lie with a man's self that he is a gentleman. Good-night, sir." *X673 Bulstrode was going to speak, but Will with determined quickness was out of the room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had closed behind him. He was too strongly possessed with passionate rebellion against this inherited blot which had been thrust on his knowledge to reflect at present whether he had not been too hard on Bulstrode -- too arrogantly merciless towards a man of sixty, who was making efforts at retrieval when time had rendered them in vain. No third person listening could have thoroughly understood the impetuosity of Will's repulse or the bitterness of his words. No one but himself then knew how everything connected with the sentiment of his own dignity had an immediate bearing for him on his relation to Dorothea and to Mr Casaubon's treatment of him. And in the rush of impulses by which he flung back that offer of Bulstrode's, there was mingled the sense that it would have been impossible for him ever to tell Dorothea that he had accepted it. As for Bulstrode -- when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction, and wept like a woman. It was the first time he had encountered an open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with that scorn hurrying like venom through his system, there was no sensibility left to consolations. But the relief of weeping had to be checked. His wife and daughters soon came home from hearing the address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret that papa had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which they tried to repeat to him. Perhaps, through all other hidden thoughts, the one that breathed most comfort, was that Will Ladislaw at least was not likely to publish what had taken place that evening. *C62 He was a squyer of lowe degre, That loved the king's daughter of Hungarie. ˛Old˛ ˛Romance˛ Will Ladislaw's mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again, and forthwith quitting Middlemarch. The morning after his agitating scene with Bulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that various causes had detained him in the neighbourhood longer than he had expected, and asking her permission to call again at Lowick at some hour which she would mention on the earliest possible day, he being anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so until she had granted him an interview. He left the letter at the office, ordering the messenger to carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for an answer. Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words. His former farewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam, and had been announced as final even to the butler. It is certainly trying to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering. Still it was on the whole more satisfactory to his feeling to take the directest means of seeing Dorothea, than to use any device which might give an air of chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that it was what he earnestly sought. When he had parted from her before, he had been in ignorance of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation between them, and made a more absolute severance than he had then believed in. He knew nothing og Dorothea's private fortune, and being little used to reflect on such matters, took it for granted that according to Mr Casaubon's arrangement, marriage to him, Will Ladislaw, would mean that she consented to be penniless. That was not what he could wish for even in his secret heart, or even if she had been ready to meet such hard contrast for his sake. And then, too, there was the *X675 fresh smart of that disclosure about his mother's family, which if known would be an added reason why Dorothea's friends should look down upon him as utterly below her. The secret hope that after some years he might come back with the sense that he had at least a personal value equal to her wealth, seemed now the dreamly continuation of a dream. This change would surely justify him in asking Dorothea to receive him once more. But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will's note. In consequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to be at home in a week, she had driven first to Freshitt to carry the news, meaning to go on to the Grange to deliver some orders with which her uncle had intrusted her -- thinking, as he said, "a little mental occupation of this sort good for a widow". If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt that morning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed as to the readiness of certain people to sneer at his lingering in the neighbourhood. Sir James, indeed, though much relieved concerning Dorothea, had been on the watch to learn Ladislaw's movements, and had an instructed informant in Mr Standish, who was necessarily in his confidence on this matter. That Ladislaw had stayed in Middlemarch nearly two months after he had declared that he was going immediately, was a fact to embitter Sir James's suspicions, or at least to justify his aversion to a "young fellow" whom he represented to himself as slight, volatile, and likely to show such recklessness as naturally went along with a position unriveted by family ties or a strict profession. But he had just heard something from Standish which, while it justified these surmises about Will, offered a means of nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea. Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner. Good Sir James was this morning so far unlike himself that he was irritably anxious to say something to Dorothea on a subject which he usually avoided as if it had been a matter of shame to them both. He could not use Celia as a medium, because he did not choose that she should know the kind of gossip he had in his mind; *X676 and before Dorothea happened to arrive he had been trying to imagine how, with his shyness and unready tongue, he could ever manage to introduce his communication. Her unexpected presence brought him to utter hopelessness in his own power of saying anything unpleasant; but desperation suggested a resource; he sent the groom on an unsaddled horse across the park with a pencilled note to Mrs Cadwallader, who already knew the gossip, and would think it no compromise of herself to repeat it as often as required. Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr Garth, whom she wanted to see, was expected at the Hall within the hour, and she was still talking to Caleb on the gravel when Sir James, on the watch for the rector's wife, saw her coming and met her with the needful hints. "Enough] I understand," said Mrs Cadwallader. "You shall be innocent. I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself." "I don't mean that it's of any consequence," said Sir James, disliking that Mrs Cadwallader should understand too much. "Only it is desirable that Dorothea should know there are reasons why she should not receive him again; and I really can't say so to her. It will come lightly from you." It came very lightly indeed. When Dorothea quitted Caleb and turned to meet them, it appeared that Mrs Cadwallader had stepped across the park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat with Celia in a matronly way about the baby. And so Mr Brooke was coming back? Delightful -- coming back, it was to be hoped, quite cured of Parliamentary fever and pioneering. ˛Apropos˛ of the ˛Pioneer˛ -- somebody had prophesied that it would soon be like a dying dolphin, and turn all colours for want of knowing how to help itself, because Mr Brooke's ˛prote