Middlemarch | Project Gutenberg (2024)

PRELUDE.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixturebehaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly,on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at thethought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with herstill smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as twofawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; untildomestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back fromtheir great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’spassionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romancesof chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flamequickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after someillimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness,which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of lifebeyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not thelast of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epiclife wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhapsonly a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeurill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure whichfound no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangledcirc*mstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; butafter all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency andformlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent socialfaith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardentlywilling soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the commonyearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and theother condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenientindefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability tocount three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated withscientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits ofvariation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness ofwomen’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here andthere a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, andnever finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Hereand there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose lovingheart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersedamong hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.

CHAPTER I.

Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
—The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief bypoor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wearsleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appearedto Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemedto gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side ofprovincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from theBible,—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 additionthat her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcelymore trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed fromher sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for MissBrooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which hersister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: theBrooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably“good:” if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not findany yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiralor a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritangentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed tocome out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable familyestate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, andattending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regardedfrippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was well-bredeconomy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deductedfrom, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Suchreasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart fromreligious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would havedetermined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s sentiments, onlyinfusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentousdoctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many passages ofPascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies ofmankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of femininefashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxietiesof a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest ingimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearnedby its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might franklyinclude the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she wasenamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed toher to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, andthen to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended tointerfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom,by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection. With all this, she, theelder of the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both been educated,since they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on plans atonce narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in aSwiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this wayto remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with theiruncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, anduncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger years, and was held in thispart of the county to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr.Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was onlysafe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he wouldspend as little money as possible in carrying them out. For the mostglutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man hasbeen seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of hissnuff-box, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance;but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turningsometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk or his way of “letting things be”on his estate, and making her long all the more for the time when she would beof age and have some command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded asan heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from theirparents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr.Brooke’s estate, presumably worth about three thousand a-year—a rental whichseemed wealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel’s late conducton the Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeousplutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.

And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects?Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence onregulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitatebefore he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse alloffers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on abrick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thoughtherself living in the time of the Apostles—who had strange whims of fastinglike a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such awife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the applicationof her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping ofsaddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself insuch fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the greatsafeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were atlarge, one might know and avoid them.

The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, wasgenerally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, whileMiss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking.Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing andworldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues whichmake a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by thisalarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable withit. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved thefresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeksglowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding wasan indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; shefelt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward torenouncing it.

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was prettyto see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogethersuperior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange fromsome other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must bein love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantlyconsidered from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would begood for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herselfwould have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all hereagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas aboutmarriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, ifshe had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made inmatrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the othergreat men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but anamiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when sheexpressed uncertainty,—how could he affect her as a lover? The reallydelightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, andcould teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

These peculiarities of Dorothea’s character caused Mr. Brooke to be all themore blamed in neighboring families for not securing some middle-aged lady asguide and companion to his nieces. But he himself dreaded so much the sort ofsuperior woman likely to be available for such a position, that he allowedhimself to be dissuaded by Dorothea’s objections, and was in this case braveenough to defy the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector’s wife,and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner ofLoamshire. So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle’s household, and did not at alldislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.

Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another gentlemanwhom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt some veneratingexpectation. This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as aman of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a greatwork concerning religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to givelustre to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more clearlyascertained on the publication of his book. His very name carried animpressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise chronology ofscholarship.

Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she had setgoing in the village, and was taking her usual place in the pretty sitting-roomwhich divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on finishing a plan for somebuildings (a kind of work which she delighted in), when Celia, who had beenwatching her with a hesitating desire to propose something, said—

“Dorothea, dear, if you don’t mind—if you are not very busy—suppose we lookedat mamma’s jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six months to-daysince uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at them yet.”

Celia’s face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full presence ofthe pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and principle; twoassociated facts which might show a mysterious electricity if you touched themincautiously. To her relief, Dorothea’s eyes were full of laughter as shelooked up.

“What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar or sixlunar months?”

“It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April when unclegave them to you. You know, he said that he had forgotten them till then. Ibelieve you have never thought of them since you locked them up in the cabinethere.”

“Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know.” Dorothea spoke in a fullcordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencil in her hand,and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.

Celia colored, and looked very grave. “I think, dear, we are wanting in respectto mamma’s memory, to put them by and take no notice of them. And,” she added,after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification, “necklaces arequite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even thanyou are, used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally—surely there arewomen in heaven now who wore jewels.” Celia was conscious of some mentalstrength when she really applied herself to argument.

“You would like to wear them?” exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonisheddiscovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she hadcaught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments. “Of course, then,let us have them out. Why did you not tell me before? But the keys, the keys!”She pressed her hands against the sides of her head and seemed to despair ofher memory.

“They are here,” said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long meditatedand prearranged.

“Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box.”

The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread out, makinga bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection, but a few of theornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest that was obvious atfirst being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and apearl cross with five brilliants in it. Dorothea immediately took up thenecklace and fastened it round her sister’s neck, where it fitted almost asclosely as a bracelet; but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style ofCelia’s head and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glassopposite.

“There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin. But this cross youmust wear with your dark dresses.”

Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. “O Dodo, you must keep the crossyourself.”

“No, no, dear, no,” said Dorothea, putting up her hand with carelessdeprecation.

“Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you—in your black dress, now,” said Celia,insistingly. “You might wear that.”

“Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would wearas a trinket.” Dorothea shuddered slightly.

“Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,” said Celia, uneasily.

“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “Souls havecomplexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”

“But you might like to keep it for mamma’s sake.”

“No, I have other things of mamma’s—her sandal-wood box which I am so fondof—plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need discuss them nolonger. There—take away your property.”

Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in thisPuritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of anunenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.

“But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will never wearthem?”

“Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep youin countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel asif I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I should notknow how to walk.”

Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. “It would be a little tightfor your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit you better,” she said,with some satisfaction. The complete unfitness of the necklace from all pointsof view for Dorothea, made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening somering-boxes, which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sunpassing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.

“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current offeeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colors seem topenetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used asspiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments ofheaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.”

“And there is a bracelet to match it,” said Celia. “We did not notice this atfirst.”

“They are lovely,” said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finelyturned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a level withher eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in thecolors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.

“You would like those, Dorothea,” said Celia, rather falteringly,beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness, and alsothat emeralds would suit her own complexion even better than purple amethysts.“You must keep that ring and bracelet—if nothing else. But see, these agatesare very pretty and quiet.”

“Yes! I will keep these—this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then, lettingher hand fall on the table, she said in another tone—“Yet what miserable menfind such things, and work at them, and sell them!” She paused again, and Celiathought that her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistencyshe ought to do.

“Yes, dear, I will keep these,” said Dorothea, decidedly. “But take all therest away, and the casket.”

She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at them.She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at these littlefountains of pure color.

“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her with realcuriosity as to what she would do.

Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative adornment ofthose whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen discernment, which wasnot without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke ever attained perfect meekness,it would not be for lack of inward fire.

“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I maysink.”

Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her sister, anddared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the ornaments which sheput back into the box and carried away. Dorothea too was unhappy, as she wenton with her plan-drawing, questioning the purity of her own feeling and speechin the scene which had ended with that little explosion.

Celia’s consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the wrong: itwas quite natural and justifiable that she should have asked that question, andshe repeated to herself that Dorothea was inconsistent: either she should havetaken her full share of the jewels, or, after what she had said, she shouldhave renounced them altogether.

“I am sure—at least, I trust,” thought Celia, “that the wearing of a necklacewill not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see that I should be bound byDorothea’s opinions now we are going into society, though of course she herselfought to be bound by them. But Dorothea is not always consistent.”

Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard her sistercalling her.

“Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect,if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces.”

As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s armcaressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in thewrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been amixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her eldersister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creaturewithout its private opinions?

CHAPTER II.

“‘Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un caballo ruciorodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?’ ‘Lo que veo y columbro,’respondio Sancho, ‘no es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, quetrae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra.’ ‘Pues ese es el yelmo deMambrino,’ dijo Don Quijote.”—CERVANTES.

“‘Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray steed, andweareth a golden helmet?’ ‘What I see,’ answered Sancho, ‘is nothing but a manon a gray ass like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.’ ‘Just so,’answered Don Quixote: ‘and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.’”

“Sir Humphry Davy?” said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling way,taking up Sir James Chettam’s remark that he was studying Davy’s AgriculturalChemistry. “Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him years ago atCartwright’s, and Wordsworth was there too—the poet Wordsworth, you know. Nowthere was something singular. I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, andI never met him—and I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s.There’s an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, asI may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true inevery sense, you know.”

Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, theparty being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of amagistrate’s mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubonwould support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified;the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble theportrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became astudent; as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of thered-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.

“I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry,” said this excellent baronet,“because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see ifsomething cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my tenants.Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?”

“A great mistake, Chettam,” interposed Mr. Brooke, “going into electrifyingyour land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house. Itwon’t do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw itwould not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone. No, no—seethat your tenants don’t sell their straw, and that kind of thing; and give themdraining-tiles, you know. But your fancy farming will not do—the most expensivesort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds.”

“Surely,” said Dorothea, “it is better to spend money in finding out how mencan make the most of the land which supports them all, than in keeping dogs andhorses only to gallop over it. It is not a sin to make yourself poor inperforming experiments for the good of all.”

She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir Jameshad appealed to her. He was accustomed to do so, and she had often thought thatshe could urge him to many good actions when he was her brother-in-law.

Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was speaking,and seemed to observe her newly.

“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr. Brooke,smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. “I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith.There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time—humanperfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may bevery well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carryyou a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at onetime; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not toohard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought;else we shall be landed back in the dark ages. But talking of books, there isSouthey’s ‘Peninsular War.’ I am reading that of a morning. You know Southey?”

“No,” said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke’s impetuous reason,and thinking of the book only. “I have little leisure for such literature justnow. I have been using up my eyesight on old characters lately; the fact is, Iwant a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannotendure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: Ifeed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind issomething like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and tryingmentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusingchanges. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.”

This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length. Hedelivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make apublic statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech,occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the moreconspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke’s scrappy slovenliness.Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she hadever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret, the Vaudois clergyman who hadgiven conferences on the history of the Waldenses. To reconstruct a past world,doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth—what a work to be in anyway present at, to assist in, though only as a lamp-holder! This elevatingthought lifted her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance ofpolitical economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as anextinguisher over all her lights.

“But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke,” Sir James presently took anopportunity of saying. “I should have thought you would enter a little into thepleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me send over a chestnut horse foryou to try. It has been trained for a lady. I saw you on Saturday canteringover the hill on a nag not worthy of you. My groom shall bring Corydon for youevery day, if you will only mention the time.”

“Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding. I shall not ride anymore,” said Dorothea, urged to this brusque resolution by a little annoyancethat Sir James would be soliciting her attention when she wanted to give it allto Mr. Casaubon.

“No, that is too hard,” said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that showedstrong interest. “Your sister is given to self-mortification, is she not?” hecontinued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.

“I think she is,” said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say something thatwould not please her sister, and blushing as prettily as possible above hernecklace. “She likes giving up.”

“If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, notself-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do whatis very agreeable,” said Dorothea.

Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr. Casaubonwas observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.

“Exactly,” said Sir James. “You give up from some high, generous motive.”

“No, indeed, not exactly. I did not say that of myself,” answered Dorothea,reddening. Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from high delight oranger. At this moment she felt angry with the perverse Sir James. Why did henot pay attention to Celia, and leave her to listen to Mr. Casaubon?—if thatlearned man would only talk, instead of allowing himself to be talked to by Mr.Brooke, who was just then informing him that the Reformation either meantsomething or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but thatCatholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for aRomanist chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properlyspeaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.

“I made a great study of theology at one time,” said Mr. Brooke, as if toexplain the insight just manifested. “I know something of all schools. I knewWilberforce in his best days. Do you know Wilberforce?”

Mr. Casaubon said, “No.”

“Well, Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I went intoParliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on the independent bench,as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy.”

Mr. Casaubon bowed, and observed that it was a wide field.

“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, “but I have documents. I began along while ago to collect documents. They want arranging, but when a questionhas struck me, I have written to somebody and got an answer. I have documentsat my back. But now, how do you arrange your documents?”

“In pigeon-holes partly,” said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air ofeffort.

“Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything getsmixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”

“I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle,” said Dorothea. “Iwould letter them all, and then make a list of subjects under each letter.”

Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, “You have anexcellent secretary at hand, you perceive.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; “I cannot let young ladies meddlewith my documents. Young ladies are too flighty.”

Dorothea felt hurt. Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had some specialreason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark lay in his mind aslightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other fragments there,and a chance current had sent it alighting on her.

When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said—

“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”

“Celia! He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw. He isremarkably like the portrait of Locke. He has the same deep eye-sockets.”

“Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?”

“Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him,” said Dorothea,walking away a little.

“Mr. Casaubon is so sallow.”

“All the better. I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a cochonde lait.”

“Dodo!” exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise. “I never heard you makesuch a comparison before.”

“Why should I make it before the occasion came? It is a good comparison: thematch is perfect.”

Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.

“I wonder you show temper, Dorothea.”

“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if theywere merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man’sface.”

“Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?” Celia was not without a touch of naive malice.

“Yes, I believe he has,” said Dorothea, with the full voice of decision.“Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology.”

“He talks very little,” said Celia

“There is no one for him to talk to.”

Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam; I believeshe would not accept him.” Celia felt that this was a pity. She had never beendeceived as to the object of the baronet’s interest. Sometimes, indeed, she hadreflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her wayof looking at things; and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feelingthat her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples werelike spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or eveneating.

When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by her, nothaving felt her mode of answering him at all offensive. Why should he? Hethought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very markedindeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confidentor distrustful. She was thoroughly charming to him, but of course he theorizeda little about his attachment. He was made of excellent human dough, and hadthe rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not setthe smallest stream in the county on fire: hence he liked the prospect of awife to whom he could say, “What shall we do?” about this or that; who couldhelp her husband out with reasons, and would also have the propertyqualification for doing so. As to the excessive religiousness alleged againstMiss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, andthought that it would die out with marriage. In short, he felt himself to be inlove in the right place, and was ready to endure a great deal of predominance,which, after all, a man could always put down when he liked. Sir James had noidea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsomegirl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind—what there is ofit—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree isof a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of asounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kindProvidence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in theform of tradition.

“Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse, MissBrooke,” said the persevering admirer. “I assure you, riding is the mosthealthy of exercises.”

“I am aware of it,” said Dorothea, coldly. “I think it would do Celia good—ifshe would take to it.”

“But you are such a perfect horsewoman.”

“Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily thrown.”

“Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a perfecthorsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”

“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I oughtnot to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond to yourpattern of a lady.” Dorothea looked straight before her, and spoke with coldbrusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy, in amusing contrast withthe solicitous amiability of her admirer.

“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is notpossible that you should think horsemanship wrong.”

“It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”

“Oh, why?” said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.

Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was listening.

“We must not inquire too curiously into motives,” he interposed, in hismeasured way. “Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in theutterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep thegerminating grain away from the light.”

Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker. Herewas a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom therecould be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with thewidest knowledge: a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whateverhe believed!

Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone onat any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions, which hasfacilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization. Has any one everpinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonialacquaintanceship?

“Certainly,” said good Sir James. “Miss Brooke shall not be urged to tellreasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her reasons would do herhonor.”

He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had lookedup at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he wasmeditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty,except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman of somedistinction.

However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with Mr.Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to Celia, andtalked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town, and asked whetherMiss Brooke disliked London. Away from her sister, Celia talked quite easily,and Sir James said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was certainly veryagreeable as well as pretty, though not, as some people pretended, more cleverand sensible than the elder sister. He felt that he had chosen the one who wasin all respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward tohaving the best. He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not toexpect it.

CHAPTER III.

“Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . .
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange.”
—Paradise Lost, B. vii.

If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a suitablewife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him were alreadyplanted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day the reasons had buddedand bloomed. For they had had a long conversation in the morning, while Celia,who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon’s moles and sallowness, hadescaped to the vicarage to play with the curate’s ill-shod but merry children.

Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr.Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension everyquality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, andhad understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractivelylabyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton’s “affablearchangel;” and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he hadundertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with thatthoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at whichMr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragmentsin the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having oncemastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field ofmythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflectedlight of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was nolight or speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of volumes, butthe crowning task would be to condense these voluminous still-accumulatingresults and bring them, like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit alittle shelf. In explaining this to Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himselfnearly as he would have done to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles oftalking at command: it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase healways gave the English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have donethis in any case. A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of hisacquaintances as of “lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men, thatconne Latyn but lytille.”

Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this conception. Herewas something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school literature: here was aliving Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devotedpiety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.

The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when Dorotheawas impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she could speak of to noone whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially on the secondary importanceof ecclesiastical forms and articles of belief compared with that spiritualreligion, that submergence of self in communion with Divine perfection whichseemed to her to be expressed in the best Christian books of widely distantages, she found in Mr. Casaubon a listener who understood her at once, whocould assure her of his own agreement with that view when duly tempered withwise conformity, and could mention historical examples before unknown to her.

“He thinks with me,” said Dorothea to herself, “or rather, he thinks a wholeworld of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror. And his feelings too,his whole experience—what a lake compared with my little pool!”

Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly thanother young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things, butinterpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, everysign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by adiffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge. They are not alwaystoo grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-luck on a truedescription, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in rightconclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loopsand zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Because MissBrooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon wasunworthy of it.

He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure ofinvitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own documents onmachine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called into the library tolook at these in a heap, while his host picked up first one and then the otherto read aloud from in a skipping and uncertain way, passing from one unfinishedpassage to another with a “Yes, now, but here!” and finally pushing them allaside to open the journal of his youthful Continental travels.

“Look here—here is all about Greece. Rhamnus, the ruins of Rhamnus—you are agreat Grecian, now. I don’t know whether you have given much study to thetopography. I spent no end of time in making out these things—Helicon, now.Here, now!—‘We started the next morning for Parnassus, the double-peakedParnassus.’ All this volume is about Greece, you know,” Mr. Brooke wound up,rubbing his thumb transversely along the edges of the leaves as he held thebook forward.

Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in the rightplace, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as possible, withoutshowing disregard or impatience; mindful that this desultoriness was associatedwith the institutions of the country, and that the man who took him on thissevere mental scamper was not only an amiable host, but a landholder and custosrotulorum. Was his endurance aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke wasthe uncle of Dorothea?

Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on drawingher out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her his face was oftenlit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine. Before he left the next morning,while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke along the gravelled terrace, hehad mentioned to her that he felt the disadvantage of loneliness, the need ofthat cheerful companionship with which the presence of youth can lighten orvary the serious toils of maturity. And he delivered this statement with asmuch careful precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words wouldbe attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect that heshould have to repeat or revise his communications of a practical or personalkind. The inclinations which he had deliberately stated on the 2d of October hewould think it enough to refer to by the mention of that date; judging by thestandard of his own memory, which was a volume where a vide supra could serveinstead of repetitions, and not the ordinary long-used blotting-book which onlytells of forgotten writing. But in this case Mr. Casaubon’s confidence was notlikely to be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with theeager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in experience isan epoch.

It was three o’clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr. Casaubon droveoff to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from Tipton; and Dorothea, whohad on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along the shrubbery and across the parkthat she might wander through the bordering wood with no other visiblecompanionship than that of Monk, the Great St. Bernard dog, who always tookcare of the young ladies in their walks. There had risen before her the girl’svision of a possible future for herself to which she looked forward withtrembling hope, and she wanted to wander on in that visionary future withoutinterruption. She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in hercheeks, and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look at withconjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a little backward.She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if it were omitted that shewore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled behind so as to expose theoutline of her head in a daring manner at a time when public feeling requiredthe meagreness of nature to be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curlsand bows, never surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean. This was atrait of Miss Brooke’s asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic’sexpression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not consciouslyseeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of theafternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes,whose shadows touched each other.

All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform times),would have thought her an interesting object if they had referred the glow inher eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary images of young love: theillusions of Chloe about Strephon have been sufficiently consecrated in poetry,as the pathetic loveliness of all spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss Pippinadoring young Pumpkin, and dreaming along endless vistas of unwearyingcompanionship, was a little drama which never tired our fathers and mothers,and had been put into all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a figure which wouldsustain the disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-tail, and everybody feltit not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a sweetgirl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional ability, andabove all, his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no persons then living—certainlynone in the neighborhood of Tipton—would have had a sympathetic understandingfor the dreams of a girl whose notions about marriage took their color entirelyfrom an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was litchiefly by its own fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau,the pattern of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the bloomingmatron.

It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make her hiswife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort of reverentialgratitude. How good of him—nay, it would be almost as if a winged messenger hadsuddenly stood beside her path and held out his hand towards her! For a longwhile she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, likea thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective.What could she do, what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman,but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfiedby a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of adiscursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might havethought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life invillage charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “FemaleScripture Characters,” unfolding the private experience of Sara under the OldDispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over herembroidery in her own boudoir—with a background of prospective marriage to aman who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiouslyinexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From suchcontentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religiousdisposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of anature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and withsuch a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by asocial life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-inmaze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike othersas at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best,she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in apretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hungeras yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her wasone that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance,and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take heralong the grandest path.

“I should learn everything then,” she said to herself, still walking quicklyalong the bridle road through the wood. “It would be my duty to study that Imight help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivialabout our lives. Every-day things with us would mean the greatest things. Itwould be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the samelight as great men have seen it by. And then I should know what to do, when Igot older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here—now—inEngland. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seemslike going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know;—unless it werebuilding good cottages—there can be no doubt about that. Oh, I hope I should beable to get the people well housed in Lowick! I will draw plenty of plans whileI have time.”

Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the presumptuous way inwhich she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she was spared any inwardeffort to change the direction of her thoughts by the appearance of a canteringhorseman round a turning of the road. The well-groomed chestnut horse and twobeautiful setters could leave no doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam. Hediscerned Dorothea, jumped off his horse at once, and, having delivered it tohis groom, advanced towards her with something white on his arm, at which thetwo setters were barking in an excited manner.

“How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke,” he said, raising his hat and showinghis sleekly waving blond hair. “It has hastened the pleasure I was lookingforward to.”

Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption. This amiable baronet, really asuitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of making himselfa*greeable to the elder sister. Even a prospective brother-in-law may be anoppression if he will always be presupposing too good an understanding withyou, and agreeing with you even when you contradict him. The thought that hehad made the mistake of paying his addresses to herself could not take shape:all her mental activity was used up in persuasions of another kind. But he waspositively obtrusive at this moment, and his dimpled hands were quitedisagreeable. Her roused temper made her color deeply, as she returned hisgreeting with some haughtiness.

Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying tohimself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.

“I have brought a little petitioner,” he said, “or rather, I have brought himto see if he will be approved before his petition is offered.” He showed thewhite object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature’smost naive toys.

“It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,” saidDorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will)under the heat of irritation.

“Oh, why?” said Sir James, as they walked forward.

“I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy. Theyare too helpless: their lives are too frail. A weasel or a mouse that gets itsown living is more interesting. I like to think that the animals about us havesouls something like our own, and either carry on their own little affairs orcan be companions to us, like Monk here. Those creatures are parasitic.”

“I am so glad I know that you do not like them,” said good Sir James. “I shouldnever keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of these Maltese dogs.Here, John, take this dog, will you?”

The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and expressive,was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had better not have beenborn. But she felt it necessary to explain.

“You must not judge of Celia’s feeling from mine. I think she likes these smallpets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond of. It made meunhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am rather short-sighted.”

“You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is always agood opinion.”

What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?

“Do you know, I envy you that,” Sir James said, as they continued walking atthe rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.

“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Your power of forming an opinion. I can form an opinion of persons. I knowwhen I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have often adifficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on opposite sides.”

“Or that seem sensible. Perhaps we don’t always discriminate between sense andnonsense.”

Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.

“Exactly,” said Sir James. “But you seem to have the power of discrimination.”

“On the contrary, I am often unable to decide. But that is from ignorance. Theright conclusion is there all the same, though I am unable to see it.”

“I think there are few who would see it more readily. Do you know, Lovegood wastelling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the world of a plan forcottages—quite wonderful for a young lady, he thought. You had a realgenus, to use his expression. He said you wanted Mr. Brooke to build anew set of cottages, but he seemed to think it hardly probable that your unclewould consent. Do you know, that is one of the things I wish to do—I mean, onmy own estate. I should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours, if youwould let me see it. Of course, it is sinking money; that is why people objectto it. Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer. But, after all, it isworth doing.”

“Worth doing! yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting herprevious small vexations. “I think we deserve to be beaten out of our beautifulhouses with a scourge of small cords—all of us who let tenants live in suchsties as we see round us. Life in cottages might be happier than ours, if theywere real houses fit for human beings from whom we expect duties andaffections.”

“Will you show me your plan?”

“Yes, certainly. I dare say it is very faulty. But I have been examining allthe plans for cottages in Loudon’s book, and picked out what seem the bestthings. Oh what a happiness it would be to set the pattern about here! I thinkinstead of Lazarus at the gate, we should put the pigsty cottages outside thepark-gate.”

Dorothea was in the best temper now. Sir James, as brother in-law, buildingmodel cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being built at Lowick,and more and more elsewhere in imitation—it would be as if the spirit ofOberlin had passed over the parishes to make the life of poverty beautiful!

Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with Lovegood.He also took away a complacent sense that he was making great progress in MissBrooke’s good opinion. The Maltese puppy was not offered to Celia; an omissionwhich Dorothea afterwards thought of with surprise; but she blamed herself forit. She had been engrossing Sir James. After all, it was a relief that therewas no puppy to tread upon.

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir James’sillusion. “He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only cares about herplans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him if she thought he wouldlet her manage everything and carry out all her notions. And how veryuncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot bear notions.”

It was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike. She dared not confessit to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be laying herself opento a demonstration that she was somehow or other at war with all goodness. Buton safe opportunities, she had an indirect mode of making her negative wisdomtell upon Dorothea, and calling her down from her rhapsodic mood by remindingher that people were staring, not listening. Celia was not impulsive: what shehad to say could wait, and came from her always with the same quiet staccatoevenness. When people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their facesand features merely. She never could understand how well-bred persons consentedto sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous manner requisite for that vocalexercise.

It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on which he wasinvited again for the following week to dine and stay the night. Thus Dorotheahad three more conversations with him, and was convinced that her firstimpressions had been just. He was all she had at first imagined him to be:almost everything he had said seemed like a specimen from a mine, or theinscription on the door of a museum which might open on the treasures of pastages; and this trust in his mental wealth was all the deeper and more effectiveon her inclination because it was now obvious that his visits were made for hersake. This accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take thepains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to herunderstanding, and sometimes with instructive correction. What delightfulcompanionship! Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that trivialities existed,and never handed round that small-talk of heavy men which is as acceptable asstale bride-cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard. He talked of what hewas interested in, or else he was silent and bowed with sad civility. ToDorothea this was adorable genuineness, and religious abstinence from thatartificiality which uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence. For she lookedas reverently at Mr. Casaubon’s religious elevation above herself as she did athis intellect and learning. He assented to her expressions of devout feeling,and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed himself to say that hehad gone through some spiritual conflicts in his youth; in short, Dorothea sawthat here she might reckon on understanding, sympathy, and guidance. Onone—only one—of her favorite themes she was disappointed. Mr. Casaubonapparently did not care about building cottages, and diverted the talk to theextremely narrow accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of theancient Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard. After he was gone,Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his; and her mindwas much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying conditions of climatewhich modify human needs, and from the admitted wickedness of pagan despots.Should she not urge these arguments on Mr. Casaubon when he came again? Butfurther reflection told her that she was presumptuous in demanding hisattention to such a subject; he would not disapprove of her occupying herselfwith it in leisure moments, as other women expected to occupy themselves withtheir dress and embroidery—would not forbid it when—Dorothea felt ratherashamed as she detected herself in these speculations. But her uncle had beeninvited to go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to supposethat Mr. Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke’s society for its own sake, eitherwith or without documents?

Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir JamesChettam’s readiness to set on foot the desired improvements. He came muchoftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him disagreeable sincehe showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had already entered with muchpractical ability into Lovegood’s estimates, and was charmingly docile. Sheproposed to build a couple of cottages, and transfer two families from theirold cabins, which could then be pulled down, so that new ones could be built onthe old sites. Sir James said “Exactly,” and she bore the word remarkably well.

Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very usefulmembers of society under good feminine direction, if they were fortunate inchoosing their sisters-in-law! It is difficult to say whether there was or wasnot a little wilfulness in her continuing blind to the possibility that anothersort of choice was in question in relation to her. But her life was just nowfull of hope and action: she was not only thinking of her plans, but gettingdown learned books from the library and reading many things hastily (that shemight be a little less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the whilebeing visited with conscientious questionings whether she were not exaltingthese poor doings above measure and contemplating them with thatself-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.

CHAPTER IV.

“Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish,” said Celia, as theywere driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.

“He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,” saidDorothea, inconsiderately.

“You mean that he appears silly.”

“No, no,” said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on hersister’s a moment, “but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.”

“I should think none but disagreeable people do,” said Celia, in her usualpurring way. “They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! atbreakfast, and always.”

Dorothea laughed. “O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!” She pinched Celia’schin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and lovely—fit hereafterto be an eternal cherub, and if it were not doctrinally wrong to say so, hardlymore in need of salvation than a squirrel. “Of course people need not be alwaystalking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds when they try to talkwell.”

“You mean that Sir James tries and fails.”

“I was speaking generally. Why do you catechise me about Sir James? It is notthe object of his life to please me.”

“Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?”

“Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister—that is all.” Dorothea had neverhinted this before, waiting, from a certain shyness on such subjects which wasmutual between the sisters, until it should be introduced by some decisiveevent. Celia blushed, but said at once—

“Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo. When Tantripp was brushing myhair the other day, she said that Sir James’s man knew from Mrs. Cadwallader’smaid that Sir James was to marry the eldest Miss Brooke.”

“How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?” said Dorothea,indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep in her memory were nowawakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation. “You must have asked herquestions. It is degrading.”

“I see no harm at all in Tantripp’s talking to me. It is better to hear whatpeople say. You see what mistakes you make by taking up notions. I am quitesure that Sir James means to make you an offer; and he believes that you willaccept him, especially since you have been so pleased with him about the plans.And uncle too—I know he expects it. Every one can see that Sir James is verymuch in love with you.”

The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea’s mind that the tearswelled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered, and shethought with disgust of Sir James’s conceiving that she recognized him as herlover. There was vexation too on account of Celia.

“How could he expect it?” she burst forth in her most impetuous manner. “I havenever agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I was barely polite tohim before.”

“But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel quitesure that you are fond of him.”

“Fond of him, Celia! How can you choose such odious expressions?” saidDorothea, passionately.

“Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a manwhom you accepted for a husband.”

“It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of him.Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have towards the man Iwould accept as a husband.”

“Well, I am sorry for Sir James. I thought it right to tell you, because youwent on as you always do, never looking just where you are, and treading in thewrong place. You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to satisfyyou; yet you never see what is quite plain. That’s your way, Dodo.” Somethingcertainly gave Celia unusual courage; and she was not sparing the sister ofwhom she was occasionally in awe. Who can tell what just criticisms Murr theCat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?

“It is very painful,” said Dorothea, feeling scourged. “I can have no more todo with the cottages. I must be uncivil to him. I must tell him I will havenothing to do with them. It is very painful.” Her eyes filled again with tears.

“Wait a little. Think about it. You know he is going away for a day or two tosee his sister. There will be nobody besides Lovegood.” Celia could not helprelenting. “Poor Dodo,” she went on, in an amiable staccato. “It is very hard:it is your favorite fad to draw plans.”

“Fad to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my fellow-creatures’houses in that childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can one ever doanything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”

No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper and behaveso as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was disposed ratherto accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the societyaround her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in herspirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence inthe “Pilgrim’s Progress.” The fad of drawing plans! What was lifeworth—what great faith was possible when the whole effect of one’s actionscould be withered up into such parched rubbish as that? When she got out of thecarriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids red. She was an image of sorrow,and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been alarmed, if Celia had notbeen close to her looking so pretty and composed, that he at once concludedDorothea’s tears to have their origin in her excessive religiousness. He hadreturned, during their absence, from a journey to the county town, about apetition for the pardon of some criminal.

“Well, my dears,” he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him, “I hope nothingdisagreeable has happened while I have been away.”

“No, uncle,” said Celia, “we have been to Fresh*tt to look at the cottages. Wethought you would have been at home to lunch.”

“I came by Lowick to lunch—you didn’t know I came by Lowick. And I have broughta couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea—in the library, you know; they lie onthe table in the library.”

It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her fromdespair into expectation. They were pamphlets about the early Church. Theoppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir James was shaken off, and she walkedstraight to the library. Celia went up-stairs. Mr. Brooke was detained by amessage, but when he re-entered the library, he found Dorothea seated andalready deep in one of the pamphlets which had some marginal manuscript of Mr.Casaubon’s,—taking it in as eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of afresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary walk.

She was getting away from Tipton and Fresh*tt, and her own sad liability totread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.

Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards the wood-fire,which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice between the dogs, andrubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly towards Dorothea, but with aneutral leisurely air, as if he had nothing particular to say. Dorothea closedher pamphlet, as soon as she was aware of her uncle’s presence, and rose as ifto go. Usually she would have been interested about her uncle’s merciful errandon behalf of the criminal, but her late agitation had made her absent-minded.

“I came back by Lowick, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not as if with anyintention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his usual tendency tosay what he had said before. This fundamental principle of human speech wasmarkedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke. “I lunched there and saw Casaubon’s library,and that kind of thing. There’s a sharp air, driving. Won’t you sit down, mydear? You look cold.”

Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation. Some times, when heruncle’s easy way of taking things did not happen to be exasperating, it wasrather soothing. She threw off her mantle and bonnet, and sat down opposite tohim, enjoying the glow, but lifting up her beautiful hands for a screen. Theywere not thin hands, or small hands; but powerful, feminine, maternal hands.She seemed to be holding them up in propitiation for her passionate desire toknow and to think, which in the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Fresh*tt hadissued in crying and red eyelids.

She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal. “What news have youbrought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”

“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be hanged.”

Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.

“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly! he wouldhave helped us. I knew Romilly. Casaubon didn’t know Romilly. He is a littleburied in books, you know, Casaubon is.”

“When a man has great studies and is writing a great work, he must of coursegive up seeing much of the world. How can he go about making acquaintances?”

“That’s true. But a man mopes, you know. I have always been a bachelor too, butI have that sort of disposition that I never moped; it was my way to go abouteverywhere and take in everything. I never moped: but I can see that Casaubondoes, you know. He wants a companion—a companion, you know.”

“It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion,” said Dorothea,energetically.

“You like him, eh?” said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or otheremotion. “Well, now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he came toLowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you know. However, he isa tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing, you know, if Peel staysin. And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear.”

Dorothea could not speak.

“The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you. And he speaksuncommonly well—does Casaubon. He has deferred to me, you not being of age. Inshort, I have promised to speak to you, though I told him I thought there wasnot much chance. I was bound to tell him that. I said, my niece is very young,and that kind of thing. But I didn’t think it necessary to go into everything.However, the long and the short of it is, that he has asked my permission tomake you an offer of marriage—of marriage, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with hisexplanatory nod. “I thought it better to tell you, my dear.”

No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke’s manner, but he didreally wish to know something of his niece’s mind, that, if there were any needfor advice, he might give it in time. What feeling he, as a magistrate who hadtaken in so many ideas, could make room for, was unmixedly kind. Since Dorotheadid not speak immediately, he repeated, “I thought it better to tell you, mydear.”

“Thank you, uncle,” said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone. “I am verygrateful to Mr. Casaubon. If he makes me an offer, I shall accept him. I admireand honor him more than any man I ever saw.”

Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone, “Ah?…Well! He is a good match in some respects. But now, Chettam is a good match.And our land lies together. I shall never interfere against your wishes, mydear. People should have their own way in marriage, and that sort of thing—upto a certain point, you know. I have always said that, up to a certain point. Iwish you to marry well; and I have good reason to believe that Chettam wishesto marry you. I mention it, you know.”

“It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam,” said Dorothea.“If he thinks of marrying me, he has made a great mistake.”

“That is it, you see. One never knows. I should have thought Chettam was justthe sort of man a woman would like, now.”

“Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle,” said Dorothea, feelingsome of her late irritation revive.

Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject ofstudy, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientificprediction about them. Here was a fellow like Chettam with no chance at all.

“Well, but Casaubon, now. There is no hurry—I mean for you. It’s true, everyyear will tell upon him. He is over five-and-forty, you know. I should say agood seven-and-twenty years older than you. To be sure,—if you like learningand standing, and that sort of thing, we can’t have everything. And his incomeis good—he has a handsome property independent of the Church—his income isgood. Still he is not young, and I must not conceal from you, my dear, that Ithink his health is not over-strong. I know nothing else against him.”

“I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,” said Dorothea, withgrave decision. “I should wish to have a husband who was above me in judgmentand in all knowledge.”

Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, “Ah?—I thought you had more of your ownopinion than most girls. I thought you liked your own opinion—liked it, youknow.”

“I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should wish tohave good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see which opinionshad the best foundation, and would help me to live according to them.”

“Very true. You couldn’t put the thing better—couldn’t put it better,beforehand, you know. But there are oddities in things,” continued Mr. Brooke,whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for his niece onthis occasion. “Life isn’t cast in a mould—not cut out by rule and line, andthat sort of thing. I never married myself, and it will be the better for youand yours. The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into anoose for them. It is a noose, you know. Temper, now. There is temper.And a husband likes to be master.”

“I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher duties.I never thought of it as mere personal ease,” said poor Dorothea.

“Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, thatkind of thing. I can see that Casaubon’s ways might suit you better thanChettam’s. And you shall do as you like, my dear. I would not hinder Casaubon;I said so at once; for there is no knowing how anything may turn out. You havenot the same tastes as every young lady; and a clergyman and scholar—who may bea bishop—that kind of thing—may suit you better than Chettam. Chettam is a goodfellow, a good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn’t go much intoideas. I did, when I was his age. But Casaubon’s eyes, now. I think he has hurtthem a little with too much reading.”

“I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me to helphim,” said Dorothea, ardently.

“You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is, I have aletter for you in my pocket.” Mr. Brooke handed the letter to Dorothea, but asshe rose to go away, he added, “There is not too much hurry, my dear. Thinkabout it, you know.”

When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly spoken strongly:he had put the risks of marriage before her in a striking manner. It was hisduty to do so. But as to pretending to be wise for young people,—no uncle,however much he had travelled in his youth, absorbed the new ideas, and dinedwith celebrities now deceased, could pretend to judge what sort of marriagewould turn out well for a young girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam. Inshort, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke’s mind felt blank before it,could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.

CHAPTER V.

“Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia,bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo,winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: theyare most part lean, dry, ill-colored… and all through immoderate painsand extraordinary studies. If you will not believe the truth of this, look upongreat Tostatus and Thomas Aquainas’ works; and tell me whether those men tookpains.”—BURTON’S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.

This was Mr. Casaubon’s letter.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian’s permission to address you on asubject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken inthe recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the factthat a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously withthe possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour ofmeeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitnessto supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affectionsas even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could notuninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observationhas given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically ofthat fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively thoseaffections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think,made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenorunsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned inyou an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I hadhitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth orwith those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to conferdistinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mentalqualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with thisrare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aidin graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the eventof my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to besuperficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially relatedthereto as stages towards the completion of a life’s plan), I should presumablyhave gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by amatrimonial union.
Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings; and Irely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own areof a nature to confirm my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as yourhusband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as thehighest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affectionhitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however shortin the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, youwill find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. Iawait the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be thepart of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual.But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to anunfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will bemore difficult after the temporary illumination of hope.

In any case, I shall remain,
Yours with sincere devotion,
EDWARD CASAUBON.

Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees,buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray: under the rush of solemnemotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, shecould but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of adivine consciousness which sustained her own. She remained in that attitudetill it was time to dress for dinner.

How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it critically as aprofession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller lifewas opening before her: she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade ofinitiation. She was going to have room for the energies which stirred uneasilyunder the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and the pettyperemptoriness of the world’s habits.

Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties; now shewould be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind that she couldreverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow of proud delight—the joyousmaiden surprise that she was chosen by the man whom her admiration had chosen.All Dorothea’s passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards anideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first objectthat came within its level. The impetus with which inclination becameresolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had rousedher discontent with the actual conditions of her life.

After dinner, when Celia was playing an “air, with variations,” a small kind oftinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young ladies’ education,Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr. Casaubon’s letter. Why should shedefer the answer? She wrote it over three times, not because she wished tochange the wording, but because her hand was unusually uncertain, and she couldnot bear that Mr. Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible. Shepiqued herself on writing a hand in which each letter was distinguishablewithout any large range of conjecture, and she meant to make much use of thisaccomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon’s eyes. Three times she wrote.

MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I am very grateful to you for loving me, and thinking meworthy to be your wife. I can look forward to no better happiness than thatwhich would be one with yours. If I said more, it would only be the same thingwritten out at greater length, for I cannot now dwell on any other thought thanthat I may be through life

Yours devotedly,
DOROTHEA BROOKE.

Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to give him theletter, that he might send it in the morning. He was surprised, but hissurprise only issued in a few moments’ silence, during which he pushed aboutvarious objects on his writing-table, and finally stood with his back to thefire, his glasses on his nose, looking at the address of Dorothea’s letter.

“Have you thought enough about this, my dear?” he said at last.

“There was no need to think long, uncle. I know of nothing to make mevacillate. If I changed my mind, it must be because of something important andentirely new to me.”

“Ah!—then you have accepted him? Then Chettam has no chance? Has Chettamoffended you—offended you, you know? What is it you don’t like in Chettam?”

“There is nothing that I like in him,” said Dorothea, rather impetuously.

Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one had thrown alight missile at him. Dorothea immediately felt some self-rebuke, and said—

“I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think—really very goodabout the cottages. A well-meaning man.”

“But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies a little inour family. I had it myself—that love of knowledge, and going into everything—alittle too much—it took me too far; though that sort of thing doesn’t often runin the female-line; or it runs underground like the rivers in Greece, youknow—it comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers. I went a good dealinto that, at one time. However, my dear, I have always said that people shoulddo as they like in these things, up to a certain point. I couldn’t, as yourguardian, have consented to a bad match. But Casaubon stands well: his positionis good. I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though, and Mrs. Cadwallader willblame me.”

That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened. Sheattributed Dorothea’s abstracted manner, and the evidence of further cryingsince they had got home, to the temper she had been in about Sir James Chettamand the buildings, and was careful not to give further offence: having oncesaid what she wanted to say, Celia had no disposition to recur to disagreeablesubjects. It had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with anyone—only to observe with wonder that they quarrelled with her, and looked liketurkey-co*cks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat’s cradle with themwhenever they recovered themselves. And as to Dorothea, it had always been herway to find something wrong in her sister’s words, though Celia inwardlyprotested that she always said just how things were, and nothing else: shenever did and never could put words together out of her own head. But the bestof Dodo was, that she did not keep angry for long together. Now, though theyhad hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet when Celia put by herwork, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which she was always much theearlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low stool, unable to occupy herselfexcept in meditation, said, with the musical intonation which in moments ofdeep but quiet feeling made her speech like a fine bit of recitative—

“Celia, dear, come and kiss me,” holding her arms open as she spoke.

Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterfly kiss,while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her lips gravely oneach cheek in turn.

“Don’t sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon,” said Celia, ina comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.

“No, dear, I am very, very happy,” said Dorothea, fervently.

“So much the better,” thought Celia. “But how strangely Dodo goes from oneextreme to the other.”

The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr. Brooke, said,“Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter.”

Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea, said, “Casaubon,my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn’t wait to write more—didn’t wait,you know.”

It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should be announcedto her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the same direction as heruncle’s, she was struck with the peculiar effect of the announcement onDorothea. It seemed as if something like the reflection of a white sunlit winghad passed across her features, ending in one of her rare blushes. For thefirst time it entered into Celia’s mind that there might be something morebetween Mr. Casaubon and her sister than his delight in bookish talk and herdelight in listening. Hitherto she had classed the admiration for this “ugly”and learned acquaintance with the admiration for Monsieur Liret at Lausanne,also ugly and learned. Dorothea had never been tired of listening to oldMonsieur Liret when Celia’s feet were as cold as possible, and when it hadreally become dreadful to see the skin of his bald head moving about. Why thenshould her enthusiasm not extend to Mr. Casaubon simply in the same way as toMonsieur Liret? And it seemed probable that all learned men had a sort ofschoolmaster’s view of young people.

But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted into hermind. She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, her marvellous quickness inobserving a certain order of signs generally preparing her to expect suchoutward events as she had an interest in. Not that she now imagined Mr.Casaubon to be already an accepted lover: she had only begun to feel disgust atthe possibility that anything in Dorothea’s mind could tend towards such anissue. Here was something really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very wellnot to accept Sir James Chettam, but the idea of marrying Mr. Casaubon! Celiafelt a sort of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous. But perhaps Dodo,if she were really bordering on such an extravagance, might be turned away fromit: experience had often shown that her impressibility might be calculated on.The day was damp, and they were not going to walk out, so they both went up totheir sitting-room; and there Celia observed that Dorothea, instead of settlingdown with her usual diligent interest to some occupation, simply leaned herelbow on an open book and looked out of the window at the great cedar silveredwith the damp. She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate’schildren, and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately.

Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know of themomentous change in Mr. Casaubon’s position since he had last been in thehouse: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance of what would necessarilyaffect her attitude towards him; but it was impossible not to shrink fromtelling her. Dorothea accused herself of some meanness in this timidity: it wasalways odious to her to have any small fears or contrivances about her actions,but at this moment she was seeking the highest aid possible that she might notdread the corrosiveness of Celia’s pretty carnally minded prose. Her reveriewas broken, and the difficulty of decision banished, by Celia’s small andrather guttural voice speaking in its usual tone, of a remark aside or a “bythe bye.”

“Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat his soup so.”

“What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?”

“Really, Dodo, can’t you hear how he scrapes his spoon? And he always blinksbefore he speaks. I don’t know whether Locke blinked, but I’m sure I am sorryfor those who sat opposite to him if he did.”

“Celia,” said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, “pray don’t make any moreobservations of that kind.”

“Why not? They are quite true,” returned Celia, who had her reasons forpersevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.

“Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe.”

“Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful. I think it is a pityMr. Casaubon’s mother had not a commoner mind: she might have taught himbetter.” Celia was inwardly frightened, and ready to run away, now she hadhurled this light javelin.

Dorothea’s feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could be no furtherpreparation.

“It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon.”

Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before. The paper man she was makingwould have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of whatever she heldin her hands. She laid the fragile figure down at once, and sat perfectly stillfor a few moments. When she spoke there was a tear gathering.

“Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy.” Her sisterly tenderness could not butsurmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the fears ofaffection.

Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.

“It is quite decided, then?” said Celia, in an awed under tone. “And uncleknows?”

“I have accepted Mr. Casaubon’s offer. My uncle brought me the letter thatcontained it; he knew about it beforehand.”

“I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo,” said Celia,with a slight sob. She never could have thought that she should feel as shedid. There was something funereal in the whole affair, and Mr. Casaubon seemedto be the officiating clergyman, about whom it would be indecent to makeremarks.

“Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve. We should never admire the same people. Ioften offend in something of the same way; I am apt to speak too strongly ofthose who don’t please me.”

In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as much fromCelia’s subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms. Of course all theworld round Tipton would be out of sympathy with this marriage. Dorothea knewof no one who thought as she did about life and its best objects.

Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy. In an hour’stête-à-tête with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him with more freedom thanshe had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the thought of devotingherself to him, and of learning how she might best share and further all hisgreat ends. Mr. Casaubon was touched with an unknown delight (what man wouldnot have been?) at this childlike unrestrained ardor: he was not surprised(what lover would have been?) that he should be the object of it.

“My dear young lady—Miss Brooke—Dorothea!” he said, pressing her hand betweenhis hands, “this is a happiness greater than I had ever imagined to be inreserve for me. That I should ever meet with a mind and person so rich in themingled graces which could render marriage desirable, was far indeed from myconception. You have all—nay, more than all—those qualities which I have everregarded as the characteristic excellences of womanhood. The great charm ofyour sex is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection, and hereinwe see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own. Hitherto Ihave known few pleasures save of the severer kind: my satisfactions have beenthose of the solitary student. I have been little disposed to gather flowersthat would wither in my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, toplace them in your bosom.”

No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the frigidrhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of anamorous rook. Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behindthose sonnets to Delia which strike us as the thin music of a mandolin?

Dorothea’s faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon’s words seemed to leave unsaid:what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether ofprophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his badgrammar is sublime.

“I am very ignorant—you will quite wonder at my ignorance,” said Dorothea. “Ihave so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken; and now I shall be able totell them all to you, and ask you about them. But,” she added, with rapidimagination of Mr. Casaubon’s probable feeling, “I will not trouble you toomuch; only when you are inclined to listen to me. You must often be weary withthe pursuit of subjects in your own track. I shall gain enough if you will takeme 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 hadvouchsafed him a blessing in every way suited to his peculiar wants. He wasbeing unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirelywithout hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends.It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some judges, sostupid, with all her reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present caseof throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon’s feet, andkissing his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope. She wasnot 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 marriageshould take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon’s house was ready. Itwas 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 exceptpreaching the morning sermon.

CHAPTER VI.

My lady’s tongue is like the meadow blades,
That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
Nice cutting is her function: she divides
With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
And makes intangible savings.

As Mr. Casaubon’s carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested theentrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated behind. Itwas doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for Mr. Casaubon waslooking 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 veryold Indian shawl, it was plain that the lodge-keeper regarded her as animportant personage, from the low curtsy which was dropped on the entrance ofthe small phaeton.

“Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?” said the high-colored,dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.

“Pretty well for laying, madam, but they’ve ta’en to eating their eggs: I’ve nopeace o’ mind with ’em at all.”

“Oh, the cannibals! Better sell them cheap at once. What will you sell them acouple? 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 aSunday. He has consumed all ours that I can spare. You are half paid with thesermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that. Take a pair of tumbler-pigeons forthem—little beauties. You must come and see them. You have no tumblers amongyour pigeons.”

“Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see ’em after work. He’s very hot onnew sorts; to oblige you.”

“Oblige me! It will be the best bargain he ever made. A pair of church pigeonsfor a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own eggs! Don’t you andFitchett boast too much, that is all!”

The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs. Fitchettlaughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional “Surely,surely!”—from which it might be inferred that she would have found thecountry-side somewhat duller if the Rector’s lady had been less free-spoken andless of a skinflint. Indeed, both the farmers and laborers in the parishes ofFresh*tt and Tipton would have felt a sad lack of conversation but for thestories about what Mrs. Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably highbirth, descended, as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the crowd of heroicshades—who pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut jokes in the mostcompanionable manner, though with a turn of tongue that let you know who shewas. Such a lady gave a neighborliness to both rank and religion, and mitigatedthe bitterness of uncommuted tithe. A much more exemplary character with aninfusion of sour dignity would not have furthered their comprehension of theThirty-nine Articles, and would have been less socially uniting.

Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader’s merits from a different point of view,winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where he wassitting alone.

“I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here,” she said, seating herselfcomfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built figure.“I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you would not beseeing so much of the lively man. I shall inform against you: remember you areboth 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 Whigside when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in anunderhand manner: going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open thepublic-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 talkpolitics much. He doesn’t care much about the philanthropic side of things;punishments, and that kind of thing. He only cares about Church questions. Thatis not my line of action, you know.”

“Ra-a-ther too much, my friend. I have heard of your doings. Who was it thatsold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch? I believe you bought it onpurpose. You are a perfect Guy Faux. See if you are not burnt in effigy this5th 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—notpersecuting, you know.”

“There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for thehustings. 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 excusebut being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming andhawing. You will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You will make a Saturday pie ofall parties’ opinions, and be pelted by everybody.”

“That is what I expect, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to betray howlittle 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 onby 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 haveany certain point when he belongs to no party—leading a roving life, and neverletting his friends know his address. ‘Nobody knows where Brooke willbe—there’s no counting on Brooke’—that is what people say of you, to be quitefrank. Now, do turn respectable. How will you like going to Sessions witheverybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad conscience and an emptypocket?”

“I don’t pretend to argue with a lady on politics,” said Mr. Brooke, with anair of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly conscious thatthis attack of Mrs. Cadwallader’s had opened the defensive campaign to whichcertain rash steps had exposed him. “Your sex are not thinkers, youknow—varium et mutabile semper—that kind of thing. You don’t knowVirgil. I knew”—Mr. Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the personalacquaintance of the Augustan poet—“I was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know.That was what he said. You ladies are always against an independentattitude—a man’s caring for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing. Andthere is no part of the county where opinion is narrower than it is here—Idon’t mean to throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take theindependent line; and if I don’t take it, who will?”

“Who? Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position. People ofstanding 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 ofour best men. Sir James would be cruelly annoyed: it will be too hard on him ifyou turn round now and make yourself a Whig sign-board.”

Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea’s engagement had no sooner beendecided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader’s prospective taunts. It mighthave been easy for ignorant observers to say, “Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;”but where is a country gentleman to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors?Who could taste the fine flavor in the name of Brooke if it were deliveredcasually, like wine without a seal? Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan upto a certain point.

“I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to say thereis no prospect of his marrying my niece,” said Mr. Brooke, much relieved to seethrough the window that Celia was coming in.

“Why not?” said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise. “It is hardlya fortnight since you and I were talking about it.”

“My niece has chosen another suitor—has chosen him, you know. I have hadnothing to do with it. I should have preferred Chettam; and I should have saidChettam was the man any girl would have chosen. But there is no accounting forthese things. Your sex is capricious, you know.”

“Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?” Mrs.Cadwallader’s mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of choice forDorothea.

But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the greetingwith her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity of answering immediately. Hegot up hastily, and saying, “By the way, I must speak to Wright about thehorses,” 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 thesimplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking to theRector’s wife alone.

“This is frightful. How long has it been going on?”

“I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.”

“Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.”

“I am so sorry for Dorothea.”

“Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.”

“Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul.”

“With all my heart.”

“Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a greatsoul.”

“Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now; when the next comesand 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 JamesChettam? 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 goodhusband. Only,” Celia added, with a slight blush (she sometimes seemed to blushas 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 particularabout what one says. Sir James never seemed to please her.”

“She must have encouraged him, I am sure. That is not very creditable.”

“Please don’t be angry with Dodo; she does not see things. She thought so muchabout 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 inhaste, “I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him. He will havebrought his mother back by this time, and I must call. Your uncle will nevertell him. We are all disappointed, my dear. Young people should think of theirfamilies in marrying. I set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and mademyself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get my coals bystratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil. However, Casaubon has moneyenough; I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the familyquarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant. By the bye,before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry. I want tosend 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 willoblige me. Sir James’s cook is a perfect dragon.”

In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter and drivento Fresh*tt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her husband beingresident in Fresh*tt and keeping a curate in Tipton.

Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had kept him absentfor a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending to ride over toTipton Grange. His horse was standing at the door when Mrs. Cadwallader droveup, and he immediately appeared there himself, whip in hand. Lady Chettam hadnot yet returned, but Mrs. Cadwallader’s errand could not be despatched in thepresence of grooms, so she asked to be taken into the conservatory close by, tolook 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 youpretended 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 ofmeaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he looked silly andnever 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 saythat you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a sort ofpolitical 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 grainsof common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a capital quality torun in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on. And there must be alittle 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 MissBrooke would be such a fine match. I knew there was a great deal of nonsense inher—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 Brookeshould have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some preposterous sectunknown 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 fewmoments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend’s face, which hewas trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his boot; but shesoon added, “Engaged to Casaubon.”

Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up. Perhaps his face hadnever before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he turned to Mrs.Cadwallader and repeated, “Casaubon?”

“Even so. You know my errand now.”

“Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!” (The point of viewhas to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)

“She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!”said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?” said Sir James. “He hasone 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 sheis 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 abuseCasaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it isunnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who attendsso little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybodymyself. Come, come, cheer up! you are well rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who wouldhave been requiring you to see the stars by daylight. Between ourselves, littleCelia is worth two of her, and likely after all to be the better match. Forthis 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 shouldtry to use their influence.”

“Well, Humphrey doesn’t know yet. But when I tell him, you may depend on it hewill say, ‘Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow—and young—young enough.’ Thesecharitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it andgot the colic. However, if I were a man I should prefer Celia, especially whenDorothea was gone. The truth is, you have been courting one and have won theother. I can see that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to beadmired. If it were any one but me who said so, you might think itexaggeration. Good-by!”

Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on his horse.He was not going to renounce his ride because of his friend’s unpleasantnews—only to ride the faster in some other direction than that of TiptonGrange.

Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about MissBrooke’s marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think she had ahand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived the preliminariesof 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 telescopemight have swept the parishes of Tipton and Fresh*tt, the whole area visited byMrs. Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that couldexcite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the sameunperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In fact, if thatconvenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages, one of themwould doubtless have remarked, that you can know little of women by followingthem about in their pony-phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on awater-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rathercoarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibitingan active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if theywere so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certaintiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallowerwaits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking,a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play ofminute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bringher the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally simple, quite free fromsecrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciouslyaffected by the great affairs of the world. All the more did the affairs of thegreat world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-bornrelations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs bymarrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, andthe furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing ofgenealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened therelations of scandal,—these were topics of which she retained details with theutmost accuracy, and reproduced them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, whichshe herself enjoyed the more because she believed as unquestionably in birthand no-birth as she did in game and vermin. She would never have disowned anyone on the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basinwould have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I fearhis aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling towardsthe vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made alltheir money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Cadwallader detested highprices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such peoplewere no part of God’s design in making the world; and their accent was anaffliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly morethan a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bredscheme of the universe. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs.Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, andbe quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have thehonor to coexist with hers.

With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near intothe form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that the Miss Brookesand their matrimonial prospects were alien to her? especially as it had beenthe 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 thefirst arrival of the young ladies in Tipton she had prearranged Dorothea’smarriage with Sir James, and if it had taken place would have been quite surethat it was her doing: that it should not take place after she had preconceivedit, caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with. She wasthe diplomatist of Tipton and Fresh*tt, and for anything to happen in spite ofher 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 ofthis girl had been infected with some of her husband’s weak charitableness:those Methodistical whims, that air of being more religious than the rector andcurate together, came from a deeper and more constitutional disease than shehad been willing to believe.

“However,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards to herhusband, “I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married Sir James,of her becoming a sane, sensible woman. He would never have contradicted her,and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in herabsurdities. But now I wish her joy of her hair shirt.”

It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir James,and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss Brooke, therecould not have been a more skilful move towards the success of her plan thanher hint to the baronet that he had made an impression on Celia’s heart. For hewas not one of those gentlemen who languish after the unattainable Sappho’sapple that laughs from the topmost bough—the charms which

“Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.”

He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that he wasnot an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred. Already theknowledge that Dorothea had chosen Mr. Casaubon had bruised his attachment andrelaxed its hold. Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some otherfeelings towards women than towards grouse and foxes, and did not regard hisfuture wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of thechase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive races asto feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, wasnecessary 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, anddisinclines 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 oftenderness from out his heart towards hers.

Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for half an hourin a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened his pace, and at lastturned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter cut. Various feelingswrought in him the determination after all to go to the Grange to-day as ifnothing new had happened. He could not help rejoicing that he had never madethe offer and been rejected; mere friendly politeness required that he shouldcall to see Dorothea about the cottages, and now happily Mrs. Cadwallader hadprepared him to offer his congratulations, if necessary, without showing toomuch awkwardness. He really did not like it: giving up Dorothea was verypainful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this visitforthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of file-biting andcounter-irritant. And without his distinctly recognizing the impulse, therecertainly was present in him the sense that Celia would be there, and that heshould pay her more attention than he had done before.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast anddinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and inanswer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a badthing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

CHAPTER VII.

“Piacer e popone
Vuol la sua stagione.”
—Italian Proverb.

Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time at theGrange in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship occasioned to theprogress of his great work—the Key to all Mythologies—naturally made him lookforward the more eagerly to the happy termination of courtship. But he haddeliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was nowtime for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, toirradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals ofstudious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, hisculminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years. Hencehe determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps wassurprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughtyregions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, Mr. Casaubonfound that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his streamwould afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated theforce of masculine passion. Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that MissBrooke showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfil his mostagreeable previsions of marriage. It had once or twice crossed his mind thatpossibly there was some deficiency in Dorothea to account for the moderation ofhis abandonment; but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure tohimself a woman who would have pleased him better; so that there was clearly noreason 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 Latinand Greek aloud to you, as Milton’s daughters did to their father, withoutunderstanding 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 thatexercise 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 havebeen proud to minister to such a father; and in the second place they mighthave studied privately and taught themselves to understand what they read, andthen it would have been interesting. I hope you don’t expect me to be naughtyand stupid?”

“I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every possiblerelation of life. Certainly it might be a great advantage if you were able tocopy the Greek character, and to that end it were well to begin with a littlereading.”

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 betiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to herfuture husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces ofmasculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth couldbe 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-roomedcottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appearedto conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhapseven Hebrew might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in orderto arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of theChristian. And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which shewould have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child,to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her allegedcleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw theemptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in generalbut little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much onany particular occasion.

However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour together, likea schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover, to whom a mistress’selementary ignorance and difficulties have a touching fitness. Few scholarswould have disliked teaching the alphabet under such circ*mstances. ButDorothea herself was a little shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, andthe answers she got to some timid questions about the value of the Greekaccents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secretsnot capable of explanation to a woman’s reason.

Mr. Brooke had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with his usualstrength upon it one day that he came into the library while the reading wasgoing forward.

“Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kindof 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 isa lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the fine arts, thatkind of thing—they should study those up to a certain point, women should; butin a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you orsing you a good old English tune. That is what I like; though I have heard mostthings—been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. ButI’m a conservative in music—it’s not like ideas, you know. I stick to the goodold tunes.”

“Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,” saidDorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must beforgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chieflyconsisted at that dark period. She smiled and looked up at her betrothed withgrateful eyes. If he had always been asking her to play the “Last Rose ofSummer,” she would have required much resignation. “He says there is only anold harpsichord at Lowick, and it is covered with books.”

“Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear. Celia, now, plays very prettily, andis always ready to play. However, since Casaubon does not like it, you are allright. But it’s a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort,Casaubon: the bow always strung—that kind of thing, you know—will not do.”

“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teasedwith measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon. “A tune much iterated has theridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of minuet tokeep time—an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after boyhood. As to thegrander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even toserve as an educating influence according to the ancient conception, I saynothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned.”

“No; but music of that sort I should enjoy,” said Dorothea. “When we werecoming 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, shewill 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 thatit was perhaps better for her to be early married to so sober a fellow asCasaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.

“It is wonderful, though,” he said to himself as he shuffled out of theroom—“it is wonderful that she should have liked him. However, the match isgood. I should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered it, letMrs. Cadwallader say what she will. He is pretty certain to be a bishop, isCasaubon. That was a very seasonable pamphlet of his on the CatholicQuestion:—a deanery at least. They owe him a deanery.”

And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by remarkingthat Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the Radical speech which, ata later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the bishops. What eleganthistorian would neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroesdid not foresee the history of the world, or even their own actions?—Forexample, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of beinga Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his laboriousnights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring theiridle days with watches. Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously itmay be worked, is likely to outlast our coal.

But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted byprecedent—namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have madeany great difference. To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having alarge ecclesiastical income was one thing—to make a Liberal speech was anotherthing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from variouspoints of view.

CHAPTER VIII.

“Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now,
And you her father. Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian in each gentleman.”

It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he continued to like going tothe Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty of seeing Dorothea forthe first time in the light of a woman who was engaged to another man. Ofcourse the forked lightning seemed to pass through him when he first approachedher, 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 itwould have been if he had thought his rival a brilliant and desirable match. Hehad no sense of being eclipsed by Mr. Casaubon; he was only shocked thatDorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification lost some ofits bitterness by being mingled with compassion.

Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had completely resignedher, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not affected a proposedmatch that was clearly suitable and according to nature; he could not yet bequite passive under the idea of her engagement to Mr. Casaubon. On the day whenhe first saw them together in the light of his present knowledge, it seemed tohim that he had not taken the affair seriously enough. Brooke was reallyculpable; he ought to have hindered it. Who could speak to him? Something mightbe done perhaps even now, at least to defer the marriage. On his way home heturned into the Rectory and asked for Mr. Cadwallader. Happily, the Rector wasat home, and his visitor was shown into the study, where all the fishing tacklehung. But he himself was in a little room adjoining, at work with his turningapparatus, and he called to the baronet to join him there. The two were betterfriends than any other landholder and clergyman in the county—a significantfact which was in agreement with the amiable expression of their faces.

Mr. Cadwallader was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very plainand rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease andgood-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the sunshine,quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed of itself. “Well,how are you?” he said, showing a hand not quite fit to be grasped. “Sorry Imissed you before. Is there anything particular? You look vexed.”

Sir James’s brow had a little crease in it, a little depression of the eyebrow,which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.

“It is only this conduct of Brooke’s. I really think somebody should speak tohim.”

“What? meaning to stand?” said Mr. Cadwallader, going on with the arrangementof the reels which he had just been turning. “I hardly think he means it. Butwhere’s the harm, if he likes it? Any one who objects to Whiggery should beglad when the Whigs don’t put up the strongest fellow. They won’t overturn theConstitution with our friend Brooke’s head for a battering ram.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Sir James, who, after putting down his hat andthrowing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse his leg and examine the soleof his boot with much bitterness. “I mean this marriage. I mean his lettingthat 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. Heought not to allow the thing to be done in this headlong manner. I wonder a manlike you, Cadwallader—a man with daughters, can look at the affair withindifference: 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 aprovoking little inward laugh. “You are as bad as Elinor. She has been wantingme to go and lecture Brooke; and I have reminded her that her friends had avery poor opinion of the match she made when she married me.”

“But look at Casaubon,” said Sir James, indignantly. “He must be fifty, and Idon’t believe he could ever have been much more than the shadow of a man. Lookat his legs!”

“Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own wayin the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much asyou admire yourselves. Elinor used to tell her sisters that she married me formy ugliness—it was so various and amusing that it had quite conquered herprudence.”

“You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you. But this is no question ofbeauty. I don’t like Casaubon.” This was Sir James’s strongest way ofimplying that he thought ill of a man’s character.

“Why? what do you know against him?” said the Rector laying down his reels, andputting his thumbs into his armholes with an air of attention.

Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: itseemed 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, thatyou may be sure of. He is very good to his poor relations: pensions several ofthe women, and is educating a young fellow at a good deal of expense. Casaubonacts up to his sense of justice. His mother’s sister made a bad match—a Pole, Ithink—lost herself—at any rate was disowned by her family. If it had not beenfor that, Casaubon would not have had so much money by half. I believe he wenthimself to find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them. Every manwould not ring so well as that, if you tried his metal. You would,Chettam; but not every man.”

“I don’t know,” said Sir James, coloring. “I am not so sure of myself.” Hepaused 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. Awoman may not be happy with him. And I think when a girl is so young as MissBrooke is, her friends ought to interfere a little to hinder her from doinganything foolish. You laugh, because you fancy I have some feeling on my ownaccount. But upon my honor, it is not that. I should feel just the same if Iwere 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 asI do—I wish you would talk to Brooke about it.”

Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs. Cadwalladerentering from the study. She held by the hand her youngest girl, about fiveyears 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 noimpression on Humphrey. As long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is whathe ought to be. Bless you, Casaubon has got a trout-stream, and does not careabout fishing in it himself: could there be a better fellow?”

“Well, there is something in that,” said the Rector, with his quiet, inwardlaugh. “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 themarriage.”

“In the first place,” said the Rector, looking rather grave, “it would benonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him actaccordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into anymould, 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’sdisadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be acting forthe advantage of Miss Brooke? I know no harm of Casaubon. I don’t care abouthis Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he doesn’t care about myfishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the Catholic Question, that wasunexpected; but he has always been civil to me, and I don’t see why I shouldspoil his sport. For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with himthan she would be with any other man.”

“Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather dine underthe 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 myamusem*nt.”

“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 andparentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,” said Sir James, witha 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, whenhe was a little boy, he made an abstract of ‘Hop o’ my Thumb,’ and he has beenmaking abstracts ever since. Ugh! And that is the man Humphrey goes on sayingthat a woman may be happy with.”

“Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes,” said the Rector. “I don’t profess tounderstand 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’tfeel called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good as most of us. He is ascholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some Radical fellowspeechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned straw-choppingincumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the anglingincumbent. And upon my word, I don’t see that one is worse or better than theother.” The Rector ended with his silent laugh. He always saw the joke of anysatire against himself. His conscience was large and easy, like the rest ofhim: 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 perfectliberty of misjudgment. It was a sign of his good disposition that he did notslacken at all in his intention of carrying out Dorothea’s design of thecottages. Doubtless this persistence was the best course for his own dignity:but pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more thanvanity makes us witty. She was now enough aware of Sir James’s position withregard to her, to appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord’sduty, to which he had at first been urged by a lover’s complaisance, and herpleasure in it was great enough to count for something even in her presenthappiness. Perhaps she gave to Sir James Chettam’s cottages all the interestshe could spare from Mr. Casaubon, or rather from the symphony of hopefuldreams, admiring trust, and passionate self devotion which that learnedgentleman had set playing in her soul. Hence it happened that in the goodbaronet’s succeeding visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions toCelia, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. Shewas perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he wasgradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionshipbetween a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Casaubon’s behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr.Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening theweeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictateany changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates beforemarriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. Andcertainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have ourown way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company with heruncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon’s home was the manor-house. Close by, visiblefrom some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonageopposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr. Casaubon had only held theliving, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manoralso. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue oflimes towards the southwest front, with a sunk fence between park andpleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance sweptuninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level ofcorn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the settingsun. This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rathermelancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were moreconfined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps oftrees, 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, butsmall-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must havechildren, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, tomake it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnantof yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillnesswithout sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr.Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown intorelief by that background.

“Oh dear!” Celia said to herself, “I am sure Fresh*tt Hall would have beenpleasanter than this.” She thought of the white freestone, the pillaredportico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like aprince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush, with a handkerchief swiftlymetamorphosed from the most delicately odorous petals—Sir James, who talked soagreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not aboutlearning! Celia had those light young feminine tastes which grave andweatherworn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon’sbias 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 colorssubdued by time, the curious old maps and bird’s-eye views on the walls of thecorridor, with here and there an old vase below, had no oppression for her, andseemed more cheerful than the casts and pictures at the Grange, which her unclehad long ago brought home from his travels—they being probably among the ideashe had taken in at one time. To poor Dorothea these severe classical nuditiesand smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staringinto the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she had never been taught how shecould bring them into any sort of relevance with her life. But the owners ofLowick apparently had not been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon’s studies of thepast were not carried on by means of such aids.

Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything seemedhallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked upwith eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attentionspecially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would like analteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing toalter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no defect forher. She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting himas she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discordsby her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left inthe weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

“Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which room youwould like to have as your boudoir,” said Mr. Casaubon, showing that his viewsof 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 Iwould rather have all those matters decided for me. I shall be much happier totake everything as it is—just as you have been used to have it, or as you willyourself choose it to be. I have no motive for wishing anything else.”

“Oh, Dodo,” said Celia, “will you not have the bow-windowed room up-stairs?”

Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the avenue oflimes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures ofladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group. A piece of tapestryover a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it. The chairsand tables were thin-legged and easy to upset. It was a room where one mightfancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery. Alight bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf,completing the furniture.

“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, “this would be a pretty room with some new hangings,sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now.”

“No, uncle,” said Dorothea, eagerly. “Pray do not speak of altering anything.There are so many other things in the world that want altering—I like to takethese 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 wasyoung.”

“It was,” he said, with his slow bend of the head.

“This is your mother,” said Dorothea, who had turned to examine the group ofminiatures. “It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I should think, abetter portrait. And this one opposite, who is this?”

“Her elder sister. They were, like you and your sister, the only two childrenof their parents, who hang above them, you see.”

“The sister is pretty,” said Celia, implying that she thought less favorably ofMr. Casaubon’s mother. It was a new opening to Celia’s imagination, that hecame of a family who had all been young in their time—the ladies wearingnecklaces.

“It is a peculiar face,” said Dorothea, looking closely. “Those deep gray eyesrather near together—and the delicate irregular nose with a sort of ripple init—and all the powdered curls hanging backward. Altogether it seems to mepeculiar rather than pretty. There is not even a family likeness between herand 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 toask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer, and she turned tothe window to admire the view. The sun had lately pierced the gray, and theavenue 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 adroll 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 ofalms-houses—little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, please,” said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I should like to seeall that.” She had got nothing from him more graphic about the Lowick cottagesthan that they were “not bad.”

They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy borders andclumps 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 beenhanging a little in the rear, came up presently, when she saw that Mr. Casaubonwas gone away, and said in her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradictthe 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 toldCasaubon he should change his gardener.”

“No, not a gardener,” said Celia; “a gentleman with a sketch-book. He hadlight-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, andTucker 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 areusually not wanting in sons. But after the introduction, the conversation didnot lead to any question about his family, and the startling apparition ofyouthfulness was forgotten by every one but Celia. She inwardly declined tobelieve that the light-brown curls and slim figure could have any relationshipto Mr. Tucker, who was just as old and musty-looking as she would have expectedMr. Casaubon’s curate to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven(for Celia wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were sounpleasant. Celia thought with some dismalness of the time she should have tospend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the curate had probably no pretty littlechildren whom she could like, irrespective of principle.

Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon had not beenwithout foresight on this head, the curate being able to answer all Dorothea’squestions about the villagers and the other parishioners. Everybody, he assuredher, was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those double cottages at a lowrent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. Thesmall boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or dida little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though thepublic disposition was rather towards laying by money than towardsspirituality, there was not much vice. The speckled fowls were so numerous thatMr. Brooke observed, “Your farmers leave some barley for the women to glean, Isee. The poor folks here might have a fowl in their pot, as the good Frenchking used to wish for all his people. The French eat a good many fowls—skinnyfowls, you know.”

“I think it was a very cheap wish of his,” said Dorothea, indignantly. “Arekings 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. Butperhaps he wished them to have fat fowls.”

“Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was subauditum; thatis, present in the king’s mind, but not uttered,” said Mr. Casaubon, smilingand 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 somedisappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing for her todo in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had glanced over thepossibility, which she would have preferred, of finding that her home would bein a parish which had a larger share of the world’s misery, so that she mighthave had more active duties in it. Then, recurring to the future actuallybefore her, she made a picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon’s aimsin which she would await new duties. Many such might reveal themselves to thehigher knowledge gained by her in that companionship.

Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not allow himto lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden through thelittle gate, Mr. Casaubon said—

“You seem a little sad, Dorothea. I trust you are pleased with what you haveseen.”

“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 donefor them here. I have known so few ways of making my life good for anything. Ofcourse, my notions of usefulness must be narrow. I must learn new ways ofhelping people.”

“Doubtless,” said Mr. Casaubon. “Each position has its corresponding duties.Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any yearningunfulfilled.”

“Indeed, I believe that,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “Do not suppose that I amsad.”

“That is well. But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to the housethan that by which we came.”

Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a fineyew-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 ofevergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old tree. Mr. Brooke, who waswalking 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,” headded, looking at Dorothea, “of the lady whose portrait you have been noticing,my aunt Julia.”

The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy light-browncurls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once with Celia’sapparition.

“Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw. Will, this is MissBrooke.”

The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea could see apair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose with a littleripple in it, and hair falling backward; but there was a mouth and chin of amore prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of thegrandmother’s miniature. Young Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile, asif he were charmed with this introduction to his future second cousin and herrelatives; but wore rather a pouting air of discontent.

“You are an artist, I see,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book andturning it over in his unceremonious fashion.

“No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,” said youngLadislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.

“Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself at onetime, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice thing, done withwhat we used to call brio.” Mr. Brooke held out towards the two girls alarge colored sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool.

“I am no judge of these things,” said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an eagerdeprecation of the appeal to her. “You know, uncle, I never see the beauty ofthose pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a language I do notunderstand. I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature whichI am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a Greek sentence stands forwhich means nothing to me.” Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed hishead 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 thatkind of thing. You will come to my house, I hope, and I will show you what Idid in this way,” he continued, turning to young Ladislaw, who had to berecalled from his preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up hismind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marryCasaubon, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would haveconfirmed that opinion even if he had believed her. As it was, he took herwords for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketchdetestable. There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was laughing bothat her uncle and himself. But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soulthat had once lived in an Aeolian harp. This must be one of Nature’sinconsistencies. There could be no sort of passion in a girl who would marryCasaubon. But he turned from her, and bowed his thanks for Mr. Brooke’sinvitation.

“We will turn over my Italian engravings together,” continued that good-naturedman. “I have no end of those things, that I have laid by for years. One getsrusty in this part of the country, you know. Not you, Casaubon; you stick toyour studies; but my best ideas get undermost—out of use, you know. You cleveryoung men must guard against indolence. I was too indolent, you know: else Imight have been anywhere at one time.”

“That is a seasonable admonition,” said Mr. Casaubon; “but now we will pass onto the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of standing.”

When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with hissketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of amusem*ntwhich increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw back his head andlaughed aloud. Partly it was the reception of his own artistic production thattickled 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 theimpediment of indolence. Mr. Will Ladislaw’s sense of the ludicrous lit up hisfeatures very agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had nomixture of sneering and self-exaltation.

“What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?” said Mr. Brooke, asthey 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 hedeclined 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 vaguepurpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what. Hedeclines 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 wouldfurnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a scholarlyeducation, and launching him respectably. I am therefore bound to fulfil theexpectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting his conduct in the light ofmere 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 MungoPark,” 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 prematureand violent death. But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurateknowledge of the earth’s surface, that he said he should prefer not to know thesources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved ashunting grounds for the poetic imagination.”

“Well, there is something in that, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, who hadcertainly an impartial mind.

“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy andindisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury for himin any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far submissive to ordinaryrule as to choose one.”

“Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,” saidDorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable explanation.“Because the law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake,should they not? People’s lives and fortunes depend on them.”

“Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chieflydetermined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steadyapplication, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful instrumentally,but is not charming or immediately inviting to self-indulgent taste. I haveinsisted to him on what Aristotle has stated with admirable brevity, that forthe achievement of any work regarded as an end there must be a prior exerciseof many energies or acquired facilities of a secondary order, demandingpatience. I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toilof years preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain. To carefulreasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every form ofprescribed work ‘harness.’”

Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say somethingquite amusing.

“Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a Churchill—that sortof 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; heasks 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 withdelight. “It is noble. After all, people may really have in them some vocationwhich is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle andweak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, Ithink.”

“I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think patiencegood,” said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone together, taking offtheir wrappings.

“You mean that I am very impatient, Celia.”

“Yes; when people don’t do and say just what you like.” Celia had become lessafraid of “saying things” to Dorothea since this engagement: cleverness seemedto her more pitiable than ever.

CHAPTER X.

“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skinof a bear not yet killed.”—FULLER.

Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited him, andonly six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young relative hadstarted for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry.Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than theentire 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 toits peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towardsall sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will hadsincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he hadseveral 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 madehimself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted fromthese measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there wasan entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s. Thesuperadded circ*mstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; theuniverse had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but agrand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and whateffective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world isfull of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Willsaw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing nochick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose ploddingapplication, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploringthe tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouragingto Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard tohimself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is nomark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor inhumility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but somethingin particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncingon 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 inrelation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to Dorothea Mr. Casaubonhad been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable materialof her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was fairly represented in theminds of those less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered theirjudgments concerning him? I protest against any absolute conclusion, anyprejudice derived from Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighboringclergyman’s alleged greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor opinion ofhis rival’s legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, orfrom Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance. I am notsure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlativeexisted, could escape these unfavorable reflections of himself in various smallmirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit tohave the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking forhimself, has rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that thereis no good work or fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist andinterpreter of hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solarsystem been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose weturn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what isthe report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with whathindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or whatdeeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and withwhat spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be tooheavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot isimportant in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too largea place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we referhim to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held sublimefor our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have gotfrom us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was liableto think that others were providentially made for him, and especially toconsider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a “Key to allMythologies,” this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the othermendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.

Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more nearlythan it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their disapproval ofit, and in the present stage of things I feel more tenderly towards hisexperience 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 didnot find his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonialgarden scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered withflowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed vaultswhere he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to himself, still less couldhe have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely andnoble-hearted girl he had not won delight,—which he had also regarded as anobject to be found by search. It is true that he knew all the classicalpassages implying the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is amode of motion, which explains why they leave so little extra force for theirpersonal application.

Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had storedup for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on hisaffections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, getour 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 hiscirc*mstances were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which hecould account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him justwhen his expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when heexchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to theGrange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned toloneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling inthe morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal. And his was thatworst loneliness which would shrink from sympathy. He could not but wish thatDorothea should think him not less happy than the world would expect hersuccessful suitor to be; and in relation to his authorship he leaned on heryoung trust and veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest inlistening, as a means of encouragement to himself: in talking to her hepresented all his performance and intention with the reflected confidence ofthe pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audiencewhich crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure ofTartarean shades.

For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to youngladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Casaubon’s talkabout his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, thissurprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who hadideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usualeagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine intostrict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources ofknowledge some bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching wouldcome—Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higherinitiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending herdim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorotheawould have cared about any share in Mr. Casaubon’s learning as mereaccomplishment; for though opinion in the neighborhood of Fresh*tt and Tiptonhad pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circlesin whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowingand doing, apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay withinthat full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses werehabitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wearit loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had writtena book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of anauthority that constrained her conscience. But something she yearned for bywhich her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; andsince the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, sinceprayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there butknowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr.Casaubon?

Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation was unbroken,and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of flatness, he couldnever refer it to any slackening of her affectionate interest.

The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the weddingjourney as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this because he wishedto 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 thatDorothea 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 duringour 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 firsttime in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored from annoyance.

“You must have misunderstood me very much,” she said, “if you think I shouldnot enter into the value of your time—if you think that I should not willinglygive 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 theleast noticing that she was hurt; “but if you had a lady as your companion, Icould put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we could thus achieve twopurposes in the same space of time.”

“I beg you will not refer to this again,” said Dorothea, rather haughtily. Butimmediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning towards him she laid herhand on his, adding in a different tone, “Pray do not be anxious about me. Ishall have so much to think of when I am alone. And Tantripp will be asufficient companion, just to take care of me. I could not bear to have Celia:she would be miserable.”

It was time to dress. There was to be a dinner-party that day, the last of theparties 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 thebell, as if she needed more than her usual amount of preparation. She wasashamed of being irritated from some cause she could not define even toherself; for though she had no intention to be untruthful, her reply had nottouched the real hurt within her. Mr. Casaubon’s words had been quitereasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous sense of aloofness onhis 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 needsme less than I need him?”

Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right, she recoveredher equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity when she came intothe drawing-room in her silver-gray dress—the simple lines of her dark-brownhair parted over her brow and coiled massively behind, in keeping with theentire 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 airof repose about her as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking outfrom her tower into the clear air; but these intervals of quietude made theenergy of her speech and emotion the more remarked when some outward appeal hadtouched her.

She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for thedinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male portionthan any which had been held at the Grange since Mr. Brooke’s nieces hadresided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and trios more or lessinharmonious. There was the newly elected mayor of Middlemarch, who happened tobe a manufacturer; the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law, whopredominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist, others ahypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary; and there werevarious professional men. In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Brooke wasbeginning to treat the Middlemarchers, and that she preferred the farmers atthe tithe-dinner, who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed oftheir grandfathers’ furniture. For in that part of the country, before reformhad done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there wasa clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties; so that Mr.Brooke’s miscellaneous invitations seemed to belong to that general laxitywhich came from his inordinate travel and habit of taking too much in the formof ideas.

Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was foundfor 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 gentrythat he had become landed himself, and used that oath in a deep-mouthed manneras a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the speech of a man who held a goodposition.

Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman dislikedcoarseness and profanity, and merely bowed. The remark was taken up by Mr.Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who had a complexionsomething like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriageimplying the consciousness of a distinguished appearance.

“Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a littlemore to please us. There should be a little filigree about a woman—something ofthe coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a dead set she makesat 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. Betweenourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste than Miss Brooke or MissCelia either. If I were a marrying man I should choose Miss Vincy before eitherof them.”

“Well, make up, make up,” said Mr. Standish, jocosely; “you see the middle-agedfellows carry the day.”

Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to incur thecertainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.

The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely’s ideal was of coursenot present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far, would not havechosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer,unless it were on a public occasion. The feminine part of the company includednone whom Lady Chettam or Mrs. Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew,the colonel’s widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, butalso interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, andseemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might needthe supplement of quackery. Lady Chettam, who attributed her own remarkablehealth to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance, enteredwith 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 butstately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively, when Mrs. Renfrew’sattention was called away.

“It strengthens the disease,” said the Rector’s wife, much too well-born not tobe an amateur in medicine. “Everything depends on the constitution: some peoplemake fat, some blood, and some bile—that’s my view of the matter; and whateverthey take is a sort of grist to the mill.”

“Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce—reduce the disease, youknow, 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 samesoil. One of them grows more and more watery—”

“Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew—that is what I think. Dropsy! There is noswelling 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 dryingnature.”

“Let her try a certain person’s pamphlets,” said Mrs. Cadwallader in anundertone, seeing the gentlemen enter. “He does not want drying.”

“Who, my dear?” said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick as to nullifythe pleasure of explanation.

“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since theengagement: 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 overfor the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hatehim. She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by she will be at theother extreme. All flightiness!”

“How very shocking! I fear she is headstrong. But tell me—you know all abouthim—is there anything very bad? What is the truth?”

“The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and sure todisagree.”

“There could not be anything worse than that,” said Lady Chettam, with so vivida conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned something exactabout Mr. Casaubon’s disadvantages. “However, James will hear nothing againstMiss Brooke. He says she is the mirror of women still.”

“That is a generous make-believe of his. Depend upon it, he likes little Celiabetter, and she appreciates him. I hope you like my little Celia?”

“Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though not sofine a figure. But we were talking of physic. Tell me about this new youngsurgeon, Mr. Lydgate. I am told he is wonderfully clever: he certainly looksit—a fine brow indeed.”

“He is a gentleman. I heard him talking to Humphrey. He talks well.”

“Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland, really wellconnected. One does not expect it in a practitioner of that kind. For my ownpart, I like a medical man more on a footing with the servants; they are oftenall the cleverer. I assure you I found poor Hicks’s judgment unfailing; I neverknew him wrong. He was coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution. Itwas a loss to me his going off so suddenly. Dear me, what a very animatedconversation Miss Brooke seems to be having with this Mr. Lydgate!”

“She is talking cottages and hospitals with him,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, whoseears and power of interpretation were quick. “I believe he is a sort ofphilanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him up.”

“James,” said Lady Chettam when her son came near, “bring Mr. Lydgate andintroduce him to me. I want to test him.”

The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of makingMr. Lydgate’s acquaintance, having heard of his success in treating fever on anew plan.

Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatevernonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him impressiveness asa listener. He was as little as possible like the lamented Hicks, especially ina certain careless refinement about his toilet and utterance. Yet Lady Chettamgathered much confidence in him. He confirmed her view of her own constitutionas being peculiar, by admitting that all constitutions might be calledpeculiar, and he did not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others. Hedid not approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, onthe other hand, of incessant port wine and bark. He said “I think so” with anair of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement, that she formedthe most cordial opinion of his talents.

“I am quite pleased with your protege,” she said to Mr. Brooke before goingaway.

“My protege?—dear me!—who is that?” said Mr. Brooke.

“This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand hisprofession admirably.”

“Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of his whosent me a letter about him. However, I think he is likely to be first-rate—hasstudied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you know—wants to raise theprofession.”

“Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that sort ofthing,” resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady Chettam, and hadreturned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.

“Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?—upsetting the old treatment, whichhas made Englishmen what they are?” said Mr. Standish.

“Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who spoke ina subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part, hail the adventof Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for confiding the new hospital tohis management.”

“That is all very fine,” replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital patients, andkill a few people for charity I have no objection. But I am not going to handmoney out of my purse to have experiments tried on me. I like treatment thathas been tested a little.”

“Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an experiment,you know,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.

“Oh, if you talk in that sense!” said Mr. Standish, with as much disgust atsuch non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a valuable client.

“I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing me to askeleton, like poor Grainger,” said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a florid man, whowould have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with the Franciscantints of Mr. Bulstrode. “It’s an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left withoutany padding against the shafts of disease, as somebody said,—and I think it avery good expression myself.”

Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party early, andwould have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty of certainintroductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke, whose youthfulbloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded scholar, and her interest inmatters socially useful, gave her the piquancy of an unusual combination.

“She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,” he thought.“It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yetthey are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usuallyfall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste.”

Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate’s style of woman any more than Mr.Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter, whose mind wasmatured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to shock his trust infinal causes, including the adaptation of fine young women to purplefacedbachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might possibly have experience beforehim which would modify his opinion as to the most excellent things in woman.

Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen under hermaiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become Mrs. Casaubon, andwas on her way to Rome.

CHAPTER XI.

But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
—BEN JONSON.

Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a womanstrikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose that hehad lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particularwoman, “She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That iswhat a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music.”Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be facedwith philosophy and investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to havethe true melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would havechosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor willusually depend on her resolution rather than on his. Lydgate believed that heshould not marry for several years: not marry until he had trodden out a goodclear path for himself away from the broad road which was quite ready made. Hehad seen Miss Vincy above his horizon almost as long as it had taken Mr.Casaubon to become engaged and married: but this learned gentleman waspossessed of a fortune; he had assembled his voluminous notes, and had madethat sort of reputation which precedes performance,—often the larger part of aman’s fame. He took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant ofhis course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculableperturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-centurybefore him instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent on doingmany things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even securehim a good income. To a man under such circ*mstances, taking a wife issomething more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this;and Lydgate was disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions. Tohis taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point on which MissBrooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She didnot look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such womenwas about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, insteadof reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes fora heaven.

Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate than theturn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of the womanwho had attracted this young surgeon. But any one watching keenly the stealthyconvergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life onanother, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozenstare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands bysarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only itsstriking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended byliving up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, butalso those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting theboundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness ofinterdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing:people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood forboroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, andperhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a fewpersonages or families that stood with rocky firmness amid all thisfluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, andaltering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and ruralparish gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the oldstocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guineabecame extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once livedblamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closeracquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with analarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning. Infact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as wefind in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well totake a woman’s lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparentlybeguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in thisrespect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellenttaste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blondness which give thelargest range to choice in the flow and color of drapery. But these things madeonly part of her charm. She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon’sschool, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all thatwas demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting inand out of a carriage. Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as anexample: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental acquisitionand propriety of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional. Wecannot help the way in which people speak of us, and probably if Mrs. Lemon hadundertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen, these heroines would not have seemedpoetical. The first vision of Rosamond would have been enough with most judgesto dispel any prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon’s praise.

Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable vision,or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family; for though Mr.Peaco*ck, whose practice he had paid something to enter on, had not been theirdoctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering system adopted by him), he had manypatients among their connections and acquaintances. For who of any consequencein Middlemarch was not connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? Theywere old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, inwhich there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more or lessdecidedly genteel. Mr. Vincy’s sister had made a wealthy match in accepting Mr.Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimlyknown origin, was considered to have done well in uniting himself with a realMiddlemarch family; on the other hand, Mr. Vincy had descended a little, havingtaken an innkeeper’s daughter. But on this side too there was a cheering senseof money; for Mrs. Vincy’s sister had been second wife to rich old Mr.Featherstone, and had died childless years ago, so that her nephews and niecesmight be supposed to touch the affections of the widower. And it happened thatMr. Bulstrode and Mr. Featherstone, two of Peaco*ck’s most important patients,had, from different causes, given an especially good reception to hissuccessor, who had raised some partisanship as well as discussion. Mr. Wrench,medical attendant to the Vincy family, very early had grounds for thinkinglightly of Lydgate’s professional discretion, and there was no report about himwhich was not retailed at the Vincys’, where visitors were frequent. Mr. Vincywas more inclined to general good-fellowship than to taking sides, but therewas no need for him to be hasty in making any new man acquaintance. Rosamondsilently wished that her father would invite Mr. Lydgate. She was tired of thefaces and figures she had always been used to—the various irregular profilesand gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whomshe had known as boys. She had been at school with girls of higher position,whose brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be moreinterested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions. But she wouldnot have chosen to mention her wish to her father; and he, for his part, was inno hurry on the subject. An alderman about to be mayor must by-and-by enlargehis dinner-parties, but at present there were plenty of guests at hiswell-spread table.

That table often remained covered with the relics of the family breakfast longafter Mr. Vincy had gone with his second son to the warehouse, and when MissMorgan was already far on in morning lessons with the younger girls in theschoolroom. It awaited the family laggard, who found any sort of inconvenience(to others) less disagreeable than getting up when he was called. This was thecase one morning of the October in which we have lately seen Mr. Casaubonvisiting the Grange; and though the room was a little overheated with the fire,which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner, Rosamond, for somereason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer than usual, now and thengiving herself a little shake, and laying her work on her knee to contemplateit with an air of hesitating weariness. Her mamma, who had returned from anexcursion to the kitchen, sat on the other side of the small work-table with anair of more entire placidity, until, the clock again giving notice that it wasgoing to strike, she looked up from the lace-mending which was occupying herplump fingers and rang the bell.

“Knock at Mr. Fred’s door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has struckhalf-past ten.”

This was said without any change in the radiant good-humor of Mrs. Vincy’sface, in which forty-five years had delved neither angles nor parallels; andpushing back her pink capstrings, she let her work rest on her lap, while shelooked admiringly at her daughter.

“Mamma,” said Rosamond, “when Fred comes down I wish you would not let him havered herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them all over the house at this hourof the morning.”

“Oh, my dear, you are so hard on your brothers! It is the only fault I have tofind with you. You are the sweetest temper in the world, but you are so tetchywith your brothers.”

“Not tetchy, mamma: you never hear me speak in an unladylike way.”

“Well, but you want to deny them things.”

“Brothers are so unpleasant.”

“Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men. Be thankful if they have goodhearts. A woman must learn to put up with little things. You will be marriedsome day.”

“Not to any one who is like Fred.”

“Don’t decry your own brother, my dear. Few young men have less against them,although he couldn’t take his degree—I’m sure I can’t understand why, for heseems to me most clever. And you know yourself he was thought equal to the bestsociety at college. So particular as you are, my dear, I wonder you are notglad to have such a gentlemanly young man for a brother. You are always findingfault with Bob because he is not Fred.”

“Oh no, mamma, only because he is Bob.”

“Well, my dear, you will not find any Middlemarch young man who has notsomething against him.”

“But”—here Rosamond’s face broke into a smile which suddenly revealed twodimples. She herself thought unfavorably of these dimples and smiled little ingeneral society. “But I shall not marry any Middlemarch young man.”

“So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick of them; and ifthere’s better to be had, I’m sure there’s no girl better deserves it.”

“Excuse me, mamma—I wish you would not say, ‘the pick of them.’”

“Why, what else are they?”

“I mean, mamma, it is rather a vulgar expression.”

“Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker. What should I say?”

“The best of them.”

“Why, that seems just as plain and common. If I had had time to think, I shouldhave said, ‘the most superior young men.’ But with your education you mustknow.”

“What must Rosy know, mother?” said Mr. Fred, who had slid in unobservedthrough the half-open door while the ladies were bending over their work, andnow going up to the fire stood with his back towards it, warming the soles ofhis slippers.

“Whether it’s right to say ‘superior young men,’” said Mrs. Vincy, ringing thebell.

“Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to beshopkeepers’ slang.”

“Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?” said Rosamond, with mild gravity.

“Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”

“There is correct English: that is not slang.”

“I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history andessays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

“You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.”

“Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox aleg-plaiter.”

“Of course you can call it poetry if you like.”

“Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; Ishall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you toseparate.”

“Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!” said Mrs. Vincy, withcheerful admiration.

“Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?” said Fred, to theservant who brought in coffee and buttered toast; while he walked round thetable surveying the ham, potted beef, and other cold remnants, with an air ofsilent rejection, and polite forbearance from signs of disgust.

“Should you like eggs, sir?”

“Eggs, no! Bring me a grilled bone.”

“Really, Fred,” said Rosamond, when the servant had left the room, “if you musthave hot things for breakfast, I wish you would come down earlier. You can getup at six o’clock to go out hunting; I cannot understand why you find it sodifficult to get up on other mornings.”

“That is your want of understanding, Rosy. I can get up to go hunting because Ilike it.”

“What would you think of me if I came down two hours after every one else andordered grilled bone?”

“I should think you were an uncommonly fast young lady,” said Fred, eating histoast with the utmost composure.

“I cannot see why brothers are to make themselves disagreeable, any more thansisters.”

“I don’t make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is aword that describes your feelings and not my actions.”

“I think it describes the smell of grilled bone.”

“Not at all. It describes a sensation in your little nose associated withcertain finicking notions which are the classics of Mrs. Lemon’s school. Lookat my mother; you don’t see her objecting to everything except what she doesherself. She is my notion of a pleasant woman.”

“Bless you both, my dears, and don’t quarrel,” said Mrs. Vincy, with motherlycordiality. “Come, Fred, tell us all about the new doctor. How is your unclepleased with him?”

“Pretty well, I think. He asks Lydgate all sorts of questions and then screwsup his face while he hears the answers, as if they were pinching his toes.That’s his way. Ah, here comes my grilled bone.”

“But how came you to stay out so late, my dear? You only said you were going toyour uncle’s.”

“Oh, I dined at Plymdale’s. We had whist. Lydgate was there too.”

“And what do you think of him? He is very gentlemanly, I suppose. They say heis of excellent family—his relations quite county people.”

“Yes,” said Fred. “There was a Lydgate at John’s who spent no end of money. Ifind this man is a second cousin of his. But rich men may have very poor devilsfor second cousins.”

“It always makes a difference, though, to be of good family,” said Rosamond,with a tone of decision which showed that she had thought on this subject.Rosamond felt that she might have been happier if she had not been the daughterof a Middlemarch manufacturer. She disliked anything which reminded her thather mother’s father had been an innkeeper. Certainly any one remembering thefact might think that Mrs. Vincy had the air of a very handsome good-humoredlandlady, accustomed to the most capricious orders of gentlemen.

“I thought it was odd his name was Tertius,” said the bright-faced matron, “butof course it’s a name in the family. But now, tell us exactly what sort of manhe is.”

“Oh, tallish, dark, clever—talks well—rather a prig, I think.”

“I never can make out what you mean by a prig,” said Rosamond.

“A fellow who wants to show that he has opinions.”

“Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions,” said Mrs. Vincy. “What are theythere for else?”

“Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for. But a prig is a fellow who isalways making you a present of his opinions.”

“I suppose Mary Garth admires Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, not without a touchof innuendo.

“Really, I can’t say.” said Fred, rather glumly, as he left the table, andtaking up a novel which he had brought down with him, threw himself into anarm-chair. “If you are jealous of her, go oftener to Stone Court yourself andeclipse her.”

“I wish you would not be so vulgar, Fred. If you have finished, pray ring thebell.”

“It is true, though—what your brother says, Rosamond,” Mrs. Vincy began, whenthe servant had cleared the table. “It is a thousand pities you haven’tpatience to go and see your uncle more, so proud of you as he is, and wantedyou to live with him. There’s no knowing what he might have done for you aswell as for Fred. God knows, I’m fond of having you at home with me, but I canpart with my children for their good. And now it stands to reason that youruncle Featherstone will do something for Mary Garth.”

“Mary Garth can bear being at Stone Court, because she likes that better thanbeing a governess,” said Rosamond, folding up her work. “I would rather nothave anything left to me if I must earn it by enduring much of my uncle’s coughand his ugly relations.”

“He can’t be long for this world, my dear; I wouldn’t hasten his end, but whatwith asthma and that inward complaint, let us hope there is something betterfor him in another. And I have no ill-will towards Mary Garth, but there’sjustice to be thought of. And Mr. Featherstone’s first wife brought him nomoney, as my sister did. Her nieces and nephews can’t have so much claim as mysister’s. And I must say I think Mary Garth a dreadful plain girl—more fit fora governess.”

“Every one would not agree with you there, mother,” said Fred, who seemed to beable to read and listen too.

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, wheeling skilfully, “if she had somefortune left her,—a man marries his wife’s relations, and the Garths are sopoor, and live in such a small way. But I shall leave you to your studies, mydear; for I must go and do some shopping.”

“Fred’s studies are not very deep,” said Rosamond, rising with her mamma, “heis only reading a novel.”

“Well, well, by-and-by he’ll go to his Latin and things,” said Mrs. Vincy,soothingly, stroking her son’s head. “There’s a fire in the smoking-room onpurpose. It’s your father’s wish, you know—Fred, my dear—and I always tell himyou will be good, and go to college again to take your degree.”

Fred drew his mother’s hand down to his lips, but said nothing.

“I suppose you are not going out riding to-day?” said Rosamond, lingering alittle after her mamma was gone.

“No; why?”

“Papa says I may have the chestnut to ride now.”

“You can go with me to-morrow, if you like. Only I am going to Stone Court,remember.”

“I want to ride so much, it is indifferent to me where we go.” Rosamond reallywished to go to Stone Court, of all other places.

“Oh, I say, Rosy,” said Fred, as she was passing out of the room, “if you aregoing to the piano, let me come and play some airs with you.”

“Pray do not ask me this morning.”

“Why not this morning?”

“Really, Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute. A man looks verysilly playing the flute. And you play so out of tune.”

“When next any one makes love to you, Miss Rosamond, I will tell him howobliging you are.”

“Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute, any morethan I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?”

“And why should you expect me to take you out riding?”

This question led to an adjustment, for Rosamond had set her mind on thatparticular ride.

So Fred was gratified with nearly an hour’s practice of “Ar hyd y nos,” “Yebanks and braes,” and other favorite airs from his “Instructor on the Flute;” awheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and an irrepressiblehopefulness.

CHAPTER XII.

He had more tow on his distaffe
Than Gerveis knew.
—CHAUCER.

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, laythrough a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures,with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coralfruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy,dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood: the pool in thecorner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oakshadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew;the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock;the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way ofapproach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood;and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys withwondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in laterlife, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that makethe gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls—the things they toddledamong, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees whilehe drove leisurely.

But the road, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we have seen, wasnot a parish of muddy lanes and poor tenants; and it was into Lowick parishthat Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple of miles’ riding. Another milewould bring them to Stone Court, and at the end of the first half, the housewas already visible, looking as if it had been arrested in its growth toward astone mansion by an unexpected budding of farm-buildings on its left flank,which had hindered it from becoming anything more than the substantial dwellingof a gentleman farmer. It was not the less agreeable an object in the distancefor the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks which balanced the fine row of walnutson the right.

Presently it was possible to discern something that might be a gig on thecircular drive before the front door.

“Dear me,” said Rosamond, “I hope none of my uncle’s horrible relations arethere.”

“They are, though. That is Mrs. Waule’s gig—the last yellow gig left, I shouldthink. When I see Mrs. Waule in it, I understand how yellow can have been wornfor mourning. That gig seems to me more funereal than a hearse. But then Mrs.Waule always has black crape on. How does she manage it, Rosy? Her friendscan’t always be dying.”

“I don’t know at all. And she is not in the least evangelical,” said Rosamond,reflectively, as if that religious point of view would have fully accounted forperpetual crape. “And, not poor,” she added, after a moment’s pause.

“No, by George! They are as rich as Jews, those Waules and Featherstones; Imean, for people like them, who don’t want to spend anything. And yet they hangabout my uncle like vultures, and are afraid of a farthing going away fromtheir side of the family. But I believe he hates them all.”

The Mrs. Waule who was so far from being admirable in the eyes of these distantconnections, had happened to say this very morning (not at all with a defiantair, but in a low, muffled, neutral tone, as of a voice heard through cottonwool) that she did not wish “to enjoy their good opinion.” She was seated, asshe observed, on her own brother’s hearth, and had been Jane Featherstonefive-and-twenty years before she had been Jane Waule, which entitled her tospeak when her own brother’s name had been made free with by those who had noright to it.

“What are you driving at there?” said Mr. Featherstone, holding his stickbetween his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a momentary sharpglance, which seemed to react on him like a draught of cold air and set himcoughing.

Mrs. Waule had to defer her answer till he was quiet again, till Mary Garth hadsupplied him with fresh syrup, and he had begun to rub the gold knob of hisstick, looking bitterly at the fire. It was a bright fire, but it made nodifference to the chill-looking purplish tint of Mrs. Waule’s face, which wasas neutral as her voice; having mere chinks for eyes, and lips that hardlymoved in speaking.

“The doctors can’t master that cough, brother. It’s just like what I have; forI’m your own sister, constitution and everything. But, as I was saying, it’s apity Mrs. Vincy’s family can’t be better conducted.”

“Tchah! you said nothing o’ the sort. You said somebody had made free with myname.”

“And no more than can be proved, if what everybody says is true. My brotherSolomon tells me it’s the talk up and down in Middlemarch how unsteady youngVincy is, and has been forever gambling at billiards since home he came.”

“Nonsense! What’s a game at billiards? It’s a good gentlemanly game; and youngVincy is not a clodhopper. If your son John took to billiards, now, he’d make afool of himself.”

“Your nephew John never took to billiards or any other game, brother, and isfar from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody says is true, mustbe found somewhere else than out of Mr. Vincy the father’s pocket. For they sayhe’s been losing money for years, though nobody would think so, to see him gocoursing and keeping open house as they do. And I’ve heard say Mr. Bulstrodecondemns Mrs. Vincy beyond anything for her flightiness, and spoiling herchildren so.”

“What’s Bulstrode to me? I don’t bank with him.”

“Well, Mrs. Bulstrode is Mr. Vincy’s own sister, and they do say that Mr. Vincymostly trades on the Bank money; and you may see yourself, brother, when awoman past forty has pink strings always flying, and that light way of laughingat everything, it’s very unbecoming. But indulging your children is one thing,and finding money to pay their debts is another. And it’s openly said thatyoung Vincy has raised money on his expectations. I don’t say whatexpectations. Miss Garth hears me, and is welcome to tell again. I know youngpeople hang together.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Waule,” said Mary Garth. “I dislike hearing scandal toomuch to wish to repeat it.”

Mr. Featherstone rubbed the knob of his stick and made a brief convulsive showof laughter, which had much the same genuineness as an old whist-player’schuckle over a bad hand. Still looking at the fire, he said—

“And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn’t got expectations? Such a fine,spirited fellow is like enough to have ’em.”

There was a slight pause before Mrs. Waule replied, and when she did so, hervoice seemed to be slightly moistened with tears, though her face was stilldry.

“Whether or no, brother, it is naturally painful to me and my brother Solomonto hear your name made free with, and your complaint being such as may carryyou off sudden, and people who are no more Featherstones than the Merry-Andrewat the fair, openly reckoning on your property coming to them. And meyour own sister, and Solomon your own brother! And if that’s to be it, what hasit pleased the Almighty to make families for?” Here Mrs. Waule’s tears fell,but with moderation.

“Come, out with it, Jane!” said Mr. Featherstone, looking at her. “You mean tosay, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him money on what he sayshe knows about my will, eh?”

“I never said so, brother” (Mrs. Waule’s voice had again become dry andunshaken). “It was told me by my brother Solomon last night when he calledcoming from market to give me advice about the old wheat, me being a widow, andmy son John only three-and-twenty, though steady beyond anything. And he had itfrom most undeniable authority, and not one, but many.”

“Stuff and nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it. It’s all a got-up story. Goto the window, missy; I thought I heard a horse. See if the doctor’s coming.”

“Not got up by me, brother, nor yet by Solomon, who, whatever else he maybe—and I don’t deny he has oddities—has made his will and parted his propertyequal between such kin as he’s friends with; though, for my part, I think thereare times when some should be considered more than others. But Solomon makes itno secret what he means to do.”

“The more fool he!” said Mr. Featherstone, with some difficulty; breaking intoa severe fit of coughing that required Mary Garth to stand near him, so thatshe did not find out whose horses they were which presently paused stamping onthe gravel before the door.

Before Mr. Featherstone’s cough was quiet, Rosamond entered, bearing up herriding-habit with much grace. She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs. Waule, who saidstiffly, “How do you do, miss?” smiled and nodded silently to Mary, andremained standing till the coughing should cease, and allow her uncle to noticeher.

“Heyday, miss!” he said at last, “you have a fine color. Where’s Fred?”

“Seeing about the horses. He will be in presently.”

“Sit down, sit down. Mrs. Waule, you’d better go.”

Even those neighbors who had called Peter Featherstone an old fox, had neveraccused him of being insincerely polite, and his sister was quite used to thepeculiar absence of ceremony with which he marked his sense ofblood-relationship. Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entirefreedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’sintentions about families. She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, andsaid in her usual muffled monotone, “Brother, I hope the new doctor will beable to do something for you. Solomon says there’s great talk of hiscleverness. I’m sure it’s my wish you should be spared. And there’s none moreready to nurse you than your own sister and your own nieces, if you’d only saythe word. There’s Rebecca, and Joanna, and Elizabeth, you know.”

“Ay, ay, I remember—you’ll see I’ve remembered ’em all—all dark and ugly.They’d need have some money, eh? There never was any beauty in the women of ourfamily; but the Featherstones have always had some money, and the Waules too.Waule had money too. A warm man was Waule. Ay, ay; money’s a good egg; and ifyou’ve got money to leave behind you, lay it in a warm nest. Good-by, Mrs.Waule.” Here Mr. Featherstone pulled at both sides of his wig as if he wantedto deafen himself, and his sister went away ruminating on this oracular speechof his. Notwithstanding her jealousy of the Vincys and of Mary Garth, thereremained as the nethermost sediment in her mental shallows a persuasion thather brother Peter Featherstone could never leave his chief property away fromhis blood-relations:—else, why had the Almighty carried off his two wives bothchildless, after he had gained so much by manganese and things, turning up whennobody expected it?—and why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waulesand Powderells all sitting in the same pew for generations, and theFeatherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter’s death,everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the family? The humanmind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result wasnot strictly conceivable. But we are frightened at much that is not strictlyconceivable.

When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle, which theyounger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the satisfactory detailsof his appearance.

“You two misses go away,” said Mr. Featherstone. “I want to speak to Fred.”

“Come into my room, Rosamond, you will not mind the cold for a little while,”said Mary. The two girls had not only known each other in childhood, but hadbeen at the same provincial school together (Mary as an articled pupil), sothat they had many memories in common, and liked very well to talk in private.Indeed, this tête-à-tête was one of Rosamond’s objects in coming toStone Court.

Old Featherstone would not begin the dialogue till the door had been closed. Hecontinued to look at Fred with the same twinkle and with one of his habitualgrimaces, alternately screwing and widening his mouth; and when he spoke, itwas in a low tone, which might be taken for that of an informer ready to bebought off, rather than for the tone of an offended senior. He was not a man tofeel any strong moral indignation even on account of trespasses againsthimself. 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 topay off by mortgaging my land when I’m dead and gone, eh? You put my life at atwelvemonth, say. But I can alter my will yet.”

Fred blushed. He had not borrowed money in that way, for excellent reasons. Buthe was conscious of having spoken with some confidence (perhaps with more thanhe exactly remembered) about his prospect of getting Featherstone’s land as afuture means of paying present debts.

“I don’t know what you refer to, sir. I have certainly never borrowed any moneyon such an insecurity. Please do explain.”

“No, sir, it’s you must explain. I can alter my will yet, let me tell you. I’mof sound mind—can reckon compound interest in my head, and remember everyfool’s name as well as I could twenty years ago. What the deuce? I’m undereighty. I say, you must contradict this story.”

“I have contradicted it, sir,” Fred answered, with a touch of impatience, notremembering that his uncle did not verbally discriminate contradicting fromdisproving, though no one was further from confounding the two ideas than oldFeatherstone, who often wondered that so many fools took his own assertions forproofs. “But I contradict it again. The story is a silly lie.”

“Nonsense! you must bring dockiments. It comes from authority.”

“Name the authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed the money,and then I can disprove the story.”

“It’s pretty good authority, I think—a man who knows most of what goes on inMiddlemarch. It’s that fine, religious, charitable uncle o’ yours. Come now!”Here Mr. Featherstone had his peculiar inward shake which signified merriment.

“Mr. Bulstrode?”

“Who else, eh?”

“Then the story has grown into this lie out of some sermonizing words he mayhave let fall about me. Do they pretend that he named the man who lent me themoney?”

“If there is such a man, depend upon it Bulstrode knows him. But, supposing youonly tried to get the money lent, and didn’t get it—Bulstrode ’ud know thattoo. You bring me a writing from Bulstrode to say he doesn’t believe you’veever promised to pay your debts out o’ my land. Come now!”

Mr. Featherstone’s face required its whole scale of grimaces as a muscularoutlet 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 ofthings that are not true, and he has a prejudice against me. I could easily gethim to write that he knew no facts in proof of the report you speak of, thoughit might lead to unpleasantness. But I could hardly ask him to write down whathe believes or does not believe about me.” Fred paused an instant, and thenadded, in politic appeal to his uncle’s vanity, “That is hardly a thing for agentleman to ask.” But he was disappointed in the result.

“Ay, I know what you mean. You’d sooner offend me than Bulstrode. And what’she?—he’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A speckilatingfellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him. Andthat’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to come in. That’snonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go tochurch—and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and Hegives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle. But you take theother side. You like Bulstrode and speckilation better than Featherstone andland.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Fred, rising, standing with his back to the fireand 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 oldFeatherstone, secretly disliking the possibility that Fred would show himselfat all independent. “You neither want a bit of land to make a squire of youinstead of a starving parson, nor a lift of a hundred pound by the way. It’sall one to me. I can make five codicils if I like, and I shall keep mybank-notes for a nest-egg. It’s all one to me.”

Fred colored again. Featherstone had rarely given him presents of money, and atthis moment it seemed almost harder to part with the immediate prospect ofbank-notes than with the more distant prospect of the land.

“I am not ungrateful, sir. I never meant to show disregard for any kindintentions you might have towards me. On the contrary.”

“Very good. Then prove it. You bring me a letter from Bulstrode saying hedoesn’t believe you’ve been cracking and promising to pay your debts out o’ myland, and then, if there’s any scrape you’ve got into, we’ll see if I can’tback you a bit. Come now! That’s a bargain. Here, give me your arm. I’ll tryand walk round the room.”

Fred, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be a littlesorry for the unloved, unvenerated old man, who with his dropsical legs lookedmore than usually pitiable in walking. While giving his arm, he thought that heshould 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 wontedremarks about the guinea-fowls and the weather-co*ck, and then before the scantybook-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 booksfor?”

“They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading.”

“A little too fond,” said Mr. Featherstone, captiously. “She was for readingwhen she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She’s got the newspaper to readout loud. That’s enough for one day, I should think. I can’t abide to see herreading 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 secretlydisobeyed 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 notthink of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table near the window whileRosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of herfinger-tips to her hair—hair of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow.Mary Garth seemed all the plainer standing at an angle between the twonymphs—the one in the glass, and the one out of it, who looked at each otherwith eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the most exquisite meanings aningenious beholder could put into them, and deep enough to hide the meanings ofthe owner if these should happen to be less exquisite. Only a few children inMiddlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayedby her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch,except her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, andsome called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of anordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; herstature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactoryantithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiartemptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feignamiability, 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 creatureyour companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracityand fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly notattained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usuallyrecommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained inquantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required. Hershrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and nevercarried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towardsthose who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did somethingto make her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of agood human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly worn in alllatitudes under a more or less becoming headgear. Rembrandt would have paintedher with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of thecanvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, wasMary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged inthem for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enoughin her to laugh at herself. When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflectedin the glass, she said, laughingly—

“What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most unbecomingcompanion.”

“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 herhead towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck inthe glass.

“You mean my beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically.

Rosamond thought, “Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.” Aloud shesaid, “What have you been doing lately?”

“I? Oh, minding the house—pouring out syrup—pretending to be amiable andcontented—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 ispleasanter 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 thateverything gets easier as one gets older.”

“No,” said Rosamond, reflectively; “one wonders what such people do, withoutany 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 toshow any change.

“Does that always make people fall in love?” she answered, carelessly; “itseems 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 indulgeRosamond’s indirectness.

“Merely, how you like him.”

“There is no question of liking at present. My liking always wants some littlekindness to kindle it. I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak tome without seeming to see me.”

“Is he so haughty?” said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction. “You know thathe 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? Describehim to me.”

“How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory: heavy eyebrows, darkeyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid white hands—and—let mesee—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief. But you will see him. Youknow this is about the time of his visits.”

Rosamond blushed a little, but said, meditatively, “I rather like a haughtymanner. I cannot endure a rattling young man.”

“I did not tell you that Mr. Lydgate was haughty; but il y en a pour tousles goûts, as little Mamselle used to say, and if any girl can choose theparticular 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 hasbeen telling uncle that Fred is very unsteady.” Mary spoke from a girlishimpulse which got the better of her judgment. There was a vague uneasinessassociated with the word “unsteady” which she hoped Rosamond might saysomething 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 sounsuitable 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 ofreligion.”

“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 knowsome other people who are in the same case.”

“But no one approves of them. I should not like to marry a clergyman; but theremust 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 onlysuppose, 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 thispoint.

“I don’t defend him,” said Mary, laughing; “I would defend any parish fromhaving him for a clergyman.”

“But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different.”

“Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet.”

“It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. You always take Fred’s part.”

“Why should I not take his part?” said Mary, lighting up. “He would take mine.He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige me.”

“You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary,” said Rosamond, with her gravestmildness; “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 wouldnot marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so, that I am aware. Hecertainly 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—Ithink 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 ragesometimes, 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 letus go down.”

Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long enoughto see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him, and she herselfwas so kind as to propose a second favorite song of his—“Flow on, thou shiningriver”—after she had sung “Home, sweet home” (which she detested). Thishard-headed old Overreach approved of the sentimental song, as the suitablegarnish for girls, and also as fundamentally fine, sentiment being the rightthing for a song.

Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and assuring missythat her voice was as clear as a blackbird’s, when Mr. Lydgate’s horse passedthe window.

His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged patient—whocan hardly believe that medicine would not “set him up” if the doctor were onlyclever enough—added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch charms, made adoubly effective background to this vision of Rosamond, whom old Featherstonemade haste ostentatiously to introduce as his niece, though he had neverthought it worth while to speak of Mary Garth in that light. Nothing escapedLydgate in Rosamond’s graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the noticewhich the old man’s want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet gravity, notshowing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing them afterwards inspeaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with so much good-naturedinterest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining Mary more fully than he haddone before, saw an adorable kindness in Rosamond’s eyes. But Mary from somecause 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 toreach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her flower-likehead on its white stem was seen in perfection above her riding-habit. “Fred, wemust really go.”

“Very good,” said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the bestspirits, and wanted to get away.

“Miss Vincy is a musician?” said Lydgate, following her with his eyes. (Everynerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she wasbeing looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into herphysique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she didnot know it to be precisely her own.)

“The best in Middlemarch, I’ll be bound,” said Mr. Featherstone, “let the nextbe 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 prettylightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.

Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she did, andturned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he of course waslooking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is neverarrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze. I thinkLydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felta certain astonishment. After that, she was really anxious to go, and did notknow what sort of stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shakehands with him.

Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling inlove, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since thatimportant new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of whichsomething like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers, whetherwrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied byportmanteaus, have always had a circ*mstantial fascination for the virgin mind,against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger wasabsolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance, which had always turned on alover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections atall like her own: of late, indeed, the construction seemed to demand that heshould 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 doubtthat this was the great epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms asthose of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgateshould have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things happened sooften at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showedall the better for it? Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used tobeing fallen in love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent andfastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here wasMr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign toMiddlemarch, 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 vividinterest into her life which was better than any fancied “might-be” such as shewas in the habit of opposing to the actual.

Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied andinclined to be silent. Rosamond, whose basis for her structure had the usualairy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and realistic imagination when thefoundation had been once presupposed; and before they had ridden a mile she wasfar on in the costume and introductions of her wedded life, having determinedon her house in Middlemarch, and foreseen the visits she would pay to herhusband’s high-bred relatives at a distance, whose finished manners she couldappropriate as thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparingherself thus for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come. There wasnothing financial, still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared about whatwere 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 readyhopefulness could not immediately quell. He saw no way of eludingFeatherstone’s stupid demand without incurring consequences which he liked lesseven than the task of fulfilling it. His father was already out of humor withhim, and would be still more so if he were the occasion of any additionalcoolness between his own family and the Bulstrodes. Then, he himself hatedhaving to go and speak to his uncle Bulstrode, and perhaps after drinking winehe had said many foolish things about Featherstone’s property, and these hadbeen magnified by report. Fred felt that he made a wretched figure as a fellowwho bragged about expectations from a queer old miser like Featherstone, andwent to beg for certificates at his bidding. But—those expectations! He reallyhad them, and he saw no agreeable alternative if he gave them up; besides, hehad lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old Featherstone hadalmost bargained to pay it off. The whole affair was miserably small: his debtswere small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fredhad known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness ofhis scrapes. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropicbitterness. To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitableheir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and Vyan—certainlylife was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetitefor the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.

It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode’s name in thematter was a fiction of old Featherstone’s; nor could this have made anydifference to his position. He saw plainly enough that the old man wanted toexercise his power by tormenting him a little, and also probably to get somesatisfaction out of seeing him on unpleasant terms with Bulstrode. Fred fanciedthat he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone’s soul, though in realityhalf what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations. Thedifficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whoseconsciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Fred’s main point of debate with himself was, whether he should tell hisfather, or try to get through the affair without his father’s knowledge. It wasprobably Mrs. Waule who had been talking about him; and if Mary Garth hadrepeated 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 theyslackened 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 beashamed.”

“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 youare too rude to allow me to speak.”

“Of course I care what Mary says. She is the best girl I know.”

“I should never have thought she was a girl to fall in love with.”

“How do you know what men would fall in love with? Girls never know.”

“At least, Fred, let me advise you not to fall in love with her, for shesays 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.” Beforereaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole affair as simply aspossible to his father, who might perhaps take on himself the unpleasantbusiness of speaking to Bulstrode.

BOOK II.
OLD AND YOUNG.

CHAPTER XIII.

In consequence of what he had heard from Fred, Mr. Vincy determined to speakwith Mr. Bulstrode in his private room at the Bank at half-past one, when hewas usually free from other callers. But a visitor had come in at one o’clock,and Mr. Bulstrode had so much to say to him, that there was little chance ofthe interview being over in half an hour. The banker’s speech was fluent, butit was also copious, and he used up an appreciable amount of time in briefmeditative pauses. Do not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow,black-haired sort: he had a pale blond skin, thin gray-besprinkled brown hair,light-gray eyes, and a large forehead. Loud men called his subdued tone anundertone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with openness; thoughthere seems to be no reason why a loud man should not be given to concealmentof anything except his own voice, unless it can be shown that Holy Writ hasplaced the seat of candor in the lungs. Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferentialbending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in hiseyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer thathe was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, whoexpected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned onthem. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfactionin 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 closeattention was not agreeable to the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch; it wasattributed by some to his being a Pharisee, and by others to his beingEvangelical. Less superficial reasoners among them wished to know who hisfather and grandfather were, observing that five-and-twenty years ago nobodyhad ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch. To his present visitor, Lydgate,the scrutinizing look was a matter of indifference: he simply formed anunfavorable opinion of the banker’s constitution, and concluded that he had aneager 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 interestingmatter of hospital management, there will be many questions which we shall needto discuss in private. As to the new hospital, which is nearly finished, Ishall consider what you have said about the advantages of the specialdestination for fevers. The decision will rest with me, for though LordMedlicote has given the land and timber for the building, he is not disposed togive his personal attention to the object.”

“There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town like this,”said Lydgate. “A fine fever hospital in addition to the old infirmary might bethe nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our medical reforms; andwhat would do more for medical education than the spread of such schools overthe country? A born provincial man who has a grain of public spirit as well asa few ideas, should do what he can to resist the rush of everything that is alittle better than common towards London. Any valid professional aims may oftenfind a freer, if not a richer field, in the provinces.”

One of Lydgate’s gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet capable ofbecoming very low and gentle at the right moment. About his ordinary bearingthere was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, a confidence inhis own powers and integrity much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles orseductions of which he had had no experience. But this proud openness was madelovable by an expression of unaffected good-will. Mr. Bulstrode perhaps likedhim the better for the difference between them in pitch and manners; hecertainly liked him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a stranger inMiddlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person!—even begin to be abetter man.

“I shall rejoice to furnish your zeal with fuller opportunities,” Mr. Bulstrodeanswered; “I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence of my new hospital,should a maturer knowledge favor that issue, for I am determined that so greatan object shall not be shackled by our two physicians. Indeed, I am encouragedto consider your advent to this town as a gracious indication that a moremanifest blessing is now to be awarded to my efforts, which have hitherto beenmuch withstood. With regard to the old infirmary, we have gained the initialpoint—I mean your election. And now I hope you will not shrink from incurring acertain amount of jealousy and dislike from your professional brethren bypresenting yourself as a reformer.”

“I will not profess bravery,” said Lydgate, smiling, “but I acknowledge a gooddeal of pleasure in fighting, and I should not care for my profession, if I didnot believe that better methods were to be found and enforced there as well aseverywhere else.”

“The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,” said thebanker. “I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status, for our medicalmen are most of them connected with respectable townspeople here. My ownimperfect health has induced me to give some attention to those palliativeresources which the divine mercy has placed within our reach. I have consultedeminent men in the metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardnessunder which medical treatment labors in our provincial districts.”

“Yes;—with our present medical rules and education, one must be satisfied nowand then to meet with a fair practitioner. As to all the higher questions whichdetermine the starting-point of a diagnosis—as to the philosophy of medicalevidence—any glimmering of these can only come from a scientific culture ofwhich country practitioners have usually no more notion than the man in themoon.”

Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which Lydgate hadgiven to his agreement not quite suited to his comprehension. Under suchcirc*mstances a judicious man changes the topic and enters on ground where hisown gifts may be more useful.

“I am aware,” he said, “that the peculiar bias of medical ability is towardsmaterial means. Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate, I hope we shall not vary insentiment 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, Ihope; the existence of spiritual interests in your patients?”

“Certainly I do. But those words are apt to cover different meanings todifferent minds.”

“Precisely. And on such subjects wrong teaching is as fatal as no teaching. Nowa point which I have much at heart to secure is a new regulation as to clericalattendance at the old infirmary. The building stands in Mr. Farebrother’sparish. You know Mr. Farebrother?”

“I have seen him. He gave me his vote. I must call to thank him. He seems avery bright pleasant little fellow. And I understand he is a naturalist.”

“Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate. Isuppose 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 thatMr. Farebrother’s attendance at the hospital should be superseded by theappointment of a chaplain—of Mr. Tyke, in fact—and that no other spiritual aidshould 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 wasapplied.” Lydgate smiled, but he was bent on being circ*mspect.

“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—“thesubject is likely to be referred to the medical board of the infirmary, andwhat I trust I may ask of you is, that in virtue of the cooperation between uswhich I now look forward to, you will not, so far as you are concerned, beinfluenced by my opponents in this matter.”

“I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes,” said Lydgate. “Thepath I have chosen is to work well in my own profession.”

“My responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, is of a broader kind. With me, indeed, thisquestion is one of sacred accountableness; whereas with my opponents, I havegood reason to say that it is an occasion for gratifying a spirit of worldlyopposition. But I shall not therefore drop one iota of my convictions, or ceaseto identify myself with that truth which an evil generation hates. I havedevoted myself to this object of hospital-improvement, but I will boldlyconfess to you, Mr. Lydgate, that I should have no interest in hospitals if Ibelieved that nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortaldiseases. I have another ground of action, and in the face of persecution Iwill not conceal it.”

Mr. Bulstrode’s voice had become a loud and agitated whisper as he said thelast words.

“There we certainly differ,” said Lydgate. But he was not sorry that the doorwas now opened, and Mr. Vincy was announced. That florid sociable personage wasbecome 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 mannaturally remembers a charming girl with pleasure, and is willing to dine wherehe may see her again. Before he took leave, Mr. Vincy had given that invitationwhich he had been “in no hurry about,” for Rosamond at breakfast had mentionedthat she thought her uncle Featherstone had taken the new doctor into greatfavor.

Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a glass ofwater, 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 littleaffair of my young scapegrace, Fred’s.”

“That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as differentviews as on diet, Vincy.”

“I hope not this time.” (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.) “The factis, it’s about a whim of old Featherstone’s. Somebody has been cooking up astory out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to try to set him againstFred. 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, andthat makes other people jealous.”

“Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as to thecourse you have pursued with your eldest son. It was entirely from worldlyvanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family of three sons andfour daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an expensiveeducation which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idlehabits. You are now reaping the consequences.”

To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrankfrom, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient. When a man has theimmediate 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 ofhis importance to the framework of things which seems to throw questions ofprivate conduct into the background. And this particular reproof irritated himmore than any other. It was eminently superfluous to him to be told that he wasreaping the consequences. But he felt his neck under Bulstrode’s yoke; andthough 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 patternmen, 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 prefermentalready, but that stomach fever took him off: else he might have been a dean bythis time. I think I was justified in what I tried to do for Fred. If you cometo religion, it seems to me a man shouldn’t want to carve out his meat to anounce beforehand:—one must trust a little to Providence and be generous. It’s agood British feeling to try and raise your family a little: in my opinion, it’sa father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance.”

“I don’t wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I say thatwhat you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness andinconsistent folly.”

“Very well,” said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions, “I neverprofessed to be anything but worldly; and, what’s more, I don’t see anybodyelse who is not worldly. I suppose you don’t conduct business on what you callunworldly principles. The only difference I see is that one worldliness is alittle 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 hiseyes 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 borrowmoney 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 inyour handwriting; that is, just a bit of a note saying you don’t believe a wordof such stuff, either of his having borrowed or tried to borrow in such afool’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 hisrecklessness and ignorance—I will use no severer word—has not tried to raisemoney by holding out his future prospects, or even that some one may not havebeen foolish enough to supply him on so vague a presumption: there is plenty ofsuch lax money-lending as of other folly in the world.”

“But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money on the pretenceof any understanding about his uncle’s land. He is not a liar. I don’t want tomake him better than he is. I have blown him up well—nobody can say I wink atwhat he does. But he is not a liar. And I should have thought—but I may bewrong—that there was no religion to hinder a man from believing the best of ayoung fellow, when you don’t know worse. It seems to me it would be a poor sortof religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing to say you don’t believesuch 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 hisway to the future possession of Featherstone’s property. I cannot regard wealthas a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest for this world. You donot like to hear these things, Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called uponto tell you that I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of propertyas that which you refer to. I do not shrink from saying that it will not tendto your son’s eternal welfare or to the glory of God. Why then should youexpect me to pen this kind of affidavit, which has no object but to keep up afoolish 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. Vincyburst out very bluntly. “It may be for the glory of God, but it is not for theglory of the Middlemarch trade, that Plymdale’s house uses those blue and greendyes it gets from the Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk, that’s all Iknow about it. Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to theglory of God, they might like it better. But I don’t mind so much about that—Icould get up a pretty row, if I chose.”

Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered. “You pain me very much byspeaking in this way, Vincy. I do not expect you to understand my grounds ofaction—it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for principles in theintricacies of the world—still less to make the thread clear for the carelessand the scoffing. You must remember, if you please, that I stretch my tolerancetowards you as my wife’s brother, and that it little becomes you to complain ofme as withholding material help towards the worldly position of your family. Imust remind you that it is not your own prudence or judgment that has enabledyou 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 previousresolutions). “And when you married Harriet, I don’t see how you could expectthat our families should not hang by the same nail. If you’ve changed yourmind, and want my family to come down in the world, you’d better say so. I’venever changed; I’m a plain Churchman now, just as I used to be before doctrinescame up. I take the world as I find it, in trade and everything else. I’mcontented to be no worse than my neighbors. But if you want us to come down inthe world, say so. I shall know better what to do then.”

“You talk unreasonably. Shall you come down in the world for want of thisletter about your son?”

“Well, whether or not, I consider it very unhandsome of you to refuse it. Suchdoings 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 toit when you refuse to say you didn’t set a slander going. It’s this sort ofthing—this tyrannical spirit, wanting to play bishop and banker everywhere—it’sthis sort of thing makes a man’s name stink.”

“Vincy, if you insist on quarrelling with me, it will be exceedingly painful toHarriet as well as myself,” said Mr. Bulstrode, with a trifle more eagernessand paleness than usual.

“I don’t want to quarrel. It’s for my interest—and perhaps for yours too—thatwe should be friends. I bear you no grudge; I think no worse of you than I doof other people. A man who half starves himself, and goes the length in familyprayers, 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:—plentyof fellows do. You like to be master, there’s no denying that; you must befirst chop in heaven, else you won’t like it much. But you’re my sister’shusband, and we ought to stick together; and if I know Harriet, she’ll considerit your fault if we quarrel because you strain at a gnat in this way, andrefuse to do Fred a good turn. And I don’t mean to say I shall bear it well. Iconsider it unhandsome.”

Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily at hisbrother-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 inthe coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer’s mind presented to thesubtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men; and perhaps his experience oughtto have warned him how the scene would end. But a full-fed fountain will begenerous 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 ofuncomfortable suggestions. Before changing his course, he always needed toshape his motives and bring them into accordance with his habitual standard. Hesaid, at last—

“I will reflect a little, Vincy. I will mention the subject to Harriet. I shallprobably send you a letter.”

“Very well. As soon as you can, please. I hope it will all be settled before Isee you to-morrow.”

CHAPTER XIV.

“Follows here the strict receipt
For that sauce to dainty meat,
Named Idleness, which many eat
By preference, and call it sweet:
First watch for morsels, like a hound
Mix well with buffets, stir them round
With good thick oil of flatteries, And froth with mean self-lauding lies.
Serve warm: the vessels you must choose
To keep it in are dead men’s shoes.”

Mr. Bulstrode’s consultation of Harriet seemed to have had the effect desiredby Mr. Vincy, for early the next morning a letter came which Fred could carryto Mr. Featherstone as the required testimony.

The old gentleman was staying in bed on account of the cold weather, and asMary Garth was not to be seen in the sitting-room, Fred went up-stairsimmediately and presented the letter to his uncle, who, propped up comfortablyon a bed-rest, was not less able than usual to enjoy his consciousness ofwisdom in distrusting and frustrating mankind. He put on his spectacles to readthe letter, pursing up his lips and drawing down their corners.

“Under the circ*mstances I will not decline to state myconviction—tchah! what fine words the fellow puts! He’s as fine as anauctioneer—that your son Frederic has not obtained any advance of money onbequests promised by Mr. Featherstone—promised? who said I had everpromised? I promise nothing—I shall make codicils as long as I like—and thatconsidering the nature of such a proceeding, it is unreasonable to presume thata young man of sense and character would attempt it—ah, but the gentlemandoesn’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 distinctlyaffirm that I never made any statement to the effect that your son had borrowedmoney on any property that might accrue to him on Mr. Featherstone’sdemise—bless my heart! ‘property’—accrue—demise! Lawyer Standish is nothingto him. He couldn’t speak finer if he wanted to borrow. Well,” Mr. Featherstonehere looked over his spectacles at Fred, while he handed back the letter to himwith a contemptuous gesture, “you don’t suppose I believe a thing becauseBulstrode writes it out fine, eh?”

Fred colored. “You wished to have the letter, sir. I should think it verylikely that Mr. Bulstrode’s denial is as good as the authority which told youwhat 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, butwithdrawing his hands under his wraps.

“I expect nothing, sir.” Fred with difficulty restrained himself from ventinghis irritation. “I came to bring you the letter. If you like I will bid yougood 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 hadshe 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 waistcoatnow. I told you always to put it on the bed.”

Mary’s eyes looked rather red, as if she had been crying. It was clear that Mr.Featherstone was in one of his most snappish humors this morning, and thoughFred had now the prospect of receiving the much-needed present of money, hewould have preferred being free to turn round on the old tyrant and tell himthat Mary Garth was too good to be at his beck. Though Fred had risen as sheentered the room, she had barely noticed him, and looked as if her nerves werequivering with the expectation that something would be thrown at her. But shenever had anything worse than words to dread. When she went to reach thewaistcoat 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 thewaistcoat was laid down by him. It was usual with him to season his pleasure inshowing favor to one person by being especially disagreeable to another, andMary was always at hand to furnish the condiment. When his own relatives cameshe was treated better. Slowly he took out a bunch of keys from the waistcoatpocket, and slowly he drew forth a tin box which was under the bed-clothes.

“You expect I am going to give you a little fortune, eh?” he said, lookingabove 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 theother day, else, of course, I should not have thought of the matter.” But Fredwas of a hopeful disposition, and a vision had presented itself of a sum justlarge enough to deliver him from a certain anxiety. When Fred got into debt, italways seemed to him highly probable that something or other—he did notnecessarily 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 wouldhave 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 tobelieve in a whole one.

The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes one after the other, laying themdown 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 oldfellow for his money. At last, Mr. Featherstone eyed him again over hisspectacles and presented him with a little sheaf of notes: Fred could seedistinctly that there were but five, as the less significant edges gapedtowards 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 withoutseeming to think of their value. But this did not suit Mr. Featherstone, whowas eying him intently.

“Come, don’t you think it worth your while to count ’em? You take money like alord; I suppose you lose it like one.”

“I thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, sir. But I shall bevery happy to count them.”

Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them. For they actuallypresented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had decided thatthey must be. What can the fitness of things mean, if not their fitness to aman’s expectations? Failing this, absurdity and atheism gape behind him. Thecollapse for Fred was severe when he found that he held no more than fivetwenties, and his share in the higher education of this country did not seem tohelp 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 replacingit, then taking off his spectacles deliberately, and at length, as if hisinward meditation had more deeply convinced him, repeating, “I should think ithandsome.”

“I assure you, sir, I am very grateful,” said Fred, who had had time to recoverhis cheerful air.

“So you ought to be. You want to cut a figure in the world, and I reckon PeterFeatherstone is the only one you’ve got to trust to.” Here the old man’s eyesgleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the consciousness that thissmart young fellow relied upon him, and that the smart young fellow was rathera fool for doing so.

“Yes, indeed: I was not born to very splendid chances. Few men have been morecramped than I have been,” said Fred, with some sense of surprise at his ownvirtue, considering how hardly he was dealt with. “It really seems a little toobad to have to ride a broken-winded hunter, and see men, who, are not half suchgood judges as yourself, able to throw away any amount of money on buying badbargains.”

“Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now. Eighty pound is enough for that,I reckon—and you’ll have twenty pound over to get yourself out of any littlescrape,” said Mr. Featherstone, chuckling slightly.

“You are very good, sir,” said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast between thewords and his feeling.

“Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode. You won’t get muchout of his spekilations, I think. He’s got a pretty strong string round yourfather’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 histelling. He’ll never have much to leave you: he’ll most-like die withouta will—he’s the sort of man to do it—let ’em make him mayor of Middlemarch asmuch as they like. But you won’t get much by his dying without a will, thoughyou are the eldest son.”

Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable before. True,he had never before given him quite so much money at once.

“Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode’s, sir?” said Fred, rising withthe 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 muchzest. He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed before hisinner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away immediately afterpocketing the money. Presently, the farm-bailiff came up to give his master areport, and Fred, to his unspeakable relief, was dismissed with the injunctionto come again soon.

He had longed not only to be set free from his uncle, but also to find MaryGarth. She was now in her usual place by the fire, with sewing in her hands anda book open on the little table by her side. Her eyelids had lost some of theirredness 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 withmore indifference than usual: she did not know how affectionately indignant hehad 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 agirl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in lovecoming 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. Ihave no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes nearme is in love with me.”

Mary did not mean to betray any feeling, but in spite of herself she ended in atremulous tone of vexation.

“Confound John Waule! I did not mean to make you angry. I didn’t know you hadany reason for being grateful to me. I forgot what a great service you think itif any one snuffs a candle for you.” Fred also had his pride, and was not goingto 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 spokento as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I could understand alittle more than I ever hear even from young gentlemen who have been tocollege.” Mary had recovered, and she spoke with a suppressed ripplingunder-current of laughter pleasant to hear.

“I don’t care how merry you are at my expense this morning,” said Fred, “Ithought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It is a shame you shouldstay here to be bullied in that way.”

“Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I amnot fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. I think anyhardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never reallydoing it. Everything here I can do as well as any one else could; perhapsbetter than some—Rosy, for example. Though she is just the sort of beautifulcreature 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. Ishould 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 notpleased God to call you,” said Mary, laughing.

“Well, I couldn’t do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do yoursas a governess. You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there, Mary.”

“I never said you ought to be a clergyman. There are other sorts of work. Itseems 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 themantel-piece.

“If you were sure you should not have a fortune?”

“I did not say that. You want to quarrel with me. It is too bad of you to beguided by what other people say about me.”

“How can I want to quarrel with you? I should be quarrelling with all my newbooks,” said Mary, lifting the volume on the table. “However naughty you may beto other people, you are good to me.”

“Because I like you better than any one else. But I know you despise me.”

“Yes, I do—a little,” said Mary, nodding, with a smile.

“You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions abouteverything.”

“Yes, I should.” Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly mistress ofthe situation. When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for us, we only getfarther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness. This was what Fred Vincyfelt.

“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known—eversince she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow whostrikes a girl.”

“Let me see,” said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly; “I must goback 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—shehad known Mordaunt Merton ever since they were children; but then he seems tohave been an estimable young man; and Minna was still more deeply in love withCleveland, who was a stranger. Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor; but then shedid not fall in love with him. And there are Olivia and Sophia Primrose, andCorinne—they may be said to have fallen in love with new men. Altogether, myexperience is rather mixed.”

Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers was verydear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear windows whereobservation sat laughingly. He was certainly an affectionate fellow, and as hehad grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with his old playmate,notwithstanding that share in the higher education of the country which hadexalted 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 betterfellow—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 tolove him dearly.”

“I think the goodness should come before he expects that.”

“You know better, Mary. Women don’t love men for their goodness.”

“Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.”

“It is hardly fair to say I am bad.”

“I said nothing at all about you.”

“I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you loveme—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 everto marry you.”

“I think that is quite wicked, Mary. If you love me, you ought to promise tomarry me.”

“On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I didlove you.”

“You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife. Of course: Iam but three-and-twenty.”

“In that last point you will alter. But I am not so sure of any otheralteration. My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less, bemarried.”

“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 hasanything 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 thecurates like Mr. Crowse. Divide your cleverness by ten, and the quotient—dearme!—is able to take a degree. But that only shows you are ten times more idlethan 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 yourown, I suppose. There! there is Mr. Lydgate. I must go and tell my uncle.”

“Mary,” said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; “if you will not give me someencouragement, I shall get worse instead of better.”

“I will not give you any encouragement,” said Mary, reddening. “Your friendswould dislike it, and so would mine. My father would think it a disgrace to meif 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 sheturned and said: “Fred, you have always been so good, so generous to me. I amnot ungrateful. But never speak to me in that way again.”

“Very well,” said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip. His complexionshowed patches of pale pink and dead white. Like many a plucked idle younggentleman, 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 utterlyin despair.

When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking her tokeep them for him. “I don’t want to spend that money, mother. I want it to paya debt with. So keep it safe away from my fingers.”

“Bless you, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy. She doted on her eldest son and heryoungest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two naughtiestchildren. The mother’s eyes are not always deceived in their partiality: she atleast can best judge who is the tender, filial-hearted child. And Fred wascertainly very fond of his mother. Perhaps it was his fondness for anotherperson also that made him particularly anxious to take some security againsthis own liability to spend the hundred pounds. For the creditor to whom he oweda hundred and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed byMary’s father.

CHAPTER XV.

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness tobe dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among thecolossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, gloriesin his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work,and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of hishistory, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat withus in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the dayswere longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summerafternoons 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, itis probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from acampstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravelingcertain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all thelight I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and notdispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any oneinterested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the mostof him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a manmay be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool andfallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remainvirtually unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors’ falsesuppositions. There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was notaltogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such animpression was significant of great things being expected from him. Foreverybody’s family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to haveimmeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish orvicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitiveorder, lying in his lady-patients’ immovable conviction, and was unassailableby any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equallystrong; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench and “the strengtheningtreatment” regarding Toller and “the lowering system” as medical perdition. Forthe heroic times of copious bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, stillless the times of thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called bysome bad name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally—as if, forexample, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on withblank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The strengtheners and thelowerers were all “clever” men in somebody’s opinion, which is really as muchas can be said for any living talents. Nobody’s imagination had gone so far asto 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 wasextreme, and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, therewas a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon thanany general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was butseven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common—at which theyare hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shallnever put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather thatMammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His father,a military man, had made but little provision for three children, and when theboy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to hisguardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitionerthan to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He was one of therarer lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there issomething particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, andnot because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with loveremember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach downan untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or forvery lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceablebeginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was aquick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and infive minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if itwere Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey’s Dictionary woulddo, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he wasnot 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, norany chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to himthat books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had notmuch 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 doanything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anythingremarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no sparkhad yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a verysuperficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of hiselders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive teaching at thatperiod 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 oncemore for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless,indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingylabels—the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It wouldat least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and hestood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he first tookfrom the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just whereit might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the headof Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of theheart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew thatvalvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden lightstartling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in thehuman frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read theindecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecyand obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left hisimagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay insmall bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing tohimself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But themoment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the worldwas made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vastspaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposedto be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectualpassion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall inlove with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Isit due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary ofdescribing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse,” neverweary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and arecomparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” whichmust be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of smalldesires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimesit is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And notseldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by theTroubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about theirvocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tieof their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape theirown deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapenafter the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told evenin their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooledas imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day theirearlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furnitureghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradualchange! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sentsome of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conformingfalsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrationsfrom a woman’s glance.

Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the better hopeof him because his scientific interest soon took the form of a professionalenthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work, not to bestifled by that initiation in makeshift called his ’prentice days; and hecarried to his studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that themedical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting themost perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most directalliance between intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate’s naturedemanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-bloodsense of fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study. Hecared not only for “cases,” but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and gave aman an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its venal decorationsand other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemandedqualifications. He went to study in Paris with the determination that when hecame home again he would settle in some provincial town as a generalpractitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgicalknowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of thegeneral advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as Jennerhad done, by the independent value of his work. For it must be remembered thatthis was a dark period; and in spite of venerable colleges which used greatefforts to secure purity of knowledge by making it scarce, and to exclude errorby a rigid exclusiveness in relation to fees and appointments, it happened thatvery ignorant young gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legalright to practise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard heldup to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiarsanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained bygraduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having anexcellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted ingiving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off withmore drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed largecubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had takenno degrees. Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation asto the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist in theteeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the units was themost direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to be a unit who would makea certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would oneday tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasureof making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But hedid not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. He wasambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he mightwork out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain ofdiscovery.

Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream ofhimself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the greatoriginators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and alreadyrule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who “broke the barriers of theheavens”—did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessonsto stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earthamong neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments thanof anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them hadhis little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordidcares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards finalcompanionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not blind to the dangers of suchfriction, but he had plenty of confidence in his resolution to avoid it as faras possible: being seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he wasnot going to have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldlysuccesses of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalrywith that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with theassiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination in the hope thatthe two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful observation andinference which was his daily work, the use of the lens to further his judgmentin 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 goodMiddlemarch doctor, and by that very means keep himself in the track offar-reaching investigation. On one point he may fairly claim approval at thisparticular stage of his career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropicmodels who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves whilethey are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they mayhave leisure to represent the cause of public morality. He intended to begin inhis own case some particular reforms which were quite certainly within hisreach, and much less of a problem than the demonstrating of an anatomicalconception. One of these reforms was to act stoutly on the strength of a recentlegal decision, and simply prescribe, without dispensing drugs or takingpercentage from druggists. This was an innovation for one who had chosen toadopt the style of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt asoffensive criticism by his professional brethren. But Lydgate meant to innovatein his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that the best security forhis practising honestly according to his belief was to get rid of systematictemptations to the contrary.

Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than thepresent; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America wasbeginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, mightalight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark territories of Pathology werea fine America for a spirited young adventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above allto contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of hisprofession. The more he became interested in special questions of disease, suchas the nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for thatfundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the centuryhad been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of Bichat, who died whenhe was only one-and-thirty, but, like another Alexander, left a realm largeenough for many heirs. That great Frenchman first carried out the conceptionthat living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organswhich can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it werefederally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs ortissues, out of which the various organs—brain, heart, lungs, and so on—arecompacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in variousproportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each materialhaving its peculiar composition and proportions. No man, one sees, canunderstand and estimate the entire structure or its parts—what are itsfrailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.And the conception wrought out by Bichat, with his detailed study of thedifferent tissues, acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning ofgas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections andhitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account inconsidering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But resultswhich depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at theend of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along theold paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might haveseemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat’s. This great seer did not go beyondthe consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living organism,marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was open to another mind tosay, have not these structures some common basis from which they have allstarted, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon?Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain ofthings, and revising all former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat’swork, already vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate wasenamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of livingstructure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the trueorder. The work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who knew howto use the preparation. What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate putthe question—not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but suchmissing of the right word befalls many seekers. And he counted on quietintervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads ofinvestigation—on many hints to be won from diligent application, not only ofthe scalpel, but of the microscope, which research had begun to use again withnew enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do goodsmall work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.

He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty, withoutany fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should bebeneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting quite apartfrom the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic rites of costly observance,which the eight hundred pounds left him after buying his practice wouldcertainly not have gone far in paying for. He was at a starting-point whichmakes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were anygentlemen given to that amusem*nt who could appreciate the complicatedprobabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings andfurtherings of circ*mstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a manswims and makes his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would remaineven with close knowledge of Lydgate’s character; for character too is aprocess and an unfolding. The man was still in the making, as much as theMiddlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both virtues andfaults capable of shrinking or expanding. The faults will not, I hope, be areason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends isthere not some one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful;whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a littlepinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose betterenergies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence oftransient solicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, butthen, they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam, andwould not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters. The particularfaults from which these delicate generalities are distilled havedistinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces; filling up partsin very various dramas. Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is notthe same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental makein which one of us differs from another. Lydgate’s conceit was of the arrogantsort, never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims andbenevolently contemptuous. He would do a great deal for noodles, being sorryfor them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no power over him: he hadthought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in Paris, in order to turnthem against some of their own doctrines. All his faults were marked by kindredtraits, and were those of a man who had a fine baritone, whose clothes hungwell upon him, and who even in his ordinary gestures had an air of inbreddistinction. Where then lay the spots of commonness? says a young ladyenamoured of that careless grace. How could there be any commonness in a man sowell-bred, so ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in hisviews of social duty? As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of genius ifyou take him unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who has the bestwill to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in imagining itslighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach’s music, or the brilliantpunning in the last burlesque. Lydgate’s spots of commonness lay in thecomplexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy,were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: thatdistinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetratehis feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of itsbeing known (without his telling) that he was better born than other countrysurgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he didso it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lifthim above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility inhis furniture not being of the best.

As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuous folly, whichhe meant to be final, since marriage at some distant period would of course notbe impetuous. For those who want to be acquainted with Lydgate it will be goodto know what was that case of impetuous folly, for it may stand as an exampleof the fitful swerving of passion to which he was prone, together with thechivalrous kindness which helped to make him morally lovable. The story can betold without many words. It happened when he was studying in Paris, and just atthe time when, over and above his other work, he was occupied with somegalvanic experiments. One evening, tired with his experimenting, and not beingable to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits to somerepose under their trying and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks,and went to finish his evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, wherethere was a melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, notby the ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress whosepart it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke of thepiece. Lydgate was in love with this actress, as a man is in love with a womanwhom he never expects to speak to. She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, aGreek profile, and rounded majestic form, having that sort of beauty whichcarries 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 husbandacting with her as the unfortunate lover. It was her acting which was “nobetter than it should be,” but the public was satisfied. Lydgate’s onlyrelaxation now was to go and look at this woman, just as he might have thrownhimself 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. Butthis evening the old drama had a new catastrophe. At the moment when theheroine 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 shriekpierced the house, and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon weredemanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time. Lydgate leapedand 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 andlifting her gently in his arms. Paris rang with the story of this death:—was ita murder? Some of the actress’s warmest admirers were inclined to believe inher guilt, and liked her the better for it (such was the taste of those times);but Lydgate was not one of these. He vehemently contended for her innocence,and the remote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, hadpassed now into personal devotion, and tender thought of her lot. The notion ofmurder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young couple beingunderstood to dote on each other; and it was not unprecedented that anaccidental slip of the foot should have brought these grave consequences. Thelegal investigation ended in Madame Laure’s release. Lydgate by this time hadhad many interviews with her, and found her more and more adorable. She talkedlittle; but that was an additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemedgrateful; her presence was enough, like that of the evening light. Lydgate wasmadly anxious about her affection, and jealous lest any other man than himselfshould win it and ask her to marry him. But instead of reopening her engagementat the Porte Saint Martin, where she would have been all the more popular forthe fatal episode, she left Paris without warning, forsaking her little courtof admirers. Perhaps no one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt thatall science had come to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure,stricken by ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no faithfulcomforter. Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as someother hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered indicationsthat Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her at last acting with greatsuccess at Avignon under the same name, looking more majestic than ever as aforsaken 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 cleardepths of water, and obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was benton telling her that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him. He knew thatthis was like the sudden impulse of a madman—incongruous even with his habitualfoibles. No matter! It was the one thing which he was resolved to do. He hadtwo selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each otherand bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternatevision, 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 wouldhave 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 nextday, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with eyes thatseemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders. “Are all Englishmenlike that?”

“I came because I could not live without trying to see you. You are lonely; Ilove you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait, but I want you topromise that you will marry me—no one else.”

Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under her grandeyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt close to herknees.

“I will tell you something,” she said, in her cooing way, keeping her armsfolded. “My foot really slipped.”

“I know, I know,” said Lydgate, deprecatingly. “It was a fatal accident—adreadful 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 passbefore he rose and stood at a distance from her.

“There was a secret, then,” he said at last, even vehemently. “He was brutal toyou: you hated him.”

“No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in mycountry; that was not agreeable to me.”

“Great God!” said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. “And you planned to murderhim?”

“I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I meant to do it.”

Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he looked ather. He saw this woman—the first to whom he had given his young adoration—amidthe throng of stupid criminals.

“You are a good young man,” she said. “But I do not like husbands. I will neverhave another.”

Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris chambers,believing that illusions were at an end for him. He was saved from hardeningeffects by the abundant kindness of his heart and his belief that human lifemight be made better. But he had more reason than ever for trusting hisjudgment, now that it was so experienced; and henceforth he would take astrictly scientific view of woman, entertaining no expectations but such aswere justified beforehand.

No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate’s past as hashere been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were notmore given than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in therepresentation to themselves of what did not come under their own senses. Notonly young virgins of that town, but gray-bearded men also, were often in hasteto conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes,contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had beenshaping him for that instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted onswallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.

CHAPTER XVI.

“All that in woman is adored
In thy fair self I find—
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.”
—SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain to thehospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate heard itdiscussed in a way that threw much light on the power exercised in the town byMr. Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a ruler, but there was an oppositionparty, and even among his supporters there were some who allowed it to be seenthat their support was a compromise, and who frankly stated their impressionthat 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, whoknew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch thesprings of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at onceready and severe—ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching theresult. He had gathered, as an industrious man always at his post, a chiefshare in administering the town charities, and his private charities were bothminute and abundant. He would take a great deal of pains about apprenticingTegg the shoemaker’s son, and he would watch over Tegg’s church-going; he woulddefend Mrs. Strype the washerwoman against Stubbs’s unjust exaction on thescore of her drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny againstMrs. Strype. His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquirestrictly into the circ*mstances both before and after. In this way a mangathers a domain in his neighbors’ hope and fear as well as gratitude; andpower, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself,spreading out of all proportion to its external means. It was a principle withMr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for theglory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inwardargument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’sglory required. But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightlyappreciated. There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scalescould only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that sinceMr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking solittle as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sortof vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery.

The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy’s table when Lydgate wasdining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not, heobserved, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the host himself,though his reasons against the proposed arrangement turned entirely on hisobjection to Mr. Tyke’s sermons, which were all doctrine, and his preferencefor Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were free from that taint. Mr. Vincy likedwell enough the notion of the chaplain’s having a salary, supposing it weregiven to Farebrother, who was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and thebest preacher anywhere, and companionable too.

“What line shall you take, then?” said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a greatcoursing comrade of Mr. Vincy’s.

“Oh, I’m precious glad I’m not one of the Directors now. I shall vote forreferring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board together. I shallroll some of my responsibility on your shoulders, Doctor,” said Mr. Vincy,glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior physician of the town, and then atLydgate who sat opposite. “You medical gentlemen must consult which sort ofblack draught you will prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?”

“I know little of either,” said Lydgate; “but in general, appointments are aptto be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest man for aparticular 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 goodfellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question.”

Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though Dr.Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his large heavyface of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while Lydgate wasspeaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man—forexample, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettlewhat had been settled and forgotten by his elders—was positively unwelcome to aphysician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise onMeningitis, of which at least one copy marked “own” was bound in calf. For mypart I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s self-satisfaction is anuntaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Lydgate’s remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company. Mr. Vincysaid, that if he could have his way, he would not put disagreeablefellows anywhere.

“Hang your reforms!” said Mr. Chichely. “There’s no greater humbug in theworld. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put in new men. Ihope you are not one of the ‘Lancet’s’ men, Mr. Lydgate—wanting to take thecoronership out of the hands of the legal profession: your words appear topoint that way.”

“I disapprove of Wakley,” interposed Dr. Sprague, “no man more: he is anill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of theprofession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges, for the sakeof getting some notoriety for himself. There are men who don’t mind about beingkicked blue if they can only get talked about. But Wakley is right sometimes,”the Doctor added, judicially. “I could mention one or two points in whichWakley is in the right.”

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chichely, “I blame no man for standing up in favor of hisown cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a coroner is tojudge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?”

“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man moreincompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talkabout 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 heknows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at apost-mortem examination. How is he to know the action of a poison? You might aswell 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 thepost-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical witness?” saidMr. 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 ofdecent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to be a manwho will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the stomach if anignorant practitioner happens to tell him so.”

Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his Majesty’scoroner, 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 countryloses the services of my friend Chichely, even though it might get the best manin 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 knoweverything. Most things are ‘visitation of God.’ And as to poisoning, why, whatyou want to know is the law. Come, shall we join the ladies?”

Lydgate’s private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very coronerwithout bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not meant to bepersonal. This was one of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarchsociety: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for anysalaried office. Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a prig, and now Mr. Chichely wasinclined to call him prick-eared; especially when, in the drawing-room, heseemed to be making himself eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easilymonopolized in a tête-à-tête, since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at thetea-table. She resigned no domestic function to her daughter; and the matron’sblooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating fromher fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children, was certainlyamong the great attractions of the Vincy house—attractions which made it allthe easier to fall in love with the daughter. The tinge of unpretentious,inoffensive vulgarity in Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond’s refinement,which was beyond what Lydgate had expected.

Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression ofrefined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly right whenit is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid. And Rosamond couldsay the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of cleverness whichcatches 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 notheard her sing the other day at Stone Court. The only pleasure he allowedhimself 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 themusic that I don’t know at all, and have no notion about, delights me—affectsme. How stupid the world is that it does not make more use of such a pleasurewithin its reach!”

“Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless. There are hardly any goodmusicians. 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 youto fancy the tune—very much as if it were tapped on a drum?”

“Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer,” said Rosamond, with one of her rare smiles.“But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors.”

Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation, inthinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be made out ofthe faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if the petals of somegigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her; and yet with this infantineblondness showing so much ready, self-possessed grace. Since he had had thememory of Laure, Lydgate had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divinecow no longer attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite. But herecalled himself.

“You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope.”

“I will let you hear my attempts, if you like,” said Rosamond. “Papa is sure toinsist on my singing. But I shall tremble before you, who have heard the bestsingers 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 withhim.”

“Tell me what you saw in London.”

“Very little.” (A more naive girl would have said, “Oh, everything!” ButRosamond knew better.) “A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw country girlsare always taken to.”

“Do you call yourself a raw country girl?” said Lydgate, looking at her with aninvoluntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush with pleasure.But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a little, and put up herhand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits—an habitual gesture with her as prettyas any movements of a kitten’s paw. Not that Rosamond was in the least like akitten: 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. Iam not afraid of talking to our old neighbors. But I am really afraid of you.”

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though herknowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousandthings—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any commonlanguage between them. Happily, there is a common language between women andmen, and so the bears can get taught.”

“Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder him from jarringall your nerves,” said Rosamond, moving to the other side of the room, whereFred having opened the piano, at his father’s desire, that Rosamond might givethem some music, was parenthetically performing “Cherry Ripe!” with one hand.Able men who have passed their examinations will do these things sometimes, notless than the plucked Fred.

“Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr. Lydgateill,” 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 bearswill not always be taught.”

“Now then, Rosy!” said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it upwardfor her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment. “Some good rousing tunesfirst.”

Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon’s school (close to a countytown with a memorable history that had its relics in church and castle) was oneof those excellent musicians here and there to be found in our provinces,worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offersmore plentiful conditions of musical celebrity. Rosamond, with the executant’sinstinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large renderingof noble music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heardfor the first time. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond’sfingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and toall fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be onlythat of an interpreter. Lydgate was taken possession of, and began to believein her as something exceptional. After all, he thought, one need not besurprised to find the rare conjunctions of nature under circ*mstancesapparently unfavorable: come where they may, they always depend on conditionsthat are not obvious. He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her anycompliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration was deepened.

Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to hear as achime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang “Meet me by moonlight,” and “I’vebeen roaming”; for mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none butthe ancients can be always classical. But Rosamond could also sing “Black-eyedSusan” 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. Hermother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest little girl onher lap, softly beating the child’s hand up and down in time to the music. AndFred, notwithstanding his general scepticism about Rosy, listened to her musicwith perfect allegiance, wishing he could do the same thing on his flute. Itwas the pleasantest family party that Lydgate had seen since he came toMiddlemarch. The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of allanxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptionalin most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certainsuspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusem*nts which survived in theprovinces. At the Vincys’ there was always whist, and the card-tables stoodready now, making some of the company secretly impatient of the music. Beforeit ceased Mr. Farebrother came in—a handsome, broad-chested but otherwise smallman, about forty, whose black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all inhis quick gray eyes. He came like a pleasant change in the light, arrestinglittle Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room byMiss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to condensemore talk into ten minutes than had been held all through the evening. Heclaimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come and see him. “I can’tlet you off, you know, because I have some beetles to show you. We collectorsfeel an interest in every new man till he has seen all we have to show him.”

But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying, “Comenow, let us be serious! Mr. Lydgate? not play? Ah! you are too young and lightfor this kind of thing.”

Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so painful toMr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in this certainly noterudite household. He could half understand it: the good-humor, the good looksof elder and younger, and the provision for passing the time without any laborof intelligence, might make the house beguiling to people who had no particularuse 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 personfor a governess. Lydgate did not mean to pay many such visits himself. Theywere a wretched waste of the evenings; and now, when he had talked a littlemore to Rosamond, he meant to excuse himself and go.

“You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure,” she said, when thewhist-players were settled. “We are very stupid, and you have been used tosomething quite different.”

“I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,” said Lydgate. “But I havenoticed that one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid than anyother. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall bemuch obliged if the town will take me in the same way. I have certainly foundsome charms in it which are much greater than I had expected.”

“You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased withthose,” said Rosamond, with simplicity.

“No, I mean something much nearer to me.”

Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, “Do you care aboutdancing 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 saythat we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know whether you would feelinsulted 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 thewhist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr. Farebrother’s play, which wasmasterly, and also his face, which was a striking mixture of the shrewd and themild. At ten o’clock supper was brought in (such were the customs ofMiddlemarch) and there was punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glassof water. He was winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal ofrubbers should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.

But as it was not eleven o’clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air towards thetower 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; theliving, however, was but a vicarage worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgatehad heard that, and he wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about themoney he won at cards; thinking, “He seems a very pleasant fellow, butBulstrode may have his good reasons.” Many things would be easier to Lydgate ifit should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable. “What is hisreligious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along with it? Onemust use such brains as are to be found.”

These were actually Lydgate’s first meditations as he walked away from Mr.Vincy’s, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider him hardlyworthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her music only in thesecond place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt on the image of her forthe rest of his walk, he felt no agitation, and had no sense that any newcurrent had set into his life. He could not marry yet; he wished not to marryfor several years; and therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion ofbeing in love with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamondexceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was not, hethought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman. Certainly, if fallingin love had been at all in question, it would have been quite safe with acreature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligence one woulddesire in a woman—polished, refined, docile, lending itself to finish in allthe delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with aforce of demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate feltsure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, thatdistinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music, that sortof beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pureand delicate joys.

But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years—his more pressingbusiness was to look into Louis’ new book on Fever, which he was speciallyinterested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and had followed manyanatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the specific differences oftyphus and typhoid. He went home and read far into the smallest hour, bringinga much more testing vision of details and relations into this pathologicalstudy than he had ever thought it necessary to apply to the complexities oflove and marriage, these being subjects on which he felt himself amply informedby literature, and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genialconversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him thatdelightful labor of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but theexercise of disciplined power—combining and constructing with the clearest eyefor probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet moreenergetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests bywhich to try its own work.

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of theirprofuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reports of very poortalk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his baderrands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; orexaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. Butthese kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinouscompared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by anysort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways ofnecessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy,capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. Hefor his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itselfable and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the veryeye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more andmore exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minuteprocesses which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfareswhich are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicatepoise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappyconsciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate,and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable afterglow ofexcitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into asuffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence—seems, asit were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float with therepose of unexhausted strength—Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in hisstudies, and something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of hisprofession.

“If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,” he thought, “I might have gotinto some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always in blinkers. Ishould never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth thehighest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with myneighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can havethe exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the oldfogies in the parish too. It is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrotherseems to be an anomaly.”

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the evening.They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up his bed-candle hislips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to accompany agreeablerecollections. He was an ardent fellow, but at present his ardor was absorbedin love of his work and in the ambition of making his life recognized as afactor in the better life of mankind—like other heroes of science who hadnothing but an obscure country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which theother knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subjectof eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing hermarriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert hermind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, andphrases, which makes a large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meantto look at her or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount ofadmiration and compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, itseemed to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, forhe feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at herpossession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered every look andword, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceivedromance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen development and climax.In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inwardlife of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had aprofession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquantfact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from allMiddlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rankand getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which shewould have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate withrelatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on theMiddlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond’s cleverness to discern very subtly thefaintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss Brookesaccompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and seated among thearistocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding their plain dress.

If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family couldcause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense that shewas in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of comparison a littlemore effectively, and consider whether red cloth and epaulets have never had aninfluence 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 commontable and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to theirappetite.

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius Lydgate as hewas in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was excusable in a girlwho was accustomed to hear that all young men might, could, would be, oractually were in love with her, to believe at once that Lydgate could be noexception. His looks and words meant more to her than other men’s, because shecared more for them: she thought of them diligently, and diligently attended tothat perfection of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies,which would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet beenconscious 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 herlandscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in practising her music,and in being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect lady, havingalways an audience in her own consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcomeaddition of a more variable external audience in the numerous visitors of thehouse. She found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best,and she knew much poetry by heart. Her favorite poem was “Lalla Rookh.”

“The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!” was thesentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and the rejectedyoung men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in country towns where thehorizon is not thick with coming rivals. But Mrs. Plymdale thought thatRosamond had been educated to a ridiculous pitch, for what was the use ofaccomplishments which would be all laid aside as soon as she was married? Whileher aunt Bulstrode, who had a sisterly faithfulness towards her brother’sfamily, had two sincere wishes for Rosamond—that she might show a more seriousturn of mind, and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth correspondedto her habits.

CHAPTER XVII.

“The clerkly person smiled and said
Promise was a pretty maid,
But being poor she died unwed.”

The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the next evening, livedin an old parsonage, built of stone, venerable enough to match the church whichit looked out upon. All the furniture too in the house was old, but withanother grade of age—that of Mr. Farebrother’s father and grandfather. Therewere painted white chairs, with gilding and wreaths on them, and some lingeringred silk damask with slits in it. There were engraved portraits of LordChancellors and other celebrated lawyers of the last century; and there wereold pier-glasses to reflect them, as well as the little satin-wood tables andthe sofas resembling a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in reliefa*gainst the dark wainscot. This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room intowhich Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive him, who werealso old-fashioned, and of a faded but genuine respectability: Mrs.Farebrother, the Vicar’s white-haired mother, befrilled and kerchiefed withdainty cleanliness, upright, quick-eyed, and still under seventy; Miss Noble,her sister, a tiny old lady of meeker aspect, with frills and kerchiefdecidedly more worn and mended; and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar’selder sister, well-looking like himself, but nipped and subdued as single womenare apt to be who spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to theirelders. Lydgate had not expected to see so quaint a group: knowing simply thatMr. Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought of being ushered into a snuggerywhere the chief furniture would probably be books and collections of naturalobjects. The Vicar himself seemed to wear rather a changed aspect, as most mendo when acquaintances made elsewhere see them for the first time in their ownhomes; some indeed showing like an actor of genial parts disadvantageously castfor the curmudgeon in a new piece. This was not the case with Mr. Farebrother:he seemed a trifle milder and more silent, the chief talker being his mother,while he only put in a good-humored moderating remark here and there. The oldlady was evidently accustomed to tell her company what they ought to think, andto regard no subject as quite safe without her steering. She was affordedleisure for this function by having all her little wants attended to by MissWinifred. Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble carried on her arm a small basket, intowhich she diverted a bit of sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer asif by mistake; looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacupwith a small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped. Pray think no ill ofMiss Noble. That basket held small savings from her more portable food,destined for the children of her poor friends among whom she trotted on finemornings; fostering and petting all needy creatures being so spontaneous adelight to her, that she regarded it much as if it had been a pleasant vicethat she was addicted to. Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to stealfrom those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing, andcarried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire. One must be poorto know the luxury of giving!

Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality and precision. Shepresently informed him that they were not often in want of medical aid in thathouse. She had brought up her children to wear flannel and not to over-eatthemselves, which last habit she considered the chief reason why people neededdoctors. Lydgate pleaded for those whose fathers and mothers had over-eatenthemselves, but Mrs. Farebrother held that view of things dangerous: Nature wasmore just than that; it would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestorsought to have been hanged instead of him. If those who had bad fathers andmothers were bad themselves, they were hanged for that. There was no need to goback on what you couldn’t see.

“My mother is like old George the Third,” said the Vicar, “she objects tometaphysics.”

“I object to what is wrong, Camden. I say, keep hold of a few plain truths, andmake everything square with them. When I was young, Mr. Lydgate, there neverwas any question about right and wrong. We knew our catechism, and that wasenough; we learned our creed and our duty. Every respectable Church person hadthe same opinions. But now, if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you areliable to be contradicted.”

“That makes rather a pleasant time of it for those who like to maintain theirown 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 taughtme. Any one may see what comes of turning. If you change once, why not twentytimes?”

“A man might see good arguments for changing once, and not see them forchanging again,” said Lydgate, amused with the decisive old lady.

“Excuse me there. If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting, when a manhas no constancy of mind. My father never changed, and he preached plain moralsermons without arguments, and was a good man—few better. When you get me agood man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading youthe cookery-book. That’s my opinion, and I think anybody’s stomach will bear meout.”

“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 thereare plenty of them here as elsewhere. I say, they came in with the mixed stuffsthat will neither wash nor wear. It was not so in my youth: a Churchman was aChurchman, and a clergyman, you might be pretty sure, was a gentleman, ifnothing else. But now he may be no better than a Dissenter, and want to pushaside my son on pretence of doctrine. But whoever may wish to push him aside, Iam proud to say, Mr. Lydgate, that he will compare with any preacher in thiskingdom, not to speak of this town, which is but a low standard to go by; atleast, to my thinking, for I was born and bred at Exeter.”

“A mother is never partial,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling. “What do you thinkTyke’s mother says about him?”

“Ah, poor creature! what indeed?” said Mrs. Farebrother, her sharpness bluntedfor the moment by her confidence in maternal judgments. “She says the truth toherself, depend upon it.”

“And what is the truth?” said Lydgate. “I am curious to know.”

“Oh, nothing bad at all,” said Mr. Farebrother. “He is a zealous fellow: notvery 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 youpreach.”

Mrs. Farebrother laid down her knitting, which she had resumed after her smallallowance 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 thedouble 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 areworth a load of coals to them.”

“Mr. Lydgate,” said Mrs. Farebrother, who could not let this pass, “you don’tknow my son: he always undervalues himself. I tell him he is undervaluing theGod 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,” saidthe Vicar, laughing. “I promised to show you my collection,” he added, turningto Lydgate; “shall we go?”

All three ladies remonstrated. Mr. Lydgate ought not to be hurried away withoutbeing allowed to accept another cup of tea: Miss Winifred had abundance of goodtea 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 andmoths, with no carpet on the floor. Mr. Lydgate must excuse it. A game atcribbage would be far better. In short, it was plain that a vicar might beadored by his womankind as the king of men and preachers, and yet be held bythem to stand in much need of their direction. Lydgate, with the usualshallowness of a young bachelor, wondered that Mr. Farebrother had not taughtthem better.

“My mother is not used to my having visitors who can take any interest in myhobbies,” said the Vicar, as he opened the door of his study, which was indeedas bare of luxuries for the body as the ladies had implied, unless a shortporcelain pipe and a tobacco-box were to be excepted.

“Men of your profession don’t generally smoke,” he said. Lydgate smiled andshook his head. “Nor of mine either, properly, I suppose. You will hear thatpipe alleged against me by Bulstrode and Company. They don’t know how pleasedthe devil would be if I gave it up.”

“I understand. You are of an excitable temper and want a sedative. I amheavier, and should get idle with it. I should rush into idleness, and stagnatethere with all my might.”

“And you mean to give it all to your work. I am some ten or twelve years olderthan you, and have come to a compromise. I feed a weakness or two lest theyshould get clamorous. See,” continued the Vicar, opening several small drawers,“I fancy I have made an exhaustive study of the entomology of this district. Iam going on both with the fauna and flora; but I have at least done my insectswell. We are singularly rich in orthoptera: I don’t know whether—Ah! you havegot hold of that glass jar—you are looking into that instead of my drawers. Youdon’t really care about these things?”

“Not by the side of this lovely anencephalous monster. I have never had time togive myself much to natural history. I was early bitten with an interest instructure, and it is what lies most directly in my profession. I have no hobbybesides. I have the sea to swim in there.”

“Ah! you are a happy fellow,” said Mr. Farebrother, turning on his heel andbeginning to fill his pipe. “You don’t know what it is to want spiritualtobacco—bad emendations of old texts, or small items about a variety of AphisBrassicae, with the well-known signature of Philomicron, for the ‘Twaddler’sMagazine;’ or a learned treatise on the entomology of the Pentateuch, includingall the insects not mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites in theirpassage through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant, as treated by Solomon,showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs with the results of modernresearch. You don’t mind my fumigating you?”

Lydgate was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its impliedmeaning—that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the right vocation. Theneat fitting-up of drawers and shelves, and the bookcase filled with expensiveillustrated books on Natural History, made him think again of the winnings atcards and their destination. But he was beginning to wish that the very bestconstruction of everything that Mr. Farebrother did should be the true one. TheVicar’s frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an uneasyconsciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but simply therelief of a desire to do with as little pretence as possible. Apparently he wasnot without a sense that his freedom of speech might seem premature, for hepresently said—

“I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you, Mr. Lydgate, andknow you better than you know me. You remember Trawley who shared yourapartment at Paris for some time? I was a correspondent of his, and he told mea good deal about you. I was not quite sure when you first came that you werethe same man. I was very glad when I found that you were. Only I don’t forgetthat you have not had the like prologue about me.”

Lydgate divined some delicacy of feeling here, but did not half understand it.“By the way,” he said, “what has become of Trawley? I have quite lost sight ofhim. He was hot on the French social systems, and talked of going to theBackwoods to found a sort of Pythagorean community. Is he gone?”

“Not at all. He is practising at a German bath, and has married a richpatient.”

“Then my notions wear the best, so far,” said Lydgate, with a short scornfullaugh. “He would have it, the medical profession was an inevitable system ofhumbug. 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 toset up a disinfecting apparatus within. In short—I am reporting my ownconversation—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 Pythagoreancommunity, 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 thesociety around you. You see, I have paid twelve or thirteen years more than youfor my knowledge of difficulties. But”—Mr. Farebrother broke off a moment, andthen added, “you are eying that glass vase again. Do you want to make anexchange? You shall not have it without a fair barter.”

“I have some sea-mice—fine specimens—in spirits. And I will throw in RobertBrown’s new thing—‘Microscopic Observations on the Pollen of Plants’—if youdon’t happen to have it already.”

“Why, seeing how you long for the monster, I might ask a higher price. SupposeI ask you to look through my drawers and agree with me about all my newspecies?” The Vicar, while he talked in this way, alternately moved about withhis 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 pleasehis patients in Middlemarch. You must learn to be bored, remember. However, youshall have the monster on your own terms.”

“Don’t you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody’s nonsense,till they get despised by the very fools they humor?” said Lydgate, moving toMr. Farebrother’s side, and looking rather absently at the insects ranged infine gradation, with names subscribed in exquisite writing. “The shortest wayis to make your value felt, so that people must put up with you whether youflatter them or not.”

“With all my heart. But then you must be sure of having the value, and you mustkeep yourself independent. Very few men can do that. Either you slip out ofservice altogether, and become good for nothing, or you wear the harness anddraw a good deal where your yoke-fellows pull you. But do look at thesedelicate orthoptera!”

Lydgate had after all to give some scrutiny to each drawer, the Vicar laughingat himself, and yet persisting in the exhibition.

“Apropos of what you said about wearing harness,” Lydgate began, after they hadsat down, “I made up my mind some time ago to do with as little of it aspossible. That was why I determined not to try anything in London, for a goodmany years at least. I didn’t like what I saw when I was studying there—so muchempty bigwiggism, and obstructive trickery. In the country, people have lesspretension to knowledge, and are less of companions, but for that reason theyaffect one’s amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow one’sown course more quietly.”

“Yes—well—you have got a good start; you are in the right profession, the workyou feel yourself most fit for. Some people miss that, and repent too late. Butyou must not be too sure of keeping your independence.”

“You mean of family ties?” said Lydgate, conceiving that these might pressrather tightly on Mr. Farebrother.

“Not altogether. Of course they make many things more difficult. But a goodwife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him moreindependent. There’s a parishioner of mine—a fine fellow, but who would hardlyhave pulled through as he has done without his wife. Do you know the Garths? Ithink they were not Peaco*ck’s patients.”

“No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone’s, at Lowick.”

“Their daughter: an excellent girl.”

“She is very quiet—I have hardly noticed her.”

“She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lydgate; he could hardly say “Of course.”

“Oh, she gauges everybody. I prepared her for confirmation—she is a favorite ofmine.”

Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring to knowmore about the Garths. At last the Vicar laid down his pipe, stretched out hislegs, 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 ourintrigues and our parties. I am a party man, for example, and Bulstrode isanother. 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 againsthim you will make him your enemy.”

“I don’t know that I need mind about that,” said Lydgate, rather proudly; “buthe seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he spends large sums on usefulpublic objects. He might help me a good deal in carrying out my ideas. As tohis religious notions—why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flockof sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. I look for the manwho 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 offendme, you know,” said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly. “I don’t translate myown convenience into other people’s duties. I am opposed to Bulstrode in manyways. I don’t like the set he belongs to: they are a narrow ignorant set, anddo more to make their neighbors uncomfortable than to make them better. Theirsystem is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the restof mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven. But,” headded, 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 amischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment. And I am not a modelclergyman—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 andtherapeutics. He only said, “What reason does Bulstrode give for supersedingyou?”

“That I don’t teach his opinions—which he calls spiritual religion; and that Ihave 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 yourarsenic-man, you are not to cut me in consequence. I can’t spare you. You are asort of circumnavigator come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief inthe antipodes. Now tell me all about them in Paris.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

“Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence;
Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
May languish with the scurvy.”

Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the chaplaincygathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without telling himself thereason, 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 theappointment of Tyke without any hesitation—if he had not cared personally forMr. Farebrother.

But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph’s grew with growingacquaintanceship. That, entering into Lydgate’s position as a new-comer who hadhis own professional objects to secure, Mr. Farebrother should have taken painsrather to warn off than to obtain his interest, showed an unusual delicacy andgenerosity, which Lydgate’s nature was keenly alive to. It went along withother points of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, andmade his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem dividedbetween natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few men could have beenas filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and sister, whosedependence 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 dressup their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. Inthese matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny;and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the criticalstrictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve theirdomestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for theiractions. Then, his preaching was ingenious and pithy, like the preaching of theEnglish 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 wasalways the most difficult part of a clergyman’s function, here was anotherground for a careless sense of superiority. Besides, he was a likable man:sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness orother conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to ourfriends. Lydgate liked him heartily, and wished for his friendship.

With this feeling uppermost, he continued to waive the question of thechaplaincy, and to persuade himself that it was not only no proper business ofhis, but likely enough never to vex him with a demand for his vote. Lydgate, atMr. Bulstrode’s request, was laying down plans for the internal arrangements ofthe new hospital, and the two were often in consultation. The banker was alwayspresupposing that he could count in general on Lydgate as a coadjutor, but madeno special recurrence to the coming decision between Tyke and Farebrother. Whenthe General Board of the Infirmary had met, however, and Lydgate had noticethat the question of the chaplaincy was thrown on a council of the directorsand medical men, to meet on the following Friday, he had a vexed sense that hemust make up his mind on this trivial Middlemarch business. He could not helphearing 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 couldnot help an equally pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office. Forhis observation was constantly confirming Mr. Farebrother’s assurance that thebanker would not overlook opposition. “Confound their petty politics!” was oneof his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative process of shaving, whenhe had begun to feel that he must really hold a court of conscience on thismatter. Certainly there were valid things to be said against the election ofMr. Farebrother: he had too much on his hands already, especially consideringhow much time he spent on non-clerical occupations. Then again it was acontinually repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate’s esteem, that the Vicar shouldobviously play for the sake of money, liking the play indeed, but evidentlyliking some end which it served. Mr. Farebrother contended on theory for thedesirability of all games, and said that Englishmen’s wit was stagnant for wantof them; but Lydgate felt certain that he would have played very much less butfor the money. There was a billiard-room at the Green Dragon, which someanxious mothers and wives regarded as the chief temptation in Middlemarch. TheVicar was a first-rate billiard-player, and though he did not frequent theGreen Dragon, there were reports that he had sometimes been there in thedaytime and had won money. And as to the chaplaincy, he did not pretend that hecared for it, except for the sake of the forty pounds. Lydgate was no Puritan,but he did not care for play, and winning money at it had always seemed ameanness to him; besides, he had an ideal of life which made this subservienceof conduct to the gaining of small sums thoroughly hateful to him. Hitherto inhis own life his wants had been supplied without any trouble to himself, andhis first impulse was always to be liberal with half-crowns as matters of noimportance to a gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan forgetting 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 thewant of money plays in determining the actions of men. Money had never been amotive to him. Hence he was not ready to frame excuses for this deliberatepursuit of small gains. It was altogether repulsive to him, and he neverentered into any calculation of the ratio between the Vicar’s income and hismore or less necessary expenditure. It was possible that he would not have madesuch a calculation in his own case.

And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact told morestrongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before. One would know muchbetter what to do if men’s characters were more consistent, and especially ifone’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 onthe subject: he did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode’s. On the otherhand, there was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who wassimply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter’s parish, and had time for extraduty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could notbear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his point of view, Bulstrodewas thoroughly justified.

But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make himwince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being obliged towince. He did not like frustrating his own best purposes by getting on badterms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against Farebrother, and helpingto deprive him of function and salary; and the question occurred whether theadditional forty pounds might not leave the Vicar free from that ignoble careabout winning at cards. Moreover, Lydgate did not like the consciousness thatin voting for Tyke he should be voting on the side obviously convenient forhimself. But would the end really be his own convenience? Other people wouldsay so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the sakeof making himself important and getting on in the world. What then? He for hisown part knew that if his personal prospects simply had been concerned, hewould not have cared a rotten nut for the banker’s friendship or enmity. Whathe really cared for was a medium for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; andafter all, was he not bound to prefer the object of getting a good hospital,where he could demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and testtherapeutic results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? Forthe first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of smallsocial conditions, and their frustrating complexity. At the end of his inwarddebate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was really in the chancethat discussion might somehow give a new aspect to the question, and make thescale dip so as to exclude the necessity for voting. I think he trusted alittle also to the energy which is begotten by circ*mstances—some feelingrushing warmly and making resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had onlymade it more difficult. However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself onwhich side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting thesubjection which had been forced upon him. It would have seemed beforehand likea ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his unmixed resolutions ofindependence and his select purposes, would find himself at the very outset inthe grasp of petty alternatives, each of which was repugnant to him. In hisstudent’s chambers, he had prearranged his social action quite differently.

Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other surgeons, andseveral of the directors had arrived early; Mr. Bulstrode, treasurer andchairman, being among those who were still absent. The conversation seemed toimply that the issue was problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not socertain as had been generally supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder,turned out to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, theyconcurred in action. Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one hadforeseen, an adherent of Mr. Farebrother. The Doctor was more than suspected ofhaving no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him asif he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professionalweight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness withthe evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients whohad the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negationin the Doctor which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing ofjudgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if anymedical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definitereligious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an activepiety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.

On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr. Minchin thathis religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such as gave a distantmedical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of Church or Dissent, ratherthan any adhesion to particular tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he wasapt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Churchmust stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not amere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on aparticular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for hispart liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to fixed limits; if theUnitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope’s“Essay on Man.” He objected to the rather free style of anecdote in which Dr.Sprague indulged, preferring well-sanctioned quotations, and liking refinementof all kinds: it was generally known that he had some kinship to a bishop, andsometimes spent his holidays at “the palace.”

Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline, not tobe distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance: whereas Dr. Sprague wassuperfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the knees, and showed an excessof boot at a time when straps seemed necessary to any dignity of bearing; youheard him go in and out, and up and down, as if he had come to see after theroofing. In short, he had weight, and might be expected to grapple with adisease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect itlurking and to circumvent it. They enjoyed about equally the mysteriousprivilege of medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette theircontempt for each other’s skill. Regarding themselves as Middlemarchinstitutions, they were ready to combine against all innovators, and againstnon-professionals given to interference. On this ground they were both in theirhearts equally averse to Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr. Minchin had never been inopen hostility with him, and never differed from him without elaborateexplanation to Mrs. Bulstrode, who had found that Dr. Minchin alone understoodher constitution. A layman who pried into the professional conduct of medicalmen, and was always obtruding his reforms,—though he was less directlyembarrassing to the two physicians than to the surgeon-apothecaries whoattended paupers by contract, was nevertheless offensive to the professionalnostril as such; and Dr. Minchin shared fully in the new pique againstBulstrode, excited by his apparent determination to patronize Lydgate. Thelong-established practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller; were just nowstanding apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed thatLydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode’s purpose. Tonon-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other youngpractitioner, who had come into the town on Mr. Peaco*ck’s retirement withoutfurther recommendation than his own merits and such argument for solidprofessional acquirement as might be gathered from his having apparently wastedno time on other branches of knowledge. It was clear that Lydgate, by notdispensing drugs, intended to cast imputations on his equals, and also toobscure the limit between his own rank as a general practitioner and that ofthe physicians, who, in the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintainits various grades,—especially against a man who had not been to either of theEnglish universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside studythere, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in Edinburgh andParis, where observation might be abundant indeed, but hardly sound.

Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified withLydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety of interchangeablenames for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds were enabled to form the samejudgment concerning it.

Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly to the group assembled when he entered, “I gofor 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 avicar’s charities. Put forty pounds in his pocket and you’ll do no harm. He’s agood fellow, is Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as willserve to carry orders.”

“Ho, ho! Doctor,” said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger of somestanding—his interjection being something between a laugh and a Parliamentarydisapproval; “we must let you have your say. But what we have to consider isnot 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 Gospelpreacher, is Mr. Tyke. I should vote against my conscience if I voted againstMr. Tyke—I should indeed.”

“Mr. Tyke’s opponents have not asked any one to vote against his conscience, Ibelieve,” said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent speech, whose glitteringspectacles and erect hair were turned with some severity towards innocent Mr.Powderell. “But in my judgment it behoves us, as Directors, to consider whetherwe will regard it as our whole business to carry out propositions emanatingfrom a single quarter. Will any member of the committee aver that he would haveentertained the idea of displacing the gentleman who has always discharged thefunction of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested to him by parties whosedisposition it is to regard every institution of this town as a machinery forcarrying out their own views? I tax no man’s motives: let them lie betweenhimself and a higher Power; but I do say, that there are influences at workhere which are incompatible with genuine independence, and that a crawlingservility is usually dictated by circ*mstances which gentlemen so conductingthemselves could not afford either morally or financially to avow. I myself ama layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the divisions in theChurch and—”

“Oh, damn the divisions!” burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and town-clerk, whorarely presented himself at the board, but now looked in hurriedly, whip inhand. “We have nothing to do with them here. Farebrother has been doing thework—what there was—without pay, and if pay is to be given, it should be givento 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 personalbearing,” said Mr. Plymdale. “I shall vote for the appointment of Mr. Tyke, butI should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt hadn’t hinted it, that I was a ServileCrawler.”

“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 awayfrom Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior gifts inMiddlemarch. “Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right side, eh?”

“I hope so,” said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and there; “atwhatever cost to my feelings.”

“If there’s any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man who is turnedout, 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—nonemore so—and I believe him to be proposed from unimpeachable motives. I, for mypart, wish that I could give him my vote. But I am constrained to take a viewof the case which gives the preponderance to Mr. Farebrother’s claims. He is anamiable man, an able preacher, and has been longer among us.”

Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent. Mr. Plymdale settled his cravat,uneasily.

“You don’t set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman ought to be, Ihope,” said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier, who had just come in. “I have noill-will towards him, but I think we owe something to the public, not to speakof anything higher, in these appointments. In my opinion Farebrother is too laxfor a clergyman. I don’t wish to bring up particulars against him; but he willmake a little attendance here go as far as he can.”

“And a devilish deal better than too much,” said Mr. Hawley, whose bad languagewas notorious in that part of the county. “Sick people can’t bear so muchpraying and preaching. And that methodistical sort of religion is bad for thespirits—bad for the inside, eh?” he added, turning quickly round to the fourmedical men who were assembled.

But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen, with whomthere were greetings more or less cordial. These were the Reverend EdwardThesiger, Rector of St. Peter’s, Mr. Bulstrode, and our friend Mr. Brooke ofTipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put on the board of directors inhis 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 asusual. Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical, wished for the appointment of hisfriend Mr. Tyke, a zealous able man, who, officiating at a chapel of ease, hadnot a cure of souls too extensive to leave him ample time for the new duty. Itwas desirable that chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with afervent intention: they were peculiar opportunities for spiritual influence;and while it was good that a salary should be allotted, there was the more needfor scrupulous watching lest the office should be perverted into a merequestion of salary. Mr. Thesiger’s manner had so much quiet propriety thatobjectors could only simmer in silence.

Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter. He had not himselfattended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he had a strong interest inwhatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was most happy to meet thegentlemen present on any public question—“any public question, you know,” Mr.Brooke repeated, with his nod of perfect understanding. “I am a good dealoccupied as a magistrate, and in the collection of documentary evidence, but Iregard my time as being at the disposal of the public—and, in short, my friendshave convinced me that a chaplain with a salary—a salary, you know—is a verygood thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and vote for the appointmentof Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an unexceptionable man, apostolic andeloquent and everything of that kind—and I am the last man to withhold myvote—under the circ*mstances, 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 Torysuspicious of electioneering intentions. “You don’t seem to know that one ofthe worthiest men we have has been doing duty as chaplain here for yearswithout pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed to supersede him.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hawley,” said Mr. Bulstrode. “Mr. Brooke has been fullyinformed of Mr. Farebrother’s character and position.”

“By his enemies,” flashed out Mr. Hawley.

“I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here,” said Mr. Thesiger.

“I’ll swear there is, though,” retorted Mr. Hawley.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, “the merits of the questionmay be very briefly stated, and if any one present doubts that every gentlemanwho is about to give his vote has not been fully informed, I can nowrecapitulate 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 wemean to vote for. Any man who wants to do justice does not wait till the lastminute to hear both sides of the question. I have no time to lose, and Ipropose 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 inthe mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.

“I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present,” said Mr. Bulstrode,in a clear biting voice. Then, looking up at Lydgate—

“There is a casting-vote still to be given. It is yours, Mr. Lydgate: will yoube 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, ratherdefiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.

“I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode. Do you regardthat meaning as offensive?”

“It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist from voting with him onthat account.” Lydgate immediately wrote down “Tyke.”

So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate continuedto work with Mr. Bulstrode. He was really uncertain whether Tyke were not themore suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness told him that if he had beenquite free from indirect bias he should have voted for Mr. Farebrother. Theaffair of the chaplaincy remained a sore point in his memory as a case in whichthis petty medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him. How could a manbe satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under suchcirc*mstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he haschosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing itat best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before. The characterof the publican and sinner is not always practically incompatible with that ofthe modern Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly thefaultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, or thedulness of our own jokes. But the Vicar of St. Botolph’s had certainly escapedthe slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himselfthat he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them inthis—that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judgeimpartially of their conduct even when it told against him.

“The world has been too strong for me, I know,” he said one day toLydgate. “But then I am not a mighty man—I shall never be a man of renown. Thechoice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it easy work for thehero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another story says that he came tohold the distaff, and at last wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolvemight 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 ratherhastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure. Lydgate thought thatthere was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.

CHAPTER XIX.

“L’ altra vedete ch’ha fatto alla guancia
Della sua palma, sospirando, letto.”
—Purgatorio, vii.

When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, whenthe Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy was mayor of the oldcorporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken herwedding journey to Rome. In those days the world in general was more ignorantof good and evil by forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not oftencarry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets;and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook theflower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to thepainter’s fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks withlove and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven andentered into everybody’s food; it was fermenting still as a distinguishablevigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German artists at Rome, and theyouth of other nations who worked or idled near them were sometimes caught inthe spreading movement.

One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but abundantand curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had just turned hisback on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was looking out on themagnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining round vestibule. He wassufficiently absorbed not to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animatedGerman who came up to him and placing a hand on his shoulder, said with astrong accent, “Come here, quick! else she will have changed her pose.”

Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly along bythe Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called theCleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery foldingaround her with a petal-like ease and tenderness. They were just in time to seeanother figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: abreathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad inQuakerish gray drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrownbackward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek,pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo toher face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at thesculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on astreak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But she became conscious of thetwo strangers who suddenly paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and,without looking at them, immediately turned away to join a maid-servant andcourier 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 volublywithout waiting for any other answer. “There lies antique beauty, notcorpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete contentment of itssensuous perfection: and here stands beauty in its breathing life, with theconsciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom. But she should be dressed asa nun; I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as anun in my picture. However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on thatwonderful left hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallowGeistlicher was her father. I saw him parting from her a good while ago,and just now I found her in that magnificent pose. Only think! he is perhapsrich, and would like to have her portrait taken. Ah! it is no use looking afterher—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 downthe hall with a preoccupied air, while his German friend kept at his side andwatched him eagerly.

“What! the Geistlicher? He looks more like an uncle—a more useful sortof relation.”

“He is not my uncle. I tell you he is my second cousin,” said Ladislaw, withsome irritation.

“Schön, schön. Don’t be snappish. You are not angry with me for thinking Mrs.Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw?”

“Angry? nonsense. I have only seen her once before, for a couple of minutes,when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I left England. They were notmarried 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 anaddress—since you know the name. Shall we go to the post? And you could speakabout the portrait.”

“Confound you, Naumann! I don’t know what I shall do. I am not so brazen asyou.”

“Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you were anartist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form animated byChristian sentiment—a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous force controlled byspiritual passion.”

“Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her existence—thedivinity passing into higher completeness and all but exhausted in the act ofcovering your bit of canvas. I am amateurish if you like: I do not thinkthat all the universe is straining towards the obscure significance of yourpictures.”

“But it is, my dear!—so far as it is straining through me, Adolf Naumann: thatstands firm,” said the good-natured painter, putting a hand on Ladislaw’sshoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the unaccountable touch ofill-humor in his tone. “See now! My existence presupposes the existence of thewhole universe—does it not? and my function is to paint—and as a painterI have a conception which is altogether genialisch, of your great-auntor second grandmother as a subject for a picture; therefore, the universe isstraining towards that picture through that particular hook or claw which itputs forth in the shape of me—not true?”

“But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart it?—the caseis a little less simple then.”

“Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing—picture or nopicture—logically.”

Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his facebroke into sunshiny laughter.

“Come now, my friend—you will help?” said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.

“No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody’s service asmodels. And you want to express too much with your painting. You would onlyhave made a better or worse portrait with a background which every connoisseurwould give a different reason for or against. And what is a portrait of awoman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb anddull 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 appearstung. He went on as if he had not heard.

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. Afterall, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistentimperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if awoman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone.There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment tomoment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you painther voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen ofher.”

“I see, I see. You are jealous. No man must presume to think that he can paintyour 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 shevery much wishes to be painted?”

“Yes, suppose!” said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone, intended todismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously smallcauses, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss aboutMrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regardto her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions andnodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Theirsusceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

CHAPTER XX.

“A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.”

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsomeapartment in the Via Sistina.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to thisrelief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on herown account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when shefeels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some timeat the Vatican.

Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even toherself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental actthat was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that herfeeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She hadmarried the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that shehad contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from thevery first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above herown, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirelyshare; moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she wasbeholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a wholehemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images andtrophies gathered from afar.

But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness of herbridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome, and in the kindlymornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand like a happy agedcouple one of whom would presently survive in chiller loneliness, she haddriven about at first with Mr. Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp andtheir experienced courier. She had been led through the best galleries, hadbeen taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins andthe most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive outto the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-fromthe oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become amasque with enigmatical costumes.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge whichbreathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressedtransitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centreand interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historicalcontrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal citythrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English andSwiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of thehand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance ofknowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quickemotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; agirl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance ofuntried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with herpersonal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on brightnymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreignsociety; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins andbasilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where allthat was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of asuperstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic lifegazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white formswhose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: allthis vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedlywith the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred heras with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that achebelonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Formsboth pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselvesin her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strangeassociations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bringwith them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of adoze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continuedto see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excitedintention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in themosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreadingitself 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 leftto “find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business.Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping sixweeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Somediscouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replacesthe imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply movedby what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact offrequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; andperhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision andfeeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow andthe squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on theother side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded withstupidity.

However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause,she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used:to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give ahistory of the lights and shadows, for that new real future which was replacingthe imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view ofMr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, wasgradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had beenin her maiden dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or atleast admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotednesswhich was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost suresooner or later to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a lifewithout some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her; but she was nowin an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion. Inthis way, the early months of marriage often are times of criticaltumult—whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters—which afterwardssubsides into cheerful peace.

But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of expressionchanged, or his sentiments become less laudable? Oh waywardness of womanhood!did his chronology fail him, or his ability to state not only a theory but thenames of those who held it; or his provision for giving the heads of anysubject on demand? And was not Rome the place in all the world to give freeplay to such accomplishments? Besides, had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm especiallydwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness withwhich great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?— And that such weightpressed on Mr. Casaubon was only plainer than before.

All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, thelight had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact isunalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solelythrough the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks calledcourtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, bedisclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, butwill certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing tofind how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare withit. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see yourfavorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: inthese cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimesend by inverting the quantities.

Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of flashymake-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminantanimal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions abouthimself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had notdistinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistasand wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind werereplaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? Isuppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional andpreliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken toguarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal.But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on thepresent. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not tobe aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, infact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on someexplanation 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 fervidpatience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought against Mr.Casaubon’s entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and otherfish-deities, thinking that hereafter she should see this subject which touchedhim so nearly from the same high ground whence doubtless it had become soimportant to him. Again, the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissalwith which he treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts, was easilyaccounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and preoccupation in which sheherself 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 lifemade 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 fitsof anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judiciousHooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr.Casaubon’s time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could not havethe advantage of comparison; but her husband’s way of commenting on thestrangely impressive objects around them had begun to affect her with a sort ofmental shiver: he had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himselfworthily, but only of acquitting himself. What was fresh to her mind was wornout to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever beenstimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort ofdried 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 stayingwere alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? Itcontains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most personsthink 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 ofCupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literaryperiod, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But ifyou like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, Ithink, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity toomit in a visit to Rome. He is the painter who has been held to combine themost complete grace of form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I havegathered to be the opinion of cognoscenti.”

This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a clergymanreading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of theEternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew more about them theworld would be joyously illuminated for her. There is hardly any contact moredepressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years fullof 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 aneagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of enthusiasm, and Dorotheawas anxious to follow this spontaneous direction of his thoughts, instead ofbeing made to feel that she dragged him away from it. But she was graduallyceasing to expect with her former delightful confidence that she should see anywide opening where she followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost amongsmall closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri,or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lostsight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taperstuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscriptremarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had becomeindifferent to the sunlight.

These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon, mighthave remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged to pourforth her girlish and womanly feeling—if he would have held her hands betweenhis and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all thelittle histories which made up her experience, and would have given her thesame sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could beincluded in their mutual knowledge and affection—or if she could have fed heraffection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweetwoman, 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 herand to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for what was near, to havekissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if hewould have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with hisunfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature,indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that heregarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made hisclerical toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for thoseamenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of theperiod, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.

And by a sad contradiction Dorothea’s ideas and resolves seemed like meltingice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but anotherform. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if shecould know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scatteredin fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions ofmore complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty. PoorDorothea! she was certainly troublesome—to herself chiefly; but this morningfor the first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon.

She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to shake offwhat she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face all cheerfulattention to her husband when he said, “My dear Dorothea, we must now think ofall that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to our departure. I would fainhave returned home earlier that we might have been at Lowick for the Christmas;but my inquiries here have been protracted beyond their anticipated period. Itrust, 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 moststriking and in some respects edifying. I well remember that I considered it anepoch in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall ofNapoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I think itis one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has been applied—‘SeeRome and die:’ but in your case I would propose an emendation and say, See Romeas a bride, and live henceforth as a happy wife.”

Mr. Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientiousintention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and concludingwith a smile. He had not found marriage a rapturous state, but he had no ideaof being anything else than an irreproachable husband, who would make acharming young woman as happy as she deserved to be.

“I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay—I mean, with the result sofar as your studies are concerned,” said Dorothea, trying to keep her mindfixed on what most affected her husband.

“Yes,” said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes theword half a negative. “I have been led farther than I had foreseen, and varioussubjects for annotation have presented themselves which, though I have nodirect need of them, I could not pretermit. The task, notwithstanding theassistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat laborious one, but yoursociety has happily prevented me from that too continuous prosecution ofthought beyond the hours of study which has been the snare of my solitarylife.”

“I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you,” saidDorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed that Mr.Casaubon’s mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to get to thesurface again. I fear there was a little temper in her reply. “I hope when weget to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a littlemore into what interests you.”

“Doubtless, my dear,” said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow. “The notes I havehere made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract them under mydirection.”

“And all your notes,” said Dorothea, whose heart had already burned within heron this subject, so that now she could not help speaking with her tongue. “Allthose rows of volumes—will you not now do what you used to speak of?—will younot make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write thebook which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write toyour dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of noother use.” Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, endedwith a slight sob and eyes full of tears.

The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing to Mr.Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea’s words were among the mostcutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use. She wasas blind to his inward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned thosehidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listenedpatiently to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.In Mr. Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to thosemuffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as merefancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestionsare unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust.We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—howmuch more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a nearobserver, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and striveagainst as if they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel outwardaccuser was there in the shape of a wife—nay, of a young bride, who, instead ofobserving his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncriticalawe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spywatching everything with a malign power of inference. Here, towards thisparticular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a sensitiveness to matchDorothea’s, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact. He hadformerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the rightobject; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replacedby presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,—thatwhich sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what itcosts to reach them.

For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon’s face had aquick angry flush upon it.

“My love,” he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, “you may rely uponme for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of awork which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorantonlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage ofbaseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to besaluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallestachievements, being indeed equipped for no other. And it were well if all suchcould be admonished to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matterlies entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may becompassed 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 ininward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when suddenheat cracks it. Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification ofthat shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing everything inherself except the desire to enter into some fellowship with her husband’schief interests?

“My judgment was a very superficial one—such as I am capable offorming,” she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no rehearsal.“You showed me the rows of notebooks—you have often spoken of them—you haveoften said that they wanted digesting. But I never heard you speak of thewriting that is to be published. Those were very simple facts, and my judgmentwent 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 aletter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it. Both were shocked at theirmutual situation—that each should have betrayed anger towards the other. Ifthey had been at home, settled at Lowick in ordinary life among theirneighbors, the clash would have been less embarrassing: but on a weddingjourney, the express object of which is to isolate two people on the groundthat they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is, to saythe least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed your longitudeextensively and placed yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have smallexplosions, to find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water withoutlooking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughestminds. To Dorothea’s inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed like a catastrophe,changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was a new pain, he never havingbeen on a wedding journey before, or found himself in that close union whichwas more of a subjection than he had been able to imagine, since this charmingyoung bride not only obliged him to much consideration on her behalf (which hehad sedulously given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruellyjust where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence against thecold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a moresubstantial presence?

Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. To have reversed aprevious arrangement and declined to go out would have been a show ofpersistent anger which Dorothea’s conscience shrank from, seeing that shealready began to feel herself guilty. However just her indignation might be,her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness. So when thecarriage came to the door, she drove with Mr. Casaubon to the Vatican, walkedwith him through the stony avenue of inscriptions, and when she parted with himat the entrance to the Library, went on through the Museum out of merelistlessness as to what was around her. She had not spirit to turn round andsay that she would drive anywhere. It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting herthat Naumann had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery ofsculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislawwith whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmaticalmediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure, and hadwalked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw lingering behindwhile Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea,and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable. Shedid not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw thestatues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home andover the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling thatthe way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clearto her as it had been. But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into whichall thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—the reaching forwardof the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.

CHAPTER XXI.

“Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
No contrefeted termes had she
To sem*n wise.”
—CHAUCER.

It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was securelyalone. But she was presently roused by a knock at the door, which made herhastily dry her eyes before saying, “Come in.” Tantripp had brought a card, andsaid that there was a gentleman waiting in the lobby. The courier had told himthat 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 chiefimpressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him at Lowick shehad been made aware of Mr. Casaubon’s generosity towards him, and also that shehad been interested in his own hesitation about his career. She was alive toanything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this momentit seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbeddiscontent—to remind her of her husband’s goodness, and make her feel that shehad now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds. She waited a minute ortwo, but when she passed into the next room there were just signs enough thatshe had been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing thanusual. She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of good-will which is unmixedwith 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 complexionflushed suddenly, and he spoke with a shyness extremely unlike the readyindifference of his manner with his male companion, while Dorothea became allthe calmer with a wondering desire to put him at ease.

“I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome, until this morning,when I saw you in the Vatican Museum,” he said. “I knew you at once—but—I mean,that I concluded Mr. Casaubon’s address would be found at the Poste Restante,and I was anxious to pay my respects to him and you as early as possible.”

“Pray sit down. He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of you, I amsure,” said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between the fire and thelight of the tall window, and pointing to a chair opposite, with the quietudeof a benignant matron. The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only themore striking. “Mr. Casaubon is much engaged; but you will leave youraddress—will you not?—and he will write to you.”

“You are very good,” said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in theinterest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had altered herface. “My address is on my card. But if you will allow me I will call againto-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 hardlysee him except by an appointment. Especially now. We are about to leave Rome,and he is very busy. He is usually away almost from breakfast till dinner. ButI 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 havelaughed at him as a Bat of erudition. But the idea of this dried-up pedant,this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stockof false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got thisadorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away fromher, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—thissudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided betweenthe impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst intoscornful invective.

For an instant he felt that the struggle was causing a queer contortion of hismobile features, but with a good effort he resolved it into nothing moreoffensive than a merry smile.

Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from her facetoo. Will Ladislaw’s smile was delightful, unless you were angry with himbeforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent skin aswell as the eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel weretouching them with a new charm, and banishing forever the traces of moodiness.The reflection of that smile could not but have a little merriment in it too,even under dark eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, “Somethingamuses you?”

“Yes,” said Will, quick in finding resources. “I am thinking of the sort offigure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my poor sketch withyour criticism.”

“My criticism?” said Dorothea, wondering still more. “Surely not. I always feelparticularly ignorant about painting.”

“I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what wasmost cutting. You said—I dare say you don’t remember it as I do—that therelation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you. At least, youimplied that.” Will could laugh now as well as smile.

“That was really my ignorance,” said Dorothea, admiring Will’s good-humor. “Imust have said so only because I never could see any beauty in the pictureswhich my uncle told me all judges thought very fine. And I have gone about withjust the same ignorance in Rome. There are comparatively few paintings that Ican really enjoy. At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered withfrescos, or with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe—like a child present atgreat ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself inthe presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine thepictures one by one the life goes out of them, or else is something violent andstrange to me. It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so much all at once, andnot understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painfulto be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it isfine—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,” saidWill. (It was impossible now to doubt the directness of Dorothea’s confession.)“Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, andsometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense ofknowing. I enjoy the art of all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I couldpick my enjoyment to pieces I should find it made up of many different threads.There is something in daubing a little one’s self, and having an idea of theprocess.”

“You mean perhaps to be a painter?” said Dorothea, with a new direction ofinterest. “You mean to make painting your profession? Mr. Casaubon will like tohear that you have chosen a profession.”

“No, oh no,” said Will, with some coldness. “I have quite made up my mindagainst it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been seeing a great deal of theGerman artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with one of them. Some arefine, even brilliant fellows—but I should not like to get into their way oflooking at the world entirely from the studio point of view.”

“That I can understand,” said Dorothea, cordially. “And in Rome it seems as ifthere were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures. Butif you have a genius for painting, would it not be right to take that as aguide? Perhaps you might do better things than these—or different, so thatthere might not be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place.”

There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it into frankness.“A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that sort. I am afraidmine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing well what has been donealready, at least not so well as to make it worth while. And I should neversucceed in anything by dint of drudgery. If things don’t come easily to me Inever get them.”

“I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,” saidDorothea, gently. She was rather shocked at this mode of taking all life as aholiday.

“Yes, I know Mr. Casaubon’s opinion. He and I differ.”

The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Dorothea. She wasall the more susceptible about Mr. Casaubon because of her morning’s trouble.

“Certainly you differ,” she said, rather proudly. “I did not think of comparingyou: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr. Casaubon’s is not common.”

Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional impulse to thenew irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr. Casaubon. It was toointolerable that Dorothea should be worshipping this husband: such weakness ina woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question. Mortals are easilytempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think thatsuch killing is no murder.

“No, indeed,” he answered, promptly. “And therefore it is a pity that it shouldbe thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what isbeing done by the rest of the world. If Mr. Casaubon read German he would savehimself 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 thelead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got bygroping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads.When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened himself in that direction:it was almost against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by aGerman. I was very sorry.”

Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that vauntedlaboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which Dorothea would bewounded. Young Mr. Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; butvery little achievement is required in order to pity another man’sshortcomings.

Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her husband’s lifemight be void, which left her no energy to spare for the question whether thisyoung relative who was so much obliged to him ought not to have repressed hisobservation. She did not even speak, but sat looking at her hands, absorbed inthe 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; andhaving also a conscience about plucking the tail-feathers from a benefactor.

“I regretted it especially,” he resumed, taking the usual course fromdetraction to insincere eulogy, “because of my gratitude and respect towards mycousin. It would not signify so much in a man whose talents and character wereless distinguished.”

Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and said inher saddest recitative, “How I wish I had learned German when I was atLausanne! 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’slast words. The question how she had come to accept Mr. Casaubon—which he haddismissed when he first saw her by saying that she must be disagreeable inspite of appearances—was not now to be answered on any such short and easymethod. Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was notcoldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full offeeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait andwatch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth sodirectly and ingenuously. The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.

She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage. And ifMr. Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his lair with histalons simply and without legal forms, it would have been an unavoidable featof heroism to release her and fall at her feet. But he was something moreunmanageable than a dragon: he was a benefactor with collective society at hisback, and he was at that moment entering the room in all the unimpeachablecorrectness of his demeanor, while Dorothea was looking animated with a newlyroused alarm and regret, and Will was looking animated with his admiringspeculation about her feelings.

Mr. Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but he didnot swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose and explainedhis presence. Mr. Casaubon was less happy than usual, and this perhaps made himlook all the dimmer and more faded; else, the effect might easily have beenproduced by the contrast of his young cousin’s appearance. The first impressionon seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty ofhis changing expression. Surely, his very features changed their form, his jawlooked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in his nosewas a preparation for metamorphosis. When he turned his head quickly his hairseemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius inthis coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

As Dorothea’s eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was perhaps notinsensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other causes in makingher more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf which was the first stirringof a pitying tenderness fed by the realities of his lot and not by her owndreams. Yet it was a source of greater freedom to her that Will was there; hisyoung equality was agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction. Shefelt an immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen anyone who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand everything.

Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as well aspleasantly in Rome—had thought his intention was to remain in South Germany—butbegged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he could converse more at large: atpresent he was somewhat weary. Ladislaw understood, and accepting theinvitation immediately took his leave.

Dorothea’s eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down wearily atthe end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head and looked on thefloor. 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 Ihurt you and made the day more burdensome.”

“I am glad that you feel that, my dear,” said Mr. Casaubon. He spoke quietlyand bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy feeling in his eyesas he looked at her.

“But you do forgive me?” said Dorothea, with a quick sob. In her need for somemanifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault. Would notlove see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

“My dear Dorothea—‘who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven norearth:’—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 tosmile faintly.

Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would insist onfalling.

“You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant consequencesof too much mental disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon. In fact, he had it in histhought to tell her that she ought not to have received young Ladislaw in hisabsence: but he abstained, partly from the sense that it would be ungracious tobring a new complaint in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partlybecause he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partlybecause he was too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was notso exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in otherdirections. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it ishardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasyegoism.

“I think it is time for us to dress,” he added, looking at his watch. They bothrose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what had passedon this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we allremember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some newmotive is born. Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wildillusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she hadfelt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness inhis 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 feedour supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, butyet 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 toconceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—anidea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—thathe had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must alwaysfall with a certain difference.

CHAPTER XXII.

“Nous câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumône,
Et tout en écoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n’en sut jamais rien.”
—ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave noopportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation. On the contrary it seemedto Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing her husband intoconversation and of deferentially listening to him than she had ever observedin any one before. To be sure, the listeners about Tipton were not highlygifted! Will talked a good deal himself, but what he said was thrown in withsuch rapidity, and with such an unimportant air of saying something by the way,that it seemed a gay little chime after the great bell. If Will was not alwaysperfect, this was certainly one of his good days. He described touches ofincident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could moveabout freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the unsoundopinions of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and Catholicism; andpassed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment hegot out of the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexiblewith constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world’s ages as a setof box-like partitions without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon’s studies, Willobserved, had always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhapsnever felt any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome hadgiven him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments stimulated hisimagination and made him constructive. Then occasionally, but not too often, heappealed to Dorothea, and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were anitem to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno orthe Laocoon. A sense of contributing to form the world’s opinion makesconversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not without hispride in his young wife, who spoke better than most women, as indeed he hadperceived in choosing her.

Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon’s statement that hislabors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and that after abrief renewal he should have no further reason for staying in Rome, encouragedWill to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away without seeing a studio ortwo. Would not Mr. Casaubon take her? That sort of thing ought not to bemissed: it was quite special: it was a form of life that grew like a smallfresh vegetation with its population of insects on huge fossils. Will would behappy to conduct them—not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.

Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him, could not but ask herif she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her service during thewhole day; and it was agreed that Will should come on the morrow and drive withthem.

Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr.Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way to thestudio of his friend Adolf Naumann, whom he mentioned as one of the chiefrenovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only revived but expandedthat grand conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the successiveages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periodsbecame as it were contemporaries. Will added that he had made himself Naumann’spupil for the nonce.

“I have been making some oil-sketches under him,” said Will. “I hate copying. Imust put something of my own in. Naumann has been painting the Saints drawingthe Car of the Church, and I have been making a sketch of Marlowe’s TamburlaineDriving the Conquered Kings in his Chariot. I am not so ecclesiastical asNaumann, and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning. But this time Imean to outdo him in breadth of intention. I take Tamburlaine in his chariotfor the tremendous course of the world’s physical history lashing on theharnessed dynasties. In my opinion, that is a good mythical interpretation.”Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon, who received this offhand treatment ofsymbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral air.

“The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much,” said Dorothea. “Ishould need some explanation even of the meaning you give. Do you intendTamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?”

“Oh yes,” said Will, laughing, “and migrations of races and clearings offorests—and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can imagine!”

“What a difficult kind of shorthand!” said Dorothea, smiling towards herhusband. “It would require all your knowledge to be able to read it.”

Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will. He had a suspicion that he was beinglaughed at. But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the suspicion.

They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present; hispictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious person setoff by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so that everything was asfortunate as if he had expected the beautiful young English lady exactly atthat time.

The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his finishedand unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon as much as he didDorothea. Will burst in here and there with ardent words of praise, marking outparticular merits in his friend’s work; and Dorothea felt that she was gettingquite new notions as to the significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicablecanopied thrones with the simple country as a background, and of saints witharchitectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in theirskulls. Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gatheringintelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was apparently abranch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not interested himself.

“I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to read it asan enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures sooner than yourswith the very wide meaning,” said Dorothea, speaking to Will.

“Don’t speak of my painting before Naumann,” said Will. “He will tell you, itis all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!”

“Is that true?” said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann, who made aslight grimace and said—

“Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting. His walk must bebelles-lettres. That is wi-ide.”

Naumann’s pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word satirically.Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr. Casaubon, while hefelt some disgust at the artist’s German accent, began to entertain a littlerespect for his judicious severity.

The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will aside for amoment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr. Casaubon, came forwardagain and said—

“My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a sketch ofyour head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas Aquinas in my picturethere. It is too much to ask; but I so seldom see just what I want—theidealistic in the real.”

“You astonish me greatly, sir,” said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved with aglow of delight; “but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been accustomed toregard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to you in furnishing sometraits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel honored. That is to say, if theoperation will not be a lengthy one; and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object tothe delay.”

As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had been amiraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and worthiest among thesons of men. In that case her tottering faith would have become firm again.

Naumann’s apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the sketch wenton at once as well as the conversation. Dorothea sat down and subsided intocalm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a long while before. Everyone about her seemed good, and she said to herself that Rome, if she had onlybeen less ignorant, would have been full of beauty: its sadness would have beenwinged with hope. No nature could be less suspicious than hers: when she was achild she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibilityof sparrows, and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was mademanifest.

The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about English polities,which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched himself on somesteps in the background overlooking all.

Presently Naumann said—“Now if I could lay this by for half an hour and take itup again—come and look, Ladislaw—I think it is perfect so far.”

Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is toostrong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret—

“Ah—now—if I could but have had more—but you have other engagements—I could notask it—or even to come again to-morrow.”

“Oh, let us stay!” said Dorothea. “We have nothing to do to-day except goabout, have we?” she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon. “It would bea pity not to make the head as good as possible.”

“I am at your service, sir, in the matter,” said Mr. Casaubon, with politecondescension. “Having given up the interior of my head to idleness, it is aswell that the exterior should work in this way.”

“You are unspeakably good—now I am happy!” said Naumann, and then went on inGerman to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he were consideringthat. Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round vaguely, as if seekingsome occupation for his visitors, and afterwards turning to Mr. Casaubon, said—

“Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling to letme fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of her—not, of course, asyou see, for that picture—only as a single study.”

Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him, andDorothea said, at once, “Where shall I put myself?”

Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to adjust herattitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected airs and laughsfrequently thought necessary on such occasions, when the painter said, “It isas Santa Clara that I want you to stand—leaning so, with your cheek againstyour hand—so—looking at that stool, please, so!”

Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint’s feet and kissher robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he was adjusting herarm. All this was impudence and desecration, and he repented that he hadbrought her.

The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and occupiedMr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the end prevent thetime from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear from his expressing afear that Mrs. Casaubon would be tired. Naumann took the hint and said—

“Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife.”

So Mr. Casaubon’s patience held out further, and when after all it turned outthat the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect if another sittingcould be had, it was granted for the morrow. On the morrow Santa Clara too wasretouched more than once. The result of all was so far from displeasing to Mr.Casaubon, that he arranged for the purchase of the picture in which SaintThomas Aquinas sat among the doctors of the Church in a disputation tooabstract to be represented, but listened to with more or less attention by anaudience above. The Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place,Naumann declared himself to be dissatisfied with—he could not, in conscience,engage to make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangementwas conditional.

I will not dwell on Naumann’s jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon thatevening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea’s charm, in all which Will joined,but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail of Dorothea’sbeauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness inhis choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of herlips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could notsay just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet, when after someresistance he had consented to take the Casaubons to his friend’s studio, hehad been allured by the gratification of his pride in being the person whocould grant Naumann such an opportunity of studying her loveliness—or ratherher divineness, for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodilyprettiness were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Tipton and itsneighborhood, as well as Dorothea herself, would have been surprised at herbeauty being made so much of. In that part of the world Miss Brooke had beenonly a “fine young woman.”)

“Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann. Mrs. Casaubon is not to betalked of as if she were a model,” said Will. Naumann stared at him.

“Schön! I will talk of my Aquinas. The head is not a bad type, after all. Idare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered to have hisportrait asked for. Nothing like these starchy doctors for vanity! It was as Ithought: he cared much less for her portrait than his own.”

“He’s a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb,” said Will, with gnashingimpetuosity. His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were not known to his hearer, butWill himself was thinking of them, and wishing that he could discharge them allby a check.

Naumann gave a shrug and said, “It is good they go away soon, my dear. They arespoiling your fine temper.”

All Will’s hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing Dorothea whenshe was alone. He only wanted her to take more emphatic notice of him; he onlywanted to be something more special in her remembrance than he could yetbelieve himself likely to be. He was rather impatient under that open ardentgood-will, which he saw was her usual state of feeling. The remote worship of awoman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in mostcases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign bywhich his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her highplace. That was precisely what Will wanted. But there were plenty ofcontradictions in his imaginative demands. It was beautiful to see howDorothea’s eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr. Casaubon: shewould have lost some of her halo if she had been without that duteouspreoccupation; and yet at the next moment the husband’s sandy absorption ofsuch nectar was too intolerable; and Will’s longing to say damaging thingsabout him was perhaps not the less tormenting because he felt the strongestreasons for restraining it.

Will had not been invited to dine the next day. Hence he persuaded himself thathe was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was the middle of theday, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.

Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will haddispleased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him, especially as hemight be come to pay a farewell visit. When he entered she was looking at somecameos which she had been buying for Celia. She greeted Will as if his visitwere quite a matter of course, and said at once, having a cameo bracelet in herhand—

“I am so glad you are come. Perhaps you understand all about cameos, and cantell me if these are really good. I wished to have you with us in choosingthem, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought there was not time. He will finishhis work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three days. I have been uneasyabout these cameos. Pray sit down and look at them.”

“I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about theselittle Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat. And the color is fine: it willjust suit you.”

“Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion. You saw herwith me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty—at least I think so. Wewere never so long away from each other in our lives before. She is a great petand never was naughty in her life. I found out before I came away that shewanted me to buy her some cameos, and I should be sorry for them not to begood—after their kind.” Dorothea added the last words with a smile.

“You seem not to care about cameos,” said Will, seating himself at somedistance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.

“No, frankly, I don’t think them a great object in life,” said Dorothea.

“I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should haveexpected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.”

“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should liketo make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immenseexpense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no betterfor the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made tothink that most people are shut out from it.”

“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You mightsay the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it outyou ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you mighthave no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You aredoing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. Andenjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; thatis being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Wouldyou turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing andmoralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in thevirtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.” Will had gonefurther than he intended, and checked himself. But Dorothea’s thought was nottaking just the same direction as his own, and she answered without any specialemotion—

“Indeed you mistake me. I am not a sad, melancholy creature. I am never unhappylong together. I am angry and naughty—not like Celia: I have a great outburst,and then all seems glorious again. I cannot help believing in glorious thingsin a blind sort of way. I should be quite willing to enjoy the art here, butthere is so much that I don’t know the reason of—so much that seems to me aconsecration of ugliness rather than beauty. The painting and sculpture may bewonderful, but the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes evenridiculous. Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble—something thatI might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian Hill;but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the best kindamong all that mass of things over which men have toiled so.”

“Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things wantthat soil to grow in.”

“Oh dear,” said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current of heranxiety; “I see it must be very difficult to do anything good. I have oftenfelt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglierand more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall.”

Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but changedher mind and paused.

“You are too young—it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts,” saidWill, energetically, with a quick shake of the head habitual to him. “You talkas if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous—as if you had had a visionof Hades in your childhood, like the boy in the legend. You have been broughtup in some of those horrible notions that choose the sweetest women todevour—like Minotaurs. And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prisonat Lowick: you will be buried alive. It makes me savage to think of it! I wouldrather never have seen you than think of you with such a prospect.”

Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach to wordsdepends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so much kindness in itfor Dorothea’s heart, which had always been giving out ardor and had never beenfed with much from the living beings around her, that she felt a new sense ofgratitude and answered with a gentle smile—

“It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you did not likeLowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of life. But Lowick ismy chosen home.”

The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will did notknow what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers,and tell her that he would die for her: it was clear that she required nothingof the sort; and they were both silent for a moment or two, when Dorothea beganagain with an air of saying at last what had been in her mind beforehand.

“I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day. Perhaps itwas half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that you like to putthings strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak hastily.”

“What was it?” said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity quite new inher. “I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes. I dare say Ishall have to retract.”

“I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German—I mean, for thesubjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in. I have been thinking about it; and itseems to me that with Mr. Casaubon’s learning he must have before him the samematerials as German scholars—has he not?” Dorothea’s timidity was due to anindistinct consciousness that she was in the strange situation of consulting athird person about the adequacy of Mr. Casaubon’s learning.

“Not exactly the same materials,” said Will, thinking that he would be dulyreserved. “He is not an Orientalist, you know. He does not profess to have morethan second-hand knowledge there.”

“But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written a longwhile ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern things; and they arestill used. Why should Mr. Casaubon’s not be valuable, like theirs?” saidDorothea, with more remonstrant energy. She was impelled to have the argumentaloud, which she had been having in her own mind.

“That depends on the line of study taken,” said Will, also getting a tone ofrejoinder. “The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as changing as chemistry:new discoveries are constantly making new points of view. Who wants a system onthe basis of the four elements, or a book to refute Paracelsus? Do you not seethat it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the lastcentury—men like Bryant—and correcting their mistakes?—living in a lumber-roomand furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”

“How can you bear to speak so lightly?” said Dorothea, with a look betweensorrow and anger. “If it were as you say, what could be sadder than so muchardent labor all in vain? I wonder it does not affect you more painfully, ifyou really think that a man like Mr. Casaubon, of so much goodness, power, andlearning, should in any way fail in what has been the labor of his best years.”She was beginning to be shocked that she had got to such a point ofsupposition, and indignant with Will for having led her to it.

“You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling,” said Will. “Butif you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit. I am not in a position toexpress my feeling toward Mr. Casaubon: it would be at best a pensioner’seulogy.”

“Pray excuse me,” said Dorothea, coloring deeply. “I am aware, as you say, thatI am in fault in having introduced the subject. Indeed, I am wrong altogether.Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a strivinggood enough to be called a failure.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Will, determined to change the situation—“somuch so that I have made up my mind not to run that risk of never attaining afailure. Mr. Casaubon’s generosity has perhaps been dangerous to me, and I meanto renounce the liberty it has given me. I mean to go back to England shortlyand work my own way—depend on nobody else than myself.”

“That is fine—I respect that feeling,” said Dorothea, with returning kindness.“But Mr. Casaubon, I am sure, has never thought of anything in the matterexcept what was most for your welfare.”

“She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she hasmarried him,” said Will to himself. Aloud he said, rising—

“I shall not see you again.”

“Oh, stay till Mr. Casaubon comes,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “I am so glad wemet in Rome. I wanted to know you.”

“And I have made you angry,” said Will. “I have made you think ill of me.”

“Oh no. My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do not say justwhat I like. But I hope I am not given to think ill of them. In the end I amusually obliged to think ill of myself for being so impatient.”

“Still, you don’t like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to you.”

“Not at all,” said Dorothea, with the most open kindness. “I like you verymuch.”

Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have been ofmore importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing, but looked dull, notto say sulky.

“And I am quite interested to see what you will do,” Dorothea went oncheerfully. “I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation. If it werenot for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow—there are so manythings, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant of. You would hardly believehow little I have taken in of music and literature, which you know so much of.I wonder what your vocation will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?”

“That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shadeof quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a handplaying with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in whichknowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as anew organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.”

“But you leave out the poems,” said Dorothea. “I think they are wanted tocomplete the poet. I understand what you mean about knowledge passing intofeeling, for that seems to be just what I experience. But I am sure I couldnever produce a poem.”

“You are a poem—and that is to be the best part of a poet—what makes upthe poet’s consciousness in his best moods,” said Will, showing suchoriginality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and otherendless renewals.

“I am very glad to hear it,” said Dorothea, laughing out her words in abird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her eyes.“What very kind things you say to me!”

“I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind—that I couldever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never have theopportunity.” Will spoke with fervor.

“Oh yes,” said Dorothea, cordially. “It will come; and I shall remember howwell you wish me. I quite hoped that we should be friends when I first sawyou—because of your relationship to Mr. Casaubon.” There was a certain liquidbrightness in her eyes, and Will was conscious that his own were obeying a lawof nature and filling too. The allusion to Mr. Casaubon would have spoiled allif anything at that moment could have spoiled the subduing power, the sweetdignity, of her noble unsuspicious inexperience.

“And there is one thing even now that you can do,” said Dorothea, rising andwalking a little way under the strength of a recurring impulse. “Promise methat you will not again, to any one, speak of that subject—I mean about Mr.Casaubon’s writings—I mean in that kind of way. It was I who led to it. It wasmy fault. But promise me.”

She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will, looking gravelyat him.

“Certainly, I will promise you,” said Will, reddening however. If he never saida cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left off receiving favors from him,it would clearly be permissible to hate him the more. The poet must know how tohate, says Goethe; and Will was at least ready with that accomplishment. Hesaid that he must go now without waiting for Mr. Casaubon, whom he would cometo take leave of at the last moment. Dorothea gave him her hand, and theyexchanged a simple “Good-by.”

But going out of the porte cochere he met Mr. Casaubon, and thatgentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived thepleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be sufficientlycrowded with the preparations for departure.

“I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr. Ladislaw, which I think willheighten your opinion of him,” said Dorothea to her husband in the course ofthe evening. She had mentioned immediately on his entering that Will had justgone 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 bywhich we imply that any subject, whether private or public, does not interestus 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 hismanner was the coldest).

“He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up hisdependence on your generosity. He means soon to go back to England, and workhis 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 addicthimself?”

“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 hisresolve?”

“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 washis own welfare. I remembered your goodness in what you said about him when Ifirst 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 onDorothea’s in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance whichhe could not hinder from being uneasy. “The young man, I confess, is nototherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I think, discuss his futurecourse, which it is not ours to determine beyond the limits which I havesufficiently indicated.” Dorothea did not mention Will again.

BOOK III.
WAITING FOR DEATH.

CHAPTER XXIII.

“Your horses of the Sun,” he said,
“And first-rate whip Apollo!
Whate’er they be, I’ll eat my head,
But I will beat them hollow.”

Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterialburthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for many hourstogether, there were circ*mstances connected with this debt which made thethought of it unusually importunate. The creditor was Mr. Bambridge, ahorse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company was much sought in Middlemarchby young men understood to be “addicted to pleasure.” During the vacations Fredhad naturally required more amusem*nts than he had ready money for, and Mr.Bambridge had been accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire ofhorses and the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make asmall advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at billiards. Thetotal debt was a hundred and sixty pounds. Bambridge was in no alarm about hismoney, being sure that young Vincy had backers; but he had required somethingto 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 demandthat his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, weknow, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortabledisposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly ofour friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our highindividual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such asare consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference forthe best style of thing. Fred felt sure that he should have a present from hisuncle, that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of “swapping” he shouldgradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetcha hundred at any moment—“judgment” being always equivalent to an unspecifiedsum in hard cash. And in any case, even supposing negations which only a morbiddistrust could imagine, Fred had always (at that time) his father’s pocket as alast resource, so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeoussuperfluity 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 thedeficiencies of one year be made up for by the surplus of another? The Vincyslived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according tothe family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard ofeconomy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that theirfather might pay for anything if he would. Mr. Vincy himself had expensiveMiddlemarch habits—spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and ondinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts with tradespeople, whichgive a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question ofpayment. But it was in the nature of fathers, Fred knew, to bully one aboutexpenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had todisclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors. He was too filialto be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certaintythat it was transient; but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see hismother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun; forFred was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under scolding, it was chieflyfor propriety’s sake. The easier course plainly, was to renew the bill with afriend’s signature. Why not? With the superfluous securities of hope at hiscommand, there was no reason why he should not have increased other people’sliabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good foranything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universalorder of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman.

With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their moreamiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn,try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our owneagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth. Still there isalways a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until theothers have refused; and it happened that Fred checked off all his friends butone, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable; beingimplicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained aboutmankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That heshould ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position—wear trousers shrunkwith washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to “duckunder” in any sort of way—was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerfulintuitions implanted in him by nature. And Fred winced under the idea of beinglooked down upon as wanting funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass thatthe friend whom he chose to apply to was at once the poorest and thekindest—namely, Caleb Garth.

The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and Rosamondwere little ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight connection betweenthe 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 acquaintancewhich was carried on between the children rather than the parents: the childrendrank tea together out of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together inplay. Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her thenicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he hadcut from an umbrella. Through all the stages of his education he had kept hisaffection for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as a secondhome, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his family had longceased. Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the Vincys were on condescendingterms with him and his wife, for there were nice distinctions of rank inMiddlemarch; and though old manufacturers could not any more than dukes beconnected with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent socialsuperiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardlyexpressible theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the buildingbusiness, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor,valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for thebenefit of his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to theutmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound. He had nowachieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorableexertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteelvisiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and completedinner-service. Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth, andfrequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread—meaningthat Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage; in which case anintimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall’s Questions was something like adraper’s discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier’s acquaintance withforeign countries: no woman who was better off needed that sort of thing. Andsince Mary had been keeping Mr. Featherstone’s house, Mrs. Vincy’s want ofliking for the Garths had been converted into something more positive, by alarmlest Fred should engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents “lived insuch a small way.” Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visitsto Mrs. Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing ardor ofhis affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those who belonged toher.

Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went with hisrequest. He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount of painfulexperience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth cautious about his own affairs,or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had not proved themselvesuntrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of Fred, was “sure the lad wouldturn out well—an open affectionate fellow, with a good bottom to hischaracter—you might trust him for anything.” Such was Caleb’s psychologicalargument. He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves andindulgent to others. He had a certain shame about his neighbors’ errors, andnever spoke of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind fromthe best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order topreconceive those errors. If he had to blame any one, it was necessary for himto move all the papers within his reach, or describe various diagrams with hisstick, or make calculations with the odd money in his pocket, before he couldbegin; and he would rather do other men’s work than find fault with theirdoing. I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

When Fred stated the circ*mstances of his debt, his wish to meet it withouttroubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be forthcoming soas to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his spectacles upward,listened, looked into his favorite’s clear young eyes, and believed him, notdistinguishing confidence about the future from veracity about the past; but hefelt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that beforegiving his signature he must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly, hetook 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, whichgave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details for once—you would havelearned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth), and said in a comfortabletone,—

“It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse’s knees? And then, theseexchanges, they don’t answer when you have ’cute jockeys to deal with. You’llbe wiser another time, my boy.”

Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his signaturewith the care which he always gave to that performance; for whatever he did inthe way of business he did well. He contemplated the large well-proportionedletters and final flourish, with his head a trifle on one side for an instant,then handed it to Fred, said “Good-by,” and returned forthwith to hisabsorption in a plan for Sir James Chettam’s new farm-buildings.

Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the signaturefrom his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb was more conscious, Mrs.Garth remained ignorant of the affair.

Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred’s sky, which altered his view ofthe distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone’s present of moneywas of importance enough to make his color come and go, first with a toodefinite expectation, and afterwards with a proportionate disappointment. Hisfailure in passing his examination, had made his accumulation of college debtsthe more unpardonable by his father, and there had been an unprecedented stormat home. Mr. Vincy had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to putup with, Fred should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had neveryet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had especiallyenraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did not want to be aclergyman, and would rather not “go on with that.” Fred was conscious that hewould have been yet more severely dealt with if his family as well as himselfhad not secretly regarded him as Mr. Featherstone’s heir; that old gentleman’spride in him, and apparent fondness for him, serving in the stead of moreexemplary conduct—just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call theact kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of hisbeing sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolenturnips. In fact, tacit expectations of what would be done for him by uncleFeatherstone determined the angle at which most people viewed Fred Vincy inMiddlemarch; and in his own consciousness, what uncle Featherstone would do forhim in an emergency, or what he would do simply as an incorporated luck, formedalways an immeasurable depth of aerial perspective. But that present ofbank-notes, once made, was measurable, and being applied to the amount of thedebt, showed a deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fred’s“judgment” or by luck in some other shape. For that little episode of thealleged borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting theBulstrode certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for moneytowards meeting his actual debt. Fred was keen enough to foresee that angerwould confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having borrowed expressly onthe strength of his uncle’s will would be taken as a falsehood. He had gone tohis father and told him one vexatious affair, and he had left another untold:in such cases the complete revelation always produces the impression of aprevious duplicity. Now Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and evenfibs; he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at what hecalled Rosamond’s fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with alovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he would evenincur some trouble and self-restraint. It was under strong inward pressure ofthis kind that Fred had taken the wise step of depositing the eighty poundswith his mother. It was a pity that he had not at once given them to Mr. Garth;but he meant to make the sum complete with another sixty, and with a view tothis, 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 thanthreefold—a very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a younggentleman’s infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.

Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which thesuspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessaryas the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form ofgambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with thehealthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity whichfashions 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 prospectof success is certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many aspossible a share in the stake. Fred liked play, especially billiards, as heliked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the betterbecause he wanted money and hoped to win. But the twenty pounds’ worth ofseed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green plot—all of it atleast which had not been dispersed by the roadside—and Fred found himself closeupon the term of payment with no money at command beyond the eighty poundswhich he had deposited with his mother. The broken-winded horse which he roderepresented a present which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncleFeatherstone: his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Vincy’s ownhabits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who wasrather exasperating. This horse, then, was Fred’s property, and in his anxietyto meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a possession without whichlife would certainly be worth little. He made the resolution with a sense ofheroism—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 Houndsleyhorse-fair which was to be held the next morning, and—simply sell his horse,bringing back the money by coach?—Well, the horse would hardly fetch more thanthirty pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it would be folly tobalk himself of luck beforehand. It was a hundred to one that some good chancewould fall in his way; the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemedthat he should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he shouldnot equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down. He would rideto Houndsley with Bambridge and with Horrock “the vet,” and without asking themanything expressly, he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion.Before he set out, Fred got the eighty pounds from his mother.

Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with Bambridgeand Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair, thought that youngVincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an unwonted consciousness ofgrave matters on hand, he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and ofdoing what might be expected of a gay young fellow. Considering that Fred wasnot at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners and speech ofyoung men who had not been to the university, and that he had written stanzasas pastoral and unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towardsBambridge and Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love ofhorse-flesh would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence ofNaming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other name than“pleasure” the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock must certainly havebeen regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them at Houndsley on adrizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion in a street shaded withcoal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a dirt-enamelled map of thecounty, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse in a stable, His Majesty Georgethe Fourth with legs and cravat, and various leaden spittoons, might haveseemed a hard business, but for the sustaining power of nomenclature whichdetermined that the pursuit of these things was “gay.”

In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which offeredplay to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a thrilling associationwith horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which took the slightest upwardangle just to escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had givenhim a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seemingto follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of asubdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannousover a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely tocreate the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund ofhumor—too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust,—and acritical 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 allvocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth ofEngland than in a judge of horses.

Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse’s fetlock, turned sidewaysin 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 aprofile neither more nor less sceptical than it had been.

The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective. Amixture of passions was excited in Fred—a mad desire to thrash Horrock’sopinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the advantage of hisfriendship. There was always the chance that Horrock might say something quiteinvaluable at the right moment.

Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideaswithout economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being“given to indulgence”—chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife. Somepeople who had lost by him called him a vicious man; but he regardedhorse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly thatit had nothing to do with morality. He was undeniably a prosperous man, borehis drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole,flourished like the green bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited,and like the fine old tune, “Drops of brandy,” gave you after a while a senseof returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But aslight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to severalcircles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in the bar andbilliard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes about the heroes ofthe turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed toprove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even among black-legs; but theminute retentiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he hadhimself bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no timewithout turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject ofpassionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of hishearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short,Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.

Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to Houndsleybent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at their genuine opinionof its value, not being aware that a genuine opinion was the last thing likelyto be extracted from such eminent critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge’s weaknessto be a gratuitous flatterer. He had never before been so much struck with thefact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required theroundest 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 gavehim for this brute. If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers. Inever heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belongedto 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 inwind-instruments.’ That was what I said. It went the round of the country, thatjoke did. But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer ofyours.”

“Why, you said just now his was worse than mine,” said Fred, more irritablethan usual.

“I said a lie, then,” said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically. “There wasn’t a pennyto choose between ’em.”

Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way. When they slackenedagain, 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 theconsciousness of being in gay company to support him; “I say his trot is anuncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?”

Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he had been aportrait by a great master.

Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but onreflection he saw that Bambridge’s depreciation and Horrock’s silence were bothvirtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better of the horse thanthey chose to say.

That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought he saw afavorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but an openingwhich made him congratulate himself on his foresight in bringing with him hiseighty pounds. A young farmer, acquainted with Mr. Bambridge, came into the RedLion, and entered into conversation about parting with a hunter, which heintroduced at once as Diamond, implying that it was a public character. Forhimself he only wanted a useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; beingabout to marry and to give up hunting. The hunter was in a friend’s stable atsome 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 aseasily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim street ofthat unsanitary period. Fred was not fortified against disgust by brandy, ashis companions were, but the hope of having at last seen the horse that wouldenable him to make money was exhilarating enough to lead him over the sameground again the first thing in the morning. He felt sure that if he did notcome to a bargain with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress ofcirc*mstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him withall the constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond in away that he never would have done (the horse being a friend’s) if he had notthought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal—even Horrock—wasevidently impressed with its merit. To get all the advantage of being with menof this sort, you must know how to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon whotakes things literally. The color of the horse was a dappled gray, and Fredhappened to know that Lord Medlicote’s man was on the look-out for just such ahorse. After all his running down, Bambridge let it out in the course of theevening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go foreighty pounds. Of course he contradicted himself twenty times over, but whenyou know what is likely to be true you can test a man’s admissions. And Fredcould not but reckon his own judgment of a horse as worth something. The farmerhad paused over Fred’s respectable though broken-winded steed long enough toshow that he thought it worth consideration, and it seemed probable that hewould take it, with five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent ofDiamond. In that case Fred, when he had parted with his new horse for at leasteighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction, andwould have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the bill; so thatthe deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Garth would at the utmost be twenty-fivepounds. By the time he was hurrying on his clothes in the morning, he saw soclearly the importance of not losing this rare chance, that if Bambridge andHorrock had both dissuaded him, he would not have been deluded into a directinterpretation of their purpose: he would have been aware that those deep handsheld something else than a young fellow’s interest. With regard to horses,distrust was your only clew. But scepticism, as we know, can never bethoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we mustbelieve in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtuallyour own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another.Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain, and even before the fair hadwell set in, had got possession of the dappled gray, at the price of his oldhorse and thirty pounds in addition—only five pounds more than he had expectedto give.

But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate, andwithout waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he set out alone onhis fourteen miles’ journey, meaning to take it very quietly and keep his horsefresh.

CHAPTER XXIV.

“The offender’s sorrow brings but small relief
To him who wears the strong offence’s cross.”
—SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events atHoundsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in hislife before. Not that he had been disappointed as to the possible market forhis horse, but that before the bargain could be concluded with Lord Medlicote’sman, this Diamond, in which hope to the amount of eighty pounds had beeninvested, had without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a mostvicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom, and had ended inlaming himself severely by catching his leg in a rope that overhung thestable-board. There was no more redress for this than for the discovery of badtemper after marriage—which of course old companions were aware of before theceremony. For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual elasticity underthis stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that he had only fifty pounds,that there was no chance of his getting any more at present, and that the billfor a hundred and sixty would be presented in five days. Even if he had appliedto his father on the plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss, Fred feltsmartingly that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Garth from theconsequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit. He wasso utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to go straight toMr. Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him the fifty pounds, andgetting that sum at least safely out of his own hands. His father, being at thewarehouse, did not yet know of the accident: when he did, he would storm aboutthe vicious brute being brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesserannoyance Fred wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater. Hetook 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 isprobable that but for Mary’s existence and Fred’s love for her, his consciencewould have been much less active both in previously urging the debt on histhought and impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion bydeferring 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 themind 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 arefortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly itwould have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garthhad 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 alittle way outside the town—a homely place with an orchard in front of it, arambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town hadspread had been a farm-house, but was now surrounded with the private gardensof the townsmen. We get the fonder of our houses if they have a physiognomy oftheir own, as our friends have. The Garth family, which was rather a large one,for Mary had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house,from which all the best furniture had long been sold. Fred liked it too,knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples andquinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasantexpectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he shouldprobably have to make his confession before Mrs. Garth, of whom he was rathermore in awe than of her husband. Not that she was inclined to sarcasm and toimpulsive sallies, as Mary was. In her present matronly age at least, Mrs.Garth never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said, bornethe yoke in her youth, and learned self-control. She had that rare sense whichdiscerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring herhusband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity ofminding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She hadbeen magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’sfrilling, and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears of herfeminine neighbors concerning Mr. Garth’s want of prudence and the sums hemight have had if he had been like other men. Hence these fair neighborsthought her either proud or eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to theirhusbands as “your fine Mrs. Garth.” She was not without her criticism of themin return, being more accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch,and—where is the blameless woman?—apt to be a little severe towards her ownsex, which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate. On the otherhand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and wasoften 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 befollies: the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a littletoo strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while hergrammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cookedthe family dinner, and darned all the stockings. She had sometimes taken pupilsin a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen withtheir book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make anexcellent lather while she corrected their blunders “without looking,”—that awoman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about theSubjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that, in short, she might possess“education” and other good things ending in “tion,” and worthy to be pronouncedemphatically, without being a useless doll. When she made remarks to thisedifying effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did nothinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth like aprocession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto. Certainly, theexemplary Mrs. Garth had her droll aspects, but her character sustained heroddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavor of skin.

Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been disposed toexcuse his errors, though she would probably not have excused Mary for engagingherself to him, her daughter being included in that more rigorous judgmentwhich she applied to her own sex. But this very fact of her exceptionalindulgence towards him made it the harder to Fred that he must now inevitablysink in her opinion. And the circ*mstances of his visit turned out to be stillmore unpleasant than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early tolook at some repairs not far off. Mrs. Garth at certain hours was always in thekitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations at oncethere—making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airyroom, observing Sally’s movements at the oven and dough-tub through an opendoor, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standingopposite to her at the table with their books and slates before them. A tub anda clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent washof small things also going on.

Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling herpastry—applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while sheexpounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concordof verbs and pronouns with “nouns of multitude or signifying many,” was a sightagreeably 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 matronlyfigure, and a remarkable firmness of glance. In her snowy-frilled cap shereminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing,basket on arm. Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter wouldbecome like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mothertoo 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-puffwhich seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, fromdue attention to the lesson. “‘Not without regard to the import of the word asconveying unity or plurality of idea’—tell me again what that means, Ben.”

(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient paths,and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her “Lindley Murray”above the waves.)

“Oh—it means—you must think what you mean,” said Ben, rather peevishly. “I hategrammar. What’s the use of it?”

“To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,”said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision. “Should you like to speak as old Jobdoes?”

“Yes,” said Ben, stoutly; “it’s funnier. He says, ‘Yo goo’—that’s just as goodas ‘You go.’”

“But he says, ‘A ship’s in the garden,’ instead of ‘a sheep,’” said Letty, withan 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 thesea come there?”

“These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part ofgrammar,” said Mrs. Garth. “That apple-peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; ifyou eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty. Job has only to speak aboutvery plain things. How do you think you would write or speak about anythingmore difficult, if you knew no more of grammar than he does? You would usewrong words, and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making peopleunderstand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person. What wouldyou do then?”

“I shouldn’t care, I should leave off,” said Ben, with a sense that this was anagreeable issue where grammar was concerned.

“I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben,” said Mrs. Garth, accustomed tothese obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies,she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, “Come here and tell me the storyI 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 elbowcontentiously.

“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 wasa wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his advice. And hewas 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,” saidLetty, frowning. “Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak.”

“Letty, I am ashamed of you,” said her mother, wringing out the caps from thetub. “When your brother began, you ought to have waited to see if he could nottell the story. How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted toconquer with your elbows! Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to seehis daughter behave so.” (Mrs. Garth delivered this awful sentence with muchmajesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility andgeneral disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painfulaffair.) “Now, Ben.”

“Well—oh—well—why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were allblockheads, and—I can’t tell it just how you told it—but they wanted a man tobe captain and king and everything—”

“Dictator, now,” said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish to makeher 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, carefullyserious. “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, butthat her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative. He could notdepart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs. Garth in the kitchen if shehappened to be at work there. He put his arm round Letty’s neck silently, andled her into the kitchen without his usual jokes and caresses.

Mrs. Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise was not afeeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly continuingher 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 toyou also,” he added, after a little pause, for he had no doubt that Mrs. Garthknew 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 sometrouble between Fred and his father. “He is sure not to be long, because he hassome work at his desk that must be done this morning. Do you mind staying withme, while I finish my matters here?”

“But we needn’t go on about Cincinnatus, need we?” said Ben, who had takenFred’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 oldTortoise! 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 thechildren were gone and it was needful to say something that would pass thetime. He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr. Garth, or use any goodopportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs. Garth herself, give her themoney and ride away.

“One—only one. Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven. I am not getting agreat 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-twopounds. He can go to Mr. Hanmer’s now; he is just at the right age.”

This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Garth was on the brink oflosing ninety-two pounds and more. Fred was silent. “Young gentlemen who go tocollege are rather more costly than that,” Mrs. Garth innocently continued,pulling out the edging on a cap-border. “And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turnout a distinguished engineer: he wants to give the boy a good chance. There heis! I hear him coming in. We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?”

When they entered the parlor Caleb had thrown down his hat and was seated athis desk.

“What! Fred, my boy!” he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his penstill undipped; “you are here betimes.” But missing the usual expression ofcheerful greeting in Fred’s face, he immediately added, “Is there anything upat home?—anything the matter?”

“Yes, Mr. Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give you abad opinion of me. I am come to tell you and Mrs. Garth that I can’t keep myword. I can’t find the money to meet the bill after all. I have beenunfortunate; 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 deskbefore Mr. Garth. He had burst forth at once with the plain fact, feelingboyishly miserable and without verbal resources. Mrs. Garth was mutelyastonished, and looked at her husband for an explanation. Caleb blushed, andafter a little pause said—

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred; it was for ahundred 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 changebelow 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 hasrefused you.”

“No,” said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty; “but I knowit will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use, I should not liketo mention Mr. Garth’s name in the matter.”

“It has come at an unfortunate time,” said Caleb, in his hesitating way,looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper, “Christmas uponus—I’m rather hard up just now. You see, I have to cut out everything like atailor with short measure. What can we do, Susan? I shall want every farthingwe 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’spremium,” said Mrs. Garth, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear might havediscerned a slight tremor in some of the words. “And I have no doubt that Maryhas twenty pounds saved from her salary by this time. She will advance it.”

Mrs. Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least calculatingwhat words she should use to cut him the most effectively. Like the eccentricwoman 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 orexplosions. But she had made Fred feel for the first time something like thetooth of remorse. Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand hadconsisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable, and sinkin the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with theinconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for thisexercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopefulyoung gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that thehighest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beingswho would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as apitiful 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 wordson ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram. “But boys cannot well beapprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed at fifteen.” She had neverbeen so little inclined to make excuses for Fred.

“I was the most in the wrong, Susan,” said Caleb. “Fred made sure of findingthe money. But I’d no business to be fingering bills. I suppose you have lookedall round and tried all honest means?” he added, fixing his merciful gray eyeson Fred. Caleb was too delicate to specify Mr. Featherstone.

“Yes, I have tried everything—I really have. I should have had a hundred andthirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which I was about tosell. My uncle had given me eighty pounds, and I paid away thirty with my oldhorse in order to get another which I was going to sell for eighty or more—Imeant 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 onyou. There’s no one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Garth have alwaysbeen so kind to me. However, it’s no use saying that. You will always think mea rascal now.”

Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was gettingrather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry was not of muchuse 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 believedbeforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts. I knew he wasextravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean as to hang his riskson 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 havegone to publish it in the market-place. Why should you keep such things fromme? 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 beenready with some better plan.”

“You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan,” said Caleb, looking feelingly at her. “Ican’t abide your losing the money you’ve scraped together for Alfred.”

“It is very well that I had scraped it together; and it is you who willhave to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself. You must give up your badhabits. 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 toMary, and ask the child what money she has.”

Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his headslowly, and fitting his finger-tips together with much nicety.

“Poor Mary!” he said. “Susan,” he went on in a lowered tone, “I’m afraid shemay be fond of Fred.”

“Oh no! She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her in anyother than a brotherly way.”

Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up hischair to the desk, and said, “Deuce take the bill—I wish it was at Hanover!These things are a sad interruption to business!”

The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictoryexpression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine. But it wouldbe difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word “business,”the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which hewrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.

Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensablemight of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body isfed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. Theechoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shoutsof 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 hugetrunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at workon the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety ofmuscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,—all these sights ofhis youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made aphilosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aidof theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share aspossible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with thename 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, andmining than most of the special men in the county.

His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like thecategories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advancedtimes. He divided them into “business, politics, preaching, learning, andamusem*nt.” He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded themas a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way, hethought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be ofany rank in which he had not such close contact with “business” as to get oftenhonorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, orthe sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself asother than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if thesubject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were goodpractical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings:his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denialin Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to acceptany number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviouslyinterfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, andjudicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strongpractical intelligence. But he could not manage finance: he knew values well,but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape ofprofit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to giveup all forms of his beloved “business” which required that talent. He gavehimself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do withouthandling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own districtwhom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work well,charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder,then, that the Garths were poor, and “lived in a small way.” However, they didnot mind it.

CHAPTER XXV.

“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.
. . . . . . .
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.”
—W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience.

Fred Vincy wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not expect him, andwhen his uncle was not downstairs: in that case she might be sitting alone inthe wainscoted parlor. He left his horse in the yard to avoid making a noise onthe gravel in front, and entered the parlor without other notice than the noiseof the door-handle. Mary was in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi’srecollections of Johnson, and looked up with the fun still in her face. Itgradually faded as she saw Fred approach her without speaking, and stand beforeher with his elbow on the mantel-piece, looking ill. She too was silent, onlyraising 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 tosmile, but feeling alarmed.

“I know you will never think well of me any more. You will think me a liar. Youwill think me dishonest. You will think I didn’t care for you, or your fatherand 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 goodreasons. But please to tell me at once what you have done. I would rather knowthe painful truth than imagine it.”

“I owed money—a hundred and sixty pounds. I asked your father to put his nameto a bill. I thought it would not signify to him. I made sure of paying themoney myself, and I have tried as hard as I could. And now, I have been sounlucky—a horse has turned out badly—I can only pay fifty pounds. And I can’task my father for the money: he would not give me a farthing. And my uncle gaveme a hundred a little while ago. So what can I do? And now your father has noready money to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-twopounds that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too. You see whata—”

“Oh, poor mother, poor father!” said Mary, her eyes filling with tears, and alittle sob rising which she tried to repress. She looked straight before herand took no notice of Fred, all the consequences at home becoming present toher. He too remained silent for some moments, feeling more miserable than ever.“I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world, Mary,” he said at last. “You can neverforgive me.”

“What does it matter whether I forgive you?” said Mary, passionately. “Wouldthat make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has been earning bylessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to Mr. Hanmer’s? Should youthink all that pleasant enough if I forgave you?”

“Say what you like, Mary. I deserve it all.”

“I don’t want to say anything,” said Mary, more quietly, “and my anger is of nouse.” She dried her eyes, threw aside her book, rose and fetched her sewing.

Fred followed her with his eyes, hoping that they would meet hers, and in thatway find access for his imploring penitence. But no! Mary could easily avoidlooking upward.

“I do care about your mother’s money going,” he said, when she was seated againand 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 apprenticingAlfred—would advance the money?”

“My family is not fond of begging, Fred. We would rather work for our money.Besides, you say that Mr. Featherstone has lately given you a hundred pounds.He rarely makes presents; he has never made presents to us. I am sure my fatherwill not ask him for anything; and even if I chose to beg of him, it would beof no use.”

“I am so miserable, Mary—if you knew how miserable I am, you would be sorry forme.”

“There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish peoplealways think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in theworld. I see enough of that every day.”

“It is hardly fair to call me selfish. If you knew what things other young mendo, you would think me a good way off the worst.”

“I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves withoutknowing how they shall pay, must be selfish. They are always thinking of whatthey can get for themselves, and not of what other people may lose.”

“Any man may be unfortunate, Mary, and find himself unable to pay when he meantit. There is not a better man in the world than your father, and yet he gotinto trouble.”

“How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fred?” said Mary,in a deep tone of indignation. “He never got into trouble by thinking of hisown idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doingfor other people. And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make goodeverybody’s loss.”

“And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary. It is notgenerous to believe the worst of a man. When you have got any power over him, Ithink you might try and use it to make him better; but that is what you neverdo. 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’sall.”

Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up. There is oftensomething maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary’s hard experience hadwrought her nature to an impressibility very different from that hard slightthing which we call girlishness. At Fred’s last words she felt an instantaneouspang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of hernaughty 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 angerand all her other anxieties.

“Oh, Fred, how ill you look! Sit down a moment. Don’t go yet. Let me tell unclethat you are here. He has been wondering that he has not seen you for a wholeweek.” Mary spoke hurriedly, saying the words that came first without knowingvery well what they were, but saying them in a half-soothing half-beseechingtone, and rising as if to go away to Mr. Featherstone. Of course Fred felt asif 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 worstof me—will not give me up altogether.”

“As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you,” said Mary, in amournful tone. “As if it were not very painful to me to see you an idlefrivolous creature. How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others areworking and striving, and there are so many things to be done—how can you bearto be fit for nothing in the world that is useful? And with so much good inyour 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 onothers, and reckoning on what they would do for him. What will you be when youare forty? Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose—just as idle, living in Mrs. Beck’s frontparlor—fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner—spending yourmorning 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 thatquestion about Fred’s future (young souls are mobile), and before she ended,her face had its full illumination of fun. To him it was like the cessation ofan ache that Mary could laugh at him, and with a passive sort of smile he triedto reach her hand; but she slipped away quickly towards the door and said, “Ishall tell uncle. You must see him for a moment or two.”

Fred secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the fulfilment ofMary’s sarcastic prophecies, apart from that “anything” which he was ready todo if she would define it. He never dared in Mary’s presence to approach thesubject of his expectations from Mr. Featherstone, and she always ignored them,as if everything depended on himself. But if ever he actually came into theproperty, she must recognize the change in his position. All this passedthrough his mind somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle. Hestayed 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, hebegan to be more conscious of being ill, than of being melancholy.

When Caleb Garth arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Mary was notsurprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit, and was notat all fond of having to talk with Mr. Featherstone. The old man, on the otherhand, 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, andunderstood all kinds of farming and mining business better than he did. ButMary had felt sure that her parents would want to see her, and if her fatherhad not come, she would have obtained leave to go home for an hour or two thenext day. After discussing prices during tea with Mr. Featherstone, Caleb roseto bid him good-by, and said, “I want to speak to you, Mary.”

She took a candle into another large parlor, where there was no fire, andsetting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table, turned round to herfather, and putting her arms round his neck kissed him with childish kisseswhich he delighted in,—the expression of his large brows softening as theexpression of a great beautiful dog softens when it is caressed. Mary was hisfavorite child, and whatever Susan might say, and right as she was on all othersubjects, Caleb thought it natural that Fred or any one else should think Marymore 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 nameto a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother has got to part with hersavings, that’s the worst of it, and even they won’t quite make things even. Wewanted a hundred and ten pounds: your mother has ninety-two, and I have none tospare in the bank; and she thinks that you have some savings.”

“Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds. I thought you would come,father, so I put it in my bag. See! beautiful white notes and gold.”

Mary took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into her father’shand.

“Well, but how—we only want eighteen—here, put the rest back, child,—but howdid you know about it?” said Caleb, who, in his unconquerable indifference tomoney, was beginning to be chiefly concerned about the relation the affairmight 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 hesitatingtenderness. “He means better than he acts, perhaps. But I should think it apity for any body’s happiness to be wrapped up in him, and so would yourmother.”

“And so should I, father,” said Mary, not looking up, but putting the back ofher father’s hand against her cheek.

“I don’t want to pry, my dear. But I was afraid there might be somethingbetween you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you. You see, Mary”—here Caleb’svoice became more tender; he had been pushing his hat about on the table andlooking at it, but finally he turned his eyes on his daughter—“a woman, let herbe as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes forher. 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 outthe inadequacy of words—“what I am thinking of is—what it must be for a wifewhen she’s never sure of her husband, when he hasn’t got a principle in him tomake him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his owntoes pinched. That’s the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may getfond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it allholiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, mydear. However, you have more sense than most, and you haven’t been kept incotton-wool: there may be no occasion for me to say this, but a father tremblesfor 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, andnot false, I think, with all his self-indulgence. But I will never engagemyself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away histime on the chance that others will provide for him. You and my mother havetaught me too much pride for that.”

“That’s right—that’s right. Then I am easy,” said Mr. Garth, taking up his hat.“But it’s hard to run away with your earnings, eh child.”

“Father!” said Mary, in her deepest tone of remonstrance. “Take pocketfuls oflove besides to them all at home,” was her last word before he closed the outerdoor on himself.

“I suppose your father wanted your earnings,” said old Mr. Featherstone, withhis usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Mary returned to him. “He makes buta 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 likeher might be expected to be useful, so he thought of another rejoinder,disagreeable enough to be always apropos. “If Fred Vincy comes to-morrow, now,don’t you keep him chattering: let him come up to me.”

CHAPTER XXVI.

He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it wereotherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.—Troilus andCressida.

But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were quiteperemptory. From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in search ofDiamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in horse-flesh, but thefurther misfortune of some ailment which for a day or two had deemed meredepression and headache, but which got so much worse when he returned from hisvisit to Stone Court that, going into the dining-room, he threw himself on thesofa, and in answer to his mother’s anxious question, said, “I feel very ill: Ithink you must send for Wrench.”

Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a “slightderangement,” and did not speak of coming again on the morrow. He had a duevalue for the Vincys’ house, but the wariest men are apt to be dulled byroutine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through their business withthe 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, alymphatic wife and seven children; and he was already rather late beforesetting out on a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin on the other side ofTipton, the decease of Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increasedMiddlemarch practice in that direction. Great statesmen err, and why not smallmedical men? Mr. Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, whichthis time had black and drastic contents. Their effect was not alleviating topoor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was “in for anillness,” rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and went down-stairsmeaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in sitting and shivering bythe fire. Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds, and Mrs.Vincy seeing her darling’s changed looks and general misery, began to cry andsaid she would send for Dr. Sprague.

“Oh, nonsense, mother! It’s nothing,” said Fred, putting out his hot dry handto her, “I shall soon be all right. I must have taken cold in that nasty dampride.”

“Mamma!” said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room windowslooked 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. Hehas cured Ellen Bulstrode. They say he cures every one.”

Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking only ofFred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was only two yards off on the otherside 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 wentout, after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting withher sense of what was becoming.

Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy’s mind insisted withremarkable 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 anawkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but the case was seriousenough to make him dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fred wasin the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just thewrong medicines. He must go to bed immediately, must have a regular nurse, andvarious appliances and precautions must be used, about which Lydgate wasparticular. Poor Mrs. Vincy’s terror at these indications of danger found ventin such words as came most easily. She thought it “very ill usage on the partof Mr. Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr.Peaco*ck, though Mr. Peaco*ck was equally a friend. Why Mr. Wrench should neglecther children more than others, she could not for the life of her understand. Hehad not neglected Mrs. Larcher’s when they had the measles, nor indeed wouldMrs. Vincy have wished that he should. And if anything should happen—”

Here poor Mrs. Vincy’s spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat andgood-humored face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out of Fred’shearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and now came forwardanxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, said that the symptoms yesterdaymight have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal inits beginnings: he would go immediately to the druggist’s and have aprescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrenchand tell him what had been done.

“But you must come again—you must go on attending Fred. I can’t have my boyleft to anybody who may come or not. I bear nobody ill-will, thank God, and Mr.Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he’d better have let me die—if—if—”

“I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?” said Lydgate, really believingthat Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case of this kind.

“Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, coming to hermother’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 henever came into his house again. Lydgate should go on now, whether Wrench likedit or not. It was no joke to have fever in the house. Everybody must be sent tonow, 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 withblank-cartridges. “He’s an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred. He’d need havesome luck by and by to make up for all this—else I don’t know who’d have aneldest son.”

“Don’t say so, Vincy,” said the mother, with a quivering lip, “if you don’twant 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 hinderedif Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about his—the Mayor’s—family.) “I’mthe last man to give in to the cry about new doctors, or new parsonseither—whether they’re Bulstrode’s men or not. But Wrench shall know what Ithink, take it as he will.”

Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he could be in hisoffhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage isonly an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been anobject of dislike beforehand. Country practitioners used to be an irritablespecies, susceptible on the point of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the mostirritable among them. He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but histemper 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 wasa good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Wrench come in, andwent 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 oflate had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now broadenedhimself by putting his thumbs in his armholes. “To let fever get unawares intoa house like this. There are some things that ought to be actionable, and arenot so— that’s my opinion.”

But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of beinginstructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate, inwardlyconsidered him in need of instruction, for “in point of fact,” Mr. Wrenchafterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would notwear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwards wrote to declinefurther attendance in the case. The house might be a good one, but Mr. Wrenchwas 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 caughttripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale ofdrugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threwout biting remarks on Lydgate’s tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himselfa factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was nevergot up by sound practitioners.

This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire. To bepuffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous, and not moreenviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet. He was impatient of thefoolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and likelyenough to damage himself as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessionalopenness.

However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and theevent was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some said, that theVincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy had threatened Wrench, and thatMrs. Vincy had accused him of poisoning her son. Others were of opinion thatMr. Lydgate’s passing by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever infevers, and that Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many peoplebelieved 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 inmisleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it intoher head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode’s, a fact which seemedto justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen.

She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother, who didnot fail to tell her son of it, observing—

“I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be sorry tothink it of Mr. Lydgate.”

“Why, mother,” said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, “you know verywell that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never heard of Bulstrodebefore he came here.”

“That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,” said the oldlady, with an air of precision.—“But as to Bulstrode—the report may be true ofsome other son.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your uglyfurniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me thispregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steelmade to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinouslyscratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as acentre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselvesin a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It isdemonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is onlyyour candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement,its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are aparable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any personnow absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own whohad kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to havearranged Fred’s illness and Mr. Wrench’s mistake in order to bring her andLydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to contravene thesearrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere,as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Lydgate thought theprecaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sentaway to a farmhouse the morning after Fred’s illness had declared itself,Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma.

Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman; and Mr.Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account than on Fred’s.But for his insistence she would have taken no rest: her brightness was allbedimmed; 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 sensesdulled to the sights and sounds that used most to interest her. Fred’sdelirium, 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: herone low cry was to Lydgate. She would follow him out of the room and put herhand on his arm moaning out, “Save my boy.” Once she pleaded, “He has alwaysbeen good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother,”—as ifpoor Fred’s suffering were an accusation against him. All the deepest fibres ofthe mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentlertone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with alove new to her, before he was born.

“I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy,” Lydgate would say. “Come down with me and letus talk about the food.” In that way he led her to the parlor where Rosamondwas, and made a change for her, surprising her into taking some tea or brothwhich had been prepared for her. There was a constant understanding between himand Rosamond on these matters. He almost always saw her before going to thesickroom, and she appealed to him as to what she could do for mamma. Herpresence of mind and adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, andit is not wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itselfwith 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 haveremained neutral on Wrench’s account); but after two consultations, the conductof the case was left to Lydgate, and there was every reason to make himassiduous. Morning and evening he was at Mr. Vincy’s, and gradually the visitsbecame cheerful as Fred became simply feeble, and lay not only in need of theutmost petting but conscious of it, so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all,the illness had made a festival for her tenderness.

Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits, when old Mr.Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred must make haste and getwell, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not do without him, and missed hisvisits sadly. The old man himself was getting bedridden. Mrs. Vincy told thesemessages to Fred when he could listen, and he turned towards her his delicate,pinched face, from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and inwhich the eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word aboutMary—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 fulnessof her heart not only divined Fred’s longing, but felt ready for any sacrificein order to satisfy him.

“If I can only see my boy strong again,” she said, in her loving folly; “andwho knows?—perhaps master of Stone Court! and he can marry anybody he likesthen.”

“Not if they won’t have me, mother,” said Fred. The illness had made himchildish, and tears came as he spoke.

“Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, secretly incredulous ofany such refusal.

She never left Fred’s side when her husband was not in the house, and thusRosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone. Lydgate, naturally,never thought of staying long with her, yet it seemed that the brief impersonalconversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy whichconsists in shyness. They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, andsomehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course whichit really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant andone day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turnedout badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was thatwhen their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before. There was nohelp for this in science, and as Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed tobe no help for it in folly. It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longerconsidered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Rosamondalone were very much reduced.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the otheris feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done awaywith. Talk about the weather and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollowdevice, and behavior can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes amutual fascination—which of course need not mean anything deep or serious. Thiswas the way in which Rosamond and Lydgate slid gracefully into ease, and madetheir intercourse lively again. Visitors came and went as usual, there was oncemore music in the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr. Vincy’smayoralty returned. Lydgate, whenever he could, took his seat by Rosamond’sside, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself her captive—meaning, allthe while, not to be her captive. The preposterousness of the notion that hecould at once set up a satisfactory establishment as a married man was asufficient guarantee against danger. This play at being a little in love wasagreeable, and did not interfere with graver pursuits. Flirtation, after all,was not necessarily a singeing process. Rosamond, for her part, had neverenjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure of being admired bysome 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 justwhither she would go, and her thoughts were much occupied with a handsome housein Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant. She was quitedetermined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitorswho were not agreeable to her at her father’s; and she imagined thedrawing-room in her favorite house with various styles of furniture.

Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself; he seemed toher almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his enchantment under hermusic had been less like an emotional elephant’s, and if he had been able todiscriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardlyhave mentioned a deficiency in him. How different he was from young Plymdale orMr. Caius Larcher! Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speakon no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carryingtrades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarchgentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassedin their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above them, having at leastthe accent and manner of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listenedto, bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, andseemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without everhaving to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, andwhen he approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sensethat she was the object of enviable homage. If Lydgate had been aware of allthe pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as wellpleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathologyor fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the femininemind to adore a man’s pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what itconsisted in. But Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betraythemselves unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses,instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that herrapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were everdiscernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the contrary, shewould have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heardthat another young lady had been detected in that immodestprematureness—indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility. ForRosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combinationof correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, privatealbum for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made theirresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil ofher, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, shenever thought of money except as something necessary which other people wouldalways provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if herstatements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in thatlight—they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. Naturehad inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon’s favorite pupil, who by generalconsent (Fred’s excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, andamiability.

Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was noconstraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes,and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for them, which isobservable with some sense of flatness by a third person; still they had nointerviews or asides from which a third person need have been excluded. Infact, they flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothingelse. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise atthe same time? Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr. Farebrother, weregreat bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards: whatwas he to do for relaxation? He was often invited to the Bulstrodes’; but thegirls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs. Bulstrode’snaive way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of thislife and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthyrags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of herhusband’s invariable seriousness. The Vincys’ house, with all its faults, wasthe pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond—sweet to look at asa half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refinedamusem*nt 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 othervisitors were there. The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr. NedPlymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leadingminds) was in tête-à-tête with Rosamond. He had brought the last“Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progressat that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be thefirst to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shinycopper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses ascapital 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 amedium for “paying addresses”—the very thing to please a nice girl. He had alsoreasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his ownappearance. To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect,looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause himsome difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at thattime useful.

“I think the Honorable Mrs. S. is something like you,” said Mr. Ned. He keptthe book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it ratherlanguishingly.

“Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that,” said Rosamond, notmeaning any satire, but thinking how red young Plymdale’s hands were, andwondering 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 tolook from the portrait to its rival.

“I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer,” said Rosamond, feeling sure thatshe should have to reject this young gentleman a second time.

But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached Rosamond’scorner, 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 ofchange. Rosamond enjoyed not only Lydgate’s presence but its effect: she likedto excite jealousy.

“What a late comer you are!” she said, as they shook hands. “Mamma had givenyou 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, forexample. But your mamma seems to have some objection.”

“Poor fellow!” said Rosamond, prettily. “You will see Fred so changed,” sheadded, turning to the other suitor; “we have looked to Mr. Lydgate as ourguardian angel during this illness.”

Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the “Keepsake” towards him andopening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chin, as if inwonderment 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 writinghere,” said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pagesquickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his largewhite hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought. “Do look at this bridegroomcoming out of church: did you ever see such a ‘sugared invention’—as theElizabethans used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I willanswer 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 heramusem*nt duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale had lingered with admiration overthis very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.

“There are a great many celebrated people writing in the ‘Keepsake,’ at allevents,” he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid. “This is the first time Ihave heard it called silly.”

“I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,” saidRosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. “I suspect you know nothing aboutLady Blessington and L. E. L.” Rosamond herself was not without relish forthese writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and wasalive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in thevery highest taste.

“But Sir Walter Scott—I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him,” said young Plymdale, alittle cheered by this advantage.

“Oh, I read no literature now,” said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing itaway. “I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all mylife. I used to know Scott’s poems by heart.”

“I should like to know when you left off,” said Rosamond, “because then I mightbe sure that I knew something which you did not know.”

“Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing,” said Mr. Ned, purposelycaustic.

“On the contrary,” said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling withexasperating confidence at Rosamond. “It would be worth knowing by the factthat Miss Vincy could tell it me.”

Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgatewas one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been hisill-fortune to meet.

“How rash you are!” said Rosamond, inwardly delighted. “Do you see that youhave given offence?”

“What! is it Mr. Plymdale’s book? I am sorry. I didn’t think about it.”

“I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came here—thatyou 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 herwillingly?”

To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged. That theywere some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her mind; and ideas, weknow, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the necessary materials being athand. It is true, Lydgate had the counter-idea of remaining unengaged; but thiswas a mere negative, a shadow cast by other resolves which themselves werecapable of shrinking. Circ*mstance was almost sure to be on the side ofRosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blueeyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which getsmelted without knowing it.

That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a process ofmaceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he wrote out his dailynotes with as much precision as usual. The reveries from which it was difficultfor him to detach himself were ideal constructions of something else thanRosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown.Moreover, he was beginning to feel some zest for the growing thoughhalf-suppressed feud between him and the other medical men, which was likely tobecome more manifest, now that Bulstrode’s method of managing the new hospitalwas about to be declared; and there were various inspiriting signs that hisnon-acceptance by some of Peaco*ck’s patients might be counterbalanced by theimpression he had produced in other quarters. Only a few days later, when hehad happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road and had got down from hishorse to walk by her side until he had quite protected her from a passingdrove, he had been stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling himin to a house of some importance where Peaco*ck had never attended; and it wasthe second instance of this kind. The servant was Sir James Chettam’s, and thehouse was Lowick Manor.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, returning from their wedding journey, arrived at LowickManor in the middle of January. A light snow was falling as they descended atthe door, and in the morning, when Dorothea passed from her dressing-room intothe blue-green boudoir that we know of, she saw the long avenue of limeslifting their trunks from a white earth, and spreading white branches againstthe dun and motionless sky. The distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness andlow-hanging uniformity of cloud. The very furniture in the room seemed to haveshrunk since she saw it before: the stag in the tapestry looked more like aghost in his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in thebookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books. The bright fire of dryoak-boughs burning on the logs seemed an incongruous renewal of life andglow—like the figure of Dorothea herself as she entered carrying thered-leather cases containing the cameos for Celia.

She was glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth can glow: therewas gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there waswarm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above thediffering white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and clingdown her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentientcommingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purityof the outdoor snow. As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in thebow-window, she unconsciously kept her hands on them, immediately absorbed inlooking out on the still, white enclosure which made her visible world.

Mr. Casaubon, who had risen early complaining of palpitation, was in thelibrary giving audience to his curate Mr. Tucker. By-and-by Celia would come inher quality of bridesmaid as well as sister, and through the next weeks therewould be wedding visits received and given; all in continuance of thattransitional life understood to correspond with the excitement of bridalfelicity, and keeping up the sense of busy ineffectiveness, as of a dream whichthe dreamer begins to suspect. The duties of her married life, contemplated asso great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the whitevapor-walled landscape. The clear heights where she expected to walk in fullcommunion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the deliciousrepose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effortand alarmed with dim presentiment. When would the days begin of that activewifely 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 thissolemnly pledged union of her life, duty would present itself in some new formof inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love.

Meanwhile there was the snow and the low arch of dun vapor—there was thestifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done forher and none asked for her aid—where the sense of connection with a manifoldpregnant existence had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead ofcoming from without in claims that would have shaped her energies.— “What shallI do?” “Whatever you please, my dear:” that had been her brief history sinceshe had left off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on thehated piano. Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperativeoccupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty: ithad not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness.Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which madeitself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunkenfurniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic worldthat seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.

In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the drearyoppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from the window shewalked round the room. The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind whenshe first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only asmemories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things. Allexistence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religiousfaith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every objectwas withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the roomwas disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wanderinggaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something whichhad gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon’saunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage—of Will Ladislaw’sgrandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now—the delicate woman’sface which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Wasit only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herselffind it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in themerciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed tohave passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a newcompanionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she waslooking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage.Nay, the colors deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair andeyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was masculine and beamed on herwith that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is toointeresting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed anduninterpreted. The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea:she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked upas if she were again talking to a figure in front of her. But the smiledisappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said aloud—

“Oh, it was cruel to speak so! How sad—how dreadful!”

She rose quickly and went out of the room, hurrying along the corridor, withthe irresistible impulse to go and see her husband and inquire if she could doanything for him. Perhaps Mr. Tucker was gone and Mr. Casaubon was alone in thelibrary. She felt as if all her morning’s gloom would vanish if she could seeher husband glad because of her presence.

But when she reached the head of the dark oak there was Celia coming up, andbelow there was Mr. Brooke, exchanging welcomes and congratulations with Mr.Casaubon.

“Dodo!” said Celia, in her quiet staccato; then kissed her sister, whose armsencircled her, and said no more. I think they both cried a little in a furtivemanner, while Dorothea ran down-stairs to greet her uncle.

“I need not ask how you are, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, after kissing herforehead. “Rome has agreed with you, I see—happiness, frescos, the antique—thatsort of thing. Well, it’s very pleasant to have you back again, and youunderstand all about art now, eh? But Casaubon is a little pale, I tell him—alittle pale, you know. Studying hard in his holidays is carrying it rather toofar. I overdid it at one time”—Mr. Brooke still held Dorothea’s hand, but hadturned his face to Mr. Casaubon—“about topography, ruins, temples—I thought Ihad a clew, but I saw it would carry me too far, and nothing might come of it.You may go any length in that sort of thing, and nothing may come of it, youknow.”

Dorothea’s eyes also were turned up to her husband’s face with some anxiety atthe idea that those who saw him afresh after absence might be aware of signswhich she had not noticed.

“Nothing to alarm you, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, observing her expression. “Alittle English beef and mutton will soon make a difference. It was all verywell to look pale, sitting for the portrait of Aquinas, you know—we got yourletter just in time. But Aquinas, now—he was a little too subtle, wasn’t he?Does anybody read Aquinas?”

“He is not indeed an author adapted to superficial minds,” said Mr. Casaubon,meeting these timely questions with dignified patience.

“You would like coffee in your own room, uncle?” said Dorothea, coming to therescue.

“Yes; and you must go to Celia: she has great news to tell you, you know. Ileave it all to her.”

The blue-green boudoir looked much more cheerful when Celia was seated there ina pelisse exactly like her sister’s, surveying the cameos with a placidsatisfaction, while the conversation passed on to other topics.

“Do you think it nice to go to Rome on a wedding journey?” said Celia, with herready delicate blush which Dorothea was used to on the smallest occasions.

“It would not suit all—not you, dear, for example,” said Dorothea, quietly. Noone would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey to Rome.

“Mrs. Cadwallader says it is nonsense, people going a long journey when theyare married. She says they get tired to death of each other, and can’t quarrelcomfortably, as they would at home. And Lady Chettam says she went to Bath.”Celia’s color changed again and again—seemed

“To come and go with tidings from the heart,
As it a running messenger had been.”

It must mean more than Celia’s blushing usually did.

“Celia! has something happened?” said Dorothea, in a tone full of sisterlyfeeling. “Have you really any great news to tell me?”

“It was because you went away, Dodo. Then there was nobody but me for Sir Jamesto 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 hersister’s face between her hands, and looking at her half anxiously. Celia’smarriage seemed more serious than it used to do.

“It was only three days ago,” said Celia. “And Lady Chettam is very kind.”

“And you are very happy?”

“Yes. We are not going to be married yet. Because every thing is to be gotready. And I don’t want to be married so very soon, because I think it is niceto be engaged. And we shall be married all our lives after.”

“I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty. Sir James is a good, honorableman,” said Dorothea, warmly.

“He has gone on with the cottages, Dodo. He will tell you about them when hecomes. Shall you be glad to see him?”

“Of course I shall. How can you ask me?”

“Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned,” said Celia, regarding Mr.Casaubon’s learning as a kind of damp which might in due time saturate aneighboring body.

CHAPTER XXIX.

I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate paradoxes hadentirely dried up that source of comfort.—GOLDSMITH.

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why alwaysDorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to thismarriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understandingbeing given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; forthese too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs whichwe are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white molesobjectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morallypainful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, andwas spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. He had done nothing exceptionalin marrying—nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion forwreaths and bouquets. It had occurred to him that he must not any longer deferhis intention of matrimony, and he had reflected that in taking a wife, a manof good position should expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady—theyounger the better, because more educable and submissive—of a rank equal to hisown, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and good understanding. Onsuch a young lady he would make handsome settlements, and he would neglect noarrangement for her happiness: in return, he should receive family pleasuresand leave behind him that copy of himself which seemed so urgently required ofa 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 hewas fast leaving the years behind him, that the world was getting dimmer andthat he felt lonely, was a reason to him for losing no more time in overtakingdomestic delights before they too were left behind by the years.

And when he had seen Dorothea he believed that he had found even more than hedemanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him as would enable him todispense with a hired secretary, an aid which Mr. Casaubon had never yetemployed and had a suspicious dread of. (Mr. Casaubon was nervously consciousthat 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 thepurely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think herhusband’s mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brookein presenting her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could hardly occur tohim. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as muchabout his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks ofhers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife buthis wife’s husband! Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterityin his own person!— When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was onlynatural; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to begin.

He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To knowintense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitivewithout being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out ofself-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampyground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. Hisexperience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most ofall that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which hasnot mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quiversthread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoisticscrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a severeself-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor according to the code;he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct these ends hadbeen attained; but the difficulty of making his Key to all Mythologiesunimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind; and the pamphlets—or “Parerga”as he called them—by which he tested his public and deposited small monumentalrecords 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 asto what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, andbitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of thatdepreciatory 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 wereheavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embittermentwhich is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faithwavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations ofthe Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of thestill unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him. Itis an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not toenjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberatedfrom a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory webehold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into thevividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, butalways to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous anddim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, Ifear, to Mr. Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observedthat behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be ourpoor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less underanxious control.

To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, tosensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing happinesswith a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we have seen, he foundhimself under a new depression in the consciousness that the new bliss was notblissful to him. Inclination yearned back to its old, easier custom. And thedeeper he went in domesticity the more did the sense of acquitting himself andacting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage, likereligion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become anoutward requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachablyall requirements. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study, according to hisown intention before marriage, was an effort which he was always tempted todefer, and but for her pleading insistence it might never have begun. But shehad succeeded in making it a matter of course that she should take her place atan early hour in the library and have work either of reading aloud or copyingassigned her. The work had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon hadadopted an immediate intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a smallmonograph on some lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysterieswhereby certain assertions of Warburton’s could be corrected. References wereextensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and sentences were actuallyto be written in the shape wherein they would be scanned by Brasenose and aless formidable posterity. These minor monumental productions were alwaysexciting to Mr. Casaubon; digestion was made difficult by the interference ofcitations, or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each otherin his brain. And from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about whicheverything was uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to Carp: it wasa poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon that he had once addressed a dedication toCarp in which he had numbered that member of the animal kingdom among theviros nullo ævo perituros, a mistake which would infallibly lay thededicator open to ridicule in the next age, and might even be chuckled over byPike and Tench in the present.

Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to say alittle while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where he hadbreakfasted alone. Celia at this time was on a second visit to Lowick, probablythe 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 thatthe morning had become more foggy there during the last hour. She was goingsilently to her desk when he said, in that distant tone which implied that hewas discharging a disagreeable duty—

“Dorothea, here is a letter for you, which was enclosed in one addressed tome.”

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 ofpleased surprise. “But,” she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I can imaginewhat he has written to you about.”

“You can, if you please, read the letter,” said Mr. Casaubon, severely pointingto it with his pen, and not looking at her. “But I may as well say beforehand,that I must decline the proposal it contains to pay a visit here. I trust I maybe excused for desiring an interval of complete freedom from such distractionsas have been hitherto inevitable, and especially from guests whose desultoryvivacity makes their presence a fatigue.”

There had been no clashing of temper between Dorothea and her husband sincethat little explosion in Rome, which had left such strong traces in her mindthat it had been easier ever since to quell emotion than to incur theconsequence of venting it. But this ill-tempered anticipation that she coulddesire visits which might be disagreeable to her husband, this gratuitousdefence of himself against selfish complaint on her part, was too sharp a stingto be meditated on until after it had been resented. Dorothea had thought thatshe could have been patient with John Milton, but she had never imagined himbehaving in this way; and for a moment Mr. Casaubon seemed to be stupidlyundiscerning and odiously unjust. Pity, that “new-born babe” which wasby-and-by to rule many a storm within her, did not “stride the blast” on thisoccasion. With her first words, uttered in a tone that shook him, she startledMr. 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 speakto me as if I were something you had to contend against. Wait at least till Iappear 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 ofwifehood—unless she had been pale and featureless and taken everything forgranted.

“I think it was you who were first hasty in your false suppositions about myfeeling,” said Dorothea, in the same tone. The fire was not dissipated yet, andshe 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 neitherleisure nor energy for this kind of debate.”

Here Mr. Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he would return to his writing,though his hand trembled so much that the words seemed to be written in anunknown character. There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send itto the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when youfeel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriagethan in philosophy.

Dorothea left Ladislaw’s two letters unread on her husband’s writing-table andwent to her own place, the scorn and indignation within her rejecting thereading of these letters, just as we hurl away any trash towards which we seemto have been suspected of mean cupidity. She did not in the least divine thesubtle sources of her husband’s bad temper about these letters: she only knewthat they had caused him to offend her. She began to work at once, and her handdid not tremble; on the contrary, in writing out the quotations which had beengiven to her the day before, she felt that she was forming her lettersbeautifully, and it seemed to her that she saw the construction of the Latinshe was copying, and which she was beginning to understand, more clearly thanusual. In her indignation there was a sense of superiority, but it went out forthe present in firmness of stroke, and did not compress itself into an inwardarticulate voice pronouncing the once “affable archangel” a poor creature.

There had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and Dorothea had notlooked away from her own table, when she heard the loud bang of a book on thefloor, and turning quickly saw Mr. Casaubon on the library steps clingingforward as if he were in some bodily distress. She started up and boundedtowards 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 soulmelted into tender alarm—

“Can you lean on me, dear?”

He was still for two or three minutes, which seemed endless to her, unable tospeak or move, gasping for breath. When at last he descended the three stepsand fell backward in the large chair which Dorothea had drawn close to the footof the ladder, he no longer gasped but seemed helpless and about to faint.Dorothea rang the bell violently, and presently Mr. Casaubon was helped to thecouch: he did not faint, and was gradually reviving, when Sir James Chettamcame in, having been met in the hall with the news that Mr. Casaubon had “had afit in the library.”

“Good God! this is just what might have been expected,” was his immediatethought. If his prophetic soul had been urged to particularize, it seemed tohim that “fits” would have been the definite expression alighted upon. He askedhis informant, the butler, whether the doctor had been sent for. The butlernever knew his master to want the doctor before; but would it not be right tosend for a physician?

When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr. Casaubon could make some signsof his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction from her firstterror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side now rose and herself proposedthat some one should ride off for a medical man.

“I recommend you to send for Lydgate,” said Sir James. “My mother has calledhim in, and she has found him uncommonly clever. She has had a poor opinion ofthe 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 wasSir James Chettam’s man and knew Mr. Lydgate, met him leading his horse alongthe Lowick road and giving his arm to Miss Vincy.

Celia, in the drawing-room, had known nothing of the trouble till Sir Jamestold her of it. After Dorothea’s account, he no longer considered the illness afit, but still something “of that nature.”

“Poor dear Dodo—how dreadful!” said Celia, feeling as much grieved as her ownperfect happiness would allow. Her little hands were clasped, and enclosed bySir James’s as a bud is enfolded by a liberal calyx. “It is very shocking thatMr. Casaubon should be ill; but I never did like him. And I think he is nothalf fond enough of Dorothea; and he ought to be, for I am sure no one elsewould have had him—do you think they would?”

“I always thought it a horrible sacrifice of your sister,” said Sir James.

“Yes. But poor Dodo never did do what other people do, and I think she neverwill.”

“She is a noble creature,” said the loyal-hearted Sir James. He had just had afresh impression of this kind, as he had seen Dorothea stretching her tenderarm under her husband’s neck and looking at him with unspeakable sorrow. He didnot know how much penitence there was in the sorrow.

“Yes,” said Celia, thinking it was very well for Sir James to say so, buthe would not have been comfortable with Dodo. “Shall I go to her? CouldI 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 originallyfelt 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 affairas he, Sir James, had done, the marriage might have been hindered. It waswicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without anyeffort to save her. Sir James had long ceased to have any regrets on his ownaccount: his heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia. But he had achivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service of woman among the idealglories of old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to bitterness;its death had made sweet odors—floating memories that clung with a consecratingeffect to Dorothea. He could remain her brotherly friend, interpreting heractions with generous trustfulness.

CHAPTER XXX.

Qui veut délasser hors de propos, lasse.—PASCAL.

Mr. Casaubon had no second attack of equal severity with the first, and in afew days began to recover his usual condition. But Lydgate seemed to think thecase worth a great deal of attention. He not only used his stethoscope (whichhad not become a matter of course in practice at that time), but sat quietly byhis patient and watched him. To Mr. Casaubon’s questions about himself, hereplied that the source of the illness was the common error of intellectualmen—a too eager and monotonous application: the remedy was, to be satisfiedwith moderate work, and to seek variety of relaxation. Mr. Brooke, who sat byon one occasion, suggested that Mr. Casaubon should go fishing, as Cadwalladerdid, and have a turning-room, make toys, table-legs, and that kind of thing.

“In short, you recommend me to anticipate the arrival of my second childhood,”said poor Mr. Casaubon, with some bitterness. “These things,” he added, lookingat Lydgate, “would be to me such relaxation as tow-picking is to prisoners in ahouse of correction.”

“I confess,” said Lydgate, smiling, “amusem*nt is rather an unsatisfactoryprescription. It is something like telling people to keep up their spirits.Perhaps I had better say, that you must submit to be mildly bored rather thanto go on working.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Brooke. “Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in theevenings. And shuttleco*ck, now—I don’t know a finer game than shuttleco*ck forthe daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might notstand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take tosome light study: conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study.Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett—‘Roderick Random,’ ‘HumphreyClinker:’ they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she’s married,you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly—there’s a droll bit about apostilion’s breeches. We have no such humor now. I have gone through all thesethings, but they might be rather new to you.”

“As new as eating thistles,” would have been an answer to represent Mr.Casaubon’s feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to hiswife’s uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had “served asa resource to a certain order of minds.”

“You see,” said the able magistrate to Lydgate, when they were outside thedoor, “Casaubon has been a little narrow: it leaves him rather at a loss whenyou forbid him his particular work, which I believe is something very deepindeed—in the line of research, you know. I would never give way to that; I wasalways versatile. But a clergyman is tied a little tight. If they would makehim a bishop, now!—he did a very good pamphlet for Peel. He would have moremovement then, more show; he might get a little flesh. But I recommend you totalk to Mrs. Casaubon. She is clever enough for anything, is my niece. Tellher, her husband wants liveliness, diversion: put her on amusing tactics.”

Without Mr. Brooke’s advice, Lydgate had determined on speaking to Dorothea.She had not been present while her uncle was throwing out his pleasantsuggestions as to the mode in which life at Lowick might be enlivened, but shewas usually by her husband’s side, and the unaffected signs of intense anxietyin her face and voice about whatever touched his mind or health, made a dramawhich Lydgate was inclined to watch. He said to himself that he was only doingright in telling her the truth about her husband’s probable future, but hecertainly thought also that it would be interesting to talk confidentially withher. A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes inthe pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy whichlife and death easily set at nought. Lydgate had often been satirical on thisgratuitous prediction, and he meant now to be guarded.

He asked for Mrs. Casaubon, but being told that she was out walking, he wasgoing away, when Dorothea and Celia appeared, both glowing from their strugglewith the March wind. When Lydgate begged to speak with her alone, Dorotheaopened the library door which happened to be the nearest, thinking of nothingat the moment but what he might have to say about Mr. Casaubon. It was thefirst time she had entered this room since her husband had been taken ill, andthe servant had chosen not to open the shutters. But there was light enough toread by from the narrow upper panes of the windows.

“You will not mind this sombre light,” said Dorothea, standing in the middle ofthe room. “Since you forbade books, the library has been out of the question.But Mr. Casaubon will soon be here again, I hope. Is he not making progress?”

“Yes, much more rapid progress than I at first expected. Indeed, he is alreadynearly in his usual state of health.”

“You do not fear that the illness will return?” said Dorothea, whose quick earhad detected some significance in Lydgate’s tone.

“Such cases are peculiarly difficult to pronounce upon,” said Lydgate. “Theonly point on which I can be confident is that it will be desirable to be verywatchful on Mr. Casaubon’s account, lest he should in any way strain hisnervous power.”

“I beseech you to speak quite plainly,” said Dorothea, in an imploring tone. “Icannot bear to think that there might be something which I did not know, andwhich, if I had known it, would have made me act differently.” The words cameout like a cry: it was evident that they were the voice of some mentalexperience which lay not very far off.

“Sit down,” she added, placing herself on the nearest chair, and throwing offher bonnet and gloves, with an instinctive discarding of formality where agreat question of destiny was concerned.

“What you say now justifies my own view,” said Lydgate. “I think it is one’sfunction as a medical man to hinder regrets of that sort as far as possible.But I beg you to observe that Mr. Casaubon’s case is precisely of the kind inwhich the issue is most difficult to pronounce upon. He may possibly live forfifteen years or more, without much worse health than he has had hitherto.”

Dorothea had turned very pale, and when Lydgate paused she said in a low voice,“You mean if we are very careful.”

“Yes—careful against mental agitation of all kinds, and against excessiveapplication.”

“He would be miserable, if he had to give up his work,” said Dorothea, with aquick prevision of that wretchedness.

“I am aware of that. The only course is to try by all means, direct andindirect, to moderate and vary his occupations. With a happy concurrence ofcirc*mstances, there is, as I said, no immediate danger from that affection ofthe heart, which I believe to have been the cause of his late attack. On theother hand, it is possible that the disease may develop itself more rapidly: itis one of those cases in which death is sometimes sudden. Nothing should beneglected which might be affected by such an issue.”

There was silence for a few moments, while Dorothea sat as if she had beenturned to marble, though the life within her was so intense that her mind hadnever before swept in brief time over an equal range of scenes and motives.

“Help me, pray,” she said, at last, in the same low voice as before. “Tell mewhat I can do.”

“What do you think of foreign travel? You have been lately in Rome, I think.”

The memories which made this resource utterly hopeless were a new current thatshook Dorothea out of her pallid immobility.

“Oh, that would not do—that would be worse than anything,” she said with a morechildlike despondency, while the tears rolled down. “Nothing will be of any usethat he does not enjoy.”

“I wish that I could have spared you this pain,” said Lydgate, deeply touched,yet wondering about her marriage. Women just like Dorothea had not entered intohis traditions.

“It was right of you to tell me. I thank you for telling me the truth.”

“I wish you to understand that I shall not say anything to enlighten Mr.Casaubon himself. I think it desirable for him to know nothing more than thathe must not overwork himself, and must observe certain rules. Anxiety of anykind would be precisely the most unfavorable condition for him.”

Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time, unclasping hercloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was bowing and quitting her,when an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer,made her say with a sob in her voice—

“Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Adviseme. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward.He minds about nothing else.— And I mind about nothing else—”

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by thisinvoluntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness thantheir moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the sametroublous fitfully illuminated life. But what could he say now except that heshould see Mr. Casaubon again to-morrow?

When he was gone, Dorothea’s tears gushed forth, and relieved her stiflingoppression. Then she dried her eyes, reminded that her distress must not bebetrayed to her husband; and looked round the room thinking that she must orderthe servant to attend to it as usual, since Mr. Casaubon might now at anymoment wish to enter. On his writing-table there were letters which had lainuntouched since the morning when he was taken ill, and among them, as Dorotheawell remembered, there were young Ladislaw’s letters, the one addressed to herstill unopened. The associations of these letters had been made the morepainful by that sudden attack of illness which she felt that the agitationcaused by her anger might have helped to bring on: it would be time enough toread them when they were again thrust upon her, and she had had no inclinationto fetch them from the library. But now it occurred to her that they should beput out of her husband’s sight: whatever might have been the sources of hisannoyance about them, he must, if possible, not be annoyed again; and she ranher eyes first over the letter addressed to him to assure herself whether ornot it would be necessary to write in order to hinder the offensive visit.

Will wrote from Rome, and began by saying that his obligations to Mr. Casaubonwere too deep for all thanks not to seem impertinent. It was plain that if hewere not grateful, he must be the poorest-spirited rascal who had ever found agenerous friend. To expand in wordy thanks would be like saying, “I am honest.”But Will had come to perceive that his defects—defects which Mr. Casaubon hadhimself often pointed to—needed for their correction that more strenuousposition which his relative’s generosity had hitherto prevented from beinginevitable. He trusted that he should make the best return, if return werepossible, by showing the effectiveness of the education for which he wasindebted, and by ceasing in future to need any diversion towards himself offunds on which others might have a better claim. He was coming to England, totry his fortune, as many other young men were obliged to do whose only capitalwas in their brains. His friend Naumann had desired him to take charge of the“Dispute”—the picture painted for Mr. Casaubon, with whose permission, and Mrs.Casaubon’s, Will would convey it to Lowick in person. A letter addressed to thePoste Restante in Paris within the fortnight would hinder him, if necessary,from arriving at an inconvenient moment. He enclosed a letter to Mrs. Casaubonin which he continued a discussion about art, begun with her in Rome.

Opening her own letter Dorothea saw that it was a lively continuation of hisremonstrance with her fanatical sympathy and her want of sturdy neutral delightin things as they were—an outpouring of his young vivacity which it wasimpossible to read just now. She had immediately to consider what was to bedone about the other letter: there was still time perhaps to prevent Will fromcoming to Lowick. Dorothea ended by giving the letter to her uncle, who wasstill in the house, and begging him to let Will know that Mr. Casaubon had beenill, and that his health would not allow the reception of any visitors.

No one more ready than Mr. Brooke to write a letter: his only difficulty was towrite a short one, and his ideas in this case expanded over the three largepages and the inward foldings. He had simply said to Dorothea—

“To be sure, I will write, my dear. He’s a very clever young fellow—this youngLadislaw—I dare say will be a rising young man. It’s a good letter—marks hissense of things, you know. However, I will tell him about Casaubon.”

But the end of Mr. Brooke’s pen was a thinking organ, evolving sentences,especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind could wellovertake them. It expressed regrets and proposed remedies, which, when Mr.Brooke read them, seemed felicitously worded—surprisingly the right thing, anddetermined a sequel which he had never before thought of. In this case, his penfound it such a pity young Ladislaw should not have come into the neighborhoodjust at that time, in order that Mr. Brooke might make his acquaintance morefully, and that they might go over the long-neglected Italian drawingstogether—it also felt such an interest in a young man who was starting in lifewith a stock of ideas—that by the end of the second page it had persuaded Mr.Brooke to invite young Ladislaw, since he could not be received at Lowick, tocome to Tipton Grange. Why not? They could find a great many things to dotogether, and this was a period of peculiar growth—the political horizon wasexpanding, and—in short, Mr. Brooke’s pen went off into a little speech whichit had lately reported for that imperfectly edited organ the “MiddlemarchPioneer.” While Mr. Brooke was sealing this letter, he felt elated with aninflux of dim projects:—a young man capable of putting ideas into form, the“Pioneer” purchased to clear the pathway for a new candidate, documentsutilized—who knew what might come of it all? Since Celia was going to marryimmediately, it would be very pleasant to have a young fellow at table withhim, at least for a time.

But he went away without telling Dorothea what he had put into the letter, forshe was engaged with her husband, and—in fact, these things were of noimportance to her.

CHAPTER XXXI.

How will you know the pitch of that great bell
Too large for you to stir? Let but a flute
Play ’neath the fine-mixed metal: listen close
Till the right note flows forth, a silvery rill:
Then shall the huge bell tremble—then the mass
With myriad waves concurrent shall respond
In low soft unison.

Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid someemphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that formal studiousman thirty years older than herself.

“Of course she is devoted to her husband,” said Rosamond, implying a notion ofnecessary sequence which the scientific man regarded as the prettiest possiblefor a woman; but she was thinking at the same time that it was not so verymelancholy to be mistress of Lowick Manor with a husband likely to die soon.“Do you think her very handsome?”

“She certainly is handsome, but I have not thought about it,” said Lydgate.

“I suppose it would be unprofessional,” said Rosamond, dimpling. “But how yourpractice is spreading! You were called in before to the Chettams, I think; andnow, the Casaubons.”

“Yes,” said Lydgate, in a tone of compulsory admission. “But I don’t reallylike attending such people so well as the poor. The cases are more monotonous,and one has to go through more fuss and listen more deferentially to nonsense.”

“Not more than in Middlemarch,” said Rosamond. “And at least you go throughwide corridors and have the scent of rose-leaves everywhere.”

“That is true, Mademoiselle de Montmorenci,” said Lydgate, just bending hishead to the table and lifting with his fourth finger her delicate handkerchiefwhich lay at the mouth of her reticule, as if to enjoy its scent, while helooked at her with a smile.

But this agreeable holiday freedom with which Lydgate hovered about the flowerof Middlemarch, could not continue indefinitely. It was not more possible tofind social isolation in that town than elsewhere, and two people persistentlyflirting could by no means escape from “the various entanglements, weights,blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on.” Whatever MissVincy did must be remarked, and she was perhaps the more conspicuous toadmirers and critics because just now Mrs. Vincy, after some struggle, had gonewith Fred to stay a little while at Stone Court, there being no other way of atonce gratifying old Featherstone and keeping watch against Mary Garth, whoappeared a less tolerable daughter-in-law in proportion as Fred’s illnessdisappeared.

Aunt Bulstrode, for example, came a little oftener into Lowick Gate to seeRosamond, now she was alone. For Mrs. Bulstrode had a true sisterly feeling forher brother; always thinking that he might have married better, but wishingwell to the children. Now Mrs. Bulstrode had a long-standing intimacy with Mrs.Plymdale. They had nearly the same preferences in silks, patterns forunderclothing, china-ware, and clergymen; they confided their little troublesof health and household management to each other, and various little points ofsuperiority on Mrs. Bulstrode’s side, namely, more decided seriousness, moreadmiration for mind, and a house outside the town, sometimes served to givecolor to their conversation without dividing them—well-meaning women both,knowing very little of their own motives.

Mrs. Bulstrode, paying a morning visit to Mrs. Plymdale, happened to say thatshe could not stay longer, because she was going to see poor Rosamond.

“Why do you say ‘poor Rosamond’?” said Mrs. Plymdale, a round-eyed sharp littlewoman, like a tamed falcon.

“She is so pretty, and has been brought up in such thoughtlessness. The mother,you know, had always that levity about her, which makes me anxious for thechildren.”

“Well, Harriet, if I am to speak my mind,” said Mrs. Plymdale, with emphasis,“I must say, anybody would suppose you and Mr. Bulstrode would be delightedwith what has happened, for you have done everything to put Mr. Lydgateforward.”

“Selina, what do you mean?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, in genuine surprise.

“Not but what I am truly thankful for Ned’s sake,” said Mrs. Plymdale. “Hecould certainly better afford to keep such a wife than some people can; but Ishould wish him to look elsewhere. Still a mother has anxieties, and some youngmen would take to a bad life in consequence. Besides, if I was obliged tospeak, I should say I was not fond of strangers coming into a town.”

“I don’t know, Selina,” said Mrs. Bulstrode, with a little emphasis in herturn. “Mr. Bulstrode was a stranger here at one time. Abraham and Moses werestrangers in the land, and we are told to entertain strangers. And especially,”she added, after a slight pause, “when they are unexceptionable.”

“I was not speaking in a religious sense, Harriet. I spoke as a mother.”

“Selina, I am sure you have never heard me say anything against a niece of minemarrying your son.”

“Oh, it is pride in Miss Vincy—I am sure it is nothing else,” said Mrs.Plymdale, who had never before given all her confidence to “Harriet” on thissubject. “No young man in Middlemarch was good enough for her: I have heard hermother say as much. That is not a Christian spirit, I think. But now, from allI hear, she has found a man as proud as herself.”

“You don’t mean that there is anything between Rosamond and Mr. Lydgate?” saidMrs. Bulstrode, rather mortified at finding out her own ignorance.

“Is it possible you don’t know, Harriet?”

“Oh, I go about so little; and I am not fond of gossip; I really never hearany. You see so many people that I don’t see. Your circle is rather differentfrom ours.”

“Well, but your own niece and Mr. Bulstrode’s great favorite—and yours too, Iam sure, Harriet! I thought, at one time, you meant him for Kate, when she is alittle older.”

“I don’t believe there can be anything serious at present,” said Mrs.Bulstrode. “My brother would certainly have told me.”

“Well, people have different ways, but I understand that nobody can see MissVincy and Mr. Lydgate together without taking them to be engaged. However, itis not my business. Shall I put up the pattern of mittens?”

After this Mrs. Bulstrode drove to her niece with a mind newly weighted. Shewas herself handsomely dressed, but she noticed with a little more regret thanusual that Rosamond, who was just come in and met her in walking-dress, wasalmost as expensively equipped. Mrs. Bulstrode was a feminine smaller editionof her brother, and had none of her husband’s low-toned pallor. She had a goodhonest glance and used no circumlocution.

“You are alone, I see, my dear,” she said, as they entered the drawing-roomtogether, looking round gravely. Rosamond felt sure that her aunt had somethingparticular to say, and they sat down near each other. Nevertheless, thequilling inside Rosamond’s bonnet was so charming that it was impossible not todesire the same kind of thing for Kate, and Mrs. Bulstrode’s eyes, which wererather fine, rolled round that ample quilled circuit, while she spoke.

“I have just heard something about you that has surprised me very much,Rosamond.”

“What is that, aunt?” Rosamond’s eyes also were roaming over her aunt’s largeembroidered collar.

“I can hardly believe it—that you should be engaged without my knowingit—without your father’s telling me.” Here Mrs. Bulstrode’s eyes finally restedon Rosamond’s, who blushed deeply, and said—

“I am not engaged, aunt.”

“How is it that every one says so, then—that it is the town’s talk?”

“The town’s talk is of very little consequence, I think,” said Rosamond,inwardly gratified.

“Oh, my dear, be more thoughtful; don’t despise your neighbors so. Remember youare turned twenty-two now, and you will have no fortune: your father, I amsure, will not be able to spare you anything. Mr. Lydgate is very intellectualand clever; I know there is an attraction in that. I like talking to such menmyself; and your uncle finds him very useful. But the profession is a poor onehere. To be sure, this life is not everything; but it is seldom a medical manhas true religious views—there is too much pride of intellect. And you are notfit to marry a poor man.

“Mr. Lydgate is not a poor man, aunt. He has very high connections.”

“He told me himself he was poor.”

“That is because he is used to people who have a high style of living.”

“My dear Rosamond, you must not think of living in high style.”

Rosamond looked down and played with her reticule. She was not a fiery younglady and had no sharp answers, but she meant to live as she pleased.

“Then it is really true?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking very earnestly at herniece. “You are thinking of Mr. Lydgate—there is some understanding betweenyou, though your father doesn’t know. Be open, my dear Rosamond: Mr. Lydgatehas really made you an offer?”

Poor Rosamond’s feelings were very unpleasant. She had been quite easy as toLydgate’s feeling and intention, but now when her aunt put this question shedid not like being unable to say Yes. Her pride was hurt, but her habitualcontrol of manner helped her.

“Pray excuse me, aunt. I would rather not speak on the subject.”

“You would not give your heart to a man without a decided prospect, I trust, mydear. And think of the two excellent offers I know of that you haverefused!—and one still within your reach, if you will not throw it away. I knewa very great beauty who married badly at last, by doing so. Mr. Ned Plymdale isa nice young man—some might think good-looking; and an only son; and a largebusiness of that kind is better than a profession. Not that marrying iseverything. I would have you seek first the kingdom of God. But a girl shouldkeep her heart within her own power.”

“I should never give it to Mr. Ned Plymdale, if it were. I have already refusedhim. If I loved, I should love at once and without change,” said Rosamond, witha great sense of being a romantic heroine, and playing the part prettily.

“I see how it is, my dear,” said Mrs. Bulstrode, in a melancholy voice, risingto go. “You have allowed your affections to be engaged without return.”

“No, indeed, aunt,” said Rosamond, with emphasis.

“Then you are quite confident that Mr. Lydgate has a serious attachment toyou?”

Rosamond’s cheeks by this time were persistently burning, and she felt muchmortification. She chose to be silent, and her aunt went away all the moreconvinced.

Mr. Bulstrode in things worldly and indifferent was disposed to do what hiswife bade him, and she now, without telling her reasons, desired him on thenext opportunity to find out in conversation with Mr. Lydgate whether he hadany intention of marrying soon. The result was a decided negative. Mr.Bulstrode, on being cross-questioned, showed that Lydgate had spoken as no manwould who had any attachment that could issue in matrimony. Mrs. Bulstrode nowfelt that she had a serious duty before her, and she soon managed to arrange atête-à-tête with Lydgate, in which she passed from inquiries about FredVincy’s health, and expressions of her sincere anxiety for her brother’s largefamily, to general remarks on the dangers which lay before young people withregard to their settlement in life. Young men were often wild anddisappointing, making little return for the money spent on them, and a girl wasexposed to many circ*mstances 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 tothemselves, for the mere pleasure of the moment, and that drives off others. Ithink it is a heavy responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, to interfere with theprospects of any girl.” Here Mrs. Bulstrode fixed her eyes on him, with anunmistakable purpose of warning, if not of rebuke.

“Clearly,” said Lydgate, looking at her—perhaps even staring a little inreturn. “On the other hand, a man must be a great coxcomb to go about with anotion that he must not pay attention to a young lady lest she should fall inlove with him, or lest others should think she must.”

“Oh, Mr. Lydgate, you know well what your advantages are. You know that ouryoung men here cannot cope with you. Where you frequent a house it may militatevery much against a girl’s making a desirable settlement in life, and preventher from accepting offers even if they are made.”

Lydgate was less flattered by his advantage over the Middlemarch Orlandos thanhe was annoyed by the perception of Mrs. Bulstrode’s meaning. She felt that shehad spoken as impressively as it was necessary to do, and that in using thesuperior word “militate” she had thrown a noble drapery over a mass ofparticulars which were still evident enough.

Lydgate was fuming a little, pushed his hair back with one hand, felt curiouslyin his waistcoat-pocket with the other, and then stooped to beckon the tinyblack spaniel, which had the insight to decline his hollow caresses. It wouldnot 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 beenunderstood, turned the conversation.

Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palatefindeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes. The next day Mr.Farebrother, parting from Lydgate in the street, supposed that they should meetat Vincy’s in the evening. Lydgate answered curtly, no—he had work to do—hemust give up going out in the evening.

“What! you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping yourears?” said the Vicar. “Well, if you don’t mean to be won by the sirens, youare right to take precautions in time.”

A few days before, Lydgate would have taken no notice of these words asanything more than the Vicar’s usual way of putting things. They seemed now toconvey an innuendo which confirmed the impression that he had been making afool of himself and behaving so as to be misunderstood: not, he believed, byRosamond herself; she, he felt sure, took everything as lightly as he intendedit. 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, themistake should go no farther. He resolved—and kept his resolution—that he wouldnot go to Mr. Vincy’s except on business.

Rosamond became very unhappy. The uneasiness first stirred by her aunt’squestions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had not seenLydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly come—intoforeboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes ofmortals. The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that amagician’s spells had turned for a little while into a garden. She felt thatshe was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other mancould be the occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had beenenjoying for the last six months. Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt asforlorn as Ariadne—as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxesfull 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 anydesperate act: she plaited her fair hair as beautifully as usual, and keptherself proudly calm. Her most cheerful supposition was that her aunt Bulstrodehad interfered in some way to hinder Lydgate’s visits: everything was betterthan a spontaneous indifference in him. Any one who imagines ten days too shorta time—not for falling into leanness, lightness, or other measurable effects ofpassion, but—for the whole spiritual circuit of alarmed conjecture anddisappointment, is ignorant of what can go on in the elegant leisure of a younglady’s mind.

On the eleventh day, however, Lydgate when leaving Stone Court was requested byMrs. 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 thatday. Now Lydgate might have called at the warehouse, or might have written amessage on a leaf of his pocket-book and left it at the door. Yet these simpledevices apparently did not occur to him, from which we may conclude that he hadno strong objection to calling at the house at an hour when Mr. Vincy was notat home, and leaving the message with Miss Vincy. A man may, from variousmotives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would begratified that nobody missed him. It would be a graceful, easy way of piecingon the new habits to the old, to have a few playful words with Rosamond abouthis resistance to dissipation, and his firm resolve to take long fasts evenfrom sweet sounds. It must be confessed, also, that momentary speculations asto all the possible grounds for Mrs. Bulstrode’s hints had managed to get wovenlike 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 acorresponding embarrassment, and instead of any playfulness, he began at onceto speak of his reason for calling, and to beg her, almost formally, to deliverthe message to her father. Rosamond, who at the first moment felt as if herhappiness were returning, was keenly hurt by Lydgate’s manner; her blush haddeparted, and she assented coldly, without adding an unnecessary word, sometrivial chain-work which she had in her hands enabling her to avoid looking atLydgate higher than his chin. In all failures, the beginning is certainly thehalf of the whole. After sitting two long moments while he moved his whip andcould say nothing, Lydgate rose to go, and Rosamond, made nervous by herstruggle between mortification and the wish not to betray it, dropped her chainas if startled, and rose too, mechanically. Lydgate instantaneously stooped topick up the chain. When he rose he was very near to a lovely little face set ona fair long neck which he had been used to see turning about under the mostperfect management of self-contented grace. But as he raised his eyes now hesaw a certain helpless quivering which touched him quite newly, and made himlook at Rosamond with a questioning flash. At this moment she was as natural asshe had ever been when she was five years old: she felt that her tears hadrisen, and it was no use to try to do anything else than let them stay likewater on a blue flower or let them fall over her cheeks, even as they would.

That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shookflirtation into love. Remember that the ambitious man who was looking at thoseForget-me-nots under the water was very warm-hearted and rash. He did not knowwhere the chain went; an idea had thrilled through the recesses within himwhich had a miraculous effect in raising the power of passionate love lyingburied there in no sealed sepulchre, but under the lightest, easily piercedmould. His words were quite abrupt and awkward; but the tone made them soundlike an ardent, appealing avowal.

“What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me, pray.”

Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before. I am not sure that sheknew what the words were: but she looked at Lydgate and the tears fell over hercheeks. There could have been no more complete answer than that silence, andLydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush oftenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on himfor her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently andprotectingly—he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and kissedeach of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at anunderstanding, but it was a short way. Rosamond was not angry, but she movedbackward a little in timid happiness, and Lydgate could now sit near her andspeak less incompletely. Rosamond had to make her little confession, and hepoured out words of gratitude and tenderness with impulsive lavishment. In halfan hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but thewoman’s to whom he had bound himself.

He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just returned fromStone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he heard of Mr.Featherstone’s demise. The felicitous word “demise,” which had seasonablyoccurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch.The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to ouraction. Considered as a demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a merely legalaspect, 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 bothsolemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe struck about a testator, or sang ahymn on the title to real property? Mr. Vincy was inclined to take a jovialview of all things that evening: he even observed to Lydgate that Fred had gotthe family constitution after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as everagain; and when his approbation of Rosamond’s engagement was asked for, he gaveit with astonishing facility, passing at once to general remarks on thedesirableness of matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducingfrom the whole the appropriateness of a little more punch.

CHAPTER XXXII.

They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk.
—SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.

The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone’s insistentdemand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a feeble emotioncompared with all that was agitating the breasts of the old man’sblood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of the family tieand were more visibly numerous now that he had become bedridden. Naturally: forwhen “poor Peter” had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoted parlor, noassiduous beetles for whom the cook prepares boiling water could have been lesswelcome on a hearth which they had reasons for preferring, than those personswhose Featherstone blood was ill-nourished, not from penuriousness on theirpart, but from poverty. Brother Solomon and Sister Jane were rich, and thefamily candor and total abstinence from false politeness with which they werealways received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the solemn actof making his will would overlook the superior claims of wealth. Themselves atleast he had never been unnatural enough to banish from his house, and itseemed hardly eccentric that he should have kept away Brother Jonah, SisterMartha, and the rest, who had no shadow of such claims. They knew Peter’smaxim, 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 differentpoint of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will infretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if youonly look with creative inclination. To the poorer and least favored it seemedlikely that since Peter had done nothing for them in his life, he wouldremember them at the last. Jonah argued that men liked to make a surprise oftheir wills, while Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he left thebest part of his money to those who least expected it. Also it was not to bethought but that an own brother “lying there” with dropsy in his legs must cometo feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn’t alter his will, hemight have money by him. At any rate some blood-relations should be on thepremises and on the watch against those who were hardly relations at all. Suchthings had been known as forged wills and disputed wills, which seemed to havethe 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 withthings—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, somenephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still greater subtilty as to whatmight be done by a man able to “will away” his property and give himself largetreats of oddity, felt in a handsome sort of way that there was a familyinterest to be attended to, and thought of Stone Court as a place which itwould be nothing but right for them to visit. Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs.Cranch, living with some wheeziness in the Chalky Flats, could not undertakethe journey; but her son, as being poor Peter’s own nephew, could represent heradvantageously, and watch lest his uncle Jonah should make an unfair use of theimprobable things which seemed likely to happen. In fact there was a generalsense running in the Featherstone blood that everybody must watch everybodyelse, and that it would be well for everybody else to reflect that the Almightywas watching him.

Thus Stone Court continually saw one or other blood-relation alighting ordeparting, and Mary Garth had the unpleasant task of carrying their messages toMr. Featherstone, who would see none of them, and sent her down with the stillmore unpleasant task of telling them so. As manager of the household she feltbound to ask them in good provincial fashion to stay and eat; but she chose toconsult Mrs. Vincy on the point of extra down-stairs consumption now that Mr.Featherstone was laid up.

“Oh, my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness and aproperty. God knows, I don’t grudge them every ham in the house—only, save thebest for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut.You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses,” said liberal Mrs.Vincy, once more of cheerful note and bright plumage.

But some of the visitors alighted and did not depart after the handsometreating to veal and ham. Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasantpeople in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there areBrobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greaterexpense)—Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in the world, was mainlysupported by a calling which he was modest enough not to boast of, though itwas much better than swindling either on exchange or turf, but which did notrequire his presence at Brassing so long as he had a good corner to sit in anda 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 hada 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 ofbeing on the premises, mingled with fleeting suggestions of Sunday and the barat the Green Man; and he informed Mary Garth that he should not go out of reachof his brother Peter while that poor fellow was above ground. The troublesomeones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots. Jonah was the witamong the Featherstones, and joked with the maid-servants when they came aboutthe hearth, but seemed to consider Miss Garth a suspicious character, andfollowed her with cold eyes.

Mary would have borne this one pair of eyes with comparative ease, butunfortunately there was young Cranch, who, having come all the way from theChalky Flats to represent his mother and watch his uncle Jonah, also felt ithis 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 theidiot,—verging slightly towards the latter type, and squinting so as to leaveeverything in doubt about his sentiments except that they were not of aforcible character. When Mary Garth entered the kitchen and Mr. JonahFeatherstone began to follow her with his cold detective eyes, young Cranchturning his head in the same direction seemed to insist on it that she shouldremark how he was squinting, as if he did it with design, like the gypsies whenBorrow read the New Testament to them. This was rather too much for poor Mary;sometimes it made her bilious, sometimes it upset her gravity. One day that shehad 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 topass through. But no sooner did he face the four eyes than he had to rushthrough the nearest door which happened to lead to the dairy, and there underthe high roof and among the pans he gave way to laughter which made a hollowresonance 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 pincheddelicacy of face, prepared many sarcasms in which these points of appearancewere wittily combined with the lowest moral attributes.

“Why, Tom, you don’t wear such gentlemanly trousers—you haven’t got halfsuch fine long legs,” said Jonah to his nephew, winking at the same time, toimply that there was something more in these statements than theirundeniableness. Tom looked at his legs, but left it uncertain whether hepreferred his moral advantages to a more vicious length of limb andreprehensible gentility of trouser.

In the large wainscoted parlor too there were constantly pairs of eyes on thewatch, and own relatives eager to be “sitters-up.” Many came, lunched, anddeparted, but Brother Solomon and the lady who had been Jane Featherstone fortwenty-five years before she was Mrs. Waule found it good to be there every dayfor hours, without other calculable occupation than that of observing thecunning Mary Garth (who was so deep that she could be found out in nothing) andgiving occasional dry wrinkly indications of crying—as if capable of torrentsin 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 getstronger 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 presentedthemselves together within the door of the bedroom, both in black—Mrs. Waulehaving a white handkerchief partially unfolded in her hand—and both with facesin a sort of half-mourning purple; while Mrs. Vincy with her pink cheeks andpink ribbons flying was actually administering a cordial to their own brother,and the light-complexioned Fred, his short hair curling as might be expected ina gambler’s, was lolling at his ease in a large chair.

Old Featherstone no sooner caught sight of these funereal figures appearing inspite of his orders than rage came to strengthen him more successfully than thecordial. He was propped up on a bed-rest, and always had his gold-headed sticklying by him. He seized it now and swept it backwards and forwards in as largean area as he could, apparently to ban these ugly spectres, crying in a hoarsesort of screech—

“Back, back, Mrs. Waule! Back, Solomon!”

“Oh, Brother. Peter,” Mrs. Waule began—but Solomon put his hand before herrepressingly. He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy, with small furtiveeyes, and was not only of much blander temper but thought himself much deeperthan his brother Peter; indeed not likely to be deceived in any of hisfellow-men, inasmuch as they could not well be more greedy and deceitful thanhe suspected them of being. Even the invisible powers, he thought, were likelyto be soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there—coming from a man ofproperty, who might have been as impious as others.

“Brother Peter,” he said, in a wheedling yet gravely official tone, “It’snothing but right I should speak to you about the Three Crofts and theManganese. The Almighty knows what I’ve got on my mind—”

“Then he knows more than I want to know,” said Peter, laying down his stickwith a show of truce which had a threat in it too, for he reversed the stick soas to make the gold handle a club in case of closer fighting, and looked hardat Solomon’s bald head.

“There’s things you might repent of, Brother, for want of speaking to me,” saidSolomon, not advancing, however. “I could sit up with you to-night, and Janewith me, willingly, and you might take your own time to speak, or let mespeak.”

“Yes, I shall take my own time—you needn’t offer me yours,” said Peter.

“But you can’t take your own time to die in, Brother,” began Mrs. Waule, withher usual woolly tone. “And when you lie speechless you may be tired of havingstrangers about you, and you may think of me and my children”—but here hervoice broke under the touching thought which she was attributing to herspeechless brother; the mention of ourselves being naturally affecting.

“No, I shan’t,” said old Featherstone, contradictiously. “I shan’t think of anyof you. I’ve made my will, I tell you, I’ve made my will.” Here he turned hishead towards Mrs. Vincy, and swallowed some more of his cordial.

“Some people would be ashamed to fill up a place belonging by rights toothers,” 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 pushthemselves before us.”

Fred’s spirit could not bear this: rising and looking at Mr. Featherstone, hesaid, “Shall my mother and I leave the room, sir, that you may be alone withyour friends?”

“Sit down, I tell you,” said old Featherstone, snappishly. “Stop where you are.Good-by, Solomon,” he added, trying to wield his stick again, but failing nowthat he had reversed the handle. “Good-by, Mrs. Waule. Don’t you come again.”

“I shall be down-stairs, Brother, whether or no,” said Solomon. “I shall do myduty, and it remains to be seen what the Almighty will allow.”

“Yes, in property going out of families,” said Mrs. Waule, incontinuation,—“and where there’s steady young men to carry on. But I pity themwho are not such, and I pity their mothers. Good-by, Brother Peter.”

“Remember, I’m the eldest after you, Brother, and prospered from the first,just as you did, and have got land already by the name of Featherstone,” saidSolomon, relying much on that reflection, as one which might be suggested inthe watches of the night. “But I bid you good-by for the present.”

Their exit was hastened by their seeing old Mr. Featherstone pull his wig oneach side and shut his eyes with his mouth-widening grimace, as if he weredetermined to be deaf and blind.

None the less they came to Stone Court daily and sat below at the post of duty,sometimes carrying on a slow dialogue in an undertone in which the observationand response were so far apart, that any one hearing them might have imaginedhimself listening to speaking automata, in some doubt whether the ingeniousmechanism would really work, or wind itself up for a long time in order tostick and be silent. Solomon and Jane would have been sorry to be quick: whatthat led to might be seen on the other side of the wall in the person ofBrother Jonah.

But their watch in the wainscoted parlor was sometimes varied by the presenceof 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 foundon the spot: some rural and Middlemarch neighbors expressed much agreement withthe family and sympathy with their interest against the Vincys, and femininevisitors were even moved to tears, in conversation with Mrs. Waule, when theyrecalled the fact that they themselves had been disappointed in times past bycodicils and marriages for spite on the part of ungrateful elderly gentlemen,who, it might have been supposed, had been spared for something better. Suchconversation paused suddenly, like an organ when the bellows are let drop, ifMary Garth came into the room; and all eyes were turned on her as a possiblelegatee, or one who might get access to iron chests.

But the younger men who were relatives or connections of the family, weredisposed to admire her in this problematic light, as a girl who showed muchconduct, and who among all the chances that were flying might turn out to be atleast a moderate prize. Hence she had her share of compliments and politeattentions.

Especially from Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, a distinguished bachelor and auctioneerof those parts, much concerned in the sale of land and cattle: a publiccharacter, indeed, whose name was seen on widely distributed placards, and whomight reasonably be sorry for those who did not know of him. He was secondcousin to Peter Featherstone, and had been treated by him with more amenitythan any other relative, being useful in matters of business; and in thatprogramme of his funeral which the old man had himself dictated, he had beennamed as a Bearer. There was no odious cupidity in Mr. BorthropTrumbull—nothing more than a sincere sense of his own merit, which, he wasaware, in case of rivalry might tell against competitors; so that if PeterFeatherstone, who so far as he, Trumbull, was concerned, had behaved like asgood a soul as ever breathed, should have done anything handsome by him, all hecould say was, that he had never fished and fawned, but had advised him to thebest of his experience, which now extended over twenty years from the time ofhis apprenticeship at fifteen, and was likely to yield a knowledge of nosurreptitious kind. His admiration was far from being confined to himself, butwas accustomed professionally as well as privately to delight in estimatingthings at a high rate. He was an amateur of superior phrases, and never usedpoor language without immediately correcting himself—which was fortunate, as hewas rather loud, and given to predominate, standing or walking aboutfrequently, pulling down his waistcoat with the air of a man who is very muchof his own opinion, trimming himself rapidly with his fore-finger, and markingeach new series in these movements by a busy play with his large seals. Therewas occasionally a little fierceness in his demeanor, but it was directedchiefly against false opinion, of which there is so much to correct in theworld that a man of some reading and experience necessarily has his patiencetried. He felt that the Featherstone family generally was of limitedunderstanding, but being a man of the world and a public character, tookeverything as a matter of course, and even went to converse with Mr. Jonah andyoung Cranch in the kitchen, not doubting that he had impressed the lattergreatly by his leading questions concerning the Chalky Flats. If anybody hadobserved that Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, being an auctioneer, was bound to know thenature of everything, he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently withthe sense that he came pretty near that. On the whole, in an auctioneering way,he was an honorable man, not ashamed of his business, and feeling that “thecelebrated Peel, now Sir Robert,” if introduced to him, would not fail torecognize his importance.

“I don’t mind if I have a slice of that ham, and a glass of that ale, MissGarth, if you will allow me,” he said, coming into the parlor at half-pasteleven, after having had the exceptional privilege of seeing old Featherstone,and standing with his back to the fire between Mrs. Waule and Solomon.

“It’s not necessary for you to go out;—let me ring the bell.”

“Thank you,” said Mary, “I have an errand.”

“Well, Mr. Trumbull, you’re highly favored,” said Mrs. Waule.

“What! seeing the old man?” said the auctioneer, playing with his sealsdispassionately. “Ah, you see he has relied on me considerably.” Here hepressed his lips together, and frowned meditatively.

“Might anybody ask what their brother has been saying?” said Solomon, in a softtone of humility, in which he had a sense of luxurious cunning, he being a richman and not in need of it.

“Oh yes, anybody may ask,” said Mr. Trumbull, with loud and good-humored thoughcutting sarcasm. “Anybody may interrogate. Any one may give their remarks aninterrogative 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. “Itcan’t be denied that undeserving people have been legatees, and even residuarylegatees. It is so, with testamentary dispositions.” Again he pursed up hislips and frowned a little.

“Do you mean to say for certain, Mr. Trumbull, that my brother has left hisland 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 tosome people,” observed Solomon, his sister’s question having drawn no answer.

“What, Blue-Coat land?” said Mrs. Waule, again. “Oh, Mr. Trumbull, you nevercan mean to say that. It would be flying in the face of the Almighty that’sprospered him.”

While Mrs. Waule was speaking, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull walked away from thefireplace towards the window, patrolling with his fore-finger round the insideof his stock, then along his whiskers and the curves of his hair. He now walkedto Miss Garth’s work-table, opened a book which lay there and read the titlealoud with pompous emphasis as if he were offering it for sale:

“‘Anne of Geierstein’ (pronounced Jeersteen) or the ‘Maiden of the Mist, by theauthor of Waverley.’” Then turning the page, he began sonorously—“The course offour centuries has well-nigh elapsed since the series of events which arerelated in the following chapters took place on the Continent.” He pronouncedthe last truly admirable word with the accent on the last syllable, not asunaware of vulgar usage, but feeling that this novel delivery enhanced thesonorous beauty which his reading had given to the whole.

And now the servant came in with the tray, so that the moments for answeringMrs. Waule’s question had gone by safely, while she and Solomon, watching Mr.Trumbull’s movements, were thinking that high learning interfered sadly withserious affairs. Mr. Borthrop Trumbull really knew nothing about oldFeatherstone’s will; but he could hardly have been brought to declare anyignorance 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 willback 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 thehams at Fresh*tt Hall—and I think I am a tolerable judge.”

“Some don’t like so much sugar in their hams,” said Mrs. Waule. “But my poorbrother 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 somegratification to a gentleman”—here Mr. Trumbull’s voice conveyed an emotionalremonstrance—“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 alittle forward, profiting by the occasion to look at the inner side of hislegs, which he stroked approvingly—Mr. Trumbull having all those less frivolousairs and gestures which distinguish the predominant races of the north.

“You have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth,” he observed, when Maryre-entered. “It is by the author of ‘Waverley’: that is Sir Walter Scott. Ihave bought one of his works myself—a very nice thing, a very superiorpublication, entitled ‘Ivanhoe.’ You will not get any writer to beat him in ahurry, I think—he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have justbeen reading a portion at the commencement of ‘Anne of Jeersteen.’ It commenceswell.” (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 yousubscribe 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 twohundred volumes in calf, and I flatter myself they are well selected. Alsopictures by Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Titian, Vandyck, and others. I shall behappy to lend you any work you like to mention, Miss Garth.”

“I am much obliged,” said Mary, hastening away again, “but I have little timefor reading.”

“I should say my brother has done something for her in his will,” saidMr. 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. “Shebrought 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 aleand starting up with an emphatic adjustment of his waistcoat. “I have observedher 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 friendup-stairs, poor dear old soul. A man whose life is of any value should think ofhis wife as a nurse: that is what I should do, if I married; and I believe Ihave lived single long enough not to make a mistake in that line. Some men mustmarry to elevate themselves a little, but when I am in need of that, I hopesome one will tell me so—I hope some individual will apprise me of the fact. Iwish you good morning, Mrs. Waule. Good morning, Mr. Solomon. I trust we shallmeet 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 alumping 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 givedrops.”

“Auctioneers talk wild,” said Solomon. “Not but what Trumbull has made money.”

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.”
—2 Henry VI.

That night after twelve o’clock Mary Garth relieved the watch in Mr.Featherstone’s room, and sat there alone through the small hours. She oftenchose this task, in which she found some pleasure, notwithstanding the oldman’s testiness whenever he demanded her attentions. There were intervals inwhich she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and thesubdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like asolemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbeciledesires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily movingher contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself wellsitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strongreason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiarsatisfaction, 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 aproud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Marymight have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honored, and awell of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because shehad learned to make no unreasonable claims.

She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lipsoften curling with amusem*nt at the oddities to which her fancy added freshdrollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’scaps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s weretransparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all theworld looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy. Yet there were someillusions under Mary’s eyes which were not quite comic to her. She was secretlyconvinced, though she had no other grounds than her close observation of oldFeatherstone’s nature, that in spite of his fondness for having the Vincysabout him, they were as likely to be disappointed as any of the relations whomhe kept at a distance. She had a good deal of disdain for Mrs. Vincy’s evidentalarm lest she and Fred should be alone together, but it did not hinder herfrom thinking anxiously of the way in which Fred would be affected, if itshould turn out that his uncle had left him as poor as ever. She could make abutt of Fred when he was present, but she did not enjoy his follies when he wasabsent.

Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind not overbalanced by passion,finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its own powers withinterest. Mary had plenty of merriment within.

Her thought was not veined by any solemnity or pathos about the old man on thebed: such sentiments are easier to affect than to feel about an aged creaturewhose life is not visibly anything but a remnant of vices. She had always seenthe most disagreeable side of Mr. Featherstone: he was not proud of her, andshe was only useful to him. To be anxious about a soul that is always snappingat 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: thatwas her utmost. Old Featherstone himself was not in the least anxious about hissoul, and had declined to see Mr. Tucker on the subject.

To-night he had not snapped, and for the first hour or two he lay remarkablystill, until at last Mary heard him rattling his bunch of keys against the tinbox 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 theclothes, though he usually asked to have this done for him; and he had selectedthe key. He now unlocked the box, and, drawing from it another key, lookedstraight at her with eyes that seemed to have recovered all their sharpness andsaid, “How many of ’em are in the house?”

“You mean of your own relations, sir,” said Mary, well used to the old man’sway of speech. He nodded slightly and she went on.

“Mr. Jonah Featherstone and young Cranch are sleeping here.”

“Oh ay, they stick, do they? and the rest—they come every day, I’llwarrant—Solomon and Jane, and all the young uns? They come peeping, andcounting and casting up?”

“Not all of them every day. Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule are here every day, andthe others come often.”

The old man listened with a grimace while she spoke, and then said, relaxinghis face, “The more fools they. You hearken, missy. It’s three o’clock in themorning, and I’ve got all my faculties as well as ever I had in my life. I knowall my property, and where the money’s put out, and everything. And I’ve madeeverything 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 ironchest, in the closet there. You push well at the side of the brass plate at thetop, till it goes like a bolt: then you can put the key in the front lock andturn it. See and do that; and take out the topmost paper—Last Will andTestament—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 toshake under the shock of this resistance.

“I cannot touch your iron chest or your will. I must refuse to do anything thatmight lay me open to suspicion.”

“I tell you, I’m in my right mind. Shan’t I do as I like at the last? I madetwo wills on purpose. Take the key, I say.”

“No, sir, I will not,” said Mary, more resolutely still. Her repulsion wasgetting 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 thebeginning of mine. I will not touch your iron chest or your will.” She moved toa little distance from the bedside.

The old man paused with a blank stare for a little while, holding the one keyerect on the ring; then with an agitated jerk he began to work with his bonyleft hand at emptying the tin box before him.

“Missy,” he began to say, hurriedly, “look here! take the money—the notes andgold—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, andMary again retreated.

“I will not touch your key or your money, sir. Pray don’t ask me to do itagain. 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 PeterFeatherstone begin to cry childishly. She said, in as gentle a tone as shecould command, “Pray put up your money, sir;” and then went away to her seat bythe fire, hoping this would help to convince him that it was useless to saymore. 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 mindas to what the burning of a second will might imply. She had to make adifficult 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 callSimmons now, to go and fetch the lawyer? He can be here in less than twohours.”

“Lawyer? What do I want with the lawyer? Nobody shall know—I say, nobody shallknow. I shall do as I like.”

“Let me call some one else, sir,” said Mary, persuasively. She did not like herposition—alone with the old man, who seemed to show a strange flaring ofnervous energy which enabled him to speak again and again without falling intohis usual cough; yet she desired not to push unnecessarily the contradictionwhich agitated him. “Let me, pray, call some one else.”

“You let me alone, I say. Look here, missy. Take the money. You’ll never havethe chance again. It’s pretty nigh two hundred—there’s more in the box, andnobody 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, proppedup on his pillows and bed-rest, with his bony hand holding out the key, and themoney lying on the quilt before him. She never forgot that vision of a manwanting to do as he liked at the last. But the way in which he had put theoffer 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 touchyour money. I will do anything else I can to comfort you; but I will not touchyour 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 wantnothing else. You come here—you come here.”

Mary approached him cautiously, knowing him too well. She saw him dropping hiskeys 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. Shepaused at a safe distance.

“Let me give you some cordial,” she said, quietly, “and try to composeyourself. You will perhaps go to sleep. And to-morrow by daylight you can do asyou like.”

He lifted the stick, in spite of her being beyond his reach, and threw it witha hard effort which was but impotence. It fell, slipping over the foot of thebed. Mary let it lie, and retreated to her chair by the fire. By-and-by shewould go to him with the cordial. Fatigue would make him passive. It wasgetting towards the chillest moment of the morning, the fire had got low, andshe could see through the chink between the moreen window-curtains the lightwhitened by the blind. Having put some wood on the fire and thrown a shawl overher, she sat down, hoping that Mr. Featherstone might now fall asleep. If shewent near him the irritation might be kept up. He had said nothing afterthrowing the stick, but she had seen him taking his keys again and laying hisright hand on the money. He did not put it up, however, and she thought that hewas dropping off to sleep.

But Mary herself began to be more agitated by the remembrance of what she hadgone through, than she had been by the reality—questioning those acts of herswhich had come imperatively and excluded all question in the critical moment.

Presently the dry wood sent out a flame which illuminated every crevice, andMary saw that the old man was lying quietly with his head turned a little onone side. She went towards him with inaudible steps, and thought that his facelooked strangely motionless; but the next moment the movement of the flamecommunicating itself to all objects made her uncertain. The violent beating ofher heart rendered her perceptions so doubtful that even when she touched himand listened for his breathing, she could not trust her conclusions. She wentto the window and gently propped aside the curtain and blind, so that the stilllight of the sky fell on the bed.

The next moment she ran to the bell and rang it energetically. In a very littlewhile there was no longer any doubt that Peter Featherstone was dead, with hisright hand clasping the keys, and his left hand lying on the heap of notes andgold.

BOOK IV.
THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

It was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried. In the prosaicneighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny, and on thisparticular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms from the surroundinggardens on to the green mounds of Lowick churchyard. Swiftly moving clouds onlynow 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 objectswere remarkably various, for there was a little country crowd waiting to seethe funeral. The news had spread that it was to be a “big burying;” the oldgentleman had left written directions about everything and meant to have afuneral “beyond his betters.” This was true; for old Featherstone had not beena Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean andever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain with hisundertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also loved to spend it ingratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a meansof making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. If any one willhere 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 amodest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early lifeby unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is moreeasily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentlemantheoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on hispersonal acquaintance. In any case, he had been bent on having a handsomefuneral, and on having persons “bid” to it who would rather have stayed athome. 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 theChalky Flats. She and Jane would have been altogether cheered (in a tearfulmanner) by this sign that a brother who disliked seeing them while he wasliving had been prospectively fond of their presence when he should have becomea 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 presumptuoushopes, aggravated by a bloom of complexion which told pretty plainly that shewas not a blood-relation, but of that generally objectionable class calledwife’s kin.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood ofdesire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which otherscajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion. In writing theprogramme for his burial he certainly did not make clear to himself that hispleasure in the little drama of which it formed a part was confined toanticipation. In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigidclutch of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousness with thatlivid 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 wasimaginative, after his fashion.

However, the three mourning-coaches were filled according to the written ordersof the deceased. There were pall-bearers on horseback, with the richest scarfsand hatbands, and even the under-bearers had trappings of woe which were of agood well-priced quality. The black procession, when dismounted, looked thelarger for the smallness of the churchyard; the heavy human faces and the blackdraperies shivering in the wind seemed to tell of a world strangely incongruouswith the lightly dropping blossoms and the gleams of sunshine on the daisies.The clergyman who met the procession was Mr. Cadwallader—also according to therequest of Peter Featherstone, prompted as usual by peculiar reasons. Having acontempt for curates, whom he always called understrappers, he was resolved tobe buried by a beneficed clergyman. Mr. Casaubon was out of the question, notmerely because he declined duty of this sort, but because Featherstone had anespecial dislike to him as the rector of his own parish, who had a lien on theland in the shape of tithe, also as the deliverer of morning sermons, which theold man, being in his pew and not at all sleepy, had been obliged to sitthrough with an inward snarl. He had an objection to a parson stuck up abovehis head preaching to him. But his relations with Mr. Cadwallader had been of adifferent kind: the trout-stream which ran through Mr. Casaubon’s land took itscourse through Featherstone’s also, so that Mr. Cadwallader was a parson whohad had to ask a favor instead of preaching. Moreover, he was one of the highgentry living four miles away from Lowick, and was thus exalted to an equal skywith the sheriff of the county and other dignities vaguely regarded asnecessary to the system of things. There would be a satisfaction in beingburied by Mr. Cadwallader, whose very name offered a fine opportunity forpronouncing wrongly if you liked.

This distinction conferred on the Rector of Tipton and Fresh*tt was the reasonwhy Mrs. Cadwallader made one of the group that watched old Featherstone’sfuneral from an upper window of the manor. She was not fond of visiting thathouse, but she liked, as she said, to see collections of strange animals suchas there would be at this funeral; and she had persuaded Sir James and theyoung Lady Chettam to drive the Rector and herself to Lowick in order that thevisit might be altogether pleasant.

“I will go anywhere with you, Mrs. Cadwallader,” Celia had said; “but I don’tlike funerals.”

“Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodateyour tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mindto like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread tothe 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 roomoccupied by Mr. Casaubon when he had been forbidden to work; but he had resumednearly his habitual style of life now in spite of warnings and prescriptions,and after politely welcoming Mrs. Cadwallader had slipped again into thelibrary 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, andwould not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone’s funeral, which, aloofas it seemed to be from the tenor of her life, always afterwards came back toher at the touch of certain sensitive points in memory, just as the vision ofSt. Peter’s at Rome was inwoven with moods of despondency. Scenes which makevital changes in our neighbors’ lot are but the background of our own, yet,like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for uswith the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies inthe selection of our keenest consciousness.

The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with thedeepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of lonelinesswhich was due to the very ardor of Dorothea’s nature. The country gentry of oldtime lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up themountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thickerlife below. And Dorothea was not at ease in the perspective and chilliness ofthat height.

“I shall not look any more,” said Celia, after the train had entered thechurch, placing herself a little behind her husband’s elbow so that she couldslyly touch his coat with her cheek. “I dare say Dodo likes it: she is fond ofmelancholy 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 holidaytour. “It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbors, unless they arecottagers. One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead,and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs. Cadwallader for coming andcalling me out of the library.”

“Quite right to feel obliged to me,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Your rich Lowickfarmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I dare say you don’thalf see them at church. They are quite different from your uncle’s tenants orSir James’s—monsters—farmers without landlords—one can’t tell how to classthem.”

“Most of these followers are not Lowick people,” said Sir James; “I supposethey are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch. Lovegood tells me theold 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 theexplanation. 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 tobring a little news—a little news, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding atDorothea as she came towards him. “I looked into the library, and I sawCasaubon over his books. I told him it wouldn’t do: I said, ‘This will neverdo, you know: think of your wife, Casaubon.’ And he promised me to come up. Ididn’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 isreally a good looking woman, and the fair young man must be her son. Who arethey, 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 themanufacturing 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 inTipton and Fresh*tt. 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 uglyarchangel towering above them in his white surplice.”

“It’s a solemn thing, though, a funeral,” said Mr. Brooke, “if you take it inthat 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 peopleare sorry.”

“How piteous!” said Dorothea. “This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing Iever saw. It is a blot on the morning. I cannot bear to think that any oneshould die and leave no love behind.”

She was going to say more, but she saw her husband enter and seat himself alittle in the background. The difference his presence made to her was notalways a happy one: she felt that he often inwardly objected to her speech.

“Positively,” exclaimed Mrs. Cadwallader, “there is a new face come out frombehind that broad man queerer than any of them: a little round head withbulging eyes—a sort of frog-face—do look. He must be of another blood, Ithink.”

“Let me see!” said Celia, with awakened curiosity, standing behind Mrs.Cadwallader and leaning forward over her head. “Oh, what an odd face!” Thenwith 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 shelooked 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,” saidMr. Brooke, in his easiest tone, nodding at Dorothea, as if the announcementwere just what she might have expected. “And we have brought the picture at thetop 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 ofthing. And you will hear young Ladislaw talk about it. He talks uncommonlywell—points out this, that, and the other—knows art and everything of thatkind—companionable, you know—is up with you in any track—what I’ve been wantinga long while.”

Mr. Casaubon bowed with cold politeness, mastering his irritation, but only sofar as to be silent. He remembered Will’s letter quite as well as Dorothea did;he had noticed that it was not among the letters which had been reserved forhim on his recovery, and secretly concluding that Dorothea had sent word toWill not to come to Lowick, he had shrunk with proud sensitiveness from everrecurring to the subject. He now inferred that she had asked her uncle toinvite Will to the Grange; and she felt it impossible at that moment to enterinto any explanation.

Mrs. Cadwallader’s eyes, diverted from the churchyard, saw a good deal of dumbshow which was not so intelligible to her as she could have desired, and couldnot repress the question, “Who is Mr. Ladislaw?”

“A young relative of Mr. Casaubon’s,” said Sir James, promptly. His good-natureoften made him quick and clear-seeing in personal matters, and he had divinedfrom 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, noddingencouragingly. “I hope he will stay with me a long while and we shall makesomething of my documents. I have plenty of ideas and facts, you know, and Ican see he is just the man to put them into shape—remembers what the rightquotations are, omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing—givessubjects 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, andshe asked me to write.”

Poor Dorothea felt that every word of her uncle’s was about as pleasant as agrain of sand in the eye to Mr. Casaubon. It would be altogether unfitting nowto explain that she had not wished her uncle to invite Will Ladislaw. She couldnot in the least make clear to herself the reasons for her husband’s dislike tohis 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 notionof it to others. Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented thosemixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of us,seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge. But he wished torepress outward signs, and only Dorothea could discern the changes in herhusband’s face before he observed with more of dignified bending and sing-songthan usual—

“You are exceedingly hospitable, my dear sir; and I owe you acknowledgments forexercising your hospitality towards a relative of mine.”

The funeral was ended now, and the churchyard was being cleared.

“Now you can see him, Mrs. Cadwallader,” said Celia. “He is just like aminiature of Mr. Casaubon’s aunt that hangs in Dorothea’s boudoir—quitenice-looking.”

“A very pretty sprig,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, dryly. “What is your nephew tobe, 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 justthe 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 ofman.”

“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 intill I had announced him, you know. And we’ll go down and look at the picture.There you are to the life: a deep subtle sort of thinker with his fore-fingeron the page, while Saint Bonaventure or somebody else, rather fat and florid,is looking up at the Trinity. Everything is symbolical, you know—the higherstyle of art: I like that up to a certain point, but not too far—it’s ratherstraining to keep up with, you know. But you are at home in that, Casaubon. Andyour painter’s flesh is good—solidity, transparency, everything of that sort. Iwent into that a great deal at one time. However, I’ll go and fetch Ladislaw.”

CHAPTER XXXV.

“Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir
Que de voir d’héritiers une troupe affligée
Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongée,
Lire un long testament où pales, étonnés
On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez.
Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde
Je reviendrais, je crois, exprès de l’autre monde.”
—REGNARD: Le Légataire Universel.

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied speciesmade much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so manyforms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, astending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures onthat occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds beingdisadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites andceremonies.)

The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed PeterFeatherstone’s funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on alimited store which each would have liked to get the most of. Thelong-recognized blood-relations and connections by marriage made already agoodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range forjealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness. Jealousy of the Vincys had createda fellowship in hostility among all persons of the Featherstone blood, so thatin the absence of any decided indication that one of themselves was to havemore than the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy should have theland was necessarily dominant, though it left abundant feeling and leisure forvaguer jealousies, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth. Solomon foundtime to reflect that Jonah was undeserving, and Jonah to abuse Solomon asgreedy; Jane, the elder sister, held that Martha’s children ought not to expectso much as the young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject ofprimogeniture, was sorry to think that Jane was so “having.” These nearest ofkin were naturally impressed with the unreasonableness of expectations incousins and second cousins, and used their arithmetic in reckoning the largesums that small legacies might mount to, if there were too many of them. Twocousins were present to hear the will, and a second cousin besides Mr.Trumbull. This second cousin was a Middlemarch mercer of polite manners andsuperfluous aspirates. The two cousins were elderly men from Brassing, one ofthem conscious of claims on the score of inconvenient expense sustained by himin presents of oysters and other eatables to his rich cousin Peter; the otherentirely saturnine, leaning his hands and chin on a stick, and conscious ofclaims based on no narrow performance but on merit generally: both blamelesscitizens of Brassing, who wished that Jonah Featherstone did not live there.The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.

“Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred—that you maydepend,—I shouldn’t wonder if my brother promised him,” said Solomon, musingaloud with his sisters, the evening before the funeral.

“Dear, dear!” said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds had beenhabitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.

But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were disturbed bythe presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among them as if from themoon. This was the stranger described by Mrs. Cadwallader as frog-faced: a manperhaps about two or three and thirty, whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped,downward-curved mouth, and hair sleekly brushed away from a forehead that sanksuddenly above the ridge of the eyebrows, certainly gave his face a batrachianunchangeableness of expression. Here, clearly, was a new legatee; else why washe bidden as a mourner? Here were new possibilities, raising a new uncertainty,which almost checked remark in the mourning-coaches. We are all humiliated bythe sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhapsbeen staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirelywithout it. No one had seen this questionable stranger before except MaryGarth, and she knew nothing more of him than that he had twice been to StoneCourt when Mr. Featherstone was down-stairs, and had sat alone with him forseveral hours. She had found an opportunity of mentioning this to her father,and perhaps Caleb’s were the only eyes, except the lawyer’s, which examined thestranger with more of inquiry than of disgust or suspicion. Caleb Garth, havinglittle expectation and less cupidity, was interested in the verification of hisown guesses, and the calmness with which he half smilingly rubbed his chin andshot intelligent glances much as if he were valuing a tree, made a finecontrast with the alarm or scorn visible in other faces when the unknownmourner, whose name was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlorand took his seat near the door to make part of the audience when the willshould be read. Just then Mr. Solomon and Mr. Jonah were gone up-stairs withthe lawyer to search for the will; and Mrs. Waule, seeing two vacant seatsbetween herself and Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, had the spirit to move next to thatgreat authority, who was handling his watch-seals and trimming his outlineswith a determination not to show anything so compromising to a man of abilityas wonder or surprise.

“I suppose you know everything about what my poor brother’s done, Mr.Trumbull,” said Mrs. Waule, in the lowest of her woolly tones, while she turnedher crape-shadowed bonnet towards Mr. Trumbull’s ear.

“My good lady, whatever was told me was told in confidence,” said theauctioneer, putting his hand up to screen that secret.

“Them who’ve made sure of their good-luck may be disappointed yet,” Mrs. Waulecontinued, finding some relief in this communication.

“Hopes are often delusive,” said Mr. Trumbull, still in confidence.

“Ah!” said Mrs. Waule, looking across at the Vincys, and then moving back tothe side of her sister Martha.

“It’s wonderful how close poor Peter was,” she said, in the same undertones.“We none of us know what he might have had on his mind. I only hope and trusthe wasn’t a worse liver than we think of, Martha.”

Poor Mrs. Cranch was bulky, and, breathing asthmatically, had the additionalmotive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving them a generalbearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to sudden bursts likethose of a deranged barrel-organ.

“I never was covetous, Jane,” she replied; “but I have six children andhave buried three, and I didn’t marry into money. The eldest, that sits there,is but nineteen—so I leave you to guess. And stock always short, and land mostawkward. But if ever I’ve begged and prayed; it’s been to God above; thoughwhere there’s one brother a bachelor and the other childless after twicemarrying—anybody might think!”

Meanwhile, Mr. Vincy had glanced at the passive face of Mr. Rigg, and had takenout his snuff-box and tapped it, but had put it again unopened as an indulgencewhich, however clarifying to the judgment, was unsuited to the occasion. “Ishouldn’t wonder if Featherstone had better feelings than any of us gave himcredit for,” he observed, in the ear of his wife. “This funeral shows a thoughtabout everybody: it looks well when a man wants to be followed by his friends,and if they are humble, not to be ashamed of them. I should be all the betterpleased if he’d left lots of small legacies. They may be uncommonly useful tofellows in a small way.”

“Everything is as handsome as could be, crape and silk and everything,” saidMrs. Vincy, contentedly.

But I am sorry to say that Fred was under some difficulty in repressing alaugh, which would have been more unsuitable than his father’s snuff-box. Fredhad overheard Mr. Jonah suggesting something about a “love-child,” and withthis thought in his mind, the stranger’s face, which happened to be oppositehim, affected him too ludicrously. Mary Garth, discerning his distress in thetwitchings of his mouth, and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to hisrescue by asking him to change seats with her, so that he got into a shadowycorner. Fred was feeling as good-naturedly as possible towards everybody,including Rigg; and having some relenting towards all these people who wereless lucky than he was aware of being himself, he would not for the world havebehaved amiss; still, it was particularly easy to laugh.

But the entrance of the lawyer and the two brothers drew every one’s attention.The lawyer was Mr. Standish, and he had come to Stone Court this morningbelieving that he knew thoroughly well who would be pleased and whodisappointed before the day was over. The will he expected to read was the lastof three which he had drawn up for Mr. Featherstone. Mr. Standish was not a manwho varied his manners: he behaved with the same deep-voiced, off-hand civilityto everybody, as if he saw no difference in them, and talked chiefly of thehay-crop, which would be “very fine, by God!” of the last bulletins concerningthe King, and of the Duke of Clarence, who was a sailor every inch of him, andjust the man to rule over an island like Britain.

Old Featherstone had often reflected as he sat looking at the fire thatStandish would be surprised some day: it is true that if he had done as heliked at the last, and burnt the will drawn up by another lawyer, he would nothave secured that minor end; still he had had his pleasure in ruminating on it.And certainly Mr. Standish was surprised, but not at all sorry; on thecontrary, he rather enjoyed the zest of a little curiosity in his own mind,which the discovery of a second will added to the prospective amazement on thepart of the Featherstone family.

As to the sentiments of Solomon and Jonah, they were held in utter suspense: itseemed to them that the old will would have a certain validity, and that theremight be such an interlacement of poor Peter’s former and latter intentions asto create endless “lawing” before anybody came by their own—an inconveniencewhich would have at least the advantage of going all round. Hence the brothersshowed a thoroughly neutral gravity as they re-entered with Mr. Standish; butSolomon took out his white handkerchief again with a sense that in any casethere would be affecting passages, and crying at funerals, however dry, wascustomarily served up in lawn.

Perhaps the person who felt the most throbbing excitement at this moment wasMary Garth, in the consciousness that it was she who had virtually determinedthe production of this second will, which might have momentous effects on thelot of some persons present. No soul except herself knew what had passed onthat final night.

“The will I hold in my hand,” said Mr. Standish, who, seated at the table inthe middle of the room, took his time about everything, including the coughswith which he showed a disposition to clear his voice, “was drawn up by myselfand executed by our deceased friend on the 9th of August, 1825. But I find thatthere is a subsequent instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date the 20thof July, 1826, hardly a year later than the previous one. And there is farther,I see”—Mr. Standish was cautiously travelling over the document with hisspectacles—“a codicil to this latter will, bearing date March 1, 1828.”

“Dear, dear!” said sister Martha, not meaning to be audible, but driven to somearticulation under this pressure of dates.

“I shall begin by reading the earlier will,” continued Mr. Standish, “sincesuch, as appears by his not having destroyed the document, was the intention ofdeceased.”

The preamble was felt to be rather long, and several besides Solomon shooktheir heads pathetically, looking on the ground: all eyes avoided meeting othereyes, and were chiefly fixed either on the spots in the table-cloth or on Mr.Standish’s bald head; excepting Mary Garth’s. When all the rest were trying tolook nowhere in particular, it was safe for her to look at them. And at thesound of the first “give and bequeath” she could see all complexions changingsubtly, as if some faint vibration were passing through them, save that of Mr.Rigg. He sat in unaltered calm, and, in fact, the company, preoccupied withmore important problems, and with the complication of listening to bequestswhich might or might not be revoked, had ceased to think of him. Fred blushed,and Mr. Vincy found it impossible to do without his snuff-box in his hand,though he kept it closed.

The small bequests came first, and even the recollection that there was anotherwill and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could not quell therising disgust and indignation. One likes to be done well by in every tense,past, present, and future. And here was Peter capable five years ago of leavingonly two hundred apiece to his own brothers and sisters, and only a hundredapiece to his own nephews and nieces: the Garths were not mentioned, but Mrs.Vincy and Rosamond were each to have a hundred. Mr. Trumbull was to have thegold-headed cane and fifty pounds; the other second cousins and the cousinspresent were each to have the like handsome sum, which, as the saturnine cousinobserved, was a sort of legacy that left a man nowhere; and there was much moreof such offensive dribbling in favor of persons not present—problematical, and,it was to be feared, low connections. Altogether, reckoning hastily, here wereabout three thousand disposed of. Where then had Peter meant the rest of themoney to go—and where the land? and what was revoked and what not revoked—andwas the revocation for better or for worse? All emotion must be conditional,and might turn out to be the wrong thing. The men were strong enough to bear upand keep quiet under this confused suspense; some letting their lower lip fall,others pursing it up, according to the habit of their muscles. But Jane andMartha sank under the rush of questions, and began to cry; poor Mrs. Cranchbeing half moved with the consolation of getting any hundreds at all withoutworking for them, and half aware that her share was scanty; whereas Mrs.Waule’s mind was entirely flooded with the sense of being an own sister andgetting little, while somebody else was to have much. The general expectationnow was that the “much” would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselveswere surprised when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declaredto be bequeathed to him:—was the land coming too? Fred bit his lips: it wasdifficult to help smiling, and Mrs. Vincy felt herself the happiest ofwomen—possible revocation shrinking out of sight in this dazzling vision.

There was still a residue of personal property as well as the land, but thewhole was left to one person, and that person was—O possibilities! Oexpectations founded on the favor of “close” old gentlemen! O endless vocativesthat would still leave expression slipping helpless from the measurement ofmortal folly!—that residuary legatee was Joshua Rigg, who was also soleexecutor, and who was to take thenceforth the name of Featherstone.

There was a rustling which seemed like a shudder running round the room. Everyone stared afresh at Mr. Rigg, who apparently experienced no surprise.

“A most singular testamentary disposition!” exclaimed Mr. Trumbull, preferringfor once that he should be considered ignorant in the past. “But there is asecond will—there is a further document. We have not yet heard the final wishesof the deceased.”

Mary Garth was feeling that what they had yet to hear were not the finalwishes. The second will revoked everything except the legacies to the lowpersons before mentioned (some alterations in these being the occasion of thecodicil), and the bequest of all the land lying in Lowick parish with all thestock and household furniture, to Joshua Rigg. The residue of the property wasto be devoted to the erection and endowment of almshouses for old men, to becalled Featherstone’s Alms-Houses, and to be built on a piece of land nearMiddlemarch already bought for the purpose by the testator, he wishing—so thedocument declared—to please God Almighty. Nobody present had a farthing; butMr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane. It took some time for the company torecover the power of expression. Mary dared not look at Fred.

Mr. Vincy was the first to speak—after using his snuff-box energetically—and hespoke with loud indignation. “The most unaccountable will I ever heard! Ishould say he was not in his right mind when he made it. I should say this lastwill was void,” added Mr. Vincy, feeling that this expression put the thing inthe true light. “Eh Standish?”

“Our deceased friend always knew what he was about, I think,” said Mr.Standish. “Everything is quite regular. Here is a letter from Clemmens ofBrassing tied with the will. He drew it up. A very respectable solicitor.”

“I never noticed any alienation of mind—any aberration of intellect in the lateMr. Featherstone,” said Borthrop Trumbull, “but I call this will eccentric. Iwas always willingly of service to the old soul; and he intimated prettyplainly a sense of obligation which would show itself in his will. Thegold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happilyI am above mercenary considerations.”

“There’s nothing very surprising in the matter that I can see,” said CalebGarth. “Anybody might have had more reason for wondering if the will had beenwhat you might expect from an open-minded straightforward man. For my part, Iwish there was no such thing as a will.”

“That’s a strange sentiment to come from a Christian man, by God!” said thelawyer. “I should like to know how you will back that up, Garth!”

“Oh,” said Caleb, leaning forward, adjusting his finger-tips with nicety andlooking meditatively on the ground. It always seemed to him that words were thehardest part of “business.”

But here Mr. Jonah Featherstone made himself heard. “Well, he always was a finehypocrite, was my brother Peter. But this will cuts out everything. If I’dknown, a wagon and six horses shouldn’t have drawn me from Brassing. I’ll put awhite hat and drab coat on to-morrow.”

“Dear, dear,” wept Mrs. Cranch, “and we’ve been at the expense of travelling,and that poor lad sitting idle here so long! It’s the first time I ever heardmy brother Peter was so wishful to please God Almighty; but if I was to bestruck helpless I must say it’s hard—I can think no other.”

“It’ll do him no good where he’s gone, that’s my belief,” said Solomon, with abitterness which was remarkably genuine, though his tone could not help beingsly. “Peter was a bad liver, and almshouses won’t cover it, when he’s had theimpudence to show it at the last.”

“And all the while had got his own lawful family—brothers and sisters andnephews and nieces—and has sat in church with ’em whenever he thought well tocome,” said Mrs. Waule. “And might have left his property so respectable, tothem that’s never been used to extravagance or unsteadiness in no manner ofway—and not so poor but what they could have saved every penny and made more ofit. And me—the trouble I’ve been at, times and times, to come here and besisterly—and him with things on his mind all the while that might makeanybody’s flesh creep. But if the Almighty’s allowed it, he means to punish himfor it. Brother Solomon, I shall be going, if you’ll drive me.”

“I’ve no desire to put my foot on the premises again,” said Solomon. “I’ve gotland of my own and property of my own to will away.”

“It’s a poor tale how luck goes in the world,” said Jonah. “It never answers tohave a bit of spirit in you. You’d better be a dog in the manger. But thoseabove ground might learn a lesson. One fool’s will is enough in a family.”

“There’s more ways than one of being a fool,” said Solomon. “I shan’t leave mymoney to be poured down the sink, and I shan’t leave it to foundlings fromAfricay. I like Featherstones that were brewed such, and not turnedFeatherstones with sticking the name on ’em.”

Solomon addressed these remarks in a loud aside to Mrs. Waule as he rose toaccompany her. Brother Jonah felt himself capable of much more stinging witthan this, but he reflected that there was no use in offending the newproprietor of Stone Court, until you were certain that he was quite withoutintentions of hospitality towards witty men whose name he was about to bear.

Mr. Joshua Rigg, in fact, appeared to trouble himself little about anyinnuendoes, but showed a notable change of manner, walking coolly up to Mr.Standish and putting business questions with much coolness. He had a highchirping voice and a vile accent. Fred, whom he no longer moved to laughter,thought him the lowest monster he had ever seen. But Fred was feeling rathersick. The Middlemarch mercer waited for an opportunity of engaging Mr. Rigg inconversation: there was no knowing how many pairs of legs the new proprietormight require hose for, and profits were more to be relied on than legacies.Also, the mercer, as a second cousin, was dispassionate enough to feelcuriosity.

Mr. Vincy, after his one outburst, had remained proudly silent, though too muchpreoccupied with unpleasant feelings to think of moving, till he observed thathis wife had gone to Fred’s side and was crying silently while she held herdarling’s hand. He rose immediately, and turning his back on the company whilehe said to her in an undertone,—“Don’t give way, Lucy; don’t make a fool ofyourself, my dear, before these people,” he added in his usual loud voice—“Goand order the phaeton, Fred; I have no time to waste.”

Mary Garth had before this been getting ready to go home with her father. Shemet Fred in the hall, and now for the first time had the courage to look athim. He had that withered sort of paleness which will sometimes come on youngfaces, and his hand was very cold when she shook it. Mary too was agitated; shewas conscious that fatally, without will of her own, she had perhaps made agreat difference to Fred’s lot.

“Good-by,” she said, with affectionate sadness. “Be brave, Fred. I do believeyou are better without the money. What was the good of it to Mr. Featherstone?”

“That’s all very fine,” said Fred, pettishly. “What is a fellow to do? I mustgo into the Church now.” (He knew that this would vex Mary: very well; then shemust tell him what else he could do.) “And I thought I should be able to payyour father at once and make everything right. And you have not even a hundredpounds left you. What shall you do now, Mary?”

“Take another situation, of course, as soon as I can get one. My father hasenough to do to keep the rest, without me. Good-by.”

In a very short time Stone Court was cleared of well-brewed Featherstones andother long-accustomed visitors. Another stranger had been brought to settle inthe neighborhood of Middlemarch, but in the case of Mr. Rigg Featherstone therewas more discontent with immediate visible consequences than speculation as tothe effect which his presence might have in the future. No soul was propheticenough to have any foreboding as to what might appear on the trial of JoshuaRigg.

And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating a low subject.Historical parallels are remarkably efficient in this way. The chief objectionto them is, that the diligent narrator may lack space, or (what is often thesame thing) may not be able to think of them with any degree of particularity,though he may have a philosophical confidence that if known they would beillustrative. It seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observethat—since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables,where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa—whatever has beenor is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by beingconsidered a parable; so that if any bad habits and ugly consequences arebrought into view, the reader may have the relief of regarding them as not morethan figuratively ungenteel, and may feel himself virtually in company withpersons of some style. Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader’simagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords; andthe petty sums which any bankrupt of high standing would be sorry to retireupon, may be lifted to the level of high commercial transactions by theinexpensive addition of proportional ciphers.

As to any provincial history in which the agents are all of high moral rank,that must be of a date long posterior to the first Reform Bill, and PeterFeatherstone, you perceive, was dead and buried some months before Lord Greycame into office.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

’T is strange to see the humors of these men,
These great aspiring spirits, that should be wise:
. . . . . . . .
For being the nature of great spirits to love
To be where they may be most eminent;
They, rating of themselves so farre above
Us in conceit, with whom they do frequent,
Imagine how we wonder and esteeme
All that they do or say; which makes them strive
To make our admiration more extreme,
Which they suppose they cannot, ’less they give
Notice of their extreme and highest thoughts.
—DANIEL: Tragedy of Philotas.

Mr. Vincy went home from the reading of the will with his point of viewconsiderably changed in relation to many subjects. He was an open-minded man,but given to indirect modes of expressing himself: when he was disappointed ina market for his silk braids, he swore at the groom; when his brother-in-lawBulstrode had vexed him, he made cutting remarks on Methodism; and it was nowapparent that he regarded Fred’s idleness with a sudden increase of severity,by his throwing an embroidered cap out of the smoking-room on to thehall-floor.

“Well, sir,” he observed, when that young gentleman was moving off to bed, “Ihope you’ve made up your mind now to go up next term and pass your examination.I’ve taken my resolution, so I advise you to lose no time in taking yours.”

Fred made no answer: he was too utterly depressed. Twenty-four hours ago he hadthought that instead of needing to know what he should do, he should by thistime know that he needed to do nothing: that he should hunt in pink, have afirst-rate hunter, ride to cover on a fine hack, and be generally respected fordoing so; moreover, that he should be able at once to pay Mr. Garth, and thatMary could no longer have any reason for not marrying him. And all this was tohave come without study or other inconvenience, purely by the favor ofprovidence in the shape of an old gentleman’s caprice. But now, at the end ofthe twenty-four hours, all those firm expectations were upset. It was “ratherhard lines” that while he was smarting under this disappointment he should betreated as if he could have helped it. But he went away silently and his motherpleaded for him.

“Don’t be hard on the poor boy, Vincy. He’ll turn out well yet, though thatwicked man has deceived him. I feel as sure as I sit here, Fred will turn outwell—else why was he brought back from the brink of the grave? And I call it arobbery: it was like giving him the land, to promise it; and what is promising,if making everybody believe is not promising? And you see he did leave him tenthousand pounds, and then took it away again.”

“Took it away again!” said Mr. Vincy, pettishly. “I tell you the lad’s anunlucky lad, Lucy. And you’ve always spoiled him.”

“Well, Vincy, he was my first, and you made a fine fuss with him when he came.You were as proud as proud,” said Mrs. Vincy, easily recovering her cheerfulsmile.

“Who knows what babies will turn to? I was fool enough, I dare say,” said thehusband—more mildly, however.

“But who has handsomer, better children than ours? Fred is far beyond otherpeople’s sons: you may hear it in his speech, that he has kept college company.And Rosamond—where is there a girl like her? She might stand beside any lady inthe land, and only look the better for it. You see—Mr. Lydgate has kept thehighest company and been everywhere, and he fell in love with her at once. Notbut what I could have wished Rosamond had not engaged herself. She might havemet somebody on a visit who would have been a far better match; I mean at herschoolfellow Miss Willoughby’s. There are relations in that family quite ashigh as Mr. Lydgate’s.”

“Damn relations!” said Mr. Vincy; “I’ve had enough of them. I don’t want ason-in-law who has got nothing but his relations to recommend him.”

“Why, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, “you seemed as pleased as could be about it.It’s true, I wasn’t at home; but Rosamond told me you hadn’t a word to sayagainst the engagement. And she has begun to buy in the best linen and cambricfor her underclothing.”

“Not by my will,” said Mr. Vincy. “I shall have enough to do this year, with anidle scamp of a son, without paying for wedding-clothes. The times are as tightas can be; everybody is being ruined; and I don’t believe Lydgate has got afarthing. I shan’t give my consent to their marrying. Let ’em wait, as theirelders have done before ’em.”

“Rosamond will take it hard, Vincy, and you know you never could bear to crossher.”

“Yes, I could. The sooner the engagement’s off, the better. I don’t believehe’ll ever make an income, the way he goes on. He makes enemies; that’s all Ihear of his making.”

“But he stands very high with Mr. Bulstrode, my dear. The marriage would pleasehim, I should think.”

“Please the deuce!” said Mr. Vincy. “Bulstrode won’t pay for their keep. And ifLydgate thinks I’m going to give money for them to set up housekeeping, he’smistaken, that’s all. I expect I shall have to put down my horses soon. You’dbetter tell Rosy what I say.”

This was a not infrequent procedure with Mr. Vincy—to be rash in jovial assent,and on becoming subsequently conscious that he had been rash, to employ othersin making the offensive retractation. However, Mrs. Vincy, who never willinglyopposed her husband, lost no time the next morning in letting Rosamond knowwhat he had said. Rosamond, examining some muslin-work, listened in silence,and at the end gave a certain turn of her graceful neck, of which only longexperience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy.

“What do you say, my dear?” said her mother, with affectionate deference.

“Papa does not mean anything of the kind,” said Rosamond, quite calmly. “He hasalways said that he wished me to marry the man I loved. And I shall marry Mr.Lydgate. It is seven weeks now since papa gave his consent. And I hope we shallhave Mrs. Bretton’s house.”

“Well, my dear, I shall leave you to manage your papa. You always do manageeverybody. But if we ever do go and get damask, Sadler’s is the place—farbetter than Hopkins’s. Mrs. Bretton’s is very large, though: I should love youto have such a house; but it will take a great deal of furniture—carpeting andeverything, besides plate and glass. And you hear, your papa says he will giveno money. Do you think Mr. Lydgate expects it?”

“You cannot imagine that I should ask him, mamma. Of course he understands hisown affairs.”

“But he may have been looking for money, my dear, and we all thought of yourhaving a pretty legacy as well as Fred;—and now everything is sodreadful—there’s no pleasure in thinking of anything, with that poor boydisappointed as he is.”

“That has nothing to do with my marriage, mamma. Fred must leave off beingidle. I am going up-stairs to take this work to Miss Morgan: she does the openhemming very well. Mary Garth might do some work for me now, I should think.Her sewing is exquisite; it is the nicest thing I know about Mary. I should solike to have all my cambric frilling double-hemmed. And it takes a long time.”

Mrs. Vincy’s belief that Rosamond could manage her papa was well founded. Apartfrom his dinners and his coursing, Mr. Vincy, blustering as he was, had aslittle of his own way as if he had been a prime minister: the force ofcirc*mstances was easily too much for him, as it is for most pleasure-lovingflorid men; and the circ*mstance called Rosamond was particularly forcible bymeans of that mild persistence which, as we know, enables a white soft livingsubstance to make its way in spite of opposing rock. Papa was not a rock: hehad no other fixity than that fixity of alternating impulses sometimes calledhabit, and this was altogether unfavorable to his taking the only decisive lineof conduct in relation to his daughter’s engagement—namely, to inquirethoroughly into Lydgate’s circ*mstances, declare his own inability to furnishmoney, and forbid alike either a speedy marriage or an engagement which must betoo lengthy. That seems very simple and easy in the statement; but adisagreeable resolve formed in the chill hours of the morning had as manyconditions against it as the early frost, and rarely persisted under thewarming influences of the day. The indirect though emphatic expression ofopinion to which Mr. Vincy was prone suffered much restraint in this case:Lydgate was a proud man towards whom innuendoes were obviously unsafe, andthrowing his hat on the floor was out of the question. Mr. Vincy was a littlein awe of him, a little vain that he wanted to marry Rosamond, a littleindisposed to raise a question of money in which his own position was notadvantageous, a little afraid of being worsted in dialogue with a man bettereducated and more highly bred than himself, and a little afraid of doing whathis daughter would not like. The part Mr. Vincy preferred playing was that ofthe generous host whom nobody criticises. In the earlier half of the day therewas business to hinder any formal communication of an adverse resolve; in thelater there was dinner, wine, whist, and general satisfaction. And in the meanwhile the hours were each leaving their little deposit and gradually formingthe final reason for inaction, namely, that action was too late. The acceptedlover spent most of his evenings in Lowick Gate, and a love-making not at alldependent on money-advances from fathers-in-law, or prospective income from aprofession, went on flourishingly under Mr. Vincy’s own eyes. Younglove-making—that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whenceits subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touchesof fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases,lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made ofspontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towardsanother, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell tospinning that web from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite ofexperience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure—in spite too ofmedicine and biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyespresented in a dish (like Santa Lucia’s), and other incidents of scientificinquiry, are observed to be less incompatible with poetic love than a nativedulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose. As for Rosamond, she was inthe water-lily’s expanding wonderment at its own fuller life, and she too wasspinning industriously at the mutual web. All this went on in the corner of thedrawing-room where the piano stood, and subtle as it was, the light made it asort of rainbow visible to many observers besides Mr. Farebrother. Thecertainty that Miss Vincy and Mr. Lydgate were engaged became general inMiddlemarch without the aid of formal announcement.

Aunt Bulstrode was again stirred to anxiety; but this time she addressedherself to her brother, going to the warehouse expressly to avoid Mrs. Vincy’svolatility. His replies were not satisfactory.

“Walter, you never mean to tell me that you have allowed all this to go onwithout inquiry into Mr. Lydgate’s prospects?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, opening hereyes with wider gravity at her brother, who was in his peevish warehouse humor.“Think of this girl brought up in luxury—in too worldly a way, I am sorry tosay—what will she do on a small income?”

“Oh, confound it, Harriet! What can I do when men come into the town withoutany asking of mine? Did you shut your house up against Lydgate? Bulstrode haspushed him forward more than anybody. I never made any fuss about the youngfellow. You should go and talk to your husband about it, not me.”

“Well, really, Walter, how can Mr. Bulstrode be to blame? I am sure he did notwish for the engagement.”

“Oh, if Bulstrode had not taken him by the hand, I should never have invitedhim.”

“But you called him in to attend on Fred, and I am sure that was a mercy,” saidMrs. Bulstrode, losing her clew in the intricacies of the subject.

“I don’t know about mercy,” said Mr. Vincy, testily. “I know I am worried morethan I like with my family. I was a good brother to you, Harriet, before youmarried Bulstrode, and I must say he doesn’t always show that friendly spirittowards your family that might have been expected of him.” Mr. Vincy was verylittle like a Jesuit, but no accomplished Jesuit could have turned a questionmore adroitly. Harriet had to defend her husband instead of blaming herbrother, and the conversation ended at a point as far from the beginning assome recent sparring between the brothers-in-law at a vestry meeting.

Mrs. Bulstrode did not repeat her brother’s complaints to her husband, but inthe evening she spoke to him of Lydgate and Rosamond. He did not share her warminterest, however; and only spoke with resignation of the risks attendant onthe beginning of medical practice and the desirability of prudence.

“I am sure we are bound to pray for that thoughtless girl—brought up as she hasbeen,” said Mrs. Bulstrode, wishing to rouse her husband’s feelings.

“Truly, my dear,” said Mr. Bulstrode, assentingly. “Those who are not of thisworld can do little else to arrest the errors of the obstinately worldly. Thatis what we must accustom ourselves to recognize with regard to your brother’sfamily. I could have wished that Mr. Lydgate had not entered into such a union;but my relations with him are limited to that use of his gifts for God’spurposes which is taught us by the divine government under each dispensation.”

Mrs. Bulstrode said no more, attributing some dissatisfaction which she felt toher own want of spirituality. She believed that her husband was one of thosem*n whose memoirs should be written when they died.

As to Lydgate himself, having been accepted, he was prepared to accept all theconsequences which he believed himself to foresee with perfect clearness. Ofcourse he must be married in a year—perhaps even in half a year. This was notwhat he had intended; but other schemes would not be hindered: they wouldsimply adjust themselves anew. Marriage, of course, must be prepared for in theusual way. A house must be taken instead of the rooms he at present occupied;and Lydgate, having heard Rosamond speak with admiration of old Mrs. Bretton’shouse (situated in Lowick Gate), took notice when it fell vacant after the oldlady’s death, and immediately entered into treaty for it.

He did this in an episodic way, very much as he gave orders to his tailor forevery requisite of perfect dress, without any notion of being extravagant. Onthe contrary, he would have despised any ostentation of expense; his professionhad familiarized him with all grades of poverty, and he cared much for thosewho suffered hardships. He would have behaved perfectly at a table where thesauce was served in a jug with the handle off, and he would have rememberednothing about a grand dinner except that a man was there who talked well. Butit had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what hewould have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellentwaiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had broughtaway no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunitywhile our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings inour own case, link us indissolubly with the established order. And Lydgate’stendency was not towards extreme opinions: he would have liked no barefooteddoctrines, being particular about his boots: he was no radical in relation toanything but medical reform and the prosecution of discovery. In the rest ofpractical life he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride andunreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness, and half from thatnaivete which belonged to preoccupation with favorite ideas.

Any inward debate Lydgate had as to the consequences of this engagement whichhad stolen upon him, turned on the paucity of time rather than of money.Certainly, being in love and being expected continually by some one who alwaysturned out to be prettier than memory could represent her to be, did interferewith the diligent use of spare hours which might serve some “plodding fellow ofa German” to make the great, imminent discovery. This was really an argumentfor not deferring the marriage too long, as he implied to Mr. Farebrother, oneday that the Vicar came to his room with some pond-products which he wanted toexamine under a better microscope than his own, and, finding Lydgate’s tablefulof apparatus and specimens in confusion, said sarcastically—

“Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now hebrings back chaos.”

“Yes, at some stages,” said Lydgate, lifting his brows and smiling, while hebegan to arrange his microscope. “But a better order will begin after.”

“Soon?” said the Vicar.

“I hope so, really. This unsettled state of affairs uses up the time, and whenone has notions in science, every moment is an opportunity. I feel sure thatmarriage must be the best thing for a man who wants to work steadily. He haseverything at home then—no teasing with personal speculations—he can getcalmness and freedom.”

“You are an enviable dog,” said the Vicar, “to have such a prospect—Rosamond,calmness and freedom, all to your share. Here am I with nothing but my pipe andpond-animalcules. Now, are you ready?”

Lydgate did not mention to the Vicar another reason he had for wishing toshorten the period of courtship. It was rather irritating to him, even with thewine of love in his veins, to be obliged to mingle so often with the familyparty at the Vincys’, and to enter so much into Middlemarch gossip, protractedgood cheer, whist-playing, and general futility. He had to be deferential whenMr. Vincy decided questions with trenchant ignorance, especially as to thoseliquors which were the best inward pickle, preserving you from the effects ofbad air. Mrs. Vincy’s openness and simplicity were quite unstreaked withsuspicion as to the subtle offence she might give to the taste of her intendedson-in-law; and altogether Lydgate had to confess to himself that he wasdescending a little in relation to Rosamond’s family. But that exquisitecreature herself suffered in the same sort of way:—it was at least onedelightful thought that in marrying her, he could give her a much-neededtransplantation.

“Dear!” he said to her one evening, in his gentlest tone, as he sat down by herand looked closely at her face—

But I must first say that he had found her alone in the drawing-room, where thegreat old-fashioned window, almost as large as the side of the room, was openedto the summer scents of the garden at the back of the house. Her father andmother were gone to a party, and the rest were all out with the butterflies.

“Dear! your eyelids are red.”

“Are they?” said Rosamond. “I wonder why.” It was not in her nature to pourforth wishes or grievances. They only came forth gracefully on solicitation.

“As if you could hide it from me!” said Lydgate, laying his hand tenderly onboth of hers. “Don’t I see a tiny drop on one of the lashes? Things troubleyou, and you don’t tell me. That is unloving.”

“Why should I tell you what you cannot alter? They are every-daythings:—perhaps they have been a little worse lately.”

“Family annoyances. Don’t fear speaking. I guess them.”

“Papa has been more irritable lately. Fred makes him angry, and this morningthere was a fresh quarrel because Fred threatens to throw his whole educationaway, and do something quite beneath him. And besides—”

Rosamond hesitated, and her cheeks were gathering a slight flush. Lydgate hadnever seen her in trouble since the morning of their engagement, and he hadnever felt so passionately towards her as at this moment. He kissed thehesitating lips gently, as if to encourage them.

“I feel that papa is not quite pleased about our engagement,” Rosamondcontinued, almost in a whisper; “and he said last night that he shouldcertainly speak to you and say it must be given up.”

“Will you give it up?” said Lydgate, with quick energy—almost angrily.

“I never give up anything that I choose to do,” said Rosamond, recovering hercalmness at the touching of this chord.

“God bless you!” said Lydgate, kissing her again. This constancy of purpose inthe right place was adorable. He went on:—

“It is too late now for your father to say that our engagement must be givenup. You are of age, and I claim you as mine. If anything is done to make youunhappy,—that is a reason for hastening our marriage.”

An unmistakable delight shone forth from the blue eyes that met his, and theradiance seemed to light up all his future with mild sunshine. Ideal happiness(of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you are invited to step fromthe labor and discord of the street into a paradise where everything is givento you and nothing claimed) seemed to be an affair of a few weeks’ waiting,more or less.

“Why should we defer it?” he said, with ardent insistence. “I have taken thehouse now: everything else can soon be got ready—can it not? You will not mindabout new clothes. Those can be bought afterwards.”

“What original notions you clever men have!” said Rosamond, dimpling with morethorough laughter than usual at this humorous incongruity. “This is the firsttime I ever heard of wedding-clothes being bought after marriage.”

“But you don’t mean to say you would insist on my waiting months for the sakeof clothes?” said Lydgate, half thinking that Rosamond was tormenting himprettily, and half fearing that she really shrank from speedy marriage.“Remember, we are looking forward to a better sort of happiness even thanthis—being continually together, independent of others, and ordering our livesas we will. Come, dear, tell me how soon you can be altogether mine.”

There was a serious pleading in Lydgate’s tone, as if he felt that she would beinjuring him by any fantastic delays. Rosamond became serious too, and slightlymeditative; in fact, she was going through many intricacies of lace-edging andhosiery and petticoat-tucking, in order to give an answer that would at leastbe approximative.

“Six weeks would be ample—say so, Rosamond,” insisted Lydgate, releasing herhands to put his arm gently round her.

One little hand immediately went to pat her hair, while she gave her neck ameditative turn, and then said seriously—

“There would be the house-linen and the furniture to be prepared. Still, mammacould see to those while we were away.”

“Yes, to be sure. We must be away a week or so.”

“Oh, more than that!” said Rosamond, earnestly. She was thinking of her eveningdresses for the visit to Sir Godwin Lydgate’s, which she had long been secretlyhoping for as a delightful employment of at least one quarter of the honeymoon,even if she deferred her introduction to the uncle who was a doctor of divinity(also a pleasing though sober kind of rank, when sustained by blood). Shelooked at her lover with some wondering remonstrance as she spoke, and hereadily understood that she might wish to lengthen the sweet time of doublesolitude.

“Whatever you wish, my darling, when the day is fixed. But let us take adecided course, and put an end to any discomfort you may be suffering. Sixweeks!—I am sure they would be ample.”

“I could certainly hasten the work,” said Rosamond. “Will you, then, mention itto papa?—I think it would be better to write to him.” She blushed and looked athim as the garden flowers look at us when we walk forth happily among them inthe transcendent evening light: is there not a soul beyond utterance, halfnymph, half child, in those delicate petals which glow and breathe about thecentres of deep color?

He touched her ear and a little bit of neck under it with his lips, and theysat quite still for many minutes which flowed by them like a small gurglingbrook with the kisses of the sun upon it. Rosamond thought that no one could bemore in love than she was; and Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakesand absurd credulity, he had found perfect womanhood—felt as if alreadybreathed upon by exquisite wedded affection such as would be bestowed by anaccomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labors andwould never interfere with them; who would create order in the home andaccounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute andtransform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the truewomanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond—docile, therefore, and ready tocarry out behests which came from that limit. It was plainer now than ever thathis notion of remaining much longer a bachelor had been a mistake: marriagewould not be an obstruction but a furtherance. And happening the next day toaccompany a patient to Brassing, he saw a dinner-service there which struck himas so exactly the right thing that he bought it at once. It saved time to dothese things just when you thought of them, and Lydgate hated ugly crockery.The dinner-service in question was expensive, but that might be in the natureof dinner-services. Furnishing was necessarily expensive; but then it had to bedone only once.

“It must be lovely,” said Mrs. Vincy, when Lydgate mentioned his purchase withsome descriptive touches. “Just what Rosy ought to have. I trust in heaven itwon’t be broken!”

“One must hire servants who will not break things,” said Lydgate. (Certainly,this was reasoning with an imperfect vision of sequences. But at that periodthere was no sort of reasoning which was not more or less sanctioned by men ofscience.)

Of course it was unnecessary to defer the mention of anything to mamma, who didnot readily take views that were not cheerful, and being a happy wife herself,had hardly any feeling but pride in her daughter’s marriage. But Rosamond hadgood reasons for suggesting to Lydgate that papa should be appealed to inwriting. She prepared for the arrival of the letter by walking with her papa tothe warehouse the next morning, and telling him on the way that Mr. Lydgatewished to be married soon.

“Nonsense, my dear!” said Mr. Vincy. “What has he got to marry on? You’d muchbetter give up the engagement. I’ve told you so pretty plainly before this.What have you had such an education for, if you are to go and marry a poor man?It’s a cruel thing for a father to see.”

“Mr. Lydgate is not poor, papa. He bought Mr. Peaco*ck’s practice, which, theysay, is worth eight or nine hundred a-year.”

“Stuff and nonsense! What’s buying a practice? He might as well buy next year’sswallows. It’ll all slip through his fingers.”

“On the contrary, papa, he will increase the practice. See how he has beencalled in by the Chettams and Casaubons.”

“I hope he knows I shan’t give anything—with this disappointment about Fred,and Parliament going to be dissolved, and machine-breaking everywhere, and anelection coming on—”

“Dear papa! what can that have to do with my marriage?”

“A pretty deal to do with it! We may all be ruined for what I know—thecountry’s in that state! Some say it’s the end of the world, and be hanged if Idon’t think it looks like it! Anyhow, it’s not a time for me to be drawingmoney out of my business, and I should wish Lydgate to know that.”

“I am sure he expects nothing, papa. And he has such very high connections: heis sure to rise in one way or another. He is engaged in making scientificdiscoveries.”

Mr. Vincy was silent.

“I cannot give up my only prospect of happiness, papa. Mr. Lydgate is agentleman. I could never love any one who was not a perfect gentleman. Youwould not like me to go into a consumption, as Arabella Hawley did. And youknow that I never change my mind.”

Again papa was silent.

“Promise me, papa, that you will consent to what we wish. We shall never giveeach other up; and you know that you have always objected to long courtshipsand late marriages.”

There was a little more urgency of this kind, till Mr. Vincy said, “Well, well,child, he must write to me first before I can answer him,”—and Rosamond wascertain that she had gained her point.

Mr. Vincy’s answer consisted chiefly in a demand that Lydgate should insure hislife—a demand immediately conceded. This was a delightfully reassuring ideasupposing that Lydgate died, but in the mean time not a self-supporting idea.However, it seemed to make everything comfortable about Rosamond’s marriage;and the necessary purchases went on with much spirit. Not without prudentialconsiderations, however. A bride (who is going to visit at a baronet’s) musthave a few first-rate pocket-handkerchiefs; but beyond the absolutely necessaryhalf-dozen, Rosamond contented herself without the very highest style ofembroidery and Valenciennes. Lydgate also, finding that his sum of eighthundred pounds had been considerably reduced since he had come to Middlemarch,restrained his inclination for some plate of an old pattern which was shown tohim when he went into Kibble’s establishment at Brassing to buy forks andspoons. He was too proud to act as if he presupposed that Mr. Vincy wouldadvance money to provide furniture; and though, since it would not be necessaryto pay for everything at once, some bills would be left standing over, he didnot waste time in conjecturing how much his father-in-law would give in theform of dowry, to make payment easy. He was not going to do anythingextravagant, but the requisite things must be bought, and it would be badeconomy to buy them of a poor quality. All these matters were by the bye.Lydgate foresaw that science and his profession were the objects he shouldalone pursue enthusiastically; but he could not imagine himself pursuing themin such a home as Wrench had—the doors all open, the oil-cloth worn, thechildren in soiled pinafores, and lunch lingering in the form of bones,black-handled knives, and willow-pattern. But Wrench had a wretched lymphaticwife who made a mummy of herself indoors in a large shawl; and he must havealtogether begun with an ill-chosen domestic apparatus.

Rosamond, however, was on her side much occupied with conjectures, though herquick imitative perception warned her against betraying them too crudely.

“I shall like so much to know your family,” she said one day, when the weddingjourney was being discussed. “We might perhaps take a direction that wouldallow us to see them as we returned. Which of your uncles do you like best?”

“Oh,—my uncle Godwin, I think. He is a good-natured old fellow.”

“You were constantly at his house at Quallingham, when you were a boy, were younot? I should so like to see the old spot and everything you were used to. Doeshe know you are going to be married?”

“No,” said Lydgate, carelessly, turning in his chair and rubbing his hair up.

“Do send him word of it, you naughty undutiful nephew. He will perhaps ask youto take me to Quallingham; and then you could show me about the grounds, and Icould imagine you there when you were a boy. Remember, you see me in my home,just as it has been since I was a child. It is not fair that I should be soignorant of yours. But perhaps you would be a little ashamed of me. I forgotthat.”

Lydgate smiled at her tenderly, and really accepted the suggestion that theproud pleasure of showing so charming a bride was worth some trouble. And nowhe came to think of it, he would like to see the old spots with Rosamond.

“I will write to him, then. But my cousins are bores.”

It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly of abaronet’s family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect of being ableto estimate them contemptuously on her own account.

But mamma was near spoiling all, a day or two later, by saying—

“I hope your uncle Sir Godwin will not look down on Rosy, Mr. Lydgate. I shouldthink he would do something handsome. A thousand or two can be nothing to abaronet.”

“Mamma!” said Rosamond, blushing deeply; and Lydgate pitied her so much that heremained silent and went to the other end of the room to examine a printcuriously, as if he had been absent-minded. Mamma had a little filial lectureafterwards, and was docile as usual. But Rosamond reflected that if any ofthose high-bred cousins who were bores, should be induced to visit Middlemarch,they would see many things in her own family which might shock them. Hence itseemed desirable that Lydgate should by-and-by get some first-rate positionelsewhere than in Middlemarch; and this could hardly be difficult in the caseof a man who had a titled uncle and could make discoveries. Lydgate, youperceive, had talked fervidly to Rosamond of his hopes as to the highest usesof his life, and had found it delightful to be listened to by a creature whowould bring him the sweet furtherance of satisfyingaffection—beauty—repose—such help as our thoughts get from the summer sky andthe flower-fringed meadows.

Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sakeof variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the innatesubmissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of thegander.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Thrice happy she that is so well assured
Unto herself and settled so in heart
That neither will for better be allured
Ne fears to worse with any chance to start,
But like a steddy ship doth strongly part
The raging waves and keeps her course aright;
Ne aught for tempest doth from it depart,
Ne aught for fairer weather’s false delight.
Such self-assurance need not fear the spight
Of grudging foes; ne favour seek of friends;
But in the stay of her own stedfast might
Neither to one herself nor other bends.
Most happy she that most assured doth rest,
But he most happy who such one loves best.
—SPENSER.

The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general election or theend of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth was dead,Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel generally depreciated and the newKing apologetic, was a feeble type of the uncertainties in provincial opinionat that time. With the glow-worm lights of country places, how could men seewhich were their own thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry passingLiberal measures, of Tory nobles and electors being anxious to return Liberalsrather than friends of the recreant Ministers, and of outcries for remedieswhich seemed to have a mysteriously remote bearing on private interest, andwere made suspicious by the advocacy of disagreeable neighbors? Buyers of theMiddlemarch newspapers found themselves in an anomalous position: during theagitation on the Catholic Question many had given up the “Pioneer”—which had amotto from Charles James Fox and was in the van of progress—because it hadtaken Peel’s side about the Papists, and had thus blotted its Liberalism with atoleration of Jesuitry and Baal; but they were ill-satisfied with the“Trumpet,” which—since its blasts against Rome, and in the general flaccidityof the public mind (nobody knowing who would support whom)—had become feeble inits blowing.

It was a time, according to a noticeable article in the “Pioneer,” when thecrying needs of the country might well counteract a reluctance to public actionon the part of men whose minds had from long experience acquired breadth aswell as concentration, decision of judgment as well as tolerance,dispassionateness as well as energy—in fact, all those qualities which in themelancholy experience of mankind have been the least disposed to sharelodgings.

Mr. Hackbutt, whose fluent speech was at that time floating more widely thanusual, and leaving much uncertainty as to its ultimate channel, was heard tosay in Mr. Hawley’s office that the article in question “emanated” from Brookeof Tipton, and that Brooke had secretly bought the “Pioneer” some months ago.

“That means mischief, eh?” said Mr. Hawley. “He’s got the freak of being apopular man now, after dangling about like a stray tortoise. So much the worsefor him. I’ve had my eye on him for some time. He shall be prettily pumpedupon. He’s a damned bad landlord. What business has an old county man to comecurrying favor with a low set of dark-blue freemen? As to his paper, I onlyhope he may do the writing himself. It would be worth our paying for.”

“I understand he has got a very brilliant young fellow to edit it, who canwrite the highest style of leading article, quite equal to anything in theLondon papers. And he means to take very high ground on Reform.”

“Let Brooke reform his rent-roll. He’s a cursed old screw, and the buildingsall over his estate are going to rack. I suppose this young fellow is someloose fish from London.”

“His name is Ladislaw. He is said to be of foreign extraction.”

“I know the sort,” said Mr. Hawley; “some emissary. He’ll begin withflourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench. That’s thestyle.”

“You must concede that there are abuses, Hawley,” said Mr. Hackbutt, foreseeingsome political disagreement with his family lawyer. “I myself should neverfavor immoderate views—in fact I take my stand with Huskisson—but I cannotblind myself to the consideration that the non-representation of large towns—”

“Large towns be damned!” said Mr. Hawley, impatient of exposition. “I know alittle too much about Middlemarch elections. Let ’em quash every pocket boroughto-morrow, and bring in every mushroom town in the kingdom—they’ll onlyincrease the expense of getting into Parliament. I go upon facts.”

Mr. Hawley’s disgust at the notion of the “Pioneer” being edited by anemissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political—as if a tortoise ofdesultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and becomerampant—was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr. Brooke’sown family. The result had oozed forth gradually, like the discovery that yourneighbor has set up an unpleasant kind of manufacture which will be permanentlyunder your nostrils without legal remedy. The “Pioneer” had been secretlybought even before Will Ladislaw’s arrival, the expected opportunity havingoffered itself in the readiness of the proprietor to part with a valuableproperty which did not pay; and in the interval since Mr. Brooke had writtenhis invitation, those germinal ideas of making his mind tell upon the world atlarge which had been present in him from his younger years, but had hithertolain in some obstruction, had been sprouting under cover.

The development was much furthered by a delight in his guest which provedgreater even than he had anticipated. For it seemed that Will was not only athome in all those artistic and literary subjects which Mr. Brooke had gone intoat one time, but that he was strikingly ready at seizing the points of thepolitical situation, and dealing with them in that large spirit which, aided byadequate memory, lends itself to quotation and general effectiveness oftreatment.

“He seems to me a kind of Shelley, you know,” Mr. Brooke took an opportunity ofsaying, for the gratification of Mr. Casaubon. “I don’t mean as to anythingobjectionable—laxities or atheism, or anything of that kind, youknow—Ladislaw’s sentiments in every way I am sure are good—indeed, we weretalking a great deal together last night. But he has the same sort ofenthusiasm for liberty, freedom, emancipation—a fine thing under guidance—underguidance, you know. I think I shall be able to put him on the right tack; and Iam the more pleased because he is a relation of yours, Casaubon.”

If the right tack implied anything more precise than the rest of Mr. Brooke’sspeech, Mr. Casaubon silently hoped that it referred to some occupation at agreat distance from Lowick. He had disliked Will while he helped him, but hehad begun to dislike him still more now that Will had declined his help. Thatis the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if ourtalents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom wehave grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt forus, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves.Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness ofinjuring him—rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and thedrawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, givesour bitterness a milder infusion. Now Mr. Casaubon had been deprived of thatsuperiority (as anything more than a remembrance) in a sudden, capriciousmanner. His antipathy to Will did not spring from the common jealousy of awinter-worn husband: it was something deeper, bred by his lifelong claims anddiscontents; but Dorothea, now that she was present—Dorothea, as a young wifewho herself had shown an offensive capability of criticism, necessarily gaveconcentration to the uneasiness which had before been vague.

Will Ladislaw on his side felt that his dislike was flourishing at the expenseof his gratitude, and spent much inward discourse in justifying the dislike.Casaubon hated him—he knew that very well; on his first entrance he coulddiscern a bitterness in the mouth and a venom in the glance which would almostjustify declaring war in spite of past benefits. He was much obliged toCasaubon in the past, but really the act of marrying this wife was a set-offa*gainst the obligation. It was a question whether gratitude which refers towhat is done for one’s self ought not to give way to indignation at what isdone against another. And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marryingher. A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to growgray crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl intohis companionship. “It is the most horrible of virgin-sacrifices,” said Will;and he painted to himself what were Dorothea’s inward sorrows as if he had beenwriting a choric wail. But he would never lose sight of her: he would watchover her—if he gave up everything else in life he would watch over her, and sheshould know that she had one slave in the world. Will had—to use Sir ThomasBrowne’s phrase—a “passionate prodigality” of statement both to himself andothers. The simple truth was that nothing then invited him so strongly as thepresence of Dorothea.

Invitations of the formal kind had been wanting, however, for Will had neverbeen asked to go to Lowick. Mr. Brooke, indeed, confident of doing everythingagreeable which Casaubon, poor fellow, was too much absorbed to think of, hadarranged to bring Ladislaw to Lowick several times (not neglecting meanwhile tointroduce him elsewhere on every opportunity as “a young relative ofCasaubon’s”). And though Will had not seen Dorothea alone, their interviews hadbeen enough to restore her former sense of young companionship with one who wascleverer than herself, yet seemed ready to be swayed by her. Poor Dorotheabefore her marriage had never found much room in other minds for what she caredmost to say; and she had not, as we know, enjoyed her husband’s superiorinstruction so much as she had expected. If she spoke with any keenness ofinterest to Mr. Casaubon, he heard her with an air of patience as if she hadgiven a quotation from the Delectus familiar to him from his tender years, andsometimes mentioned curtly what ancient sects or personages had held similarideas, as if there were too much of that sort in stock already; at other timeshe would inform her that she was mistaken, and reassert what her remark hadquestioned.

But Will Ladislaw always seemed to see more in what she said than she herselfsaw. Dorothea had little vanity, but she had the ardent woman’s need to rulebeneficently by making the joy of another soul. Hence the mere chance of seeingWill occasionally was like a lunette opened in the wall of her prison, givingher a glimpse of the sunny air; and this pleasure began to nullify her originalalarm at what her husband might think about the introduction of Will as heruncle’s guest. On this subject Mr. Casaubon had remained dumb.

But Will wanted to talk with Dorothea alone, and was impatient of slowcirc*mstance. However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante andBeatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and inlater days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation.Necessity excused stratagem, but stratagem was limited by the dread ofoffending Dorothea. He found out at last that he wanted to take a particularsketch at Lowick; and one morning when Mr. Brooke had to drive along the Lowickroad on his way to the county town, Will asked to be set down with hissketch-book and camp-stool at Lowick, and without announcing himself at theManor settled himself to sketch in a position where he must see Dorothea if shecame out to walk—and he knew that she usually walked an hour in the morning.

But the stratagem was defeated by the weather. Clouds gathered with treacherousquickness, the rain came down, and Will was obliged to take shelter in thehouse. He intended, on the strength of relationship, to go into thedrawing-room and wait there without being announced; and seeing his oldacquaintance the butler in the hall, he said, “Don’t mention that I am here,Pratt; I will wait till luncheon; I know Mr. Casaubon does not like to bedisturbed when he is in the library.”

“Master is out, sir; there’s only Mrs. Casaubon in the library. I’d better tellher you’re here, sir,” said Pratt, a red-cheeked man given to lively conversewith Tantripp, and often agreeing with her that it must be dull for Madam.

“Oh, very well; this confounded rain has hindered me from sketching,” saidWill, feeling so happy that he affected indifference with delightful ease.

In another minute he was in the library, and Dorothea was meeting him with hersweet unconstrained smile.

“Mr. Casaubon has gone to the Archdeacon’s,” she said, at once. “I don’t knowwhether he will be at home again long before dinner. He was uncertain how longhe should be. Did you want to say anything particular to him?”

“No; I came to sketch, but the rain drove me in. Else I would not havedisturbed you yet. I supposed that Mr. Casaubon was here, and I know hedislikes interruption at this hour.”

“I am indebted to the rain, then. I am so glad to see you.” Dorothea utteredthese common words with the simple sincerity of an unhappy child, visited atschool.

“I really came for the chance of seeing you alone,” said Will, mysteriouslyforced to be just as simple as she was. He could not stay to ask himself, whynot? “I wanted to talk about things, as we did in Rome. It always makes adifference when other people are present.”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, in her clear full tone of assent. “Sit down.” She seatedherself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plaindress of some thin woollen-white material, without a single ornament on herbesides her wedding-ring, as if she were under a vow to be different from allother women; and Will sat down opposite her at two yards’ distance, the lightfalling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile, with itsdefiant curves of lip and chin. Each looked at the other as if they had beentwo flowers which had opened then and there. Dorothea for the moment forgot herhusband’s mysterious irritation against Will: it seemed fresh water at herthirsty lips to speak without fear to the one person whom she had foundreceptive; for in looking backward through sadness she exaggerated a pastsolace.

“I have often thought that I should like to talk to you again,” she said,immediately. “It seems strange to me how many things I said to you.”

“I remember them all,” said Will, with the unspeakable content in his soul offeeling that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be perfectly loved.I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have ourdivine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the belovedobject.

“I have tried to learn a great deal since we were in Rome,” said Dorothea. “Ican read Latin a little, and I am beginning to understand just a little Greek.I can help Mr. Casaubon better now. I can find out references for him and savehis eyes in many ways. But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as ifpeople were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy thembecause they are too tired.”

“If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake thembefore he is decrepit,” said Will, with irrepressible quickness. But throughcertain sensibilities Dorothea was as quick as he, and seeing her face change,he added, immediately, “But it is quite true that the best minds have beensometimes overstrained in working out their ideas.”

“You correct me,” said Dorothea. “I expressed myself ill. I should have saidthat those who have great thoughts get too much worn in working them out. Iused to feel about that, even when I was a little girl; and it always seemed tome that the use I should like to make of my life would be to help some one whodid great works, so that his burthen might be lighter.”

Dorothea was led on to this bit of autobiography without any sense of making arevelation. But she had never before said anything to Will which threw sostrong a light on her marriage. He did not shrug his shoulders; and for want ofthat muscular outlet he thought the more irritably of beautiful lips kissingholy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined. Also he had totake care that his speech should not betray that thought.

“But you may easily carry the help too far,” he said, “and get over-wroughtyourself. Are you not too much shut up? You already look paler. It would bebetter for Mr. Casaubon to have a secretary; he could easily get a man whowould do half his work for him. It would save him more effectually, and youneed only help him in lighter ways.”

“How can you think of that?” said Dorothea, in a tone of earnest remonstrance.“I should have no happiness if I did not help him in his work. What could I do?There is no good to be done in Lowick. The only thing I desire is to help himmore. And he objects to a secretary: please not to mention that again.”

“Certainly not, now I know your feeling. But I have heard both Mr. Brooke andSir James Chettam express the same wish.”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, “but they don’t understand—they want me to be a greatdeal on horseback, and have the garden altered and new conservatories, to fillup my days. I thought you could understand that one’s mind has other wants,”she added, rather impatiently—“besides, Mr. Casaubon cannot bear to hear of asecretary.”

“My mistake is excusable,” said Will. “In old days I used to hear Mr. Casaubonspeak as if he looked forward to having a secretary. Indeed he held out theprospect of that office to me. But I turned out to be—not good enough for it.”

Dorothea was trying to extract out of this an excuse for her husband’s evidentrepulsion, as she said, with a playful smile, “You were not a steady workerenough.”

“No,” said Will, shaking his head backward somewhat after the manner of aspirited horse. And then, the old irritable demon prompting him to give anothergood pinch at the moth-wings of poor Mr. Casaubon’s glory, he went on, “And Ihave seen since that Mr. Casaubon does not like any one to overlook his workand know thoroughly what he is doing. He is too doubtful—too uncertain ofhimself. I may not be good for much, but he dislikes me because I disagree withhim.”

Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues arelittle triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can bebrought to bear. And it was too intolerable that Casaubon’s dislike of himshould not be fairly accounted for to Dorothea. Yet when he had spoken he wasrather uneasy as to the effect on her.

But Dorothea was strangely quiet—not immediately indignant, as she had been ona like occasion in Rome. And the cause lay deep. She was no longer strugglingagainst the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearestperception; and now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, stillmore at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking alongthe one track where duty became tenderness. Will’s want of reticence might havebeen met with more severity, if he had not already been recommended to hermercy by her husband’s dislike, which must seem hard to her till she saw betterreason for it.

She did not answer at once, but after looking down ruminatingly she said, withsome earnestness, “Mr. Casaubon must have overcome his dislike of you so far ashis actions were concerned: and that is admirable.”

“Yes; he has shown a sense of justice in family matters. It was an abominablething that my grandmother should have been disinherited because she made whatthey called a mesalliance, though there was nothing to be said againsther husband except that he was a Polish refugee who gave lessons for hisbread.”

“I wish I knew all about her!” said Dorothea. “I wonder how she bore the changefrom wealth to poverty: I wonder whether she was happy with her husband! Do youknow much about them?”

“No; only that my grandfather was a patriot—a bright fellow—could speak manylanguages—musical—got his bread by teaching all sorts of things. They both diedrather early. And I never knew much of my father, beyond what my mother toldme; but he inherited the musical talents. I remember his slow walk and his longthin hands; and one day remains with me when he was lying ill, and I was veryhungry, and had only a little bit of bread.”

“Ah, what a different life from mine!” said Dorothea, with keen interest,clasping her hands on her lap. “I have always had too much of everything. Buttell me how it was—Mr. Casaubon could not have known about you then.”

“No; but my father had made himself known to Mr. Casaubon, and that was my lasthungry day. My father died soon after, and my mother and I were well taken careof. Mr. Casaubon always expressly recognized it as his duty to take care of usbecause of the harsh injustice which had been shown to his mother’s sister. Butnow I am telling you what is not new to you.”

In his inmost soul Will was conscious of wishing to tell Dorothea what wasrather new even in his own construction of things—namely, that Mr. Casaubon hadnever done more than pay a debt towards him. Will was much too good a fellow tobe easy under the sense of being ungrateful. And when gratitude has become amatter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.

“No,” answered Dorothea; “Mr. Casaubon has always avoided dwelling on his ownhonorable actions.” She did not feel that her husband’s conduct wasdepreciated; but this notion of what justice had required in his relations withWill Ladislaw took strong hold on her mind. After a moment’s pause, she added,“He had never told me that he supported your mother. Is she still living?”

“No; she died by an accident—a fall—four years ago. It is curious that mymother, too, ran away from her family, but not for the sake of her husband. Shenever would tell me anything about her family, except that she forsook them toget her own living—went on the stage, in fact. She was a dark-eyed creature,with crisp ringlets, and never seemed to be getting old. You see I come ofrebellious blood on both sides,” Will ended, smiling brightly at Dorothea,while she was still looking with serious intentness before her, like a childseeing a drama for the first time.

But her face, too, broke into a smile as she said, “That is your apology, Isuppose, for having yourself been rather rebellious; I mean, to Mr. Casaubon’swishes. You must remember that you have not done what he thought best for you.And if he dislikes you—you were speaking of dislike a little while ago—but Ishould rather say, if he has shown any painful feelings towards you, you mustconsider how sensitive he has become from the wearing effect of study.Perhaps,” she continued, getting into a pleading tone, “my uncle has not toldyou how serious Mr. Casaubon’s illness was. It would be very petty of us whoare well and can bear things, to think much of small offences from those whocarry a weight of trial.”

“You teach me better,” said Will. “I will never grumble on that subject again.”There was a gentleness in his tone which came from the unutterable contentmentof perceiving—what Dorothea was hardly conscious of—that she was travellinginto the remoteness of pure pity and loyalty towards her husband. Will wasready to adore her pity and loyalty, if she would associate himself with her inmanifesting them. “I have really sometimes been a perverse fellow,” he went on,“but I will never again, if I can help it, do or say what you woulddisapprove.”

“That is very good of you,” said Dorothea, with another open smile. “I shallhave a little kingdom then, where I shall give laws. But you will soon go away,out of my rule, I imagine. You will soon be tired of staying at the Grange.”

“That is a point I wanted to mention to you—one of the reasons why I wished tospeak to you alone. Mr. Brooke proposes that I should stay in thisneighborhood. He has bought one of the Middlemarch newspapers, and he wishes meto conduct that, and also to help him in other ways.”

“Would not that be a sacrifice of higher prospects for you?” said Dorothea.

“Perhaps; but I have always been blamed for thinking of prospects, and notsettling to anything. And here is something offered to me. If you would notlike me to accept it, I will give it up. Otherwise I would rather stay in thispart of the country than go away. I belong to nobody anywhere else.”

“I should like you to stay very much,” said Dorothea, at once, as simply andreadily as she had spoken at Rome. There was not the shadow of a reason in hermind at the moment why she should not say so.

“Then I will stay,” said Ladislaw, shaking his head backward, rising andgoing towards the window, as if to see whether the rain had ceased.

But the next moment, Dorothea, according to a habit which was gettingcontinually stronger, began to reflect that her husband felt differently fromherself, and she colored deeply under the double embarrassment of havingexpressed what might be in opposition to her husband’s feeling, and of havingto suggest this opposition to Will. His face was not turned towards her, andthis made it easier to say—

“But my opinion is of little consequence on such a subject. I think you shouldbe guided by Mr. Casaubon. I spoke without thinking of anything else than myown feeling, which has nothing to do with the real question. But it now occursto me—perhaps Mr. Casaubon might see that the proposal was not wise. Can younot wait now and mention it to him?”

“I can’t wait to-day,” said Will, inwardly seared by the possibility that Mr.Casaubon would enter. “The rain is quite over now. I told Mr. Brooke not tocall for me: I would rather walk the five miles. I shall strike across HalsellCommon, and see the gleams on the wet grass. I like that.”

He approached her to shake hands quite hurriedly, longing but not daring tosay, “Don’t mention the subject to Mr. Casaubon.” No, he dared not, could notsay it. To ask her to be less simple and direct would be like breathing on thecrystal that you want to see the light through. And there was always the othergreat dread—of himself becoming dimmed and forever ray-shorn in her eyes.

“I wish you could have stayed,” said Dorothea, with a touch of mournfulness, asshe rose and put out her hand. She also had her thought which she did not liketo express:—Will certainly ought to lose no time in consulting Mr. Casaubon’swishes, but for her to urge this might seem an undue dictation.

So they only said “Good-by,” and Will quitted the house, striking across thefields so as not to run any risk of encountering Mr. Casaubon’s carriage,which, however, did not appear at the gate until four o’clock. That was anunpropitious hour for coming home: it was too early to gain the moral supportunder ennui of dressing his person for dinner, and too late to undress his mindof the day’s frivolous ceremony and affairs, so as to be prepared for a goodplunge into the serious business of study. On such occasions he usually threwinto an easy-chair in the library, and allowed Dorothea to read the Londonpapers to him, closing his eyes the while. To-day, however, he declined thatrelief, observing that he had already had too many public details urged uponhim; but he spoke more cheerfully than usual, when Dorothea asked about hisfatigue, and added with that air of formal effort which never forsook him evenwhen he spoke without his waistcoat and cravat—

“I have had the gratification of meeting my former acquaintance, Dr. Spanning,to-day, and of being praised by one who is himself a worthy recipient ofpraise. He spoke very handsomely of my late tractate on the EgyptianMysteries,—using, in fact, terms which it would not become me to repeat.” Inuttering the last clause, Mr. Casaubon leaned over the elbow of his chair, andswayed his head up and down, apparently as a muscular outlet instead of thatrecapitulation which would not have been becoming.

“I am very glad you have had that pleasure,” said Dorothea, delighted to seeher husband less weary than usual at this hour. “Before you came I had beenregretting that you happened to be out to-day.”

“Why so, my dear?” said Mr. Casaubon, throwing himself backward again.

“Because Mr. Ladislaw has been here; and he has mentioned a proposal of myuncle’s which I should like to know your opinion of.” Her husband she felt wasreally concerned in this question. Even with her ignorance of the world she hada vague impression that the position offered to Will was out of keeping withhis family connections, and certainly Mr. Casaubon had a claim to be consulted.He did not speak, but merely bowed.

“Dear uncle, you know, has many projects. It appears that he has bought one ofthe Middlemarch newspapers, and he has asked Mr. Ladislaw to stay in thisneighborhood and conduct the paper for him, besides helping him in other ways.”

Dorothea looked at her husband while she spoke, but he had at first blinked andfinally closed his eyes, as if to save them; while his lips became more tense.“What is your opinion?” she added, rather timidly, after a slight pause.

“Did Mr. Ladislaw come on purpose to ask my opinion?” said Mr. Casaubon,opening his eyes narrowly with a knife-edged look at Dorothea. She was reallyuncomfortable on the point he inquired about, but she only became a little moreserious, and her eyes did not swerve.

“No,” she answered immediately, “he did not say that he came to ask youropinion. But when he mentioned the proposal, he of course expected me to tellyou of it.”

Mr. Casaubon was silent.

“I feared that you might feel some objection. But certainly a young man with somuch talent might be very useful to my uncle—might help him to do good in abetter way. And Mr. Ladislaw wishes to have some fixed occupation. He has beenblamed, he says, for not seeking something of that kind, and he would like tostay in this neighborhood because no one cares for him elsewhere.”

Dorothea felt that this was a consideration to soften her husband. However, hedid not speak, and she presently recurred to Dr. Spanning and the Archdeacon’sbreakfast. But there was no longer sunshine on these subjects.

The next morning, without Dorothea’s knowledge, Mr. Casaubon despatched thefollowing letter, beginning “Dear Mr. Ladislaw” (he had always before addressedhim as “Will”):—

“Mrs. Casaubon informs me that a proposal has been made to you, and (accordingto an inference by no means stretched) has on your part been in some degreeentertained, which involves your residence in this neighborhood in a capacitywhich I am justified in saying touches my own position in such a way as rendersit not only natural and warrantable in me when that effect is viewed under theinfluence of legitimate feeling, but incumbent on me when the same effect isconsidered in the light of my responsibilities, to state at once that youracceptance of the proposal above indicated would be highly offensive to me.That I have some claim to the exercise of a veto here, would not, I believe, bedenied by any reasonable person cognizant of the relations between us:relations which, though thrown into the past by your recent procedure, are notthereby annulled in their character of determining antecedents. I will not heremake reflections on any person’s judgment. It is enough for me to point out toyourself that there are certain social fitnesses and proprieties which shouldhinder a somewhat near relative of mine from becoming any wise conspicuous inthis vicinity in a status not only much beneath my own, but associated at bestwith the sciolism of literary or political adventurers. At any rate, thecontrary issue must exclude you from further reception at my house.

Yours faithfully,
“EDWARD CASAUBON.”

Meanwhile Dorothea’s mind was innocently at work towards the furtherembitterment of her husband; dwelling, with a sympathy that grew to agitation,on what Will had told her about his parents and grandparents. Any private hoursin her day were usually spent in her blue-green boudoir, and she had come to bevery fond of its pallid quaintness. Nothing had been outwardly altered there;but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond theavenue of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of aninward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, theinvisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls.She had been so used to struggle for and to find resolve in looking along theavenue towards the arch of western light that the vision itself had gained acommunicating power. Even the pale stag seemed to have reminding glances and tomean mutely, “Yes, we know.” And the group of delicately touched miniatures hadmade an audience as of beings no longer disturbed about their own earthly lot,but still humanly interested. Especially the mysterious “Aunt Julia” about whomDorothea had never found it easy to question her husband.

And now, since her conversation with Will, many fresh images had gathered roundthat Aunt Julia who was Will’s grandmother; the presence of that delicateminiature, so like a living face that she knew, helping to concentrate herfeelings. What a wrong, to cut off the girl from the family protection andinheritance only because she had chosen a man who was poor! Dorothea, earlytroubling her elders with questions about the facts around her, had wroughtherself into some independent clearness as to the historical, political reasonswhy eldest sons had superior rights, and why land should be entailed: thosereasons, impressing her with a certain awe, might be weightier than she knew,but here was a question of ties which left them uninfringed. Here was adaughter whose child—even according to the ordinary aping of aristocraticinstitutions by people who are no more aristocratic than retired grocers, andwho have no more land to “keep together” than a lawn and a paddock—would have aprior claim. Was inheritance a question of liking or of responsibility? All theenergy of Dorothea’s nature went on the side of responsibility—the fulfilmentof claims founded on our own deeds, such as marriage and parentage.

It was true, she said to herself, that Mr. Casaubon had a debt to theLadislaws—that he had to pay back what the Ladislaws had been wronged of. Andnow she began to think of her husband’s will, which had been made at the timeof their marriage, leaving the bulk of his property to her, with proviso incase of her having children. That ought to be altered; and no time ought to belost. This very question which had just arisen about Will Ladislaw’soccupation, was the occasion for placing things on a new, right footing. Herhusband, she felt sure, according to all his previous conduct, would be readyto take the just view, if she proposed it—she, in whose interest an unfairconcentration of the property had been urged. His sense of right had surmountedand would continue to surmount anything that might be called antipathy. Shesuspected that her uncle’s scheme was disapproved by Mr. Casaubon, and thismade it seem all the more opportune that a fresh understanding should be begun,so that instead of Will’s starting penniless and accepting the first functionthat offered itself, he should find himself in possession of a rightful incomewhich should be paid by her husband during his life, and, by an immediatealteration of the will, should be secured at his death. The vision of all thisas what ought to be done seemed to Dorothea like a sudden letting in ofdaylight, waking her from her previous stupidity and incurious self-absorbedignorance about her husband’s relation to others. Will Ladislaw had refused Mr.Casaubon’s future aid on a ground that no longer appeared right to her; and Mr.Casaubon had never himself seen fully what was the claim upon him. “But hewill!” said Dorothea. “The great strength of his character lies here. And whatare we doing with our money? We make no use of half of our income. My own moneybuys me nothing but an uneasy conscience.”

There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of propertyintended for herself, and always regarded by her as excessive. She was blind,you see, to many things obvious to others—likely to tread in the wrong places,as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her ownpure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision wouldhave been perilous with fear.

The thoughts which had gathered vividness in the solitude of her boudoiroccupied her incessantly through the day on which Mr. Casaubon had sent hisletter to Will. Everything seemed hindrance to her till she could find anopportunity of opening her heart to her husband. To his preoccupied mind allsubjects were to be approached gently, and she had never since his illness lostfrom her consciousness the dread of agitating him. But when young ardor is setbrooding over the conception of a prompt deed, the deed itself seems to startforth with independent life, mastering ideal obstacles. The day passed in asombre fashion, not unusual, though Mr. Casaubon was perhaps unusually silent;but there were hours of the night which might be counted on as opportunities ofconversation; for Dorothea, when aware of her husband’s sleeplessness, hadestablished a habit of rising, lighting a candle, and reading him to sleepagain. And this night she was from the beginning sleepless, excited byresolves. He slept as usual for a few hours, but she had risen softly and hadsat in the darkness for nearly an hour before he said—

“Dorothea, since you are up, will you light a candle?”

“Do you feel ill, dear?” was her first question, as she obeyed him.

“No, not at all; but I shall be obliged, since you are up, if you will read mea few pages of Lowth.”

“May I talk to you a little instead?” said Dorothea.

“Certainly.”

“I have been thinking about money all day—that I have always had too much, andespecially the prospect of too much.”

“These, my dear Dorothea, are providential arrangements.”

“But if one has too much in consequence of others being wronged, it seems to methat the divine voice which tells us to set that wrong right must be obeyed.”

“What, my love, is the bearing of your remark?”

“That you have been too liberal in arrangements for me—I mean, with regard toproperty; and that makes me unhappy.”

“How so? I have none but comparatively distant connections.”

“I have been led to think about your aunt Julia, and how she was left inpoverty only because she married a poor man, an act which was not disgraceful,since he was not unworthy. It was on that ground, I know, that you educated Mr.Ladislaw and provided for his mother.”

Dorothea waited a few moments for some answer that would help her onward. Nonecame, and her next words seemed the more forcible to her, falling clear uponthe dark silence.

“But surely we should regard his claim as a much greater one, even to the halfof that property which I know that you have destined for me. And I think heought at once to be provided for on that understanding. It is not right that heshould be in the dependence of poverty while we are rich. And if there is anyobjection to the proposal he mentioned, the giving him his true place and histrue share would set aside any motive for his accepting it.”

“Mr. Ladislaw has probably been speaking to you on this subject?” said Mr.Casaubon, with a certain biting quickness not habitual to him.

“Indeed, no!” said Dorothea, earnestly. “How can you imagine it, since he hasso lately declined everything from you? I fear you think too hardly of him,dear. He only told me a little about his parents and grandparents, and almostall in answer to my questions. You are so good, so just—you have doneeverything you thought to be right. But it seems to me clear that more thanthat is right; and I must speak about it, since I am the person who would getwhat is called benefit by that ‘more’ not being done.”

There was a perceptible pause before Mr. Casaubon replied, not quickly asbefore, but with a still more biting emphasis.

“Dorothea, my love, this is not the first occasion, but it were well that itshould be the last, on which you have assumed a judgment on subjects beyondyour scope. Into the question how far conduct, especially in the matter ofalliances, constitutes a forfeiture of family claims, I do not now enter.Suffice it, that you are not here qualified to discriminate. What I now wishyou to understand is, that I accept no revision, still less dictation withinthat range of affairs which I have deliberated upon as distinctly and properlymine. It is not for you to interfere between me and Mr. Ladislaw, and stillless to encourage communications from him to you which constitute a criticismon my procedure.”

Poor Dorothea, shrouded in the darkness, was in a tumult of conflictingemotions. Alarm at the possible effect on himself of her husband’s stronglymanifested anger, would have checked any expression of her own resentment, evenif she had been quite free from doubt and compunction under the consciousnessthat there might be some justice in his last insinuation. Hearing him breathequickly after he had spoken, she sat listening, frightened, wretched—with adumb inward cry for help to bear this nightmare of a life in which every energywas arrested by dread. But nothing else happened, except that they bothremained a long while sleepless, without speaking again.

The next day, Mr. Casaubon received the following answer from Will Ladislaw:—

“DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I have given all due consideration to your letter ofyesterday, but I am unable to take precisely your view of our mutual position.With the fullest acknowledgment of your generous conduct to me in the past, Imust still maintain that an obligation of this kind cannot fairly fetter me asyou appear to expect that it should. Granted that a benefactor’s wishes mayconstitute a claim; there must always be a reservation as to the quality ofthose wishes. They may possibly clash with more imperative considerations. Or abenefactor’s veto might impose such a negation on a man’s life that theconsequent blank might be more cruel than the benefaction was generous. I ammerely using strong illustrations. In the present case I am unable to take yourview of the bearing which my acceptance of occupation—not enriching certainly,but not dishonorable—will have on your own position which seems to me toosubstantial to be affected in that shadowy manner. And though I do not believethat any change in our relations will occur (certainly none has yet occurred)which can nullify the obligations imposed on me by the past, pardon me for notseeing that those obligations should restrain me from using the ordinaryfreedom of living where I choose, and maintaining myself by any lawfuloccupation I may choose. Regretting that there exists this difference betweenus as to a relation in which the conferring of benefits has been entirely onyour side—

I remain, yours with persistent obligation,
WILL LADISLAW.”

Poor Mr. Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him alittle?) that no man had juster cause for disgust and suspicion than he. YoungLadislaw, he was sure, meant to defy and annoy him, meant to win Dorothea’sconfidence and sow her mind with disrespect, and perhaps aversion, towards herhusband. Some motive beneath the surface had been needed to account for Will’ssudden change of course in rejecting Mr. Casaubon’s aid and quitting histravels; and this defiant determination to fix himself in the neighborhood bytaking up something so much at variance with his former choice as Mr. Brooke’sMiddlemarch projects, revealed clearly enough that the undeclared motive hadrelation to Dorothea. Not for one moment did Mr. Casaubon suspect Dorothea ofany doubleness: he had no suspicions of her, but he had (what was little lessuncomfortable) the positive knowledge that her tendency to form opinions abouther husband’s conduct was accompanied with a disposition to regard WillLadislaw favorably and be influenced by what he said. His own proud reticencehad prevented him from ever being undeceived in the supposition that Dorotheahad originally asked her uncle to invite Will to his house.

And now, on receiving Will’s letter, Mr. Casaubon had to consider his duty. Hewould never have been easy to call his action anything else than duty; but inthis case, contending motives thrust him back into negations.

Should he apply directly to Mr. Brooke, and demand of that troublesomegentleman to revoke his proposal? Or should he consult Sir James Chettam, andget him to concur in remonstrance against a step which touched the wholefamily? In either case Mr. Casaubon was aware that failure was just as probableas success. It was impossible for him to mention Dorothea’s name in the matter,and without some alarming urgency Mr. Brooke was as likely as not, aftermeeting all representations with apparent assent, to wind up by saying, “Neverfear, Casaubon! Depend upon it, young Ladislaw will do you credit. Depend uponit, I have put my finger on the right thing.” And Mr. Casaubon shrank nervouslyfrom communicating on the subject with Sir James Chettam, between whom andhimself there had never been any cordiality, and who would immediately think ofDorothea without any mention of her.

Poor Mr. Casaubon was distrustful of everybody’s feeling towards him,especially as a husband. To let any one suppose that he was jealous would be toadmit their (suspected) view of his disadvantages: to let them know that he didnot find marriage particularly blissful would imply his conversion to their(probably) earlier disapproval. It would be as bad as letting Carp, andBrasenose generally, know how backward he was in organizing the matter for his“Key to all Mythologies.” All through his life Mr. Casaubon had been trying notto admit even to himself the inward sores of self-doubt and jealousy. And onthe most delicate of all personal subjects, the habit of proud suspiciousreticence told doubly.

Thus Mr. Casaubon remained proudly, bitterly silent. But he had forbidden Willto come to Lowick Manor, and he was mentally preparing other measures offrustration.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

“C’est beaucoup que le jugement des hommes sur les actions humaines; tôt outard il devient efficace.”—GUIZOT.

Sir James Chettam could not look with any satisfaction on Mr. Brooke’s newcourses; but it was easier to object than to hinder. Sir James accounted forhis having come in alone one day to lunch with the Cadwalladers by saying—

“I can’t talk to you as I want, before Celia: it might hurt her. Indeed, itwould not be right.”

“I know what you mean—the ‘Pioneer’ at the Grange!” darted in Mrs. Cadwallader,almost before the last word was off her friend’s tongue. “It is frightful—thistaking to buying whistles and blowing them in everybody’s hearing. Lying in bedall day and playing at dominoes, like poor Lord Plessy, would be more privateand bearable.”

“I see they are beginning to attack our friend Brooke in the ‘Trumpet,’” saidthe Rector, lounging back and smiling easily, as he would have done if he hadbeen attacked himself. “There are tremendous sarcasms against a landlord not ahundred miles from Middlemarch, who receives his own rents, and makes noreturns.”

“I do wish Brooke would leave that off,” said Sir James, with his little frownof annoyance.

“Is he really going to be put in nomination, though?” said Mr. Cadwallader. “Isaw Farebrother yesterday—he’s Whiggish himself, hoists Brougham and UsefulKnowledge; that’s the worst I know of him;—and he says that Brooke is gettingup a pretty strong party. Bulstrode, the banker, is his foremost man. But hethinks Brooke would come off badly at a nomination.”

“Exactly,” said Sir James, with earnestness. “I have been inquiring into thething, for I’ve never known anything about Middlemarch politics before—thecounty being my business. What Brooke trusts to, is that they are going to turnout Oliver because he is a Peelite. But Hawley tells me that if they send up aWhig at all it is sure to be Bagster, one of those candidates who come fromheaven knows where, but dead against Ministers, and an experiencedParliamentary man. Hawley’s rather rough: he forgot that he was speaking to me.He said if Brooke wanted a pelting, he could get it cheaper than by going tothe hustings.”

“I warned you all of it,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her hands outward. “Isaid to Humphrey long ago, Mr. Brooke is going to make a splash in the mud. Andnow he has done it.”

“Well, he might have taken it into his head to marry,” said the Rector. “Thatwould have been a graver mess than a little flirtation with politics.”

“He may do that afterwards,” said Mrs. Cadwallader—“when he has come out on theother side of the mud with an ague.”

“What I care for most is his own dignity,” said Sir James. “Of course I carethe more because of the family. But he’s getting on in life now, and I don’tlike to think of his exposing himself. They will be raking up everythingagainst him.”

“I suppose it’s no use trying any persuasion,” said the Rector. “There’s suchan odd mixture of obstinacy and changeableness in Brooke. Have you tried him onthe subject?”

“Well, no,” said Sir James; “I feel a delicacy in appearing to dictate. But Ihave been talking to this young Ladislaw that Brooke is making a factotum of.Ladislaw seems clever enough for anything. I thought it as well to hear what hehad to say; and he is against Brooke’s standing this time. I think he’ll turnhim round: I think the nomination may be staved off.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, nodding. “The independent member hasn’t gothis speeches well enough by heart.”

“But this Ladislaw—there again is a vexatious business,” said Sir James. “Wehave had him two or three times to dine at the Hall (you have met him, by thebye) as Brooke’s guest and a relation of Casaubon’s, thinking he was only on aflying visit. And now I find he’s in everybody’s mouth in Middlemarch as theeditor of the ‘Pioneer.’ There are stories going about him as a quill-drivingalien, a foreign emissary, and what not.”

“Casaubon won’t like that,” said the Rector.

“There is some foreign blood in Ladislaw,” returned Sir James. “I hopehe won’t go into extreme opinions and carry Brooke on.”

“Oh, he’s a dangerous young sprig, that Mr. Ladislaw,” said Mrs. Cadwallader,“with his opera songs and his ready tongue. A sort of Byronic hero—an amorousconspirator, it strikes me. And Thomas Aquinas is not fond of him. I could seethat, the day the picture was brought.”

“I don’t like to begin on the subject with Casaubon,” said Sir James. “He hasmore right to interfere than I. But it’s a disagreeable affair all round. Whata character for anybody with decent connections to show himself in!—one ofthose newspaper fellows! You have only to look at Keck, who manages the‘Trumpet.’ I saw him the other day with Hawley. His writing is sound enough, Ibelieve, but he’s such a low fellow, that I wished he had been on the wrongside.”

“What can you expect with these peddling Middlemarch papers?” said the Rector.“I don’t suppose you could get a high style of man anywhere to be writing upinterests he doesn’t really care about, and for pay that hardly keeps him in atelbows.”

“Exactly: that makes it so annoying that Brooke should have put a man who has asort of connection with the family in a position of that kind. For my part, Ithink Ladislaw is rather a fool for accepting.”

“It is Aquinas’s fault,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Why didn’t he use his interestto get Ladislaw made an attache or sent to India? That is how familiesget rid of troublesome sprigs.”

“There is no knowing to what lengths the mischief may go,” said Sir James,anxiously. “But if Casaubon says nothing, what can I do?”

“Oh my dear Sir James,” said the Rector, “don’t let us make too much of allthis. It is likely enough to end in mere smoke. After a month or two Brooke andthis Master Ladislaw will get tired of each other; Ladislaw will take wing;Brooke will sell the ‘Pioneer,’ and everything will settle down again asusual.”

“There is one good chance—that he will not like to feel his money oozing away,”said Mrs. Cadwallader. “If I knew the items of election expenses I could scarehim. It’s no use plying him with wide words like Expenditure: I wouldn’t talkof phlebotomy, I would empty a pot of leeches upon him. What we good stingypeople don’t like, is having our sixpences sucked away from us.”

“And he will not like having things raked up against him,” said Sir James.“There is the management of his estate. They have begun upon that already. Andit really is painful for me to see. It is a nuisance under one’s very nose. Ido think one is bound to do the best for one’s land and tenants, especially inthese hard times.”

“Perhaps the ‘Trumpet’ may rouse him to make a change, and some good may comeof it all,” said the Rector. “I know I should be glad. I should hear lessgrumbling when my tithe is paid. I don’t know what I should do if there werenot a modus in Tipton.”

“I want him to have a proper man to look after things—I want him to take onGarth again,” said Sir James. “He got rid of Garth twelve years ago, andeverything has been going wrong since. I think of getting Garth to manage forme—he has made such a capital plan for my buildings; and Lovegood is hardly upto the mark. But Garth would not undertake the Tipton estate again unlessBrooke left it entirely to him.”

“In the right of it too,” said the Rector. “Garth is an independent fellow: anoriginal, simple-minded fellow. One day, when he was doing some valuation forme, he told me point-blank that clergymen seldom understood anything aboutbusiness, and did mischief when they meddled; but he said it as quietly andrespectfully as if he had been talking to me about sailors. He would make adifferent parish of Tipton, if Brooke would let him manage. I wish, by the helpof the ‘Trumpet,’ you could bring that round.”

“If Dorothea had kept near her uncle, there would have been some chance,” saidSir James. “She might have got some power over him in time, and she was alwaysuneasy about the estate. She had wonderfully good notions about such things.But now Casaubon takes her up entirely. Celia complains a good deal. We canhardly get her to dine with us, since he had that fit.” Sir James ended with alook of pitying disgust, and Mrs. Cadwallader shrugged her shoulders as much asto say that she was not likely to see anything new in that direction.

“Poor Casaubon!” the Rector said. “That was a nasty attack. I thought he lookedshattered the other day at the Archdeacon’s.”

“In point of fact,” resumed Sir James, not choosing to dwell on “fits,” “Brookedoesn’t mean badly by his tenants or any one else, but he has got that way ofparing and clipping at expenses.”

“Come, that’s a blessing,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “That helps him to findhimself in a morning. He may not know his own opinions, but he does know hisown pocket.”

“I don’t believe a man is in pocket by stinginess on his land,” said Sir James.

“Oh, stinginess may be abused like other virtues: it will not do to keep one’sown pigs lean,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, who had risen to look out of the window.“But talk of an independent politician and he will appear.”

“What! Brooke?” said her husband.

“Yes. Now, you ply him with the ‘Trumpet,’ Humphrey; and I will put the leecheson him. What will you do, Sir James?”

“The fact is, I don’t like to begin about it with Brooke, in our mutualposition; the whole thing is so unpleasant. I do wish people would behave likegentlemen,” said the good baronet, feeling that this was a simple andcomprehensive programme for social well-being.

“Here you all are, eh?” said Mr. Brooke, shuffling round and shaking hands. “Iwas going up to the Hall by-and-by, Chettam. But it’s pleasant to findeverybody, you know. Well, what do you think of things?—going on a little fast!It was true enough, what Lafitte said—‘Since yesterday, a century has passedaway:’—they’re in the next century, you know, on the other side of the water.Going on faster than we are.”

“Why, yes,” said the Rector, taking up the newspaper. “Here is the ‘Trumpet’accusing you of lagging behind—did you see?”

“Eh? no,” said Mr. Brooke, dropping his gloves into his hat and hastilyadjusting his eye-glass. But Mr. Cadwallader kept the paper in his hand,saying, with a smile in his eyes—

“Look here! all this is about a landlord not a hundred miles from Middlemarch,who receives his own rents. They say he is the most retrogressive man in thecounty. I think you must have taught them that word in the ‘Pioneer.’”

“Oh, that is Keck—an illiterate fellow, you know. Retrogressive, now! Come,that’s capital. He thinks it means destructive: they want to make me out adestructive, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with that cheerfulness which isusually sustained by an adversary’s ignorance.

“I think he knows the meaning of the word. Here is a sharp stroke or two. Ifwe had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil sense of theword—we should say, he is one who would dub himself a reformer of ourconstitution, while every interest for which he is immediately responsible isgoing to decay: a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, butdoes not mind five honest tenants being half-starved: a man who shrieks atcorruption, and keeps his farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rottenboroughs, and does not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: aman very open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give anynumber of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their ownpockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to help atenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather out at atenant’s barn-door or make his house look a little less like an Irishcottier’s. But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a manwhose charity increases directly as the square of the distance. And so on.All the rest is to show what sort of legislator a philanthropist is likely tomake,” ended the Rector, throwing down the paper, and clasping his hands at theback of his head, while he looked at Mr. Brooke with an air of amusedneutrality.

“Come, that’s rather good, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the paper andtrying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did, but coloring andsmiling rather nervously; “that about roaring himself red at rotten boroughs—Inever made a speech about rotten boroughs in my life. And as to roaring myselfred and that kind of thing—these men never understand what is good satire.Satire, you know, should be true up to a certain point. I recollect they saidthat in ‘The Edinburgh’ somewhere—it must be true up to a certain point.”

“Well, that is really a hit about the gates,” said Sir James, anxious to treadcarefully. “Dagley complained to me the other day that he hadn’t got a decentgate on his farm. Garth has invented a new pattern of gate—I wish you would tryit. One ought to use some of one’s timber in that way.”

“You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke, appearing toglance over the columns of the “Trumpet.” “That’s your hobby, and you don’tmind the expense.”

“I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing for Parliament,”said Mrs. Cadwallader. “They said the last unsuccessful candidate atMiddlemarch—Giles, wasn’t his name?—spent ten thousand pounds and failedbecause he did not bribe enough. What a bitter reflection for a man!”

“Somebody was saying,” said the Rector, laughingly, “that East Retford wasnothing to Middlemarch, for bribery.”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Brooke. “The Tories bribe, you know: Hawley andhis set bribe with treating, hot codlings, and that sort of thing; and theybring the voters drunk to the poll. But they are not going to have it their ownway in future—not in future, you know. Middlemarch is a little backward, Iadmit—the freemen are a little backward. But we shall educate them—we shallbring them on, you know. The best people there are on our side.”

“Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm,” remarked SirJames. “He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm.”

“And that if you got pelted,” interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, “half the rotteneggs would mean hatred of your committee-man. Good heavens! Think what it mustbe to be pelted for wrong opinions. And I seem to remember a story of a manthey pretended to chair and let him fall into a dust-heap on purpose!”

“Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one’s coat,” said the Rector. “Iconfess that’s what I should be afraid of, if we parsons had to stand at thehustings for preferment. I should be afraid of their reckoning up all myfishing days. Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can bepelted with.”

“The fact is,” said Sir James, “if a man goes into public life he must beprepared for the consequences. He must make himself proof against calumny.”

“My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But howwill you make yourself proof against calumny? You should read history—look atostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happento the best men, you know. But what is that in Horace?—fiat justitia,ruat… something or other.”

“Exactly,” said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual. “What I mean bybeing proof against calumny is being able to point to the fact as acontradiction.”

“And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one’s self,” saidMrs. Cadwallader.

But it was Sir James’s evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke. “Well,you know, Chettam,” he said, rising, taking up his hat and leaning on hisstick, “you and I have a different system. You are all for outlay with yourfarms. I don’t want to make out that my system is good under allcirc*mstances—under all circ*mstances, you know.”

“There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,” said Sir James.“Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair valuation. What do yousay, Cadwallader?”

“I agree with you. If I were Brooke, I would choke the ‘Trumpet’ at once bygetting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving him carteblanche about gates and repairs: that’s my view of the politicalsituation,” said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking his thumbs in hisarmholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.

“That’s a showy sort of thing to do, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But I shouldlike you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his tenants forarrears as little as I have. I let the old tenants stay on. I’m uncommonlyeasy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy. I have my own ideas, and I take mystand on them, you know. A man who does that is always charged witheccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of thing. When I change my line ofaction, I shall follow my own ideas.”

After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had omittedto send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly good-by.

“I didn’t want to take a liberty with Brooke,” said Sir James; “I see he isnettled. But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of fact no newtenant would take the farms on the present terms.”

“I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,” said the Rector. “Butyou were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling another. You wanted tofrighten him away from expense, and we want to frighten him into it. Better lethim try to be popular and see that his character as a landlord stands in hisway. I don’t think it signifies two straws about the ‘Pioneer,’ or Ladislaw, orBrooke’s speechifying to the Middlemarchers. But it does signify about theparishioners in Tipton being comfortable.”

“Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.“You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad management, and thenwe should all have pulled together. If you put him a-horseback on politics, Iwarn you of the consequences. It was all very well to ride on sticks at homeand call them ideas.”

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Sir James Chettam’s mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxietyto “act on Brooke,” once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea’scapacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely,to plead Celia’s indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself tothe Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, aftermaking her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of theestate.

In this way it happened that one day near four o’clock, when Mr. Brooke andLadislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs. Casaubon wasannounced.

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and, obliged tohelp Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging sheep-stealers, wasexemplifying the power our minds have of riding several horses at once byinwardly arranging measures towards getting a lodging for himself inMiddlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while thereflitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealingepic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced hestarted up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends.Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in theadjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which mighthave made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the messageof a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature;and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality ofsoul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from hispassion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and whitemountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will,too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near himcleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and hispoint of view shifted as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was thefreshness of morning.

“Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now,” said Mr. Brooke, meeting and kissingher. “You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose. That’s right. We mustnot have you getting too learned for a woman, you know.”

“There is no fear of that, uncle,” said Dorothea, turning to Will and shakinghands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of greeting, butwent on answering her uncle. “I am very slow. When I want to be busy withbooks, I am often playing truant among my thoughts. I find it is not so easy tobe learned as to plan cottages.”

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidentlypreoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He wasridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming had anythingto do with him.

“Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was good tobreak that off a little. Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; itdoesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. I have never let myselfbe run away with; I always pulled up. That is what I tell Ladislaw. He and Iare alike, you know: he likes to go into everything. We are working at capitalpunishment. We shall do a great deal together, Ladislaw and I.”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, “Sir James has beentelling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon in yourmanagement of the estate—that you are thinking of having the farms valued, andrepairs made, and the cottages improved, so that Tipton may look quite anotherplace. Oh, how happy!”—she went on, clasping her hands, with a return to thatmore childlike impetuous manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. “IfI were at home still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about withyou and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised mycottages, Sir James says.”

“Chettam is a little hasty, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, coloring slightly; “alittle hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything of the kind. I neversaid I should not do it, you know.”

“He only feels confident that you will do it,” said Dorothea, in a voice asclear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a credo, “becauseyou mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for the improvement of thepeople, and one of the first things to be made better is the state of the landand the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and sevenchildren in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger thanthis table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where theylive in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is onereason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think mestupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarseugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-roomseemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while wedon’t mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I thinkwe have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we havetried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.”

Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten everythingexcept the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked: an experience oncehabitual with her, but hardly ever present since her marriage, which had been aperpetual struggle of energy with fear. For the moment, Will’s admiration wasaccompanied with a chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed offeeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness inher: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes madesad oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case of good Mr.Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a stammeringcondition under the eloquence of his niece. He could not immediately find anyother mode of expressing himself than that of rising, fixing his eye-glass, andfingering the papers before him. At last he said—

“There is something in what you say, my dear, something in what you say—but noteverything—eh, Ladislaw? You and I don’t like our pictures and statues beingfound fault with. Young ladies are a little ardent, you know—a littleone-sided, my dear. Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates anation—emollit mores—you understand a little Latin now. But—eh? what?”

These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had come in to say thatthe keeper had found one of Dagley’s boys with a leveret in his hand justkilled.

“I’ll come, I’ll come. I shall let him off easily, you know,” said Mr. Brookeaside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.

“I hope you feel how right this change is that I—that Sir James wishes for,”said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.

“I do, now I have heard you speak about it. I shall not forget what you havesaid. But can you think of something else at this moment? I may not haveanother opportunity of speaking to you about what has occurred,” said Will,rising with a movement of impatience, and holding the back of his chair withboth hands.

“Pray tell me what it is,” said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and going tothe open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and wagging his tail. Sheleaned her back against the window-frame, and laid her hand on the dog’s head;for though, as we know, she was not fond of pets that must be held in the handsor trodden on, she was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and verypolite if she had to decline their advances.

Will followed her only with his eyes and said, “I presume you know that Mr.Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house.”

“No, I did not,” said Dorothea, after a moment’s pause. She was evidently muchmoved. “I am very, very sorry,” she added, mournfully. She was thinking of whatWill had no knowledge of—the conversation between her and her husband in thedarkness; and she was anew smitten with hopelessness that she could influenceMr. Casaubon’s action. But the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Willthat it was not all given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not beenvisited by the idea that Mr. Casaubon’s dislike and jealousy of him turned uponherself. He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation: of delight that hecould dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home, withoutsuspicion and without stint—of vexation because he was of too little accountwith her, was not formidable enough, was treated with an unhesitatingbenevolence which did not flatter him. But his dread of any change in Dorotheawas stronger than his discontent, and he began to speak again in a tone of mereexplanation.

“Mr. Casaubon’s reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position here whichhe considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin. I have told him that I cannotgive way on this point. It is a little too hard on me to expect that my coursein life is to be hampered by prejudices which I think ridiculous. Obligationmay be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on uswhen we were too young to know its meaning. I would not have accepted theposition if I had not meant to make it useful and honorable. I am not bound toregard family dignity in any other light.”

Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether in the wrong, onmore grounds than Will had mentioned.

“It is better for us not to speak on the subject,” she said, with atremulousness not common in her voice, “since you and Mr. Casaubon disagree.You intend to remain?” She was looking out on the lawn, with melancholymeditation.

“Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now,” said Will, in a tone of almostboyish complaint.

“No,” said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, “hardly ever. But I shallhear of you. I shall know what you are doing for my uncle.”

“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell meanything.”

“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisitesmile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at Lowick.”

“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.

“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I mean,for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my sharewithout doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and itcomforts me.”

“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what itis and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power againstevil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darknessnarrower.”

“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”

“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her handsentreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. Itis my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always beenfinding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now Ihardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they maynot be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that youmight know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”

“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather wondering athimself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who weretalking confidentially of birds.

“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know aboutreligion, but the belief that helps you most?”

“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am arebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”

“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea,smiling.

“Now you are subtle,” said Will.

“Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don’t feel as if I weresubtle,” said Dorothea, playfully. “But how long my uncle is! I must go andlook for him. I must really go on to the Hall. Celia is expecting me.”

Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said that he would stepinto the carriage and go with Dorothea as far as Dagley’s, to speak about thesmall delinquent who had been caught with the leveret. Dorothea renewed thesubject of the estate as they drove along, but Mr. Brooke, not being takenunawares, got the talk under his own control.

“Chettam, now,” he replied; “he finds fault with me, my dear; but I should notpreserve my game if it were not for Chettam, and he can’t say that that expenseis for the sake of the tenants, you know. It’s a little against myfeeling:—poaching, now, if you come to look into it—I have often thought ofgetting up the subject. Not long ago, Flavell, the Methodist preacher, wasbrought up for knocking down a hare that came across his path when he and hiswife were walking out together. He was pretty quick, and knocked it on theneck.”

“That was very brutal, I think,” said Dorothea.

“Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a Methodist preacher,you know. And Johnson said, ‘You may judge what a hypocrite he is.’ Andupon my word, I thought Flavell looked very little like ‘the highest style ofman’—as somebody calls the Christian—Young, the poet Young, I think—you knowYoung? Well, now, Flavell in his shabby black gaiters, pleading that he thoughtthe Lord had sent him and his wife a good dinner, and he had a right to knockit down, though not a mighty hunter before the Lord, as Nimrod was—I assure youit was rather comic: Fielding would have made something of it—or Scott,now—Scott might have worked it up. But really, when I came to think of it, Icouldn’t help liking that the fellow should have a bit of hare to say graceover. It’s all a matter of prejudice—prejudice with the law on its side, youknow—about the stick and the gaiters, and so on. However, it doesn’t do toreason about things; and law is law. But I got Johnson to be quiet, and Ihushed the matter up. I doubt whether Chettam would not have been more severe,and yet he comes down on me as if I were the hardest man in the county. Buthere we are at Dagley’s.”

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is wonderfulhow much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed forthem. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for usafter we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and onthe other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes ourencroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them.Dagley’s homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today,with his mind thus sore about the fault-finding of the “Trumpet,” echoed by SirJames.

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine artswhich makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delightedwith this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had dormer-windows inthe dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porchwas blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed withgray worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wildluxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it was aperfect study of highly mingled subdued color, and there was an aged goat (keptdoubtless on interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the openback-kitchen door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken graybarn-doors, the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finishedunloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scantydairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed inbrown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about theuneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre qualityof rinsings,—all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with highclouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a“charming bit,” touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred bythe depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farmingcapital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. But thesetroublesome associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, andspoiled the scene for him. Mr. Dagley himself made a figure in the landscape,carrying a pitchfork and wearing his milking-hat—a very old beaver flattened infront. His coat and breeches were the best he had, and he would not have beenwearing them on this weekday occasion if he had not been to market and returnedlater than usual, having given himself the rare treat of dining at the publictable of the Blue Bull. How he came to fall into this extravagance wouldperhaps be matter of wonderment to himself on the morrow; but before dinnersomething in the state of the country, a slight pause in the harvest before theFar Dips were cut, the stories about the new King and the numerous handbills onthe walls, had seemed to warrant a little recklessness. It was a maxim aboutMiddlemarch, and regarded as self-evident, that good meat should have gooddrink, which last Dagley interpreted as plenty of table ale well followed up byrum-and-water. These liquors have so far truth in them that they were not falseenough to make poor Dagley seem merry: they only made his discontent lesstongue-tied than usual. He had also taken too much in the shape of muddypolitical talk, a stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism,which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likelyto be worse. He was flushed, and his eyes had a decidedly quarrelsome stare ashe stood still grasping his pitchfork, while the landlord approached with hiseasy shuffling walk, one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other swinginground a thin walking-stick.

“Dagley, my good fellow,” began Mr. Brooke, conscious that he was going to bevery friendly about the boy.

“Oh, ay, I’m a good feller, am I? Thank ye, sir, thank ye,” said Dagley, with aloud snarling irony which made fa*g the sheep-dog stir from his seat and prickhis ears; but seeing Monk enter the yard after some outside loitering, fa*gseated himself again in an attitude of observation. “I’m glad to hear I’m agood feller.”

Mr. Brooke reflected that it was market-day, and that his worthy tenant hadprobably been dining, but saw no reason why he should not go on, since he couldtake the precaution of repeating what he had to say to Mrs. Dagley.

“Your little lad Jacob has been caught killing a leveret, Dagley: I have toldJohnson to lock him up in the empty stable an hour or two, just to frightenhim, you know. But he will be brought home by-and-by, before night: and you’lljust look after him, will you, and give him a reprimand, you know?”

“No, I woon’t: I’ll be dee’d if I’ll leather my boy to please you or anybodyelse, not if you was twenty landlords istid o’ one, and that a bad un.”

Dagley’s words were loud enough to summon his wife to the back-kitchen door—theonly entrance ever used, and one always open except in bad weather—and Mr.Brooke, saying soothingly, “Well, well, I’ll speak to your wife—I didn’t meanbeating, you know,” turned to walk to the house. But Dagley, only the moreinclined to “have his say” with a gentleman who walked away from him, followedat once, with fa*g slouching at his heels and sullenly evading some small andprobably charitable advances on the part of Monk.

“How do you do, Mrs. Dagley?” said Mr. Brooke, making some haste. “I came totell you about your boy: I don’t want you to give him the stick, you know.” Hewas careful to speak quite plainly this time.

Overworked Mrs. Dagley—a thin, worn woman, from whose life pleasure had soentirely vanished that she had not even any Sunday clothes which could give hersatisfaction in preparing for church—had already had a misunderstanding withher husband since he had come home, and was in low spirits, expecting theworst. But her husband was beforehand in answering.

“No, nor he woon’t hev the stick, whether you want it or no,” pursued Dagley,throwing out his voice, as if he wanted it to hit hard. “You’ve got no call tocome an’ talk about sticks o’ these primises, as you woon’t give a stick tow’rtmending. Go to Middlemarch to ax for your charrickter.”

“You’d far better hold your tongue, Dagley,” said the wife, “and not kick yourown trough over. When a man as is father of a family has been an’ spent moneyat market and made himself the worse for liquor, he’s done enough mischief forone day. But I should like to know what my boy’s done, sir.”

“Niver do you mind what he’s done,” said Dagley, more fiercely, “it’s mybusiness to speak, an’ not yourn. An’ I wull speak, too. I’ll hev my say—supperor no. An’ what I say is, as I’ve lived upo’ your ground from my father andgrandfather afore me, an’ hev dropped our money into’t, an’ me an’ my childrenmight lie an’ rot on the ground for top-dressin’ as we can’t find the money tobuy, if the King wasn’t to put a stop.”

“My good fellow, you’re drunk, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, confidentially butnot judiciously. “Another day, another day,” he added, turning as if to go.

But Dagley immediately fronted him, and fa*g at his heels growled low, as hismaster’s voice grew louder and more insulting, while Monk also drew close insilent dignified watch. The laborers on the wagon were pausing to listen, andit seemed wiser to be quite passive than to attempt a ridiculous flight pursuedby a bawling man.

“I’m no more drunk nor you are, nor so much,” said Dagley. “I can carry myliquor, an’ I know what I meean. An’ I meean as the King ’ull put a stop to ’t,for them say it as knows it, as there’s to be a Rinform, and them landlords asnever done the right thing by their tenants ’ull be treated i’ that way asthey’ll hev to scuttle off. An’ there’s them i’ Middlemarch knows what theRinform is—an’ as knows who’ll hev to scuttle. Says they, ‘I know whoyour landlord is.’ An’ says I, ‘I hope you’re the better for knowin’him, I arn’t.’ Says they, ‘He’s a close-fisted un.’ ‘Ay ay,’ says I. ‘He’s aman for the Rinform,’ says they. That’s what they says. An’ I made out what theRinform were—an’ it were to send you an’ your likes a-scuttlin’ an’ wi’ prettystrong-smellin’ things too. An’ you may do as you like now, for I’m none afeardon you. An’ you’d better let my boy aloan, an’ look to yoursen, afore theRinform has got upo’ your back. That’s what I’n got to say,” concluded Mr.Dagley, striking his fork into the ground with a firmness which provedinconvenient as he tried to draw it up again.

At this last action Monk began to bark loudly, and it was a moment for Mr.Brooke to escape. He walked out of the yard as quickly as he could, in someamazement at the novelty of his situation. He had never been insulted on hisown land before, and had been inclined to regard himself as a general favorite(we are all apt to do so, when we think of our own amiability more than of whatother people are likely to want of us). When he had quarrelled with Caleb Garthtwelve years before he had thought that the tenants would be pleased at thelandlord’s taking everything into his own hands.

Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the midnightdarkness of Mr. Dagley; but nothing was easier in those times than for anhereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant, in spite somehow of having arector in the twin parish who was a gentleman to the backbone, a curate nearerat hand who preached more learnedly than the rector, a landlord who had goneinto everything, especially fine art and social improvement, and all the lightsof Middlemarch only three miles off. As to the facility with which mortalsescape knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze ofLondon, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would havebeen if he had learned scant skill in “summing” from the parish-clerk ofTipton, and read a chapter in the Bible with immense difficulty, because suchnames as Isaiah or Apollos remained unmanageable after twice spelling. PoorDagley read a few verses sometimes on a Sunday evening, and the world was atleast not darker to him than it had been before. Some things he knewthoroughly, namely, the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness ofweather, stock and crops, at Freeman’s End—so called apparently by way ofsarcasm, to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that therewas no earthly “beyond” open to him.

CHAPTER XL.

Wise in his daily work was he:
To fruits of diligence,
And not to faiths or polity,
He plied his utmost sense.
These perfect in their little parts,
Whose work is all their prize—
Without them how could laws, or arts,
Or towered cities rise?

In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often necessary tochange our place and examine a particular mixture or group at some distancefrom the point where the movement we are interested in was set up. The group Iam moving towards is at Caleb Garth’s breakfast-table in the large parlor wherethe maps and desk were: father, mother, and five of the children. Mary was justnow at home waiting for a situation, while Christy, the boy next to her, wasgetting cheap learning and cheap fare in Scotland, having to his father’sdisappointment taken to books instead of that sacred calling “business.”

The letters had come—nine costly letters, for which the postman had been paidthree and twopence, and Mr. Garth was forgetting his tea and toast while heread his letters and laid them open one above the other, sometimes swaying hishead slowly, sometimes screwing up his mouth in inward debate, but notforgetting to cut off a large red seal unbroken, which Letty snatched up likean eager terrier.

The talk among the rest went on unrestrainedly, for nothing disturbed Caleb’sabsorption except shaking the table when he was writing.

Two letters of the nine had been for Mary. After reading them, she had passedthem to her mother, and sat playing with her tea-spoon absently, till with asudden recollection she returned to her sewing, which she had kept on her lapduring breakfast.

“Oh, don’t sew, Mary!” said Ben, pulling her arm down. “Make me a peaco*ck withthis bread-crumb.” He had been kneading a small mass for the purpose.

“No, no, Mischief!” said Mary, good-humoredly, while she pricked his handlightly with her needle. “Try and mould it yourself: you have seen me do itoften enough. I must get this sewing done. It is for Rosamond Vincy: she is tobe married next week, and she can’t be married without this handkerchief.” Maryended merrily, amused with the last notion.

“Why can’t she, Mary?” said Letty, seriously interested in this mystery, andpushing her head so close to her sister that Mary now turned the threateningneedle towards Letty’s nose.

“Because this is one of a dozen, and without it there would only be eleven,”said Mary, with a grave air of explanation, so that Letty sank back with asense of knowledge.

“Have you made up your mind, my dear?” said Mrs. Garth, laying the lettersdown.

“I shall go to the school at York,” said Mary. “I am less unfit to teach in aschool than in a family. I like to teach classes best. And, you see, I mustteach: there is nothing else to be done.”

“Teaching seems to me the most delightful work in the world,” said Mrs. Garth,with a touch of rebuke in her tone. “I could understand your objection to it ifyou had not knowledge enough, Mary, or if you disliked children.”

“I suppose we never quite understand why another dislikes what we like,mother,” said Mary, rather curtly. “I am not fond of a schoolroom: I like theoutside world better. It is a very inconvenient fault of mine.”

“It must be very stupid to be always in a girls’ school,” said Alfred. “Such aset of nincompoops, like Mrs. Ballard’s pupils walking two and two.”

“And they have no games worth playing at,” said Jim. “They can neither thrownor leap. I don’t wonder at Mary’s not liking it.”

“What is that Mary doesn’t like, eh?” said the father, looking over hisspectacles and pausing before he opened his next letter.

“Being among a lot of nincompoop girls,” said Alfred.

“Is it the situation you had heard of, Mary?” said Caleb, gently, looking athis daughter.

“Yes, father: the school at York. I have determined to take it. It is quite thebest. Thirty-five pounds a-year, and extra pay for teaching the smalleststrummers at the piano.”

“Poor child! I wish she could stay at home with us, Susan,” said Caleb, lookingplaintively at his wife.

“Mary would not be happy without doing her duty,” said Mrs. Garth,magisterially, conscious of having done her own.

“It wouldn’t make me happy to do such a nasty duty as that,” said Alfred—atwhich Mary and her father laughed silently, but Mrs. Garth said, gravely—

“Do find a fitter word than nasty, my dear Alfred, for everything that youthink disagreeable. And suppose that Mary could help you to go to Mr. Hanmer’swith the money she gets?”

“That seems to me a great shame. But she’s an old brick,” said Alfred, risingfrom his chair, and pulling Mary’s head backward to kiss her.

Mary colored and laughed, but could not conceal that the tears were coming.Caleb, looking on over his spectacles, with the angles of his eyebrows falling,had an expression of mingled delight and sorrow as he returned to the openingof his letter; and even Mrs. Garth, her lips curling with a calm contentment,allowed that inappropriate language to pass without correction, although Benimmediately took it up, and sang, “She’s an old brick, old brick, old brick!”to a cantering measure, which he beat out with his fist on Mary’s arm.

But Mrs. Garth’s eyes were now drawn towards her husband, who was already deepin the letter he was reading. His face had an expression of grave surprise,which alarmed her a little, but he did not like to be questioned while he wasreading, and she remained anxiously watching till she saw him suddenly shakenby a little joyous laugh as he turned back to the beginning of the letter, andlooking at her above his spectacles, said, in a low tone, “What do you think,Susan?”

She went and stood behind him, putting her hand on his shoulder, while theyread the letter together. It was from Sir James Chettam, offering to Mr. Garththe management of the family estates at Fresh*tt and elsewhere, and adding thatSir James had been requested by Mr. Brooke of Tipton to ascertain whether Mr.Garth would be disposed at the same time to resume the agency of the Tiptonproperty. The Baronet added in very obliging words that he himself wasparticularly desirous of seeing the Fresh*tt and Tipton estates under the samemanagement, and he hoped to be able to show that the double agency might beheld on terms agreeable to Mr. Garth, whom he would be glad to see at the Hallat twelve o’clock on the following day.

“He writes handsomely, doesn’t he, Susan?” said Caleb, turning his eyes upwardto his wife, who raised her hand from his shoulder to his ear, while she restedher chin on his head. “Brooke didn’t like to ask me himself, I can see,” hecontinued, laughing silently.

“Here is an honor to your father, children,” said Mrs. Garth, looking round atthe five pair of eyes, all fixed on the parents. “He is asked to take a postagain by those who dismissed him long ago. That shows that he did his workwell, so that they feel the want of him.”

“Like Cincinnatus—hooray!” said Ben, riding on his chair, with a pleasantconfidence that discipline was relaxed.

“Will they come to fetch him, mother?” said Letty, thinking of the Mayor andCorporation in their robes.

Mrs. Garth patted Letty’s head and smiled, but seeing that her husband wasgathering up his letters and likely soon to be out of reach in that sanctuary“business,” she pressed his shoulder and said emphatically—

“Now, mind you ask fair pay, Caleb.”

“Oh yes,” said Caleb, in a deep voice of assent, as if it would be unreasonableto suppose anything else of him. “It’ll come to between four and five hundred,the two together.” Then with a little start of remembrance he said, “Mary,write and give up that school. Stay and help your mother. I’m as pleased asPunch, now I’ve thought of that.”

No manner could have been less like that of Punch triumphant than Caleb’s, buthis talents did not lie in finding phrases, though he was very particular abouthis letter-writing, and regarded his wife as a treasury of correct language.

There was almost an uproar among the children now, and Mary held up the cambricembroidery towards her mother entreatingly, that it might be put out of reachwhile the boys dragged her into a dance. Mrs. Garth, in placid joy, began toput the cups and plates together, while Caleb pushing his chair from the table,as if he were going to move to the desk, still sat holding his letters in hishand and looking on the ground meditatively, stretching out the fingers of hisleft hand, according to a mute language of his own. At last he said—

“It’s a thousand pities Christy didn’t take to business, Susan. I shall wanthelp by-and-by. And Alfred must go off to the engineering—I’ve made up my mindto that.” He fell into meditation and finger-rhetoric again for a little while,and then continued: “I shall make Brooke have new agreements with the tenants,and I shall draw up a rotation of crops. And I’ll lay a wager we can get finebricks out of the clay at Bott’s corner. I must look into that: it wouldcheapen the repairs. It’s a fine bit of work, Susan! A man without a familywould be glad to do it for nothing.”

“Mind you don’t, though,” said his wife, lifting up her finger.

“No, no; but it’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the natureof business: to have the chance of getting a bit of the country into goodfettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, andgetting a bit of good contriving and solid building done—that those who areliving and those who come after will be the better for. I’d sooner have it thana fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is.” Here Caleb laid down hisletters, thrust his fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat, and satupright, but presently proceeded with some awe in his voice and moving his headslowly aside—“It’s a great gift of God, Susan.”

“That it is, Caleb,” said his wife, with answering fervor. “And it will be ablessing to your children to have had a father who did such work: a fatherwhose good work remains though his name may be forgotten.” She could not sayany more to him then about the pay.

In the evening, when Caleb, rather tired with his day’s work, was seated insilence with his pocket-book open on his knee, while Mrs. Garth and Mary wereat their sewing, and Letty in a corner was whispering a dialogue with her doll,Mr. Farebrother came up the orchard walk, dividing the bright August lights andshadows with the tufted grass and the apple-tree boughs. We know that he wasfond of his parishioners the Garths, and had thought Mary worth mentioning toLydgate. He used to the full the clergyman’s privilege of disregarding theMiddlemarch discrimination of ranks, and always told his mother that Mrs. Garthwas more of a lady than any matron in the town. Still, you see, he spent hisevenings at the Vincys’, where the matron, though less of a lady, presided overa well-lit drawing-room and whist. In those days human intercourse was notdetermined solely by respect. But the Vicar did heartily respect the Garths,and a visit from him was no surprise to that family. Nevertheless he accountedfor it even while he was shaking hands, by saying, “I come as an envoy, Mrs.Garth: I have something to say to you and Garth on behalf of Fred Vincy. Thefact is, poor fellow,” he continued, as he seated himself and looked round withhis bright glance at the three who were listening to him, “he has taken me intohis confidence.”

Mary’s heart beat rather quickly: she wondered how far Fred’s confidence hadgone.

“We haven’t seen the lad for months,” said Caleb. “I couldn’t think what wasbecome of him.”

“He has been away on a visit,” said the Vicar, “because home was a little toohot for him, and Lydgate told his mother that the poor fellow must not begin tostudy yet. But yesterday he came and poured himself out to me. I am very gladhe did, because I have seen him grow up from a youngster of fourteen, and I amso much at home in the house that the children are like nephews and nieces tome. But it is a difficult case to advise upon. However, he has asked me to comeand tell you that he is going away, and that he is so miserable about his debtto you, and his inability to pay, that he can’t bear to come himself even tobid you good by.”

“Tell him it doesn’t signify a farthing,” said Caleb, waving his hand. “We’vehad the pinch and have got over it. And now I’m going to be as rich as a Jew.”

“Which means,” said Mrs. Garth, smiling at the Vicar, “that we are going tohave enough to bring up the boys well and to keep Mary at home.”

“What is the treasure-trove?” said Mr. Farebrother.

“I’m going to be agent for two estates, Fresh*tt and Tipton; and perhaps for apretty little bit of land in Lowick besides: it’s all the same familyconnection, and employment spreads like water if it’s once set going. It makesme very happy, Mr. Farebrother”—here Caleb threw back his head a little, andspread his arms on the elbows of his chair—“that I’ve got an opportunity againwith the letting of the land, and carrying out a notion or two withimprovements. It’s a most uncommonly cramping thing, as I’ve often told Susan,to sit on horseback and look over the hedges at the wrong thing, and not beable to put your hand to it to make it right. What people do who go intopolitics I can’t think: it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over onlya few hundred acres.”

It was seldom that Caleb volunteered so long a speech, but his happiness hadthe effect of mountain air: his eyes were bright, and the words came withouteffort.

“I congratulate you heartily, Garth,” said the Vicar. “This is the best sort ofnews I could have had to carry to Fred Vincy, for he dwelt a good deal on theinjury he had done you in causing you to part with money—robbing you of it, hesaid—which you wanted for other purposes. I wish Fred were not such an idledog; he has some very good points, and his father is a little hard upon him.”

“Where is he going?” said Mrs. Garth, rather coldly.

“He means to try again for his degree, and he is going up to study before term.I have advised him to do that. I don’t urge him to enter the Church—on thecontrary. But if he will go and work so as to pass, that will be some guaranteethat he has energy and a will; and he is quite at sea; he doesn’t know whatelse to do. So far he will please his father, and I have promised in the meantime to try and reconcile Vincy to his son’s adopting some other line of life.Fred says frankly he is not fit for a clergyman, and I would do anything Icould to hinder a man from the fatal step of choosing the wrong profession. Hequoted to me what you said, Miss Garth—do you remember it?” (Mr. Farebrotherused to say “Mary” instead of “Miss Garth,” but it was part of his delicacy totreat her with the more deference because, according to Mrs. Vincy’s phrase,she worked for her bread.)

Mary felt uncomfortable, but, determined to take the matter lightly, answeredat once, “I have said so many impertinent things to Fred—we are such oldplayfellows.”

“You said, according to him, that he would be one of those ridiculous clergymenwho help to make the whole clergy ridiculous. Really, that was so cutting thatI felt a little cut myself.”

Caleb laughed. “She gets her tongue from you, Susan,” he said, with someenjoyment.

“Not its flippancy, father,” said Mary, quickly, fearing that her mother wouldbe displeased. “It is rather too bad of Fred to repeat my flippant speeches toMr. Farebrother.”

“It was certainly a hasty speech, my dear,” said Mrs. Garth, with whom speakingevil of dignities was a high misdemeanor. “We should not value our Vicar theless because there was a ridiculous curate in the next parish.”

“There’s something in what she says, though,” said Caleb, not disposed to haveMary’s sharpness undervalued. “A bad workman of any sort makes his fellowsmistrusted. Things hang together,” he added, looking on the floor and movinghis feet uneasily with a sense that words were scantier than thoughts.

“Clearly,” said the Vicar, amused. “By being contemptible we set men’s minds tothe tune of contempt. I certainly agree with Miss Garth’s view of the matter,whether I am condemned by it or not. But as to Fred Vincy, it is only fair heshould be excused a little: old Featherstone’s delusive behavior did help tospoil him. There was something quite diabolical in not leaving him a farthingafter all. But Fred has the good taste not to dwell on that. And what he caresmost about is having offended you, Mrs. Garth; he supposes you will never thinkwell of him again.”

“I have been disappointed in Fred,” said Mrs. Garth, with decision. “But Ishall be ready to think well of him again when he gives me good reason to doso.”

At this point Mary went out of the room, taking Letty with her.

“Oh, we must forgive young people when they’re sorry,” said Caleb, watchingMary close the door. “And as you say, Mr. Farebrother, there was the very devilin that old man. Now Mary’s gone out, I must tell you a thing—it’s only knownto Susan and me, and you’ll not tell it again. The old scoundrel wanted Mary toburn one of the wills the very night he died, when she was sitting up with himby herself, and he offered her a sum of money that he had in the box by him ifshe would do it. But Mary, you understand, could do no such thing—would not behandling his iron chest, and so on. Now, you see, the will he wanted burnt wasthis last, so that if Mary had done what he wanted, Fred Vincy would have hadten thousand pounds. The old man did turn to him at the last. That touches poorMary close; she couldn’t help it—she was in the right to do what she did, butshe feels, as she says, much as if she had knocked down somebody’s property andbroken it against her will, when she was rightfully defending herself. I feelwith her, somehow, and if I could make any amends to the poor lad, instead ofbearing him a grudge for the harm he did us, I should be glad to do it. Now,what is your opinion, sir? Susan doesn’t agree with me; she says—tell what yousay, Susan.”

“Mary could not have acted otherwise, even if she had known what would be theeffect on Fred,” said Mrs. Garth, pausing from her work, and looking at Mr.Farebrother.

“And she was quite ignorant of it. It seems to me, a loss which falls onanother because we have done right is not to lie upon our conscience.”

The Vicar did not answer immediately, and Caleb said, “It’s the feeling. Thechild feels in that way, and I feel with her. You don’t mean your horse totread on a dog when you’re backing out of the way; but it goes through you,when it’s done.”

“I am sure Mrs. Garth would agree with you there,” said Mr. Farebrother, whofor some reason seemed more inclined to ruminate than to speak. “One couldhardly say that the feeling you mention about Fred is wrong—or rather,mistaken—though no man ought to make a claim on such feeling.”

“Well, well,” said Caleb, “it’s a secret. You will not tell Fred.”

“Certainly not. But I shall carry the other good news—that you can afford theloss he caused you.”

Mr. Farebrother left the house soon after, and seeing Mary in the orchard withLetty, went to say good-by to her. They made a pretty picture in the westernlight which brought out the brightness of the apples on the old scant-leavedboughs—Mary in her lavender gingham and black ribbons holding a basket, whileLetty in her well-worn nankin picked up the fallen apples. If you want to knowmore particularly how Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face like hers inthe crowded street to-morrow, if you are there on the watch: she will not beamong those daughters of Zion who are haughty, and walk with stretched-outnecks and wanton eyes, mincing as they go: let all those pass, and fix youreyes on some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looksabout her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has abroad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certainexpression of amusem*nt in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, andfor the rest features entirely insignificant—take that ordinary but notdisagreeable person for a portrait of Mary Garth. If you made her smile, shewould show you perfect little teeth; if you made her angry, she would not raiseher voice, but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have evertasted the flavor of; if you did her a kindness, she would never forget it.Mary admired the keen-faced handsome little Vicar in his well-brushedthreadbare clothes more than any man she had had the opportunity of knowing.She had never heard him say a foolish thing, though she knew that he did unwiseones; and perhaps foolish sayings were more objectionable to her than any ofMr. Farebrother’s unwise doings. At least, it was remarkable that the actualimperfections of the Vicar’s clerical character never seemed to call forth thesame scorn and dislike which she showed beforehand for the predictedimperfections of the clerical character sustained by Fred Vincy. Theseirregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper minds than MaryGarth’s: our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none ofus ever saw. Will any one guess towards which of those widely different menMary had the peculiar woman’s tenderness?—the one she was most inclined to besevere on, or the contrary?

“Have you any message for your old playfellow, Miss Garth?” said the Vicar, ashe took a fragrant apple from the basket which she held towards him, and put itin his pocket. “Something to soften down that harsh judgment? I am goingstraight to see him.”

“No,” said Mary, shaking her head, and smiling. “If I were to say that he wouldnot be ridiculous as a clergyman, I must say that he would be something worsethan ridiculous. But I am very glad to hear that he is going away to work.”

“On the other hand, I am very glad to hear that you are not going awayto work. My mother, I am sure, will be all the happier if you will come to seeher at the vicarage: you know she is fond of having young people to talk to,and she has a great deal to tell about old times. You will really be doing akindness.”

“I should like it very much, if I may,” said Mary. “Everything seems too happyfor me all at once. I thought it would always be part of my life to long forhome, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather empty: I suppose it servedinstead of sense to fill up my mind?”

“May I go with you, Mary?” whispered Letty—a most inconvenient child, wholistened to everything. But she was made exultant by having her chin pinchedand her cheek kissed by Mr. Farebrother—an incident which she narrated to hermother and father.

As the Vicar walked to Lowick, any one watching him closely might have seen himtwice shrug his shoulders. I think that the rare Englishmen who have thisgesture are never of the heavy type—for fear of any lumbering instance to thecontrary, I will say, hardly ever; they have usually a fine temperament andmuch tolerance towards the smaller errors of men (themselves inclusive). TheVicar was holding an inward dialogue in which he told himself that there wasprobably something more between Fred and Mary Garth than the regard of oldplayfellows, and replied with a question whether that bit of womanhood were nota great deal too choice for that crude young gentleman. The rejoinder to thiswas the first shrug. Then he laughed at himself for being likely to have feltjealous, as if he had been a man able to marry, which, added he, it is as clearas any balance-sheet that I am not. Whereupon followed the second shrug.

What could two men, so different from each other, see in this “brown patch,” asMary called herself? It was certainly not her plainness that attracted them(and let all plain young ladies be warned against the dangerous encouragementgiven them by Society to confide in their want of beauty). A human being inthis aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of longinterchanging influences: and charm is a result of two such wholes, the oneloving and the one loved.

When Mr. and Mrs. Garth were sitting alone, Caleb said, “Susan, guess what I’mthinking of.”

“The rotation of crops,” said Mrs. Garth, smiling at him, above her knitting,“or else the back-doors of the Tipton cottages.”

“No,” said Caleb, gravely; “I am thinking that I could do a great turn for FredVincy. Christy’s gone, Alfred will be gone soon, and it will be five yearsbefore Jim is ready to take to business. I shall want help, and Fred might comein and learn the nature of things and act under me, and it might be the makingof him into a useful man, if he gives up being a parson. What do you think?”

“I think, there is hardly anything honest that his family would object tomore,” said Mrs. Garth, decidedly.

“What care I about their objecting?” said Caleb, with a sturdiness which he wasapt to show when he had an opinion. “The lad is of age and must get his bread.He has sense enough and quickness enough; he likes being on the land, and it’smy belief that he could learn business well if he gave his mind to it.”

“But would he? His father and mother wanted him to be a fine gentleman, and Ithink he has the same sort of feeling himself. They all think us beneath them.And if the proposal came from you, I am sure Mrs. Vincy would say that wewanted Fred for Mary.”

“Life is a poor tale, if it is to be settled by nonsense of that sort,” saidCaleb, with disgust.

“Yes, but there is a certain pride which is proper, Caleb.”

“I call it improper pride to let fools’ notions hinder you from doing a goodaction. There’s no sort of work,” said Caleb, with fervor, putting out his handand moving it up and down to mark his emphasis, “that could ever be done well,if you minded what fools say. You must have it inside you that your plan isright, and that plan you must follow.”

“I will not oppose any plan you have set your mind on, Caleb,” said Mrs. Garth,who was a firm woman, but knew that there were some points on which her mildhusband was yet firmer. “Still, it seems to be fixed that Fred is to go back tocollege: will it not be better to wait and see what he will choose to do afterthat? It is not easy to keep people against their will. And you are not yetquite sure enough of your own position, or what you will want.”

“Well, it may be better to wait a bit. But as to my getting plenty of work fortwo, I’m pretty sure of that. I’ve always had my hands full with scatteredthings, and there’s always something fresh turning up. Why, onlyyesterday—bless me, I don’t think I told you!—it was rather odd that two menshould have been at me on different sides to do the same bit of valuing. Andwho do you think they were?” said Caleb, taking a pinch of snuff and holding itup between his fingers, as if it were a part of his exposition. He was fond ofa pinch when it occurred to him, but he usually forgot that this indulgence wasat his command.

His wife held down her knitting and looked attentive.

“Why, that Rigg, or Rigg Featherstone, was one. But Bulstrode was before him,so I’m going to do it for Bulstrode. Whether it’s mortgage or purchase they’regoing for, I can’t tell yet.”

“Can that man be going to sell the land just left him—which he has taken thename for?” said Mrs. Garth.

“Deuce knows,” said Caleb, who never referred the knowledge of discreditabledoings to any higher power than the deuce. “But Bulstrode has long been wantingto get a handsome bit of land under his fingers—that I know. And it’s adifficult matter to get, in this part of the country.”

Caleb scattered his snuff carefully instead of taking it, and then added, “Theins and outs of things are curious. Here is the land they’ve been all alongexpecting for Fred, which it seems the old man never meant to leave him a footof, but left it to this side-slip of a son that he kept in the dark, andthought of his sticking there and vexing everybody as well as he could havevexed ’em himself if he could have kept alive. I say, it would be curious if itgot into Bulstrode’s hands after all. The old man hated him, and never wouldbank with him.”

“What reason could the miserable creature have for hating a man whom he hadnothing to do with?” said Mrs. Garth.

“Pooh! where’s the use of asking for such fellows’ reasons? The soul of man,”said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head which always camewhen he used this phrase—“The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, willbear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came theseed thereof.”

It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speechfor his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associatedwith various points of view or states of mind; and whenever he had a feeling ofawe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardlyhave given a strict quotation.

CHAPTER XLI.

By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
—Twelfth Night.

The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward between Mr.Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning the land attached toStone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a letter or two between thesepersonages.

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have beencut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages on a forsaken beach, or“rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests,” it may end byletting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped aboutlong empires ago:—this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Suchconditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stonewhich has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little linksof effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fixthe date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which haslong been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under theone pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of acatastrophe. To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the sun,the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.

Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling attentionto the existence of low people by whose interference, however little we maylike it, the course of the world is very much determined. It would be well,certainly, if we could help to reduce their number, and something might perhapsbe done by not lightly giving occasion to their existence. Socially speaking,Joshua Rigg would have been generally pronounced a superfluity. But those wholike Peter Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the verylast to wait for such a request either in prose or verse. The copy in this casebore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features,accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded figure, are compatiblewith much charm for a certain order of admirers. The result is sometimes afrog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no order of intelligent beings.Especially when he is suddenly brought into evidence to frustrate otherpeople’s expectations—the very lowest aspect in which a social superfluity canpresent himself.

But Mr. Rigg Featherstone’s low characteristics were all of the sober,water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day he wasalways as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and old Peter hadsecretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more calculating, and far moreimperturbable, than himself. I will add that his finger-nails were scrupulouslyattended to, and that he meant to marry a well-educated young lady (as yetunspecified) whose person was good, and whose connections, in a solidmiddle-class way, were undeniable. Thus his nails and modesty were comparableto those of most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated only by theopportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial houses of aseaport. He thought the rural Featherstones very simple absurd people, and theyin their turn regarded his “bringing up” in a seaport town as an exaggerationof the monstrosity that their brother Peter, and still more Peter’s property,should have had such belongings.

The garden and gravel approach, as seen from the two windows of the wainscotedparlor at Stone Court, were never in better trim than now, when Mr. RiggFeatherstone stood, with his hands behind him, looking out on these grounds astheir master. But it seemed doubtful whether he looked out for the sake ofcontemplation or of turning his back to a person who stood in the middle of theroom, with his legs considerably apart and his hands in his trouser-pockets: aperson in all respects a contrast to the sleek and cool Rigg. He was a manobviously on the way towards sixty, very florid and hairy, with much gray inhis bushy whiskers and thick curly hair, a stoutish body which showed todisadvantage the somewhat worn joinings of his clothes, and the air of aswaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of fireworks,regarding his own remarks on any other person’s performance as likely to bemore interesting than the performance itself.

His name was John Raffles, and he sometimes wrote jocosely W.A.G. after hissignature, observing when he did so, that he was once taught by Leonard Lamb ofFinsbury who wrote B.A. after his name, and that he, Raffles, originated thewitticism of calling that celebrated principal Ba-Lamb. Such were theappearance and mental flavor of Mr. Raffles, both of which seemed to have astale odor of travellers’ rooms in the commercial hotels of that period.

“Come, now, Josh,” he was saying, in a full rumbling tone, “look at it in thislight: here is your poor mother going into the vale of years, and you couldafford something handsome now to make her comfortable.”

“Not while you live. Nothing would make her comfortable while you live,”returned Rigg, in his cool high voice. “What I give her, you’ll take.”

“You bear me a grudge, Josh, that I know. But come, now—as between man andman—without humbug—a little capital might enable me to make a first-rate thingof the shop. The tobacco trade is growing. I should cut my own nose off in notdoing the best I could at it. I should stick to it like a flea to a fleece formy own sake. I should always be on the spot. And nothing would make your poormother so happy. I’ve pretty well done with my wild oats—turned fifty-five. Iwant to settle down in my chimney-corner. And if I once buckled to the tobaccotrade, I could bring an amount of brains and experience to bear on it thatwould not be found elsewhere in a hurry. I don’t want to be bothering you onetime after another, but to get things once for all into the right channel.Consider that, Josh—as between man and man—and with your poor mother to be madeeasy for her life. I was always fond of the old woman, by Jove!”

“Have you done?” said Mr. Rigg, quietly, without looking away from the window.

“Yes, I’ve done,” said Raffles, taking hold of his hat which stoodbefore him on the table, and giving it a sort of oratorical push.

“Then just listen to me. The more you say anything, the less I shall believeit. The more you want me to do a thing, the more reason I shall have for neverdoing it. Do you think I mean to forget your kicking me when I was a lad, andeating all the best victual away from me and my mother? Do you think I forgetyour always coming home to sell and pocket everything, and going off againleaving us in the lurch? I should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail.My mother was a fool to you: she’d no right to give me a father-in-law, andshe’s been punished for it. She shall have her weekly allowance paid and nomore: and that shall be stopped if you dare to come on to these premises again,or to come into this country after me again. The next time you show yourselfinside the gates here, you shall be driven off with the dogs and the wagoner’swhip.”

As Rigg pronounced the last words he turned round and looked at Raffles withhis prominent frozen eyes. The contrast was as striking as it could have beeneighteen years before, when Rigg was a most unengaging kickable boy, andRaffles was the rather thick-set Adonis of bar-rooms and back-parlors. But theadvantage now was on the side of Rigg, and auditors of this conversation mightprobably have expected that Raffles would retire with the air of a defeateddog. Not at all. He made a grimace which was habitual with him whenever he was“out” in a game; then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from hispocket.

“Come, Josh,” he said, in a cajoling tone, “give us a spoonful of brandy, and asovereign to pay the way back, and I’ll go. Honor bright! I’ll go like abullet, by Jove!”

“Mind,” said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, “if I ever see you again, Ishan’t speak to you. I don’t own you any more than if I saw a crow; and if youwant to own me you’ll get nothing by it but a character for being what youare—a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue.”

“That’s a pity, now, Josh,” said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head andwrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed. “I’m very fond of you;by Jove, I am! There’s nothing I like better than plaguing you—you’re solike your mother, and I must do without it. But the brandy and the sovereign’sa bargain.”

He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken bureau with hiskeys. But Raffles had reminded himself by his movement with the flask that ithad become dangerously loose from its leather covering, and catching sight of afolded paper which had fallen within the fender, he took it up and shoved itunder the leather so as to make the glass firm.

By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled the flask, andhanded Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him nor speaking to him. Afterlocking up the bureau again, he walked to the window and gazed out asimpassibly as he had done at the beginning of the interview, while Raffles tooka small allowance from the flask, screwed it up, and deposited it in hisside-pocket, with provoking slowness, making a grimace at his stepson’s back.

“Farewell, Josh—and if forever!” said Raffles, turning back his head as heopened the door.

Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane. The gray day had turned to alight drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the grassy borders ofthe by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were loading the last shocks ofcorn. Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait of a town loiterer obliged to do abit of country journeying on foot, looked as incongruous amid this moist ruralquiet and industry as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie. Butthere were none to stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none to showdislike of his appearance except the little water-rats which rustled away athis approach.

He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken by thestage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took the new-maderailway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he considered it pretty wellseasoned now it had done for Huskisson. Mr. Raffles on most occasions kept upthe sense of having been educated at an academy, and being able, if he chose,to pass well everywhere; indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom hedid not feel himself in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of theentertainment which he thus gave to all the rest of the company.

He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been entirelysuccessful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask. The paper with whichhe had wedged it was a letter signed Nicholas Bulstrode, but Raffles wasnot likely to disturb it from its present useful position.

CHAPTER XLII.

How much, methinks, I could despise this man
Were I not bound in charity against it!
—SHAKESPEARE: Henry VIII.

One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return from hiswedding-journey was to Lowick Manor, in consequence of a letter which hadrequested him to fix a time for his visit.

Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his illness toLydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as to how far itmight be likely to cut short his labors or his life. On this point, as on allothers, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anythingin his lot surmised or known in spite of himself was embittering, the idea ofcalling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrowwas necessarily intolerable to him. Every proud mind knows something of thisexperience, and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deepenough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead ofexalting.

But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the question ofhis health and life haunted his silence with a more harassing importunity eventhan through the autumnal unripeness of his authorship. It is true that thislast might be called his central ambition; but there are some kinds ofauthorship in which by far the largest result is the uneasy susceptibilityaccumulated in the consciousness of the author—one knows of the river by a fewstreaks amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the waywith Mr. Casaubon’s hard intellectual labors. Their most characteristic resultwas not the “Key to all Mythologies,” but a morbid consciousness that othersdid not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetualsuspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to hisadvantage—a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and apassionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.

Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed anddried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all against thosewhich came from Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame possibilities for thefuture which were somehow more embittering to him than anything his mind haddwelt on before.

Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw’s existence, hisdefiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his flippant state of mind withregard to the possessors of authentic, well-stamped erudition: againstDorothea’s nature, always taking on some new shape of ardent activity, and evenin submission and silence covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation tothink of: against certain notions and likings which had taken possession of hermind in relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss with her. Therewas no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as hecould have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be somethingmore troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, sheanticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there hadentered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that herwifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—wasaccompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings wereseen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passedvapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to thatinappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.

Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it seemed likea betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust hadquickly turned into the critical wife; and early instances of criticism andresentment had made an impression which no tenderness and submission afterwardscould remove. To his suspicious interpretation Dorothea’s silence now was asuppressed rebellion; a remark from her which he had not in any way anticipatedwas an assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an irritatingcautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort offorbearance. The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama madeit the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we wishothers not to hear.

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quiteordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory ofthe world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck sotroublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound hisdiscontents—his suspicions that he was not any longer adored withoutcriticism—could have denied that they were founded on good reasons? On thecontrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not himself takenexplicitly into account—namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. Hesuspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it,and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have acompanion who would never find it out.

This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly prepared beforeWill Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had occurred since then hadbrought Mr. Casaubon’s power of suspicious construction into exasperatedactivity. To all the facts which he knew, he added imaginary facts both presentand future which became more real to him than those because they called up astronger dislike, a more predominating bitterness. Suspicion and jealousy ofWill Ladislaw’s intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea’s impressions,were constantly at their weaving work. It would be quite unjust to him tosuppose that he could have entered into any coarse misinterpretation ofDorothea: his own habits of mind and conduct, quite as much as the openelevation of her nature, saved him from any such mistake. What he was jealousof was her opinion, the sway that might be given to her ardent mind in itsjudgments, and the future possibilities to which these might lead her. As toWill, though until his last defiant letter he had nothing definite which hewould choose formally to allege against him, he felt himself warranted inbelieving that he was capable of any design which could fascinate a rebellioustemper and an undisciplined impulsiveness. He was quite sure that Dorothea wasthe cause of Will’s return from Rome, and his determination to settle in theneighborhood; and he was penetrating enough to imagine that Dorothea hadinnocently encouraged this course. It was as clear as possible that she wasready to be attached to Will and to be pliant to his suggestions: they hadnever had a tête-à-tête without her bringing away from it some newtroublesome impression, and the last interview that Mr. Casaubon was aware of(Dorothea, on returning from Fresh*tt Hall, had for the first time been silentabout having seen Will) had led to a scene which roused an angrier feelingagainst them both than he had ever known before. Dorothea’s outpouring of hernotions about money, in the darkness of the night, had done nothing but bring amixture of more odious foreboding into her husband’s mind.

And there was the shock lately given to his health always sadly present withhim. He was certainly much revived; he had recovered all his usual power ofwork: the illness might have been mere fatigue, and there might still be twentyyears of achievement before him, which would justify the thirty years ofpreparation. That prospect was made the sweeter by a flavor of vengeanceagainst the hasty sneers of Carp & Company; for even when Mr. Casaubon wascarrying his taper among the tombs of the past, those modern figures cameathwart the dim light, and interrupted his diligent exploration. To convinceCarp of his mistake, so that he would have to eat his own words with a gooddeal of indigestion, would be an agreeable accident of triumphant authorship,which the prospect of living to future ages on earth and to all eternity inheaven could not exclude from contemplation. Since, thus, the prevision of hisown unending bliss could not nullify the bitter savors of irritated jealousyand vindictiveness, it is the less surprising that the probability of atransient earthly bliss for other persons, when he himself should have enteredinto glory, had not a potently sweetening effect. If the truth should be thatsome undermining disease was at work within him, there might be largeopportunity for some people to be the happier when he was gone; and if one ofthose people should be Will Ladislaw, Mr. Casaubon objected so strongly that itseemed as if the annoyance would make part of his disembodied existence.

This is a very bare and therefore a very incomplete way of putting the case.The human soul moves in many channels, and Mr. Casaubon, we know, had a senseof rectitude and an honorable pride in satisfying the requirements of honor,which compelled him to find other reasons for his conduct than those ofjealousy and vindictiveness. The way in which Mr. Casaubon put the case wasthis:—“In marrying Dorothea Brooke I had to care for her well-being in case ofmy death. But well-being is not to be secured by ample, independent possessionof property; on the contrary, occasions might arise in which such possessionmight expose her to the more danger. She is ready prey to any man who knows howto play adroitly either on her affectionate ardor or her Quixotic enthusiasm;and a man stands by with that very intention in his mind—a man with no otherprinciple than transient caprice, and who has a personal animosity towards me—Iam sure of it—an animosity which is fed by the consciousness of hisingratitude, and which he has constantly vented in ridicule of which I am aswell assured as if I had heard it. Even if I live I shall not be withoutuneasiness as to what he may attempt through indirect influence. This man hasgained Dorothea’s ear: he has fascinated her attention; he has evidently triedto impress her mind with the notion that he has claims beyond anything I havedone for him. If I die—and he is waiting here on the watch for that—he willpersuade her to marry him. That would be calamity for her and success for him.She would not think it calamity: he would make her believe anything; shehas a tendency to immoderate attachment which she inwardly reproaches me fornot responding to, and already her mind is occupied with his fortunes. Hethinks 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 anythingexcept from contradiction? In knowledge he has always tried to be showy atsmall cost. In religion he could be, as long as it suited him, the facile echoof Dorothea’s vagaries. When was sciolism ever dissociated from laxity? Iutterly distrust his morals, and it is my duty to hinder to the utmost thefulfilment of his designs.”

The arrangements made by Mr. Casaubon on his marriage left strong measures opento him, but in ruminating on them his mind inevitably dwelt so much on theprobabilities of his own life that the longing to get the nearest possiblecalculation had at last overcome his proud reticence, and had determined him toask Lydgate’s opinion as to the nature of his illness.

He had mentioned to Dorothea that Lydgate was coming by appointment athalf-past three, and in answer to her anxious question, whether he had feltill, replied,—“No, I merely wish to have his opinion concerning some habitualsymptoms. You need not see him, my dear. I shall give orders that he may besent 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 withhis hands behind him according to his habit, and his head bent forward. It wasa lovely afternoon; the leaves from the lofty limes were falling silentlyacross 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 isa lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge. Lydgate, conscious of anenergetic frame in its prime, felt some compassion when the figure which he waslikely soon to overtake turned round, and in advancing towards him showed moremarkedly than ever the signs of premature age—the student’s bent shoulders, theemaciated limbs, and the melancholy lines of the mouth. “Poor fellow,” hethought, “some men with his years are like lions; one can tell nothing of theirage except that they are full grown.”

“Mr. Lydgate,” said Mr. Casaubon, with his invariably polite air, “I amexceedingly obliged to you for your punctuality. We will, if you please, carryon 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 itwere otherwise needless to refer to—that my life, on all collateral accountsinsignificant, derives a possible importance from the incompleteness of laborswhich have extended through all its best years. In short, I have long had onhand a work which I would fain leave behind me in such a state, at least, thatit might be committed to the press by—others. Were I assured that this is theutmost I can reasonably expect, that assurance would be a usefulcirc*mscription of my attempts, and a guide in both the positive and negativedetermination of my course.”

Here Mr. Casaubon paused, removed one hand from his back and thrust it betweenthe buttons of his single-breasted coat. To a mind largely instructed in thehuman destiny hardly anything could be more interesting than the inwardconflict implied in his formal measured address, delivered with the usualsing-song and motion of the head. Nay, are there many situations more sublimelytragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work whichhas been all the significance of its life—a significance which is to vanish asthe waters which come and go where no man has need of them? But there wasnothing to strike others as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who hadsome contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little amusem*nt minglingwith his pity. He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter intothe pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except thepassionate egoism of the sufferer.

“You refer to the possible hindrances from want of health?” he said, wishing tohelp forward Mr. Casaubon’s purpose, which seemed to be clogged by somehesitation.

“I do. You have not implied to me that the symptoms which—I am bound totestify—you watched with scrupulous care, were those of a fatal disease. Butwere 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 asa friendly service. If you can tell me that my life is not threatened byanything else than ordinary casualties, I shall rejoice, on grounds which Ihave already indicated. If not, knowledge of the truth is even more importantto me.”

“Then I can no longer hesitate as to my course,” said Lydgate; “but the firstthing I must impress on you is that my conclusions are doublyuncertain—uncertain not only because of my fallibility, but because diseases ofthe heart are eminently difficult to found predictions on. In any case, one canhardly increase appreciably the tremendous uncertainty of life.”

Mr. Casaubon winced perceptibly, but bowed.

“I believe that you are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of theheart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man whogave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal ofexperience—a more lengthened observation—is wanting on the subject. But afterwhat you have said, it is my duty to tell you that death from this disease isoften sudden. At the same time, no such result can be predicted. Your conditionmay be consistent with a tolerably comfortable life for another fifteen years,or even more. I could add no information to this beyond anatomical or medicaldetails, which would leave expectation at precisely the same point.” Lydgate’sinstinct was fine enough to tell him that plain speech, quite free fromostentatious 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. “Onething more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you have now told meto Mrs. Casaubon?”

“Partly—I mean, as to the possible issues.” Lydgate was going to explain why hehad told Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon, with an unmistakable desire to end theconversation, 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 theblack figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walkwhere the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and thelittle shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stolealong in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for thefirst time found himself looking into the eyes of death—who was passing throughone of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of acommonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the visionof waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the waterwhich cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We mustall die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I mustdie—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 ofdim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as ifhe suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of theoncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such anhour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward inimagination to the other side of death, gazing backward—perhaps with the divinecalm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion. Whatwas Mr. Casaubon’s bias his acts will give us a clew to. He held himself to be,with some private scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as toestimates of the present and hopes of the future. But what we strive togratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: thefuture estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in theirimagination and love. And Mr. Casaubon’s immediate desire was not for divinecommunion 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 intothe garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband. But she hesitated,fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardor, continuallyrepulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwartedenergy subsides into a shudder; and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumpsof trees until she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him, and might haverepresented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hoursremaining should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closerto a comprehended grief. His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felther timidity increased; yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm.

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling withdifficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which thisunresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not toostrong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy areforever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at thedevastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest ofsweetness—calling their denial knowledge. You may ask why, in the name ofmanliness, Mr. Casaubon should have behaved in that way. Consider that his wasa mind which shrank from pity: have you ever watched in such a mind the effectof a suspicion that what is pressing it as a grief may be really a source ofcontentment, either actual or future, to the being who already offends bypitying? Besides, he knew little of Dorothea’s sensations, and had notreflected that on such an occasion as the present they were comparable instrength 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 insilence towards the house, and as they entered by the glass door on thiseastern side, Dorothea withdrew her arm and lingered on the matting, that shemight leave her husband quite free. He entered the library and shut himself in,alone with his sorrow.

She went up to her boudoir. The open bow-window let in the serene glory of theafternoon lying in the avenue, where the lime-trees cast long shadows. ButDorothea knew nothing of the scene. She threw herself on a chair, not heedingthat she was in the dazzling sun-rays: if there were discomfort in that, howcould 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 feltsince 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 isin my mind—he never cares. What is the use of anything I do? He wishes he hadnever married me.”

She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness. Like one who haslost his way and is weary, she sat and saw as in one glance all the paths ofher young hope which she should never find again. And just as clearly in themiserable light she saw her own and her husband’s solitude—how they walkedapart 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 wasoverthrown. Was it her fault that she had believed in him—had believed in hisworthiness?—And what, exactly, was he?— She was able enough to estimate him—shewho 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. Insuch 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 andpreferred remaining up-stairs. She had never deliberately allowed herresentment to govern her in this way before, but she believed now that shecould not see him again without telling him the truth about her feeling, andshe must wait till she could do it without interruption. He might wonder and behurt at her message. It was good that he should wonder and be hurt. Her angersaid, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her—that all heaven, though itwere crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. She haddetermined 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. Hewished 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 notdisturb me again.”

Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle, while the eveningslowly deepened into night. But the struggle changed continually, as that of aman who begins with a movement towards striking and ends with conquering hisdesire to strike. The energy that would animate a crime is not more than iswanted to inspire a resolved submission, when the noble habit of the soulreasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet herhusband—her conviction that he had been asking about the possible arrest of allhis work, and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be longwithout rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at heranger with sad remonstrance. It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and ofsilent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows—but the resolvedsubmission did come; and when the house was still, and she knew that it wasnear the time when Mr. Casaubon habitually went to rest, she opened her doorgently and stood outside in the darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs witha light in his hand. If he did not come soon she thought that she would go downand even risk incurring another pang. She would never again expect anythingelse. But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced upthe staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husbandstood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He startedslightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, withoutspeaking.

“Dorothea!” he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. “Were you waiting forme?”

“Yes, I did not like to disturb you.”

“Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life bywatching.”

When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she feltsomething like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowlyescaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and theywent along the broad corridor together.

BOOK V.
THE DEAD HAND.

CHAPTER XLIII.

“This figure hath high price: ’t was wrought with love
Ages ago in finest ivory;
Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines
Of generous womanhood that fits all time
That too is costly ware; majolica
Of deft design, to please a lordly eye:
The smile, you see, is perfect—wonderful
As mere Faience! a table ornament
To suit the richest mounting.”

Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally driveinto Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity such as occurto every lady of any wealth when she lives within three miles of a town. Twodays after that scene in the Yew-tree Walk, she determined to use such anopportunity in order if possible to see Lydgate, and learn from him whether herhusband had really felt any depressing change of symptoms which he wasconcealing from her, and whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost abouthimself. 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 makeher unjust or hard—overcame every scruple. That there had been some crisis inher husband’s mind she was certain: he had the very next day begun a new methodof arranging his notes, and had associated her quite newly in carrying out hisplan. 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 writtenbeforehand. And he was not at home.

“Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?” said Dorothea, who had never, that she knew of, seenRosamond, but now remembered the fact of the marriage. Yes, Mrs. Lydgate was athome.

“I will go in and speak to her, if she will allow me. Will you ask her if shecan see me—see Mrs. Casaubon, for a few minutes?”

When the servant had gone to deliver that message, Dorothea could hear soundsof music through an open window—a few notes from a man’s voice and then a pianobursting into roulades. But the roulades broke off suddenly, and then theservant 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 ofcontrast not infrequent in country life when the habits of the different rankswere less blent than now. Let those who know, tell us exactly what stuff it wasthat Dorothea wore in those days of mild autumn—that thin white woollen stuffsoft to the touch and soft to the eye. It always seemed to have been latelywashed, and to smell of the sweet hedges—was always in the shape of a pelissewith sleeves hanging all out of the fashion. Yet if she had entered before astill audience as Imogene or Cato’s daughter, the dress might have seemed rightenough: the grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her simplyparted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then in the fate ofwomen, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold trencher we call ahalo. By the present audience of two persons, no dramatic heroine could havebeen expected with more interest than Mrs. Casaubon. To Rosamond she was one ofthose county divinities not mixing with Middlemarch mortality, whose slightestmarks of manner or appearance were worthy of her study; moreover, Rosamond wasnot without satisfaction that Mrs. Casaubon should have an opportunity ofstudying her. What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen bythe best judges? and since Rosamond had received the highest compliments at SirGodwin Lydgate’s, she felt quite confident of the impression she must make onpeople 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 agentleman standing at a distance, but seeing him merely as a coated figure at awide angle. The gentleman was too much occupied with the presence of the onewoman to reflect on the contrast between the two—a contrast that wouldcertainly have been striking to a calm observer. They were both tall, and theireyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond’s infantine blondness and wondrouscrown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfectthat no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large embroidered collarwhich it was to be hoped all beholders would know the price of, her small handsduly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness of manner whichis 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 evenallow 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 willcome home. But I can send for him.”

“Will you let me go and fetch him?” said Will Ladislaw, coming forward. He hadalready taken up his hat before Dorothea entered. She colored with surprise,but put out her hand with a smile of unmistakable pleasure, saying—

“I did not know it was you: I had no thought of seeing you here.”

“May I go to the Hospital and tell Mr. Lydgate that you wish to see him?” saidWill.

“It would be quicker to send the carriage for him,” said Dorothea, “if you willbe kind enough to give the message to the coachman.”

Will was moving to the door when Dorothea, whose mind had flashed in an instantover many connected memories, turned quickly and said, “I will go myself, thankyou. I wish to lose no time before getting home again. I will drive to theHospital and see Mr. Lydgate there. Pray excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate. I am verymuch obliged to you.”

Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she left the roomhardly conscious of what was immediately around her—hardly conscious that Willopened the door for her and offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage.She took the arm but said nothing. Will was feeling rather vexed and miserable,and found nothing to say on his side. He handed her into the carriage insilence, they said good-by, and Dorothea drove away.

In the five minutes’ drive to the Hospital she had time for some reflectionsthat were quite new to her. Her decision to go, and her preoccupation inleaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that there would be a sort ofdeception in her voluntarily allowing any further intercourse between herselfand Will which she was unable to mention to her husband, and already her errandin seeking Lydgate was a matter of concealment. That was all that had beenexplicitly in her mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort. Nowthat she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and theaccompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on herinward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that WillLadislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband’s absence. Andthen she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her underlike circ*mstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact? But Willwas Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to showkindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understoodas implying that Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his ownabsence. “Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea toherself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly. She feltconfusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so clear to her beforewas mysteriously spoiled. But the carriage stopped at the gate of the Hospital.She was soon walking round the grass plots with Lydgate, and her feelingsrecovered the strong bent which had made her seek for this interview.

Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it clearlyenough. His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here for the first timethere 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 thatshe had seen him under circ*mstances in which he might appear not to besupremely occupied with her. He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongstthe circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life. But that was nothis fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town, he had beenmaking as many acquaintances as he could, his position requiring that he shouldknow everybody and everything. Lydgate was really better worth knowing than anyone else in the neighborhood, and he happened to have a wife who was musicaland altogether worth calling upon. Here was the whole history of the situationin which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper. It wasmortifying. Will was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch butfor Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from herwith those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to thepersistence 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 atyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices, like odorous bodies, havea double existence both solid and subtle—solid as the pyramids, subtle as thetwentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented thedarkness. And Will was of a temperament to feel keenly the presence ofsubtleties: a man of clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, thatfor the first time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him hadsprung up in Dorothea’s mind, and that their silence, as he conducted her tothe carriage, had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred andjealousy, 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 headvanced 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 dayand just finish about the rendering of ‘Lungi dal caro bene’?”

“I shall be happy to be taught,” said Rosamond. “But I am sure you admit thatthe interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite envy your acquaintance withMrs. 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 werehandsome. 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 isconscious of her presence.”

“I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick,” said Rosamond, dimpling, andspeaking with aery lightness. “He will come back and think nothing of me.”

“That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto. Mrs. Casaubonis 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 theoryrather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess just at this moment—Imust really tear myself away.”

“Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear the music, and Icannot enjoy it so well without him.”

When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of him andholding his coat-collar with both her hands, “Mr. Ladislaw was here singingwith me when Mrs. Casaubon came in. He seemed vexed. Do you think he dislikedher seeing him at our house? Surely your position is more than equal tohis—whatever may be his relation to the Casaubons.”

“No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed. Ladislaw is a sortof 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, butlikable.”

“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, especiallyin discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had beeninconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes—that women,even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. At that time youngladies in the country, even when educated at Mrs. Lemon’s, read little Frenchliterature later than Racine, and public prints had not cast their presentmagnificent illumination over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with awoman’s whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slighthints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests.How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband ascrown-prince by your side—himself in fact a subject—while the captives look upforever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, somuch the better! But Rosamond’s romance turned at present chiefly on hercrown-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 onlyneglects his work and runs up bills.”

“I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital, orseeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor’s quarrel; and then at homeyou always want to pore over your microscope and phials. Confess you like thosethings better than me.”

“Haven’t you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be somethingbetter than a Middlemarch doctor?” said Lydgate, letting his hands fall on tohis wife’s shoulders, and looking at her with affectionate gravity. “I shallmake you learn my favorite bit from an old poet—

‘Why should our pride make such a stir to be
And be forgot? What good is like to this,
To do worthy the writing, and to write
Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?’

What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,—and to write out myself what Ihave done. A man must work, to do that, my pet.”

“Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you toattain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch. You cannot saythat I have ever tried to hinder you from working. But we cannot live likehermits. You are not discontented with me, Tertius?”

“No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented.”

“But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?”

“Merely to ask about her husband’s health. But I think she is going to besplendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred a-year.”

CHAPTER XLIV.

I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New Hospital withLydgate, 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 truthabout his illness, she was silent for a few moments, wondering whether she hadsaid or done anything to rouse this new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to letslip an opportunity of furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say—

“I don’t know whether your or Mr. Casaubon’s attention has been drawn to theneeds of our New Hospital. Circ*mstances have made it seem rather egotistic inme to urge the subject; but that is not my fault: it is because there is afight being made against it by the other medical men. I think you are generallyinterested in such things, for I remember that when I first had the pleasure ofseeing you at Tipton Grange before your marriage, you were asking me somequestions about the way in which the health of the poor was affected by theirmiserable housing.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, brightening. “I shall be quite grateful to you ifyou will tell me how I can help to make things a little better. Everything ofthat sort has slipped away from me since I have been married. I mean,” shesaid, after a moment’s hesitation, “that the people in our village aretolerably comfortable, and my mind has been too much taken up for me to inquirefurther. But here—in such a place as Middlemarch—there must be a great deal tobe done.”

“There is everything to be done,” said Lydgate, with abrupt energy. “And thisHospital 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 schemeof this sort. Of course he looked forward to help. And now there’s a mean,petty feud set up against the thing in the town, by certain persons who want tomake it a failure.”

“What can be their reasons?” said Dorothea, with naive surprise.

“Chiefly Mr. Bulstrode’s unpopularity, to begin with. Half the town wouldalmost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him. In this stupid world mostpeople never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done bytheir own set. I had no connection with Bulstrode before I came here. I look athim quite impartially, and I see that he has some notions—that he has setthings on foot—which I can turn to good public purpose. If a fair number of thebetter educated men went to work with the belief that their observations mightcontribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see achange for the better. That’s my point of view. I hold that by refusing to workwith Mr. Bulstrode I should be turning my back on an opportunity of making myprofession more generally serviceable.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Dorothea, at once fascinated by the situationsketched in Lydgate’s words. “But what is there against Mr. Bulstrode? I knowthat 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,” saidDorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of the greatpersecutions.

“To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:—he ismasterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade, which hascomplaints of its own that I know nothing about. But what has that to do withthe question whether it would not be a fine thing to establish here a morevaluable hospital than any they have in the county? The immediate motive to theopposition, however, is the fact that Bulstrode has put the medical directioninto my hands. Of course I am glad of that. It gives me an opportunity of doingsome good work,—and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me. But theconsequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set themselvestooth and nail against the Hospital, and not only refuse to cooperatethemselves, 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 bedone without it. And the ignorance of people about here is stupendous. I don’tlay claim to anything else than having used some opportunities which have notcome within everybody’s reach; but there is no stifling the offence of beingyoung, and a new-comer, and happening to know something more than the oldinhabitants. Still, if I believe that I can set going a better method oftreatment—if I believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquirieswhich may be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base trucklerif I allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me. And the courseis all the clearer from there being no salary in question to put my persistencein an equivocal light.”

“I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate,” said Dorothea, cordially. “Ifeel sure I can help a little. I have some money, and don’t know what to dowith it—that is often an uncomfortable thought to me. I am sure I can spare twohundred a-year for a grand purpose like this. How happy you must be, to knowthings that you feel sure will do great good! I wish I could awake with thatknowledge every morning. There seems to be so much trouble taken that one canhardly see the good of!”

There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea’s voice as she spoke these lastwords. But she presently added, more cheerfully, “Pray come to Lowick and tellus more of this. I will mention the subject to Mr. Casaubon. I must hasten homenow.”

She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to subscribe twohundred a-year—she had seven hundred a-year as the equivalent of her ownfortune, settled on her at her marriage. Mr. Casaubon made no objection beyonda passing remark that the sum might be disproportionate in relation to othergood objects, but when Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, heacquiesced. He did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctantto give it. If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through themedium of another passion than the love of material property.

Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of herconversation with him about the Hospital. Mr. Casaubon did not question herfurther, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what had passed betweenLydgate and himself. “She knows that I know,” said the ever-restless voicewithin; but that increase of tacit knowledge only thrust further off anyconfidence between them. He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness ismore lonely than distrust?

CHAPTER XLV.

It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, anddeclaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding theycannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past;condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in timeswhich they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both.Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their linesdid seem to indigitate and point at our times.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE:Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched toDorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different lights. Heregarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded prejudice. Mr. Bulstrodesaw 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 tobe an effectual lay representative—a hatred which certainly found pretextsapart from religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements ofhuman action. These might be called the ministerial views. But oppositions havethe illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short atthe boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance. Whatthe opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital and itsadministration had certainly a great deal of echo in it, for heaven has takencare that everybody shall not be an originator; but there were differenceswhich represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankardin Slaughter Lane.

Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration, that Dr.Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison them, forthe 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 respectablea woman as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage—apoor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know what wasthe matter with you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside afteryou were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was; butthere 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 ofbodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters—sucha hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch!

And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter Lane wasunimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic public-house—theoriginal Tankard, known by the name of Dollop’s—was the resort of a greatBenefit Club, which had some months before put to the vote whether itslong-standing medical man, “Doctor Gambit,” should not be cashiered in favor of“this Doctor Lydgate,” who was capable of performing the most astonishingcures, and rescuing people altogether given up by other practitioners. But thebalance had been turned against Lydgate by two members, who for some privatereasons held that this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was anequivocal recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors. In thecourse 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 oflikelihood, 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 thetotal deficit of evidence. Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives hadlong been worn threadbare, like old Featherstone’s, had been at once inclinedto try him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor’s bills, thoughtagreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him withoutstint if the children’s temper wanted a dose, occasions when the oldpractitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined to employLydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some considered that he might domore than others “where there was liver;”—at least there would be no harm ingetting a few bottles of “stuff” from him, since if these proved useless itwould still be possible to return to the Purifying Pills, which kept you aliveif they did not remove the yellowness. But these were people of minorimportance. Good Middlemarch families were of course not going to change theirdoctor without reason shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peaco*ck did notfeel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor,objecting that he was “not likely to be equal to Peaco*ck.”

But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars enoughreported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to intensifydifferences into partisanship; some of the particulars being of that impressiveorder of which the significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amountwithout 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 shudderthey might have created in some Middlemarch circles! “Oxygen! nobody knows whatthat may be—is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there arepeople who say quarantine is no good!”

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs. Thiswas offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemedinfringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; andonly a little while before, they might have counted on having the law on theirside against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to askfor pay except as a charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experiencedenough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to thelaity; and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, thoughnot one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, hewas 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 fortheir work was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, andmixtures.

“It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost asmischievous as quacks,” said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly. “To get their ownbread 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 paythat he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also asthmatic and had anincreasing 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 arrangedin a flame-like pyramid, and whose retail deference was of the cordial,encouraging kind—jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerateabstinence from letting out the full force of his mind. It was Mr. Mawmsey’sfriendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of Lydgate’sreply. But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation:it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure togo wrong.

Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the stirrup, andMr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had known who the king’slieges were, giving his “Good morning, sir, good-morning, sir,” with the air ofone 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 everyhalf-crown and eighteen-pence he was certain something measurable had beendelivered. He had done this with satisfaction, including it among hisresponsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill thanusual as a dignity worth mentioning. Moreover, in addition to the massivebenefit of the drugs to “self and family,” he had enjoyed the pleasure offorming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so as to give anintelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit—a practitioner just alittle lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and especially esteemed as anaccoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey had the poorest opinion on all otherpoints, but in doctoring, he was wont to say in an undertone, he placed Gambitabove any of them.

Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which appearedstill flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop, when they were recited toMrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as a fertilemother,—generally under attendance more or less frequent from Mr. Gambit, andoccasionally having attacks which required Dr. Minchin.

“Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?” saidMrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. “I should like him to tell mehow I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn’t take strengthening medicine for amonth beforehand. Think of what I have to provide for calling customers, mydear!”—here Mrs. Mawmsey turned to an intimate female friend who sat by—“alarge veal pie—a stuffed fillet—a round of beef—ham, tongue, et cetera, etcetera! 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. Ishould 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. Heareverything and judge for yourself is my motto. But he didn’t know who he wastalking to. I was not to be turned on his finger. People often pretendto tell me things, when they might as well say, ‘Mawmsey, you’re a fool.’ But Ismile at it: I humor everybody’s weak place. If physic had done harm to selfand family, I should have found it out by this time.”

The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic was ofno use.

“Indeed!” said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise. (He was a stouthusky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) “How will he cure hispatients, then?”

“That is what I say,” returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight to herspeech by loading her pronouns. “Does he suppose that people will payhim only to come and sit with them and go away again?”

Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit, including veryfull accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of course heknew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare time and personalnarrative had never been charged for. So he replied, humorously—

“Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know.”

“Not one that I would employ,” said Mrs. Mawmsey. “Others may doas 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 todiscredit others by advertising their own honesty, and that it might be worthsome people’s while to show him up. Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactorypractice, much pervaded by the smells of retail trading which suggested thereduction of cash payments to a balance. And he did not think it worth hiswhile to show Lydgate up until he knew how. He had not indeed great resourcesof education, and had had to work his own way against a good deal ofprofessional contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling thebreathing apparatus “longs.”

Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr. Toller shared the highestpractice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family: there wereTollers in the law and everything else above the line of retail trade. Unlikeour irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest way in the world of takingthings which might be supposed to annoy him, being a well-bred, quietlyfacetious man, who kept a good house, was very fond of a little sporting whenhe 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 theheroic treatment, bleeding and blistering and starving his patients, with adispassionate disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favoredthe 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 alittle slow in coming, but when he came, he did something. He was agreat favorite in his own circle, and whatever he implied to any one’sdisadvantage told doubly from his careless ironical tone.

He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, “Ah!” when he was told that Mr.Peaco*ck’s successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and Mr. Hackbutt oneday mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr. Toller said, laughingly,“Dibbitts will get rid of his stale drugs, then. I’m fond of littleDibbitts—I’m glad he’s in luck.”

“I see your meaning, Toller,” said Mr. Hackbutt, “and I am entirely of youropinion. I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that effect. Amedical man should be responsible for the quality of the drugs consumed by hispatients. That is the rationale of the system of charging which has hithertoobtained; and nothing is more offensive than this ostentation of reform, wherethere is no real amelioration.”

“Ostentation, Hackbutt?” said Mr. Toller, ironically. “I don’t see that. A mancan’t very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes in. There’s no reformin the matter: the question is, whether the profit on the drugs is paid to themedical man by the druggist or by the patient, and whether there shall be extrapay under the name of attendance.”

“Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug,” said Mr.Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.

Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a party,getting the more irritable in consequence.

“As to humbug, Hawley,” he said, “that’s a word easy to fling about. But what Icontend against is the way medical men are fouling their own nest, and settingup a cry about the country as if a general practitioner who dispenses drugscouldn’t be a gentleman. I throw back the imputation with scorn. I say, themost ungentlemanly trick a man can be guilty of is to come among the members ofhis profession with innovations which are a libel on their time-honoredprocedure. That is my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any onewho contradicts me.” Mr. Wrench’s voice had become exceedingly sharp.

“I can’t oblige you there, Wrench,” said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his hands intohis 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 youcome to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague.”

“Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these infringements?” saidMr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer his lights. “How does thelaw stand, eh, Hawley?”

“Nothing to be done there,” said Mr. Hawley. “I looked into it for Sprague.You’d only break your nose against a damned judge’s decision.”

“Pooh! no need of law,” said Mr. Toller. “So far as practice is concerned theattempt is an absurdity. No patient will like it—certainly not Peaco*ck’s, whohave been used to depletion. Pass the wine.”

Mr. Toller’s prediction was partly verified. If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey, who hadno idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed declarationagainst drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him in should watch alittle anxiously to see whether he did “use all the means he might use” in thecase. Even good Mr. Powderell, who in his constant charity of interpretationwas inclined to esteem Lydgate the more for what seemed a conscientious pursuitof a better plan, had his mind disturbed with doubts during his wife’s attackof erysipelas, and could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr.Peaco*ck on a similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which werenot otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs.Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in aremarkably hot August. At last, indeed, in the conflict between his desire notto hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no “means” should be lacking, he inducedhis wife privately to take Widgeon’s Purifying Pills, an esteemed Middlemarchmedicine, which arrested every disease at the fountain by setting to work atonce upon the blood. This co-operative measure was not to be mentioned toLydgate, and Mr. Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hopingthat it might be attended with a blessing.

But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate’s introduction he was helped by what wemortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came newly to aplace without making cures that surprised somebody—cures which may be calledfortune’s testimonials, and deserve as much credit as the written or printedkind. Various patients got well while Lydgate was attending them, some even ofdangerous illnesses; and it was remarked that the new doctor with his new wayshad at least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death. Thetrash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because itgave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous manwould desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering dislike of theother medical men as an encouragement on his own part of ignorant puffing. Buteven his proud outspokenness was checked by the discernment that it was asuseless 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 inher 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 hewrote a statement of the case as one of tumor, and recommended the bearer NancyNash as an out-patient. Nancy, calling at home on her way to the Infirmary,allowed the stay maker and his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr.Minchin’s paper, and by this means became a subject of compassionateconversation in the neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflictedwith a tumor at first declared to be as large and hard as a duck’s egg, butlater in the day to be about the size of “your fist.” Most hearers agreed thatit 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 takenenough of into the inside—the oil by gradually “soopling,” the squitchineal byeating away.

Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened to be oneof Lydgate’s days there. After questioning and examining her, Lydgate said tothe house-surgeon in an undertone, “It’s not tumor: it’s cramp.” He ordered hera blister and some steel mixture, and told her to go home and rest, giving herat 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 supposedtumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only wandered to anotherregion with angrier pain. The staymaker’s wife went to fetch Lydgate, and hecontinued for a fortnight to attend Nancy in her own home, until under histreatment she got quite well and went to work again. But the case continued tobe described as one of tumor in Churchyard Lane and other streets—nay, by Mrs.Larcher also; for when Lydgate’s remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin,he naturally did not like to say, “The case was not one of tumor, and I wasmistaken in describing it as such,” but answered, “Indeed! ah! I saw it was asurgical 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 daysbefore, to hear from the house-surgeon, a youngster who was not sorry to vexMinchin with impunity, exactly what had occurred: he privately pronounced thatit was indecent in a general practitioner to contradict a physician’s diagnosisin that open manner, and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate wasdisagreeably inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate did not make the affair a groundfor valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, suchrectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equalqualifications. But report took up this amazing case of tumor, not clearlydistinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for being of thewandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate’s method as to drugs wasovercome by the proof of his marvellous skill in the speedy restoration ofNancy Nash after she had been rolling and rolling in agonies from the presenceof a tumor both hard and obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.

How could Lydgate help himself? It is offensive to tell a lady when she isexpressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether mistaken andrather foolish in her amazement. And to have entered into the nature ofdiseases would only have added to his breaches of medical propriety. Thus hehad to wince under a promise of success given by that ignorant praise whichmisses every valid quality.

In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, Lydgate wasconscious of having shown himself something better than an every-day doctor,though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he won. The eloquentauctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having been a patient of Mr.Peaco*ck’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 theoryupon—watching the course of an interesting disease when left as much aspossible to itself, so that the stages might be noted for future guidance; andfrom the air with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that hewould like to be taken into his medical man’s confidence, and be represented asa partner in his own cure. The auctioneer heard, without much surprise, thathis was a constitution which (always with due watching) might be left toitself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a disease with all its phasesseen in clear delineation, and that he probably had the rare strength of mindvoluntarily to become the test of a rational procedure, and thus make thedisorder of his pulmonary functions a general benefit to society.

Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view that anillness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.

“Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether ignorant of thevis medicatrix,” said he, with his usual superiority of expression, maderather pathetic by difficulty of breathing. And he went without shrinkingthrough his abstinence from drugs, much sustained by application of thethermometer which implied the importance of his temperature, by the sense thathe furnished objects for the microscope, and by learning many new words whichseemed suited to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough toindulge him with a little technical talk.

It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a disposition tospeak of an illness in which he had manifested the strength of his mind as wellas constitution; and he was not backward in awarding credit to the medical manwho had discerned the quality of patient he had to deal with. The auctioneerwas not an ungenerous man, and liked to give others their due, feeling that hecould afford it. He had caught the words “expectant method,” and rang chimes onthis and other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate “knew athing or two more than the rest of the doctors—was far better versed in thesecrets 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-comeralready threatened to be a nuisance in the shape of rivalry, and was certainlya nuisance in the shape of practical criticism or reflections on hishard-driven elders, who had had something else to do than to busy themselveswith untried notions. His practice had spread in one or two quarters, and fromthe first the report of his high family had led to his being pretty generallyinvited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the besthouses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed always to endin a mutual attachment. There was hardly ever so much unanimity among them asin the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant young fellow, and yet ready for thesake of ultimately predominating to show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode.That Mr. Farebrother, whose name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party,always defended Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother’sunaccountable way of fighting on both sides.

Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust at theannouncement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the direction of theNew Hospital, which were the more exasperating because there was no presentpossibility of interfering with his will and pleasure, everybody except LordMedlicote having refused help towards the building, on the ground that theypreferred giving to the Old Infirmary. Mr. Bulstrode met all the expenses, andhad ceased to be sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out hisnotions of improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he hadhad to spend large sums, and the building had lingered. Caleb Garth hadundertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the interior fittingswere begun had retired from the management of the business; and when referringto the Hospital he often said that however Bulstrode might ring if you triedhim, he liked good solid carpentry and masonry, and had a notion both of drainsand chimneys. In fact, the Hospital had become an object of intense interest toBulstrode, and he would willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sumthat he might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had anotherfavorite object which also required money for its accomplishment: he wished tobuy some land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, and therefore he wished toget considerable contributions towards maintaining the Hospital. Meanwhile heframed his plan of management. The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in allits forms; Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent, that he might havefree authority to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies,particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other medicalvisitors having a consultative influence, but no power to contravene Lydgate’sultimate decisions; and the general management was to be lodged exclusively inthe hands of five directors associated with Mr. Bulstrode, who were to havevotes in the ratio of their contributions, the Board itself filling up anyvacancy in its numbers, and no mob of small contributors being admitted to ashare of government.

There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the town tobecome a visitor at the Fever Hospital.

“Very well,” said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, “we have a capital house-surgeonand dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we’ll get Webbe fromCrabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them, to come over twicea-week, and in case of any exceptional operation, Protheroe will come fromBrassing. I must work the harder, that’s all, and I have given up my post atthe Infirmary. The plan will flourish in spite of them, and then they’ll beglad to come in. Things can’t last as they are: there must be all sorts ofreform soon, and then young fellows may be glad to come and study here.”Lydgate was in high spirits.

“I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate,” said Mr. Bulstrode.“While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigor, you shall have myunfailing support. And I have humble confidence that the blessing which hash*therto attended my efforts against the spirit of evil in this town will notbe 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 tocontribute yearly: he has not specified the sum—probably not a great one. Buthe will be a useful member of the board.”

A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate nothing,and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.

The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now. Neither Dr. Spraguenor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate’s knowledge, or his dispositionto improve treatment: what they disliked was his arrogance, which nobody feltto be altogether deniable. They implied that he was insolent, pretentious, andgiven to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was theessence of the charlatan.

The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop. In those daysthe world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr. St. John Long,“noblemen and gentlemen” attesting his extraction of a fluid like mercury fromthe temples of a patient.

Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that “Bulstrode had founda man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure to like othersorts of charlatans.”

“Yes, indeed, I can imagine,” said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number of thirtystitches 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 whenthe 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 tomake a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people. The other day he waspretending 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 evenwith respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much more likelythat in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and sevens of hospitalpatients. Especially it was to be expected, as the landlady of the Tankard hadsaid, that he would recklessly cut up their dead bodies. For Lydgate havingattended Mrs. Goby, who died apparently of a heart-disease not very clearlyexpressed in the symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to openthe 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 ofher 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 toDorothea. We see that he was bearing enmity and silly misconception with muchspirit, 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 caremost about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our wants. By-and-byI shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no seductions now away from homeand work. And I am more and more convinced that it will be possible todemonstrate the hom*ogeneous origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others areon the same track, and I have been losing time.”

“I have no power of prophecy there,” said Mr. Farebrother, who had been puffingat his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; “but as to the hostility in thetown, 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. Itisn’t possible to square one’s conduct to silly conclusions which nobody canforesee.”

“Quite true; I didn’t mean that. I meant only two things. One is, keep yourselfas separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you can go on doing goodwork of your own by his help; but don’t get tied. Perhaps it seems likepersonal feeling in me to say so—and there’s a good deal of that, I own—butpersonal feeling is not always in the wrong if you boil it down to theimpressions which make it simply an opinion.”

“Bulstrode is nothing to me,” said Lydgate, carelessly, “except on publicgrounds. As to getting very closely united to him, I am not fond enough of himfor that. But what was the other thing you meant?” said Lydgate, who wasnursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and feeling in no great need ofadvice.

“Why, this. Take care—experto crede—take care not to get hampered aboutmoney matters. I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you don’t like myplaying at cards so much for money. You are right enough there. But try andkeep clear of wanting small sums that you haven’t got. I am perhaps talkingrather superfluously; but a man likes to assume superiority over himself, byholding up his bad example and sermonizing on it.”

Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother’s hints very cordially, though he would hardlyhave borne them from another man. He could not help remembering that he hadlately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable, and he had nointention now to do more than keep house in a simple way. The furniture forwhich he owed would not want renewing; nor even the stock of wine for a longwhile.

Many thoughts cheered him at that time—and justly. A man conscious ofenthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memoryof great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hoverin his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping. At home, that same eveningwhen he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother, he had his long legs stretchedon the sofa, his head thrown back, and his hands clasped behind it according tohis favorite ruminating attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and playedone tune after another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotionalelephant he was!) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodioussea-breezes.

There was something very fine in Lydgate’s look just then, and any one mighthave been encouraged to bet on his achievement. In his dark eyes and on hismouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the fulness ofcontemplative thought—the mind not searching, but beholding, and the glanceseeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close to thesofa and opposite her husband’s face.

“Is that enough music for you, my lord?” she said, folding her hands before herand putting on a little air of meekness.

“Yes, dear, if you are tired,” said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes andresting them on her, but not otherwise moving. Rosamond’s presence at thatmoment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake, and her woman’sinstinct in this matter was not dull.

“What is absorbing you?” she said, leaning forward and bringing her face nearerto his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three hundredyears ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”

“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head. “We used to play at guessinghistorical characters at Mrs. Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”

“I’ll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to knowanatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards andplaces of execution.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am very gladyou are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find some less horribleway than that.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much notice ofher answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by snatching the whitenedbones of a criminal from the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them awayby bits secretly, in the dead of night.”

“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half playfully,half anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St.Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs.Goby. You have enemies enough already.”

“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch arejealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesaliusbecause they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. Theycalled him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human framewere 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 himenough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his work. Then he gotshipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to take a great chair atPadua. He died rather miserably.”

There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know, Tertius, I oftenwish you had not been a medical man.”

“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him. “That islike saying you wish you had married another man.”

“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have beensomething else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have sunkbelow them in your choice of a profession.”

“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!” said Lydgate, with scorn. “Itwas like their impudence if they said anything of the sort to you.”

“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do not think it is a nice profession, dear.”We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

“It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,” said Lydgate, gravely.“And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the samesort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavor.Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”

“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy, dimpling, “I will declare in futurethat I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things in phials, andquarrels with everybody, that end in your dying miserably.”

“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and pettingher resignedly.

CHAPTER XLVI.

While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command, felthimself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch wasbecoming more and more conscious of the national struggle for another kind ofReform.

By the time that Lord John Russell’s measure was being debated in the House ofCommons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch, and a newdefinition of parties which might show a decided change of balance if a newelection came. And there were some who already predicted this event, declaringthat a Reform Bill would never be carried by the actual Parliament. This waswhat Will Ladislaw dwelt on to Mr. Brooke as a reason for congratulation thathe had not yet tried his strength at the hustings.

“Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year,” said Will. “The publictemper 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 timeMiddlemarch will have got more ideas into its head. What we have to work at nowis 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’twant to go too far. I want to take up Wilberforce’s and Romilly’s line, youknow, and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal Law—that kind of thing. But ofcourse I should support Grey.”

“If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take whatthe situation offers,” said Will. “If everybody pulled for his own bit againsteverybody else, the whole question would go to tatters.”

“Yes, yes, I agree with you—I quite take that point of view. I should put it inthat light. I should support Grey, you know. But I don’t want to change thebalance of the constitution, and I don’t think Grey would.”

“But that is what the country wants,” said Will. “Else there would be nomeaning 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 thelanded class, but with representatives of the other interests. And as tocontending for a reform short of that, it is like asking for a bit of anavalanche which has already begun to thunder.”

“That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it. Write that down, now. Wemust begin to get documents about the feeling of the country, as well as themachine-breaking and general distress.”

“As to documents,” said Will, “a two-inch card will hold plenty. A few rows offigures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will show the rate atwhich 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 puttingthings. Burke, now:—when I think of Burke, I can’t help wishing somebody had apocket-borough to give you, Ladislaw. You’d never get elected, you know. And weshall always want talent in the House: reform as we will, we shall always wanttalent. That avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a little like Burke. Iwant 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 inthe 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 ofexpressing one’s self better than others and never to have it noticed, and inthe general dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray ofapplause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying. Will felt that hisliterary refinements were usually beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception;nevertheless, he was beginning thoroughly to like the work of which when hebegan he had said to himself rather languidly, “Why not?”—and he studied thepolitical situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to poeticmetres or mediaevalism. It is undeniable that but for the desire to be whereDorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would notat this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people orcriticising English statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling inItaly sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it toojejune, 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 wouldhave been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our senseof duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place ofdilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matterof indifference.

Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that indeterminateloftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worthy of continuouseffort. His nature warmed easily in the presence of subjects which were visiblymixed with life and action, and the easily stirred rebellion in him helped theglow 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 andfor 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 thatreaches the four corners of the earth).

Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will’s impatience was relieved bythe division of his time between visits to the Grange and retreats to hisMiddlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.

“Shift the pegs a little,” he said to himself, “and Mr. Brooke might be in theCabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order of things: thelittle waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern. I am better herethan in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would have trained me for, where thedoing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon. Idon’t care for prestige or high pay.”

As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the senseof belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position, and apleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went. Thatsort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had felt some new distance betweenhimself and Dorothea in their accidental meeting at Lydgate’s, and hisirritation had gone out towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand thatWill would lose caste. “I never had any caste,” he would have said, if thatprophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gonelike breath in his transparent skin. But it is one thing to like defiance, andanother thing to like its consequences.

Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the “Pioneer” was tendingto confirm Mr. Casaubon’s view. Will’s relationship in that distinguishedquarter did not, like Lydgate’s high connections, serve as an advantageousintroduction: if it was rumored that young Ladislaw was Mr. Casaubon’s nephewor cousin, it was also rumored that “Mr. Casaubon would have nothing to do withhim.”

“Brooke has taken him up,” said Mr. Hawley, “because that is what no man in hissenses could have expected. Casaubon has devilish good reasons, you may besure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young fellow whose bringing-up he paidfor. Just like Brooke—one of those fellows who would praise a cat to sell ahorse.”

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 truthwere known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained, which accountedfor the preternatural quickness and glibness of his speech when he got on to aplatform—as he did whenever he had an opportunity, speaking with a facilitywhich cast reflections on solid Englishmen generally. It was disgusting to Keckto see a strip of a fellow, with light curls round his head, get up andspeechify by the hour against institutions “which had existed when he was inhis cradle.” And in a leading article of the “Trumpet,” Keck characterizedLadislaw’s speech at a Reform meeting as “the violence of an energumen—amiserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks the daring ofirresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge which was of thecheapest and most recent description.”

“That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck,” said Dr. Sprague, with sarcasticintentions. “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 habitswhich became matter of remark. He had a fondness, half artistic, halfaffectionate, for little children—the smaller they were on tolerably activelegs, and the funnier their clothing, the better Will liked to surprise andplease them. We know that in Rome he was given to ramble about among the poorpeople, and the taste did not quit him in Middlemarch.

He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys withtheir galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out, little girls whotossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him, and guardian brothers atthe mature age of seven. This troop he had led out on gypsy excursions toHalsell Wood at nutting-time, and since the cold weather had set in he hadtaken them on a clear day to gather sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of ahillside, where he drew out a small feast of gingerbread for them, andimprovised a Punch-and-Judy drama with some private home-made puppets. Here wasone oddity. Another was, that in houses where he got friendly, he was given tostretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to bediscovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularitywas likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and generallaxity.

But Will’s articles and speeches naturally recommended him in families whichthe new strictness of party division had marked off on the side of Reform. Hewas invited to Mr. Bulstrode’s; but here he could not lie down on the rug, andMrs. Bulstrode felt that his mode of talking about Catholic countries, as ifthere were any truce with Antichrist, illustrated the usual tendency tounsoundness in intellectual men.

At Mr. Farebrother’s, however, whom the irony of events had brought on the sameside with Bulstrode in the national movement, Will became a favorite with theladies; especially with little Miss Noble, whom it was one of his oddities toescort when he met her in the street with her little basket, giving her his armin the eyes of the town, and insisting on going with her to pay some call whereshe 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 wasabrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of megrims in healthy people;and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his susceptibilities on those who tookno notice of them. With Rosamond, on the other hand, he pouted and waswayward—nay, often uncomplimentary, much to her inward surprise; neverthelesshe was gradually becoming necessary to her entertainment by his companionshipin her music, his varied talk, and his freedom from the grave preoccupationwhich, with all her husband’s tenderness and indulgence, often made his mannersunsatisfactory to her, and confirmed her dislike of the medical profession.

Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the people inthe efficacy of “the bill,” while nobody cared about the low state ofpathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions. One evening inMarch, Rosamond in her cherry-colored dress with swansdown trimming about thethroat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate, lately come in tired from his outdoorwork, was seated sideways on an easy-chair by the fire with one leg over theelbow, his brow looking a little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columnsof the “Pioneer,” while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed, avoidedlooking at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself had not a moodydisposition. Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug contemplating thecurtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low the notes of “When first I sawthy face;” while the house spaniel, also stretched out with small choice ofroom, looked from between his paws at the usurper of the rug with silent butstrong objection.

Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper, and said toWill, who had started up and gone to the table—

“It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they onlypick 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 aview to its own conversion? We should have a witches’ brewing with a vengeancethen—‘Mingle, mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may’—and nobody wouldknow which side he was going to take.”

“Farebrother says, he doesn’t believe Brooke would get elected if theopportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring anothermember 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 curttone.

“They represent the local stupidity better,” said Will, laughing, and shakinghis curls; “and they are kept on their best behavior in the neighborhood.Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good things on his estate thathe 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 theHospital. Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives him.”

“That depends on how you fix your standard of public men,” said Will. “He’sgood enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as theyare 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 ifit were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very diseasethat wants curing.”

“Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land withoutknowing it,” said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when he had notthought of a question beforehand.

“That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopesabout this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to sendup voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go againstrottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making peoplebelieve that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

“That’s very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere, and putit that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformedwithout this particular reform to begin with. Look what Stanley said the otherday—that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions ofbribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybodyknows that the seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and consciencein public agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is themassive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is thewisdom of balancing claims. That’s my text—which side is injured? I support theman 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 foropium in a given case of gout.”

“I am not begging the question we are upon—whether we are to try for nothingtill we find immaculate men to work with. Should you go on that plan? If therewere one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would opposeit, should you inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?”

“Oh, of course,” said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move which he hadoften used himself, “if one did not work with such men as are at hand, thingsmust come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion in the town about Bulstrodewere a true one, that would not make it less true that he has the sense and theresolution to do what I think ought to be done in the matters I know and caremost about; but that is the only ground on which I go with him,” Lydgate addedrather proudly, bearing in mind Mr. Farebrother’s remarks. “He is nothing to meotherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground—I would keep clear ofthat.”

“Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?” said Will Ladislaw,nettled, and turning sharp round. For the first time he felt offended withLydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have declined any closeinquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr. Brooke.

“Not at all,” said Lydgate, “I was simply explaining my own action. I meantthat a man may work for a special end with others whose motives and generalcourse are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal independence, andthat he is not working for his private interest—either place or money.”

“Then, why don’t you extend your liberality to others?” said Will, stillnettled. “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 fromBrooke, than I have to imagine that you have personal expectations fromBulstrode. Motives are points of honor, I suppose—nobody can prove them. But asto money and place in the world,” Will ended, tossing back his head, “I thinkit is pretty clear that I am not determined by considerations of that sort.”

“You quite mistake me, Ladislaw,” said Lydgate, surprised. He had beenpreoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what Ladislaw mightinfer 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 ownworldly interests. On the political question, I referred simply to intellectualbias.”

“How very unpleasant you both are this evening!” said Rosamond. “I cannotconceive why money should have been referred to. Politics and Medicine aresufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon. You can both of you go onquarrelling 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, andthen 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 singwith you.”

When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, “What put you out of temperthis evening, Tertius?”

“Me? It was Ladislaw who was out of temper. He is like a bit of tinder.”

“But I mean, before that. Something had vexed you before you came in, youlooked cross. And that made you begin to dispute with Mr. Ladislaw. You hurt mevery 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 paymentof a bill for furniture. But Rosamond was expecting to have a baby, and Lydgatewished to save her from any perturbation.

CHAPTER XLVII.

Was never true love loved in vain,
For truest love is highest gain.
No art can make it: it must spring
Where elements are fostering.
So in heaven’s spot and hour
Springs the little native flower,
Downward root and upward eye,
Shapen by the earth and sky.

It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that littlediscussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own rooms was to makehim sit up half the night, thinking over again, under a new irritation, allthat he had before thought of his having settled in Middlemarch and harnessedhimself with Mr. Brooke. Hesitations before he had taken the step had sinceturned into susceptibility to every hint that he would have been wiser not totake it; and hence came his heat towards Lydgate—a heat which still kept himrestless. Was he not making a fool of himself?—and at a time when he was morethan 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: thereis no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think inconsequence of his passions—does not find images rising in his mind whichsoothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread. But this, which happens tous all, happens to some with a wide difference; and Will was not one of thosewhose wit “keeps the roadway:” he had his bypaths where there were little joysof his own choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might havethought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness forhimself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It may seemstrange, 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 theinterest he had established in her mind might turn into acceptance of him as ahusband—had no tempting, arresting power over him; he did not live in thescenery 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 wasunwilling to entertain thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and wasalready uneasy in the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge ofingratitude—the latent consciousness of many other barriers between himself andDorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped to turn away hisimagination from speculating on what might befall Mr. Casaubon. And there wereyet other reasons. Will, we know, could not bear the thought of any flawappearing in his crystal: he was at once exasperated and delighted by the calmfreedom with which Dorothea looked at him and spoke to him, and there wassomething so exquisite in thinking of her just as she was, that he could notlong for a change which must somehow change her. Do we not shun the streetversion of a fine melody?—or shrink from the news that the rarity—some bit ofchiselling or engraving perhaps—which we have dwelt on even with exultation inthe trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommonthing, and may be obtained as an every-day possession? Our good depends on thequality and breadth of our emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared littlefor what are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtlerinfluences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, waslike the inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futilityof his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he wasconscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience thathigher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy. Dorothea, he said to himself,was forever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than herfootstool; and if he could have written out in immortal syllables the effectshe 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? Whatwas his devotion worth to her? It was impossible to tell. He would not go outof her reach. He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believethat she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him. She had once saidthat she would like him to stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathingdragons might hiss around her.

This had always been the conclusion of Will’s hesitations. But he was notwithout contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve. He hadoften got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some outsidedemonstration that his public exertions with Mr. Brooke as a chief could notseem as heroic as he would like them to be, and this was always associated withthe other ground of irritation—that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignityfor Dorothea’s sake, he could hardly ever see her. Whereupon, not being able tocontradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias andsaid, “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 presencewould be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the morrow would be Sunday, hedetermined to go to Lowick Church and see her. He slept upon that idea, butwhen 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 mefrom going out to a pretty country church on a spring morning. And Dorotheawill be glad.”

“It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy him or tosee Dorothea.”

“It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to seeDorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be always comfortable? Lethim smart a little, as other people are obliged to do. I have always liked thequaintness of the church and congregation; besides, I know the Tuckers: I shallgo into their pew.”

Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick as if hehad been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and skirting the wood,where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding boughs, bringing out thebeauties 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 toLowick Church. Will easily felt happy when nothing crossed his humor, and bythis 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 ofsunshine on the water—though the occasion was not exemplary. But most of us areapt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, andnot to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excitesin ourselves. Will went along with a small book under his arm and a hand ineach side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little, as he made scenes ofwhat would happen in church and coming out. He was experimenting in tunes tosuit some words of his own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimesimprovising. The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted hisSunday experience:—

Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing hisdelicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whosespirit filled the air—a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises.

The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into thecurate’s pew before any one else arrived there. But he was still left alone init when the congregation had assembled. The curate’s pew was opposite therector’s at the entrance of the small chancel, and Will had time to fear thatDorothea might not come while he looked round at the group of rural faces whichmade the congregation from year to year within the white-washed walls and darkold pews, hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree whichbreaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots. Mr. Rigg’s frog-facewas something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to theorder of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of thePowderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel’s cheek had the samepurple round as ever, and the three generations of decent cottagers came as ofold with a sense of duty to their betters generally—the smaller childrenregarding 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. Evenin 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemntenor of the Sunday sermon. The congregation had been used to seeing Will atchurch in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, whoexpected him to make a figure in the singing.

Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the shortaisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak—the same she had worn in theVatican. Her face being, from her entrance, towards the chancel, even hershortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was no outward show of herfeeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow as she passed him. To his ownsurprise Will felt suddenly uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after theyhad bowed to each other. Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon came out of thevestry, and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felthis paralysis more complete. He could look nowhere except at the choir in thelittle gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps pained, and he hadmade a wretched blunder. It was no longer amusing to vex Mr. Casaubon, who hadthe advantage probably of watching him and seeing that he dared not turn hishead. Why had he not imagined this beforehand?—but he could not expect that heshould sit in that square pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who hadapparently departed from Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in thedesk. Still he called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would beimpossible for him to look towards Dorothea—nay, that she might feel his comingan impertinence. There was no delivering himself from his cage, however; andWill found his places and looked at his book as if he had been aschool-mistress, feeling that the morning service had never been soimmeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous, out of temper, andmiserable. This was what a man got by worshipping the sight of a woman! Theclerk observed with surprise that Mr. Ladislaw did not join in the tune ofHanover, and reflected that he might have a cold.

Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in Will’ssituation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one rose. It was thefashion at Lowick for “the betters” to go out first. With a suddendetermination 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, whichhe opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and following her immediately withoutraising his eyelids. Will’s glance had caught Dorothea’s as she turned out ofthe pew, and again she bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if shewere repressing tears. Will walked out after them, but they went on towards thelittle gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never lookinground.

It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back sadly atmid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in the morning. Thelights were all changed for him both without and within.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

Surely the golden hours are turning gray
And dance no more, and vainly strive to run:
I see their white locks streaming in the wind—
Each face is haggard as it looks at me,
Slow turning in the constant clasping round
Storm-driven.

Dorothea’s distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly from theperception that Mr. Casaubon was determined not to speak to his cousin, andthat Will’s presence at church had served to mark more strongly the alienationbetween them. Will’s coming seemed to her quite excusable, nay, she thought itan amiable movement in him towards a reconciliation which she herself had beenconstantly wishing for. He had probably imagined, as she had, that if Mr.Casaubon and he could meet easily, they would shake hands and friendlyintercourse might return. But now Dorothea felt quite robbed of that hope. Willwas banished further than ever, for Mr. Casaubon must have been newlyembittered by this thrusting upon him of a presence which he refused torecognize.

He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some difficulty inbreathing, and had not preached in consequence; she was not surprised,therefore, that he was nearly silent at luncheon, still less that he made noallusion to Will Ladislaw. For her own part she felt that she could never againintroduce that subject. They usually spent apart the hours between luncheon anddinner on a Sunday; Mr. Casaubon in the library dozing chiefly, and Dorothea inher boudoir, where she was wont to occupy herself with some of her favoritebooks. There was a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window—ofvarious sorts, from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr.Casaubon, to her old companion Pascal, and Keble’s “Christian Year.” But to-dayshe opened one after another, and could read none of them. Everything seemeddreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus—Jewish antiquities—ohdear!—devout epigrams—the sacred chime of favorite hymns—all alike were as flatas tunes beaten on wood: even the spring flowers and the grass had a dullshiver in them under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even thesustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them theweariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for hersole companions. It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship thatpoor Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetualeffort demanded by her married life. She was always trying to be what herhusband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was. Thething that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have, seemed to be alwaysexcluded from her life; for if it was only granted and not shared by herhusband it might as well have been denied. About Will Ladislaw there had been adifference between them from the first, and it had ended, since Mr. Casaubonhad so severely repulsed Dorothea’s strong feeling about his claims on thefamily property, by her being convinced that she was in the right and herhusband in the wrong, but that she was helpless. This afternoon thehelplessness was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objectswho could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear. She longed for workwhich would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and now itappeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there wasthe apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would never see the light.Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw recedinginto the distant world of warm activity and fellowship—turning his face towardsher as he went.

Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use. It was Sunday, and she could nothave the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby. There was norefuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and Dorothea had to bearher bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.

After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud, Mr. Casaubonproposed that they should go into the library, where, he said, he had ordered afire and lights. He seemed to have revived, and to be thinking intently.

In the library Dorothea observed that he had newly arranged a row of hisnote-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand a well-knownvolume, which was a table of contents to all the others.

“You will oblige me, my dear,” he said, seating himself, “if instead of otherreading this evening, you will go through this aloud, pencil in hand, and ateach point where I say ‘mark,’ will make a cross with your pencil. This is thefirst step in a sifting process which I have long had in view, and as we go onI shall be able to indicate to you certain principles of selection whereby youwill, I trust, have an intelligent participation in my purpose.”

This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his memorableinterview with Lydgate, that Mr. Casaubon’s original reluctance to let Dorotheawork with him had given place to the contrary disposition, namely, to demandmuch interest and labor from her.

After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, “We will take the volumeup-stairs—and the pencil, if you please—and in case of reading in the night, wecan 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 toldthe simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in reading oranything else which left him as joyless as ever.

It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics in Dorotheaimpressed those around her, that her husband, with all his jealousy andsuspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of her promises, andher power of devoting herself to her idea of the right and best. Of late he hadbegun to feel that these qualities were a peculiar possession for himself, andhe wanted to engross them.

The reading in the night did come. Dorothea in her young weariness had sleptsoon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light, which seemed to her atfirst like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a steep hill: sheopened her eyes and saw her husband wrapped in his warm gown seating himself inthe arm-chair near the fire-place where the embers were still glowing. He hadlit two candles, expecting that Dorothea would awake, but not liking to rouseher by more direct means.

“Are you ill, Edward?” she said, rising immediately.

“I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture. I will sit here for a time.”She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up, and said, “You would like me toread to you?”

“You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Dorothea,” said Mr. Casaubon, with ashade more meekness than usual in his polite manner. “I am wakeful: my mind isremarkably 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 darednot insist, and she read for an hour or more on the same plan as she had donein the evening, but getting over the pages with more quickness. Mr. Casaubon’smind was more alert, and he seemed to anticipate what was coming after a veryslight verbal indication, saying, “That will do—mark that”—or “Pass on to thenext head—I omit the second excursus on Crete.” Dorothea was amazed to think ofthe bird-like speed with which his mind was surveying the ground where it hadbeen creeping for years. At last he said—

“Close the book now, my dear. We will resume our work to-morrow. I havedeferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed. But you observe thatthe principle on which my selection is made, is to give adequate, and notdisproportionate illustration to each of the theses enumerated in myintroduction, as at present sketched. You have perceived that distinctly,Dorothea?”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, rather tremulously. She felt sick at heart.

“And now I think that I can take some repose,” said Mr. Casaubon. He laid downagain and begged her to put out the lights. When she had lain down too, andthere was a darkness only broken by a dull glow on the hearth, he said—

“Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea.”

“What is it?” said Dorothea, with dread in her mind.

“It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death,you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what I shoulddeprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire.”

Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her to theconjecture of some intention on her husband’s part which might make a new yokefor 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 freedomasserting itself within her; “but it is too solemn—I think it is not right—tomake a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to. Whatever affectionprompted I would do without promising.”

“But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse.”

“No, dear, no!” said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears. “Butmay I wait and reflect a little while? I desire with my whole soul to do whatwill comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge suddenly—still less a pledge todo 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, hermind was carrying on a conflict in which imagination ranged its forces first onone side and then on the other. She had no presentiment that the power whichher husband wished to establish over her future action had relation to anythingelse than his work. But it was clear enough to her that he would expect her todevote herself to sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be thedoubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful. The poor child hadbecome altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key which hadmade the ambition and the labor of her husband’s life. It was not wonderfulthat, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment in this matter was truerthan his: for she looked with unbiassed comparison and healthy sense atprobabilities on which he had risked all his egoism. And now she pictured toherself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting whatmight be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which wasitself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theorywhich was already withered in the birth like an elfin child. Doubtless avigorous 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 bodyof 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 notlikely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexibleconjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because oflikeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made themimpossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by thenecessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaboratenotion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan forthreading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often had to check herweariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealeditself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to makelife worthier! She could understand well enough now why her husband had come tocling to her, as possibly the only hope left that his labors would ever take ashape in which they could be given to the world. At first it had seemed that hewished 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 toospeedy death—

And here Dorothea’s pity turned from her own future to her husband’s past—nay,to his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out of that past: thelonely labor, the ambition breathing hardly under the pressure ofself-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs; and now at last thesword visibly trembling above him! And had she not wished to marry him that shemight help him in his life’s labor?—But she had thought the work was to besomething greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake. Was itright, even to soothe his grief—would it be possible, even if she promised—towork as in a treadmill fruitlessly?

And yet, could she deny him? Could she say, “I refuse to content this pininghunger?” It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was almost sure todo for him living. If he lived as Lydgate had said he might, for fifteen yearsor more, her life would certainly be spent in helping him and obeying him.

Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living and thatindefinite promise of devotion to the dead. While he lived, he could claimnothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate against, and even torefuse. But—the thought passed through her mind more than once, though shecould not believe in it—might he not mean to demand something more from herthan she had been able to imagine, since he wanted her pledge to carry out hiswishes without telling her exactly what they were? No; his heart was bound upin his work only: that was the end for which his failing life was to be ekedout by hers.

And now, if she were to say, “No! if you die, I will put no finger to yourwork”—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 andsought 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 whohad been with the sisters at Lausanne.

“Was I ever high-colored, Tantripp?” said Dorothea, smiling faintly.

“Well, not to say high-colored, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose. But alwayssmelling those leather books, what can be expected? Do rest a little thismorning, madam. Let me say you are ill and not able to go into that closelibrary.”

“Oh no, no! let me make haste,” said Dorothea. “Mr. Casaubon wants meparticularly.”

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 wherehe had been placing some books, and said—

“I was waiting for your appearance, my dear. I had hoped to set to work at oncethis morning, but I find myself under some indisposition, probably from toomuch excitement yesterday. I am going now to take a turn in the shrubbery,since the air is milder.”

“I am glad to hear that,” said Dorothea. “Your mind, I feared, was too activelast night.”

“I would fain have it set at rest on the point I last spoke of, Dorothea. Youcan now, I hope, give me an answer.”

“May I come out to you in the garden presently?” said Dorothea, winning alittle 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 theformer conflict: she simply felt that she was going to say “Yes” to her owndoom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting akeen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely. She satstill and let Tantripp put on her bonnet and shawl, a passivity which wasunusual with her, for she liked to wait on herself.

“God bless you, madam!” said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement of lovetowards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anythingmore, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.

This was too much for Dorothea’s highly-strung feeling, and she burst intotears, sobbing against Tantripp’s arm. But soon she checked herself, dried hereyes, 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 hadbeen at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as we know; and she always declinedto call Mr. Casaubon anything but “your master,” when speaking to the otherservants.

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 clumpsof trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a differentcause. Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome;now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herselfto a fellowship from which she shrank. Neither law nor the world’s opinioncompelled her to this—only her husband’s nature and her own compassion, onlythe ideal and not the real yoke of marriage. She saw clearly enough the wholesituation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul thatentreated hers. If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak. But the half-hour waspassing, and she must not delay longer. When she entered the Yew-tree Walk shecould not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting tocatch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvetcap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden. It occurred to herthat he might be resting in the summer-house, towards which the path diverged alittle. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to astone table. His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was bowed down onthem, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening his face on each side.

“He exhausted himself last night,” Dorothea said to herself, thinking at firstthat 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 whenshe was reading to him, as if he found it easier than any other; and that hewould sometimes speak, as well as listen, with his face down in that way. Shewent into the summerhouse and said, “I am come, Edward; I am ready.”

He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep. She laid herhand on his shoulder, and repeated, “I am ready!” Still he was motionless; andwith 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 gaveher answer.

Later in the day, Lydgate was seated by her bedside, and she was talkingdeliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone through her mind thenight before. She knew him, and called him by his name, but appeared to thinkit right that she should explain everything to him; and again, and again,begged him to explain everything to her husband.

“Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise. Only, thinking aboutit was so dreadful—it has made me ill. Not very ill. I shall soon be better. Goand tell him.”

But the silence in her husband’s ear was never more to be broken.

CHAPTER XLIX.

“A task too strong for wizard spells
This squire had brought about;
’T is easy dropping stones in wells,
But who shall get them out?”

“I wish to God we could hinder Dorothea from knowing this,” said Sir JamesChettam, with a little frown on his brow, and an expression of intense disgustabout his mouth.

He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Grange, and speakingto Mr. Brooke. It was the day after Mr. Casaubon had been buried, and Dorotheawas not yet able to leave her room.

“That would be difficult, you know, Chettam, as she is an executrix, and shelikes to go into these things—property, land, that kind of thing. She has hernotions, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, sticking his eye-glasses on nervously, andexploring the edges of a folded paper which he held in his hand; “and she wouldlike to act—depend upon it, as an executrix Dorothea would want to act. And shewas twenty-one last December, you know. I can hinder nothing.”

Sir James looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then lifting hiseyes suddenly fixed them on Mr. Brooke, saying, “I will tell you what we cando. Until Dorothea is well, all business must be kept from her, and as soon asshe is able to be moved she must come to us. Being with Celia and the baby willbe the best thing in the world for her, and will pass away the time. Andmeanwhile you must get rid of Ladislaw: you must send him out of the country.”Here Sir James’s look of disgust returned in all its intensity.

Mr. Brooke put his hands behind him, walked to the window and straightened hisback 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 withinrespectful forms, “it was you who brought him here, and you who keep him here—Imean by the occupation you give him.”

“Yes, but I can’t dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons, my dearChettam. Ladislaw has been invaluable, most satisfactory. I consider that Ihave 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 haveto say about it. At any rate, as Dorothea’s brother-in-law, I feel warranted inobjecting strongly to his being kept here by any action on the part of herfriends. You admit, I hope, that I have a right to speak about what concernsthe dignity of my wife’s sister?”

Sir James was getting warm.

“Of course, my dear Chettam, of course. But you and I have differentideas—different—”

“Not about this action of Casaubon’s, I should hope,” interrupted Sir James. “Isay that he has most unfairly compromised Dorothea. I say that there never wasa meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this—a codicil of this sort to a willwhich he made at the time of his marriage with the knowledge and reliance ofher family—a positive insult to Dorothea!”

“Well, you know, Casaubon was a little twisted about Ladislaw. Ladislaw hastold me the reason—dislike of the bent he took, you know—Ladislaw didn’t thinkmuch of Casaubon’s notions, Thoth and Dagon—that sort of thing: and I fancythat Casaubon didn’t like the independent position Ladislaw had taken up. I sawthe letters between them, you know. Poor Casaubon was a little buried inbooks—he didn’t know the world.”

“It’s all very well for Ladislaw to put that color on it,” said Sir James. “ButI believe Casaubon was only jealous of him on Dorothea’s account, and the worldwill suppose that she gave him some reason; and that is what makes it soabominable—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 withCasaubon’s oddity. This paper, now, ‘Synoptical Tabulation’ and so on, ‘for theuse of Mrs. Casaubon,’ it was locked up in the desk with the will. I suppose hemeant Dorothea to publish his researches, eh? and she’ll do it, you know; shehas gone into his studies uncommonly.”

“My dear sir,” said Sir James, impatiently, “that is neither here nor there.The question is, whether you don’t see with me the propriety of sending youngLadislaw 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 whatthey 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. “Imight get rid of Ladislaw up to a certain point—take away the ‘Pioneer’ fromhim, and that sort of thing; but I couldn’t send him out of the country if hedidn’t choose to go—didn’t choose, you know.”

Mr. Brooke, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing the nature oflast year’s weather, and nodding at the end with his usual amenity, was anexasperating form of obstinacy.

“Good God!” said Sir James, with as much passion as he ever showed, “let us gethim a post; let us spend money on him. If he could go in the suite of someColonial 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 meto-morrow, you’d only hear the more of him in the country. With his talent forspeaking and drawing up documents, there are few men who could come up to himas an agitator—an agitator, you know.”

“Agitator!” said Sir James, with bitter emphasis, feeling that the syllables ofthis word properly repeated were a sufficient exposure of its hatefulness.

“But be reasonable, Chettam. Dorothea, now. As you say, she had better go toCelia as soon as possible. She can stay under your roof, and in the mean timethings 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’sknown. Twenty things may happen to carry off Ladislaw—without my doinganything, you know.”

“Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?”

“Decline, Chettam?—no—I didn’t say decline. But I really don’t see what I coulddo. Ladislaw is a gentleman.”

“I am glad to hear it!” said Sir James, his irritation making him forgethimself a little. “I am sure Casaubon was not.”

“Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder her frommarrying 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 allgoes for nothing. She doesn’t want to marry Ladislaw.”

“But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she did. Idon’t believe anything of the sort about Dorothea,” said Sir James—thenfrowningly, “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 itwere possible to pack him off—send him to Norfolk Island—that sort of thing—itwould look all the worse for Dorothea to those who knew about it. It would seemas if we distrusted her—distrusted her, you know.”

That Mr. Brooke had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to soothe SirJames. He put out his hand to reach his hat, implying that he did not mean tocontend further, and said, still with some heat—

“Well, I can only say that I think Dorothea was sacrificed once, because herfriends were too careless. I shall do what I can, as her brother, to protecther now.”

“You can’t do better than get her to Fresh*tt as soon as possible, Chettam. Iapprove that plan altogether,” said Mr. Brooke, well pleased that he had wonthe argument. It would have been highly inconvenient to him to part withLadislaw at that time, when a dissolution might happen any day, and electorswere to be convinced of the course by which the interests of the country wouldbe best served. Mr. Brooke sincerely believed that this end could be secured byhis own return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to thenation.

CHAPTER L.

“This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.”
“Nay by my father’s soule! that schal he nat,”
Sayde the Schipman, ‘here schal he not preche,
We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche.
We leven all in the gret God,’ quod he.
He wolden sowen some diffcultee.”—Canterbury Tales.

Dorothea had been safe at Fresh*tt Hall nearly a week before she had asked anydangerous questions. Every morning now she sat with Celia in the prettiest ofup-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small conservatory—Celia all in whiteand lavender like a bunch of mixed violets, watching the remarkable acts of thebaby, which were so dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation wasinterrupted by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse.Dorothea sat by in her widow’s dress, with an expression which rather provokedCelia, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite well, but really whena husband had been so dull and troublesome while he lived, and besides thathad—well, well! Sir James, of course, had told Celia everything, with a strongrepresentation how important it was that Dorothea should not know it soonerthan was inevitable.

But Mr. Brooke had been right in predicting that Dorothea would not long remainpassive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the purport of herhusband’s will made at the time of their marriage, and her mind, as soon as shewas clearly conscious of her position, was silently occupied with what sheought to do as the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the livingattached to it.

One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusualalacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now prettycertain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Dorothea said—

“Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have the living atLowick. After Mr. Tucker had been provided for, I never heard my husband saythat he had any clergyman in his mind as a successor to himself. I think Iought 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 cango, if you like. But I cast my eyes over things in the desks and drawers—therewas nothing—nothing but deep subjects, you know—besides the will. Everythingcan be done by-and-by. As to the living, I have had an application for interestalready—I should say rather good. Mr. Tyke has been strongly recommended tome—I had something to do with getting him an appointment before. An apostolicman, 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 madesome addition to his will—there may be some instructions for me,” saidDorothea, who had all the while had this conjecture in her mind with relationto her husband’s work.

“Nothing about the rectory, my dear—nothing,” said Mr. Brooke, rising to goaway, and putting out his hand to his nieces: “nor about his researches, youknow. 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 worknow—it’s a crisis—a political crisis, you know. And here is Celia and herlittle 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 thatit would not be his (Mr. Brooke’s) fault if Dorothea insisted on looking intoeverything.

Dorothea sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room, and cast hereyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.

“Look, Dodo! look at him! Did you ever see anything like that?” said Celia, inher comfortable staccato.

“What, Kitty?” said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently.

“What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he meant tomake a face. Isn’t it wonderful! He may have his little thoughts. I wish nursewere here. Do look at him.”

A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down Dorothea’scheek as she looked up and tried to smile.

“Don’t be sad, Dodo; kiss baby. What are you brooding over so? I am sure youdid 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 overeverything—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, youhave got a wrong notion in your head as usual, Dodo—I can see that: it vexesme.”

“Where am I wrong, Kitty?” said Dorothea, quite meekly. She was almost readynow to think Celia wiser than herself, and was really wondering with some fearwhat her wrong notion was. Celia felt her advantage, and was determined to useit. None of them knew Dodo as well as she did, or knew how to manage her. SinceCelia’s baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calmwisdom. 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. “Youare wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable for you to do now,only because Mr. Casaubon wished it. As if you had not been uncomfortableenough before. And he doesn’t deserve it, and you will find that out. He hasbehaved very badly. James is as angry with him as can be. And I had better tellyou, to prepare you.”

“Celia,” said Dorothea, entreatingly, “you distress me. Tell me at once whatyou mean.” It glanced through her mind that Mr. Casaubon had left the propertyaway 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 awayfrom you if you married—I mean—”

“That is of no consequence,” said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously.

“But if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else,” Celia went on withpersevering quietude. “Of course that is of no consequence in one way—you neverwould marry Mr. Ladislaw; but that only makes it worse of Mr. Casaubon.”

The blood rushed to Dorothea’s face and neck painfully. But Celia wasadministering what she thought a sobering dose of fact. It was taking upnotions that had done Dodo’s health so much harm. So she went on in her neutraltone, as if she had been remarking on baby’s robes.

“James says so. He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And therenever was a better judge than James. It is as if Mr. Casaubon wanted to makepeople believe that you would wish to marry Mr. Ladislaw—which is ridiculous.Only James says it was to hinder Mr. Ladislaw from wanting to marry you foryour 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 mustjust 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 backhelplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that momentto 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 itselfto the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: herhusband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle betweenthem—and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in astate of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herselfwas, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it hadbeen a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, whohad had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Thenagain she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it wasa sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. It had never beforeentered her mind that he could, under any circ*mstances, be her lover: conceivethe effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in thatlight—that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,—andthis with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questionsnot 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, andlet 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, andlikely 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 tomake yourself uncomfortable about him. If he has been taken away, that is amercy, 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 hairenough, really, when you took his cap off, to make—you didn’t know what:—inshort, 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. “Ihardly know. In my opinion Mrs. Casaubon should do what would give her the mostrepose of mind. That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act.”

“Thank you,” said Dorothea, exerting herself, “I am sure that is wise. Thereare 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, sheadded, abruptly, “You know every one in Middlemarch, I think, Mr. Lydgate. Ishall ask you to tell me a great deal. I have serious things to do now. I havea living to give away. You know Mr. Tyke and all the—” But Dorothea’s effortwas too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs.

Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal volatile.

“Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes,” he said to Sir James, whom he asked to seebefore quitting the house. “She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than anyother prescription.”

His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him to formsome true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He felt sure that shehad been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and thatshe was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than thatfrom which she had been released.

Lydgate’s advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he found thatCelia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about the will. There wasno help for it now—no reason for any further delay in the execution ofnecessary business. And the next day Sir James complied at once with herrequest that he would drive her to Lowick.

“I have no wish to stay there at present,” said Dorothea; “I could hardly bearit. I am much happier at Fresh*tt with Celia. I shall be able to think betterabout what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance. And Ishould like to be at the Grange a little while with my uncle, and go about inall the old walks and among the people in the village.”

“Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are betterout of the way of such doings,” said Sir James, who at that moment thought ofthe Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw’s. But no word passed betweenhim and Dorothea about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of themfelt that the mention of it between them would be impossible. Sir James wasshy, even with men, about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing thatDorothea would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, wasforbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of herhusband’s injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what had passedbetween 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 herhusband’s strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged by his bitterresistance to that idea of claim, and not merely by personal feelings moredifficult to talk about. Also, it must be admitted, Dorothea wished that thiscould be known for Will’s sake, since her friends seemed to think of him assimply an object of Mr. Casaubon’s charity. Why should he be compared with anItalian carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed likea mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.

At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer—searched all her husband’s placesof deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed especially to her,except that “Synoptical Tabulation,” which was probably only the beginning ofmany intended directions for her guidance. In carrying out this bequest oflabor 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 ofDorothea’s competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only bydistrust of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a trust forhimself out of Dorothea’s nature: she could do what she resolved to do: and hewillingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tombwith 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 andleft his plans belated: he had only had time to ask for that promise by whichhe sought to keep his cold grasp on Dorothea’s life.

The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of herpity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgmentwhispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness whichis a supreme use. But now her judgment, instead of being controlled by duteousdevotion, was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past unionthere had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion. The living,suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained onlythe retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lowerthan she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded hisscrupulous care for his own character, and made him defeat his own pride byshocking men of ordinary honor. As for the property which was the sign of thatbroken tie, she would have been glad to be free from it and have nothing morethan her original fortune which had been settled on her, if there had not beenduties attached to ownership, which she ought not to flinch from. About thisproperty many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right inthinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?—but was it notimpossible now for her to do that act of justice? Mr. Casaubon had taken acruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation against him inher heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of his purpose revoltedher.

After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she locked upagain the desks and drawers—all empty of personal words for her—empty of anysign that in her husband’s lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her inexcuse or explanation; and she went back to Fresh*tt with the sense that aroundhis last hard demand and his last injurious assertion of his power, the silencewas unbroken.

Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and one ofthese was of a kind which others were determined to remind her of. Lydgate’sear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, hereopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for thecasting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience. “Instead oftelling you anything about Mr. Tyke,” he said, “I should like to speak ofanother man—Mr. Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph’s. His living is a poorone, 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 nevermarried 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 oldLatimer. 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 hadslipped below their own intention.

“That’s a hard question,” said Lydgate. “I find myself that it’s uncommonlydifficult to make the right thing work: there are so many strings pulling atonce. Farebrother often hints that he has got into the wrong profession; hewants a wider range than that of a poor clergyman, and I suppose he has nointerest to help him on. He is very fond of Natural History and variousscientific matters, and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with hisposition. He has no money to spare—hardly enough to use; and that has led himinto card-playing—Middlemarch is a great place for whist. He does play formoney, and he wins a good deal. Of course that takes him into company a littlebeneath 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 everknew. He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with amore correct outside.”

“I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,” saidDorothea; “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: hewould 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 ofprimitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother with a strong desire torescue him from his chance-gotten money.

“I don’t pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic,” said Lydgate. “Hisposition is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a parson amongparishioners whose lives he has to try and make better. Practically I find thatwhat is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which theparson doesn’t cut the principal figure. I see something of that in Mr. Tyke atthe Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to makepeople uncomfortably aware of him. Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!—heought 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 farmersand laborers get from their teaching. I have been looking into a volume ofsermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at Lowick—I mean, aboutimputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have always beenthinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever Ifind one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that asthe truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings inthe most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, thanto condemn too much. But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear himpreach.”

“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 ableman 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 isconstantly seeing Mr. Brooke, is a great friend of Mr. Farebrother’s oldladies, and would be glad to sing the Vicar’s praises. One of the oldladies—Miss Noble, the aunt—is a wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetfulgoodness, and Ladislaw gallants her about sometimes. I met them one day in aback 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 coupledropped out of a romantic comedy. But the best evidence about Farebrother is tosee him and hear him.”

Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this conversationoccurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate’s innocent introductionof Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual with him in matters of personalgossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond’s remark that she thought Willadored Mrs. Casaubon. At that moment he was only caring for what wouldrecommend the Farebrother family; and he had purposely given emphasis to theworst that could be said about the Vicar, in order to forestall objections. Inthe weeks since Mr. Casaubon’s death he had hardly seen Ladislaw, and he hadheard no rumor to warn him that Mr. Brooke’s confidential secretary was adangerous subject with Mrs. Casaubon. When he was gone, his picture of Ladislawlingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the Lowickliving. What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her? Would he hear of that factwhich made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And how would he feel whenhe heard it?—But she could see as well as possible how he smiled down at thelittle old maid. An Italian with white mice!—on the contrary, he was a creaturewho entered into every one’s feelings, and could take the pressure of theirthought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.

CHAPTER LI.

Party is Nature too, and you shall see
By force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
Genus holds species, both are great or small;
One genus highest, one not high at all;
Each species has its differentia too,
This is not That, and He was never You,
Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
Are like as one to one, or three to three.

No gossip about Mr. Casaubon’s will had yet reached Ladislaw: the air seemed tobe filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming election, as theold wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; andmore private noises were taken little notice of. The famous “dry election” wasat hand, in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the lowflood-mark of drink. Will Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time; andthough Dorothea’s widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far fromwishing to be spoken to on the subject, that when Lydgate sought him out totell 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 notlikely to see her, since she is at Fresh*tt. I never go there. It is Toryground, where I and the ‘Pioneer’ are no more welcome than a poacher and hisgun.”

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 thanwas quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to contrive that he should go thereas little as possible. This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke’s to SirJames Chettam’s indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hintin this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from the Grange onDorothea’s account. Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion? Theirfears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they imaginedthat he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favorof a rich woman.

Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself andDorothea—until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on theother side. He began, not without some inward rage, to think of going away fromthe neighborhood: it would be impossible for him to show any further interestin Dorothea without subjecting himself to disagreeable imputations—perhaps evenin her mind, which others might try to poison.

“We are forever divided,” said Will. “I might as well be at Rome; she would beno farther from me.” But what we call our despair is often only the painfuleagerness of unfed hope. There were plenty of reasons why he should notgo—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 therewas so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on. Will could notlike to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on theright side, even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistentwith a gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority. To coach Mr. Brookeand keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for theactual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power ofpulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Farebrother’s prophecy of afourth candidate “in the bag” had not yet been fulfilled, neither theParliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power on the watch to secure areforming majority seeing a worthy nodus for interference while there was asecond reforming candidate like Mr. Brooke, who might be returned at his ownexpense; and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member,Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke thefuture independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only.Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return ofPinkerton, and Mr. Brooke’s success must depend either on plumpers which wouldleave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory votes into reformingvotes. The latter means, of course, would be preferable.

This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr. Brooke:his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements,and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments asthey turned up in his memory, gave Will Ladislaw much trouble.

“You know there are tactics in these things,” said Mr. Brooke; “meeting peoplehalf-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 awill of its own—political unions—that sort of thing—but we sometimes cut withrather too sharp a knife, Ladislaw. These ten-pound householders, now: why ten?Draw the line somewhere—yes: but why just at ten? That’s a difficult question,now, if you go into it.”

“Of course it is,” said Will, impatiently. “But if you are to wait till we geta logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a revolutionist, and thenMiddlemarch would not elect you, I fancy. As for trimming, this is not a timefor trimming.”

Mr. Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still appeared to him asort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval the wisdom of hisown methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn into using them with muchhopefulness. At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which evensupported him under large advances of money; for his powers of convincing andpersuading had not yet been tested by anything more difficult than a chairman’sspeech introducing other orators, or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, fromwhich he came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that itwas a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing. He was a littleconscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey, a chief representative inMiddlemarch of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one ofthe most doubtful voters in the borough—willing for his own part to supply anequal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as toagree impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that thisnecessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even if therewere no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand, there would bethe painful necessity at last of disappointing respectable people whose nameswere on his books. He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr. Brooke ofTipton; but then, there were many of Pinkerton’s committee whose opinions had agreat weight of grocery on their side. Mr. Mawmsey thinking that Mr. Brooke, asnot too “clever in his intellects,” was the more likely to forgive a grocer whogave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his back parlor.

“As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light,” he said, rattling the smallsilver in his pocket, and smiling affably. “Will it support Mrs. Mawmsey, andenable her to bring up six children when I am no more? I put the questionfictiously, knowing what must be the answer. Very well, sir. I ask youwhat, 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 grocerieselsewhere: when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting thecountry by maintaining tradesmen of the right color.’ Those very words havebeen spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting. I don’tmean by your honorable self, Mr. Brooke.”

“No, no, no—that’s narrow, you know. Until my butler complains to me of yourgoods, Mr. Mawmsey,” said Mr. Brooke, soothingly, “until I hear that you sendbad sugars, spices—that sort of thing—I shall never order him to go elsewhere.”

“Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged,” said Mr. Mawmsey, feelingthat politics were clearing up a little. “There would be some pleasure invoting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner.”

“Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put yourselfon our side. This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by—a thoroughly popularmeasure—a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest canfollow. I quite agree with you that you’ve got to look at the thing in a familylight: but public spirit, now. We’re all one family, you know—it’s all onecupboard. Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may help to make men’s fortunesat the Cape—there’s no knowing what may be the effect of a vote,” Mr. Brookeended, with a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it stillenjoyable. But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I can’t afford that. When I give a vote I mustknow what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects on my till andledger, speaking respectfully. Prices, I’ll admit, are what nobody can know themerits of; and the sudden falls after you’ve bought in currants, which are agoods that will not keep—I’ve never; myself seen into the ins and outs there;which is a rebuke to human pride. But as to one family, there’s debtor andcreditor, I hope; they’re not going to reform that away; else I should vote forthings staying as they are. Few men have less need to cry for change than Ihave, personally speaking—that is, for self and family. I am not one of thosewho have nothing to lose: I mean as to respectability both in parish andprivate business, and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom,which you was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or novote, while the article sent in was satisfactory.”

After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife that he hadbeen rather too many for Brooke of Tipton, and that he didn’t mind so much nowabout going to the poll.

Mr. Brooke on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics to Ladislaw,who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that he had no concernwith any canvassing except the purely argumentative sort, and that he worked nomeaner engine than knowledge. Mr. Brooke, necessarily, had his agents, whounderstood the nature of the Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting hisignorance on the side of the Bill—which were remarkably similar to the means ofenlisting it on the side against the Bill. Will stopped his ears. OccasionallyParliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our eating and apparel, couldhardly go on if our imaginations were too active about processes. There wereplenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Willprotested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would bequite innocent.

But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the majority onthe right side was very doubtful to him. He had written out various speechesand memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Brooke’smind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let itdrop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again. To collectdocuments is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents ofa document is another. No! the only way in which Mr. Brooke could be coercedinto thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well pliedwith them till they took up all the room in his brain. But here there was thedifficulty 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 wasspeaking.

However, Ladislaw’s coaching was forthwith to be put to the test, for beforethe day of nomination Mr. Brooke was to explain himself to the worthy electorsof Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart, which looked outadvantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area infront and two converging streets. It was a fine May morning, and everythingseemed hopeful: there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster’scommittee and Brooke’s, to which Mr. Bulstrode, Mr. Standish as a Liberallawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr. Plymdale and Mr. Vincy, gave a soliditywhich almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley and his associates who sat forPinkerton at the Green Dragon. Mr. Brooke, conscious of having weakened theblasts of the “Trumpet” against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the lasthalf year, and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town, felthis heart tolerably light under his buff-colored waistcoat. But with regard tocritical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remoteuntil the last.

“This looks well, eh?” said Mr. Brooke as the crowd gathered. “I shall have agood audience, at any rate. I like this, now—this kind of public made up ofone’s own neighbors, you know.”

The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never thoughtof Mr. Brooke as a neighbor, and were not more attached to him than if he hadbeen sent in a box from London. But they listened without much disturbance tothe speakers who introduced the candidate, one of them—a political personagefrom Brassing, who came to tell Middlemarch its duty—spoke so fully, that itwas alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him. Meanwhilethe crowd became denser, and as the political personage neared the end of hisspeech, Mr. Brooke felt a remarkable change in his sensations while he stillhandled his eye-glass, trifled with documents before him, and exchanged remarkswith 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, toWill, who was close behind him, and presently handed him the supposedfortifier. It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Brooke was an abstemious man, and todrink a second glass of sherry quickly at no great interval from the first wasa surprise to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead ofcollecting them. Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make themselvesmiserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds! whereas Mr. Brookewished to serve his country by standing for Parliament—which, indeed, may alsobe done on private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demandsome speechifying.

It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at allanxious; 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, butthe vision of open sea that might come after was alarming. “And questions,now,” hinted the demon just waking up in his stomach, “somebody may putquestions about the schedules.—Ladislaw,” he continued, aloud, “just hand methe memorandum of the schedules.”

When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite loudenough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other expressions ofadverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish (decidedly an oldbird) observed in the ear next to him, “This looks dangerous, by God! Hawleyhas got some deeper plan than this.” Still, the cheers were exhilarating, andno candidate could look more amiable than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum inhis breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony, and his righttrifling with his eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were hisbuff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy. He beganwith some confidence.

“Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch!”

This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural.

“I’m uncommonly glad to be here—I was never so proud and happy in my life—neverso happy, you know.”

This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for,unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away—even couplets from Pope may be but“fallings from us, vanishings,” when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry ishurrying like smoke among our ideas. Ladislaw, who stood at the window behindthe speaker, thought, “it’s all up now. The only chance is that, since the bestthing won’t always do, floundering may answer for once.” Mr. Brooke, meanwhile,having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his qualifications—always anappropriate graceful subject for a candidate.

“I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends—you’ve known me on the bench agood 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 beengoing into that lately. It won’t do, you know, breaking machines: everythingmust go on—trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind ofthing—since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over theglobe:—‘Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, ‘from China toPeru,’ as somebody says—Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler,’ you know. That is whatI have done up to a certain point—not as far as Peru; but I’ve not alwaysstayed at home—I saw it wouldn’t do. I’ve been in the Levant, where some ofyour 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 withouttrouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy. At one andthe same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearlyopposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself:buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; andthere had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, aparrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked up at the openwindows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; butthey were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners. The most innocent echohas an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, andthis echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision of anatural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook. By the time itsaid, “The Baltic, now,” the laugh which had been running through the audiencebecame a general shout, and but for the sobering effects of party and thatgreat public cause which the entanglement of things had identified with “Brookeof Tipton,” the laugh might have caught his committee. Mr. Bulstrode asked,reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not well becollared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would have been tooequivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.

Mr. Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of anythingexcept a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had even a littlesinging in the ears, and he was the only person who had not yet taken distinctaccount of the echo or discerned the image of himself. Few things hold theperceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.Mr. Brooke heard the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts atdisturbance, and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling,stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from theBaltic.

“That reminds me,” he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket, with aneasy air, “if I wanted a precedent, you know—but we never want a precedent forthe right thing—but there is Chatham, now; I can’t say I should have supportedChatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt—he was not a man of ideas, and we wantideas, you know.”

“Blast your ideas! we want the Bill,” said a loud rough voice from the crowdbelow.

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 themocking echo. But it seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light wasencouraging; so he replied with amenity—

“There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we meet forbut to speak our minds—freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, liberty—thatkind of thing? The Bill, now—you shall have the Bill”—here Mr. Brooke paused amoment to fix on his eye-glass and take the paper from his breast-pocket, witha sense of being practical and coming to particulars. The invisible Punchfollowed:—

“You shall have the Bill, Mr. Brooke, per electioneering contest, and a seatoutside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven shillings, andfourpence.”

Mr. Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass fall, andlooking 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 alittle, and his voice too.

“Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth—all that is very well”—here anunpleasant egg broke on Mr. Brooke’s shoulder, as the echo said, “All that isvery well;” then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, butoccasionally hitting the original, as if by chance. There was a stream of newmen pushing among the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made allthe greater hubbub because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr. Brooke,disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer. The frustration would havebeen less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and boyish: a seriousassault of which the newspaper reporter “can aver that it endangered thelearned gentleman’s ribs,” or can respectfully bear witness to “the soles ofthat gentleman’s boots having been visible above the railing,” has perhaps moreconsolations 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 peopleby-and-by—but they didn’t give me time. I should have gone into the Billby-and-by, you know,” he added, glancing at Ladislaw. “However, things willcome all right at the nomination.”

But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on thecontrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political personage fromBrassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new devices.

“It was Bowyer who did it,” said Mr. Standish, evasively. “I know it as well asif he had been advertised. He’s uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and he did ituncommonly well, by God! Hawley has been having him to dinner lately: there’s afund of talent in Bowyer.”

“Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would haveinvited him to dine,” said poor Mr. Brooke, who had gone through a great dealof 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 thescale.”

Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his “principal,”and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed resolve to throw upthe “Pioneer” and Mr. Brooke together. Why should he stay? If the impassablegulf between himself and Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather beby his going away and getting into a thoroughly different position than bystaying here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper ofBrooke’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 valuenow public life was going to be wider and more national, and they might givehim such distinction that he would not seem to be asking Dorothea to step downto him. Five years:—if he could only be sure that she cared for him more thanfor others; if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he couldtell his love without lowering himself—then he could go away easily, and begina career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order ofthings, 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, andhe meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on which he would carryall his ardor. Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of thecrowd, and feel that he had won that eminence well? Without doubt he wouldleave Middlemarch, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity by “eatinghis dinners.”

But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between him andDorothea. He could not be satisfied until she knew why, even if he were the manshe would choose to marry, he would not marry her. Hence he must keep his postand bear with Mr. Brooke a little longer.

But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Brooke had anticipated him in thewish to break up their connection. Deputations without and voices within hadconcurred in inducing that philanthropist to take a stronger measure than usualfor the good of mankind; namely, to withdraw in favor of another candidate, towhom he left the advantages of his canvassing machinery. He himself called thisa strong measure, but observed that his health was less capable of sustainingexcitement than he had imagined.

“I have felt uneasy about the chest—it won’t do to carry that too far,” he saidto Ladislaw in explaining the affair. “I must pull up. Poor Casaubon was awarning, you know. I’ve made some heavy advances, but I’ve dug a channel. It’srather coarse work—this electioneering, eh, Ladislaw? dare say you are tired ofit. However, we have dug a channel with the ‘Pioneer’—put things in a track,and so on. A more ordinary man than you might carry it on now—more ordinary,you know.”

“Do you wish me to give it up?” said Will, the quick color coming in his face,as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn of three steps with hishands 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 ofthe men on our side, and they are inclined to take it into theirhands—indemnify me to a certain extent—carry it on, in fact. And under thecirc*mstances, you might like to give up—might find a better field. Thesepeople might not take that high view of you which I have always taken, as analter ego, a right hand—though I always looked forward to your doing somethingelse. I think of having a run into France. But I’ll write you any letters, youknow—to Althorpe and people of that kind. I’ve met Althorpe.”

“I am exceedingly obliged to you,” said Ladislaw, proudly. “Since you are goingto part with the ‘Pioneer,’ I need not trouble you about the steps I shalltake. I may choose to continue here for the present.”

After Mr. Brooke had left him Will said to himself, “The rest of the familyhave been urging him to get rid of me, and he doesn’t care now about my going.I shall stay as long as I like. I shall go of my own movements and not becausethey are afraid of me.”

CHAPTER LII.

“His heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”
—WORDSWORTH.

On that June evening when Mr. Farebrother knew that he was to have the Lowickliving, there was joy in the old fashioned parlor, and even the portraits ofthe great lawyers seemed to look on with satisfaction. His mother left her teaand toast untouched, but sat with her usual pretty primness, only showing heremotion by that flush in the cheeks and brightness in the eyes which give anold woman a touching momentary identity with her far-off youthful self, andsaying 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 gladnessin his face was of that active kind which seems to have energy enough not onlyto flash outwardly, but to light up busy vision within: one seemed to seethoughts, as well as delight, in his glances.

“Now, aunt,” he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Noble, who wasmaking tender little beaver-like noises, “There shall be sugar-candy always onthe table for you to steal and give to the children, and you shall have a greatmany new stockings to make presents of, and you shall darn your own more thanever!”

Miss Noble nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh, consciousof having already dropped an additional lump of sugar into her basket on thestrength of the new preferment.

“As for you, Winny”—the Vicar went on—“I shall make no difficulty about yourmarrying any Lowick bachelor—Mr. Solomon Featherstone, for example, as soon asI find you are in love with him.”

Miss Winifred, who had been looking at her brother all the while and cryingheartily, which was her way of rejoicing, smiled through her tears and said,“You must set me the example, Cam: you must marry now.”

“With all my heart. But who is in love with me? I am a seedy old fellow,” saidthe Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away and looking down at himself. “What doyou say, mother?”

“You are a handsome man, Camden: though not so fine a figure of a man as yourfather,” said the old lady.

“I wish you would marry Miss Garth, brother,” said Miss Winifred. “She wouldmake us so lively at Lowick.”

“Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultryat market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me,” said theVicar, not caring to specify.

“We don’t want everybody,” said Miss Winifred. “But you would like MissGarth, mother, shouldn’t you?”

“My son’s choice shall be mine,” said Mrs. Farebrother, with majesticdiscretion, “and a wife would be most welcome, Camden. You will want your whistat 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 amusem*nt for agood churchman,” said Mrs. Farebrother, innocent of the meaning that whist hadfor her son, and speaking rather sharply, as at some dangerous countenancing ofnew 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 givesomebody 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 thinkit would be easier to give up power and money than to keep them. It seems veryunfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I felt that I ought not to letit be used by some one else instead of me.”

“It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power,” said Mr.Farebrother.

His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active when theyoke of life ceases to gall them. He made no display of humility on thesubject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed that his conduct had shownlaches 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 toLydgate, “but perhaps it will be better to try and make as good a clergyman outof 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 atrick of behaving unexpectedly—something like a heavy friend whom we haveamiably 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 ofFred Vincy, now returned from Omnibus College with his bachelor’s degree.

“I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr. Farebrother,” said Fred, whose fair open facewas propitiating, “but you are the only friend I can consult. I told youeverything once before, and you were so good that I can’t help coming to youagain.”

“Sit down, Fred, I’m ready to hear and do anything I can,” said the Vicar, whowas 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 seeanything else to do. I don’t like it, but I know it’s uncommonly hard on myfather to say so, after he has spent a good deal of money in educating me forit.” Fred paused again an instant, and then repeated, “and I can’t see anythingelse to do.”

“I did talk to your father about it, Fred, but I made little way with him. Hesaid it was too late. But you have got over one bridge now: what are your otherdifficulties?”

“Merely that I don’t like it. I don’t like divinity, and preaching, and feelingobliged to look serious. I like riding across country, and doing as other mendo. I don’t mean that I want to be a bad fellow in any way; but I’ve no tastefor the sort of thing people expect of a clergyman. And yet what else am I todo? My father can’t spare me any capital, else I might go into farming. And hehas no room for me in his trade. And of course I can’t begin to study for lawor physic now, when my father wants me to earn something. It’s all very well tosay I’m wrong to go into the Church; but those who say so might as well tell meto go into the backwoods.”

Fred’s voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, and Mr. Farebrothermight have been inclined to smile if his mind had not been too busy inimagining more than Fred told him.

“Have you any difficulties about doctrines—about the Articles?” he said, tryinghard to think of the question simply for Fred’s sake.

“No; I suppose the Articles are right. I am not prepared with any arguments todisprove them, and much better, cleverer fellows than I am go in for thementirely. I think it would be rather ridiculous in me to urge scruples of thatsort, 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 priestwithout being much of a divine?”

“Of course, if I am obliged to be a clergyman, I shall try and do my duty,though I mayn’t like it. Do you think any body ought to blame me?”

“For going into the Church under the circ*mstances? That depends on yourconscience, Fred—how far you have counted the cost, and seen what your positionwill require of you. I can only tell you about myself, that I have always beentoo lax, and have been uneasy in consequence.”

“But there is another hindrance,” said Fred, coloring. “I did not tell youbefore, though perhaps I may have said things that made you guess it. There issomebody 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 agood 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 speakto her about it again. And she has set her mind especially against my being aclergyman; I know that. But I can’t give her up. I do think she cares about me.I saw Mrs. Garth last night, and she said that Mary was staying at LowickRectory with Miss Farebrother.”

“Yes, she is very kindly helping my sister. Do you wish to go there?”

“No, I want to ask a great favor of you. I am ashamed to bother you in thisway; but Mary might listen to what you said, if you mentioned the subject toher—I mean about my going into the Church.”

“That is rather a delicate task, my dear Fred. I shall have to presuppose yourattachment to her; and to enter on the subject as you wish me to do, will beasking her to tell me whether she returns it.”

“That is what I want her to tell you,” said Fred, bluntly. “I don’t know whatto 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 asanother.”

“That is nonsense, Fred. Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive theconsequences of their recklessness.”

“Not my sort of love: I have never been without loving Mary. If I had to giveher 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 shewould not put you off with fun as she does me. Of course I could not have toldany one else, or asked any one else to speak to her, but you. There is no oneelse who could be such a friend to both of us.” Fred paused a moment, and thensaid, rather complainingly, “And she ought to acknowledge that I have worked inorder to pass. She ought to believe that I would exert myself for her sake.”

There was a moment’s silence before Mr. Farebrother laid down his work, andputting 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 hadjust set up. “Decidedly I am an old stalk,” he thought, “the young growths arepushing me aside.”

He found Mary in the garden gathering roses and sprinkling the petals on asheet. The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across the grassywalks 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 asmall black-and-tan terrier, which would persist in walking on the sheet andsmelling at the rose-leaves as Mary sprinkled them. She took his fore-paws inone hand, and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled hisbrows and looked embarrassed. “Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you,” Mary was sayingin a grave contralto. “This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody wouldthink you were a silly young gentleman.”

“You are unmerciful to young gentlemen, Miss Garth,” said the Vicar, within twoyards of her.

Mary started up and blushed. “It always answers to reason with Fly,” she said,laughingly.

“But not with young gentlemen?”

“Oh, with some, I suppose; since some of them turn into excellent men.”

“I am glad of that admission, because I want at this very moment to interestyou in a young gentleman.”

“Not a silly one, I hope,” said Mary, beginning to pluck the roses again, andfeeling her heart beat uncomfortably.

“No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point, but rather affection andsincerity. However, wisdom lies more in those two qualities than people are aptto 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 herhands cold; “it must be Fred Vincy.”

“He has asked me to consult you about his going into the Church. I hope youwill 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 foldingher arms, but unable to look up, “whenever you have anything to say to me Ifeel honored.”

“But before I enter on that question, let me just touch a point on which yourfather took me into confidence; by the way, it was that very evening on which Ionce before fulfilled a mission from Fred, just after he had gone to college.Mr. Garth told me what happened on the night of Featherstone’s death—how yourefused to burn the will; and he said that you had some heart-prickings on thatsubject, because you had been the innocent means of hindering Fred from gettinghis ten thousand pounds. I have kept that in mind, and I have heard somethingthat may relieve you on that score—may show you that no sin-offering isdemanded from you there.”

Mr. Farebrother paused a moment and looked at Mary. He meant to give Fred hisfull advantage, but it would be well, he thought, to clear her mind of anysuperstitions, such as women sometimes follow when they do a man the wrong ofmarrying 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 thatthe first will would not have been legally good after the burning of the last;it would not have stood if it had been disputed, and you may be sure it wouldhave been disputed. So, on that score, you may feel your mind free.”

“Thank you, Mr. Farebrother,” said Mary, earnestly. “I am grateful to you forremembering my feelings.”

“Well, now I may go on. Fred, you know, has taken his degree. He has worked hisway so far, and now the question is, what is he to do? That question is sodifficult that he is inclined to follow his father’s wishes and enter theChurch, though you know better than I do that he was quite set against thatformerly. I have questioned him on the subject, and I confess I see noinsuperable objection to his being a clergyman, as things go. He says that hecould turn his mind to doing his best in that vocation, on one condition. Ifthat condition were fulfilled I would do my utmost in helping Fred on. After atime—not, of course, at first—he might be with me as my curate, and he wouldhave so much to do that his stipend would be nearly what I used to get asvicar. But I repeat that there is a condition without which all this goodcannot come to pass. He has opened his heart to me, Miss Garth, and asked me toplead 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 nottake any course which would lessen the chance that you would consent to be hiswife; but with that prospect, he will try his best at anything you approve.”

“I cannot possibly say that I will ever be his wife, Mr. Farebrother: but Icertainly never will be his wife if he becomes a clergyman. What you say ismost generous and kind; I don’t mean for a moment to correct your judgment. Itis 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 itsmodesty more charming.

“He wishes me to report exactly what you think,” said Mr. Farebrother.

“I could not love a man who is ridiculous,” said Mary, not choosing to godeeper. “Fred has sense and knowledge enough to make him respectable, if helikes, in some good worldly business, but I can never imagine him preaching andexhorting, and pronouncing blessings, and praying by the sick, without feelingas if I were looking at a caricature. His being a clergyman would be only forgentility’s sake, and I think there is nothing more contemptible than suchimbecile gentility. I used to think that of Mr. Crowse, with his empty face andneat umbrella, and mincing little speeches. What right have such men torepresent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiotsgenteelly—as if—” Mary checked herself. She had been carried along as if shehad been speaking to Fred instead of Mr. Farebrother.

“Young women are severe: they don’t feel the stress of action as men do, thoughperhaps I ought to make you an exception there. But you don’t put Fred Vincy onso low a level as that?”

“No, indeed, he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it as aclergyman. 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 otherway—will you give him the support of hope? May he count on winning you?”

“I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already said to him,”Mary answered, with a slight resentment in her manner. “I mean that he oughtnot to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of sayingthat he could do it.”

Mr. Farebrother was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they turned andpaused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy walk, said, “Iunderstand that you resist any attempt to fetter you, but either your feelingfor Fred Vincy excludes your entertaining another attachment, or it does not:either he may count on your remaining single until he shall have earned yourhand, or he may in any case be disappointed. Pardon me, Mary—you know I used tocatechise you under that name—but when the state of a woman’s affectionstouches the happiness of another life—of more lives than one—I think it wouldbe the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open.”

Mary in her turn was silent, wondering not at Mr. Farebrother’s manner but athis tone, which had a grave restrained emotion in it. When the strange ideaflashed across her that his words had reference to himself, she wasincredulous, and ashamed of entertaining it. She had never thought that any mancould love her except Fred, who had espoused her with the umbrella ring, whenshe wore socks and little strapped shoes; still less that she could be of anyimportance to Mr. Farebrother, the cleverest man in her narrow circle. She hadonly time to feel that all this was hazy and perhaps illusory; but one thingwas clear and determined—her answer.

“Since you think it my duty, Mr. Farebrother, I will tell you that I have toostrong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any one else. I should never bequite happy if I thought he was unhappy for the loss of me. It has taken suchdeep root in me—my gratitude to him for always loving me best, and minding somuch if I hurt myself, from the time when we were very little. I cannot imagineany new feeling coming to make that weaker. I should like better than anythingto see him worthy of every one’s respect. But please tell him I will notpromise 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, puttingout his hand to Mary, “and I shall ride back to Middlemarch forthwith. Withthis prospect before him, we shall get Fred into the right niche somehow, and Ihope I shall live to join your hands. God bless you!”

“Oh, please stay, and let me give you some tea,” said Mary. Her eyes filledwith tears, for something indefinable, something like the resolute suppressionof a pain in Mr. Farebrother’s manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as shehad 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 magnanimouslythrough a duty much harder than the renunciation of whist, or even than thewriting of penitential meditations.

CHAPTER LIII.

It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders callinconsistency—putting a dead mechanism of “ifs” and “therefores” for the livingmyriad of hidden suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought intomutual sustainment.

Mr. Bulstrode, when he was hoping to acquire a new interest in Lowick, hadnaturally had an especial wish that the new clergyman should be one whom hethoroughly approved; and he believed it to be a chastisem*nt and admonitiondirected to his own shortcomings and those of the nation at large, that justabout the time when he came in possession of the deeds which made him theproprietor of Stone Court, Mr. Farebrother “read himself” into the quaintlittle church and preached his first sermon to the congregation of farmers,laborers, and village artisans. It was not that Mr. Bulstrode intended tofrequent Lowick Church or to reside at Stone Court for a good while to come: hehad bought the excellent farm and fine homestead simply as a retreat which hemight gradually enlarge as to the land and beautify as to the dwelling, untilit should be conducive to the divine glory that he should enter on it as aresidence, partially withdrawing from his present exertions in theadministration of business, and throwing more conspicuously on the side ofGospel truth the weight of local landed proprietorship, which Providence mightincrease by unforeseen occasions of purchase. A strong leading in thisdirection seemed to have been given in the surprising facility of getting StoneCourt, when every one had expected that Mr. Rigg Featherstone would have clungto 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 oldplace to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors.

But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors! We judgefrom our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enougheven to throw out a hint of theirs. The cool and judicious Joshua Rigg had notallowed his parent to perceive that Stone Court was anything less than thechief 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, soJoshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold. He had a verydistinct and intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he hadinherited having taken a special form by dint of circ*mstance: and his chiefgood was to be a moneychanger. From his earliest employment as an errand-boy ina seaport, he had looked through the windows of the moneychangers as other boyslook through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination had wroughtit*elf 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 thesewere all accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with. The one joyafter which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer’s shop on amuch-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 ironlattice. The strength of that passion had been a power enabling him to masterall the knowledge necessary to gratify it. And when others were thinking thathe had settled at Stone Court for life, Joshua himself was thinking that themoment now was not far off when he should settle on the North Quay with thebest appointments in safes and locks.

Enough. We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg’s sale of his land fromMr. Bulstrode’s point of view, and he interpreted it as a cheering dispensationconveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose which he had for some timeentertained without external encouragement; he interpreted it thus, but not tooconfidently, offering up his thanksgiving in guarded phraseology. His doubtsdid not arise from the possible relations of the event to Joshua Rigg’sdestiny, which belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under theprovidential government, except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but theyarose from reflecting that this dispensation too might be a chastisem*nt forhimself, 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 explainingevents as any theory of yours may be, if you happen to disagree with him. Forthe 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 chastisem*nt, Mr. Bulstrode, hardlyfifteen months after the death of Peter Featherstone, had become the proprietorof Stone Court, and what Peter would say “if he were worthy to know,” hadbecome an inexhaustible and consolatory subject of conversation to hisdisappointed relatives. The tables were now turned on that dear brotherdeparted, and to contemplate the frustration of his cunning by the superiorcunning of things in general was a cud of delight to Solomon. Mrs. Waule had amelancholy triumph in the proof that it did not answer to make falseFeatherstones and cut off the genuine; and Sister Martha receiving the news inthe Chalky Flats said, “Dear, dear! then the Almighty could have been none sopleased with the almshouses after all.”

Affectionate Mrs. Bulstrode was particularly glad of the advantage which herhusband’s health was likely to get from the purchase of Stone Court. Few dayspassed without his riding thither and looking over some part of the farm withthe bailiff, and the evenings were delicious in that quiet spot, when the newhay-ricks lately set up were sending forth odors to mingle with the breath ofthe rich old garden. One evening, while the sun was still above the horizon andburning in golden lamps among the great walnut boughs, Mr. Bulstrode waspausing on horseback outside the front gate waiting for Caleb Garth, who hadmet him by appointment to give an opinion on a question of stable drainage, andwas now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard.

Mr. Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more thanusually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He wasdoctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; butthat doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demeritdoes not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame orthe pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when thedepth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and aclenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. Thememory 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 offar-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out preachingbeyond Highbury. And he would willingly have had that service of exhortation inprospect now. The texts were there still, and so was his own facility inexpounding them. His brief reverie was interrupted by the return of CalebGarth, who also was on horseback, and was just shaking his bridle beforestarting, when he exclaimed—

“Bless my heart! what’s this fellow in black coming along the lane? He’s likeone of those men one sees about after the races.”

Mr. Bulstrode turned his horse and looked along the lane, but made no reply.The comer was our slight acquaintance Mr. Raffles, whose appearance presentedno other change than such as was due to a suit of black and a crape hat-band.He was within three yards of the horseman now, and they could see the flash ofrecognition in his face as he whirled his stick upward, looking all the whileat Mr. Bulstrode, and at last exclaiming:—

“By Jove, Nick, it’s you! I couldn’t be mistaken, though the five-and-twentyyears have played old Boguy with us both! How are you, eh? you didn’t expect tosee me here. Come, shake us by the hand.” To say that Mr. Raffles’manner was rather excited would be only one mode of saying that it was evening.Caleb Garth could see that there was a moment of struggle and hesitation in Mr.Bulstrode, but it ended in his putting out his hand coldly to Raffles andsaying—

“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 aswaggering attitude. “I came to see him here before. I’m not so surprised atseeing you, old fellow, because I picked up a letter—what you may call aprovidential thing. It’s uncommonly fortunate I met you, though; for I don’tcare about seeing my stepson: he’s not affectionate, and his poor mother’s gonenow. To tell the truth, I came out of love to you, Nick: I came to get youraddress, 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 thespot for the sake of hearing all he could about a man whose acquaintance withBulstrode seemed to imply passages in the banker’s life so unlike anything thatwas known of him in Middlemarch that they must have the nature of a secret topique curiosity. But Caleb was peculiar: certain human tendencies which arecommonly strong were almost absent from his mind; and one of these wascuriosity about personal affairs. Especially if there was anythingdiscreditable to be found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred not toknow it; and if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil doings werediscovered, 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 wasnot like the first-rate man of business you used to be. ‘The Shrubs,’—they maybe anywhere: you live near at hand, eh?—have cut the London concernaltogether—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 longwhile—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. Fiveminutes before, the expanse of his life had been submerged in its eveningsunshine which shone backward to its remembered morning: sin seemed to be aquestion of doctrine and inward penitence, humiliation an exercise of thecloset, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private vision adjusted solely byspiritual relations and conceptions of the divine purposes. And now, as if bysome hideous magic, this loud red figure had risen before him in unmanageablesolidity—an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination ofchastisem*nts. But Mr. Bulstrode’s thought was busy, and he was not a man toact or speak rashly.

“I was going home,” he said, “but I can defer my ride a little. And you can, ifyou please, rest here.”

“Thank you,” said Raffles, making a grimace. “I don’t care now about seeing mystepson. I’d rather go home with you.”

“Your stepson, if Mr. Rigg Featherstone was he, is here no longer. I am masterhere 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. Inever was much of a walker, or rider either. What I like is a smart vehicle anda spirited cob. I was always a little heavy in the saddle. What a pleasantsurprise it must be to you to see me, old fellow!” he continued, as they turnedtowards the house. “You don’t say so; but you never took your luck heartily—youwere always thinking of improving the occasion—you’d such a gift for improvingyour luck.”

Mr. Raffles seemed greatly to enjoy his own wit, and swung his leg in aswaggering manner which was rather too much for his companion’s judiciouspatience.

“If I remember rightly,” Mr. Bulstrode observed, with chill anger, “ouracquaintance many years ago had not the sort of intimacy which you are nowassuming, Mr. Raffles. Any services you desire of me will be the more readilyrendered if you will avoid a tone of familiarity which did not lie in ourformer intercourse, and can hardly be warranted by more than twenty years ofseparation.”

“You don’t like being called Nick? Why, I always called you Nick in my heart,and though lost to sight, to memory dear. By Jove! my feelings have ripened foryou like fine old cognac. I hope you’ve got some in the house now. Josh filledmy flask well the last time.”

Mr. Bulstrode had not yet fully learned that even the desire for cognac was notstronger in Raffles than the desire to torment, and that a hint of annoyancealways served him as a fresh cue. But it was at least clear that furtherobjection was useless, and Mr. Bulstrode, in giving orders to the housekeeperfor the accommodation of the guest, had a resolute air of quietude.

There was the comfort of thinking that this housekeeper had been in the serviceof Rigg also, and might accept the idea that Mr. Bulstrode entertained Rafflesmerely as a friend of her former master.

When there was food and drink spread before his visitor in the wainscotedparlor, and no witness in the room, Mr. Bulstrode said—

“Your habits and mine are so different, Mr. Raffles, that we can hardly enjoyeach other’s society. The wisest plan for both of us will therefore be to partas soon as possible. Since you say that you wished to meet me, you probablyconsidered that you had some business to transact with me. But under thecirc*mstances I will invite you to remain here for the night, and I will myselfride over here early to-morrow morning—before breakfast, in fact—when I canreceive any communication you have to make to me.”

“With all my heart,” said Raffles; “this is a comfortable place—a little dullfor a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night, with this good liquorand the prospect of seeing you again in the morning. You’re a much better hostthan my stepson was; but Josh owed me a bit of a grudge for marrying hismother; and between you and me there was never anything but kindness.”

Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and sneering inRaffles’ manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had determined to waittill he was quite sober before he spent more words upon him. But he rode homewith a terribly lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging anyresult that could be permanently counted on with this man. It was inevitablethat he should wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance couldnot be regarded as lying outside the divine plan. The spirit of evil might havesent him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode’s subversion as an instrument of good; butthe threat must have been permitted, and was a chastisem*nt of a new kind. Itwas an hour of anguish for him very different from the hours in which hisstruggle had been securely private, and which had ended with a sense that hissecret misdeeds were pardoned and his services accepted. Those misdeeds evenwhen committed—had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of hisdesire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divinescheme? And was he after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a rock ofoffence? For who would understand the work within him? Who would not, whenthere was the pretext of casting disgrace upon him, confound his whole life andthe truths he had espoused, in one heap of obloquy?

In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode’s mind clad hismost egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman ends. But evenwhile we are talking and meditating about the earth’s orbit and the solarsystem, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and thechanging day. And now within all the automatic succession of theoreticphrases—distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever whenwe are discussing abstract pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presenceof his neighbors and of his own wife. For the pain, as well as the publicestimate of disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession. To men whoonly 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 StoneCourt. The fine old place never looked more like a delightful home than at thatmoment; the great white lilies were in flower, the nasturtiums, their prettyleaves all silvered with dew, were running away over the low stone wall; thevery noises all around had a heart of peace within them. But everything wasspoiled for the owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited thedescent of Mr. Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.

It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscoted parlor overtheir tea and toast, which was as much as Raffles cared to take at that earlyhour. The difference between his morning and evening self was not so great ashis companion had imagined that it might be; the delight in tormenting wasperhaps even the stronger because his spirits were rather less highly pitched.Certainly his manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light.

“As I have little time to spare, Mr. Raffles,” said the banker, who couldhardly do more than sip his tea and break his toast without eating it, “I shallbe obliged if you will mention at once the ground on which you wished to meetwith me. I presume that you have a home elsewhere and will be glad to return toit.”

“Why, if a man has got any heart, doesn’t he want to see an old friend, Nick?—Imust call you Nick—we always did call you young Nick when we knew you meant tomarry 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 seeme again? I expected an invite to stay with you at some pretty place. My ownestablishment is broken up now my wife’s dead. I’ve no particular attachment toany spot; I would as soon settle hereabout as anywhere.”

“May I ask why you returned from America? I considered that the strong wish youexpressed to go there, when an adequate sum was furnished, was tantamount to anengagement 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. AndI’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 aboutworking any more. If I did anything it would be a little travelling in thetobacco line—or something of that sort, which takes a man into agreeablecompany. But not without an independence to fall back upon. That’s what I want:I’m not so strong as I was, Nick, though I’ve got more color than you. I wantan 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 noreason why I shouldn’t make a few acquaintances hereabout. I’m not ashamed ofmyself as company for anybody. I dropped my portmanteau at the turnpike when Igot down—change of linen—genuine—honor bright—more than fronts and wristbands;and with this suit of mourning, straps and everything, I should do you creditamong the nobs here.” Mr. Raffles had pushed away his chair and looked down athimself, particularly at his straps. His chief intention was to annoyBulstrode, but he really thought that his appearance now would produce a goodeffect, and that he was not only handsome and witty, but clad in a mourningstyle which implied solid connections.

“If you intend to rely on me in any way, Mr. Raffles,” said Bulstrode, after amoment’s pause, “you will expect to meet my wishes.”

“Ah, to be sure,” said Raffles, with a mocking cordiality. “Didn’t I always doit? Lord, you made a pretty thing out of me, and I got but little. I’ve oftenthought since, I might have done better by telling the old woman that I’d foundher daughter and her grandchild: it would have suited my feelings better; I’vegot a soft place in my heart. But you’ve buried the old lady by this time, Isuppose—it’s all one to her now. And you’ve got your fortune out of thatprofitable business which had such a blessing on it. You’ve taken to being anob, buying land, being a country bashaw. Still in the Dissenting line, eh?Still godly? Or taken to the Church as more genteel?”

This time Mr. Raffles’ slow wink and slight protrusion of his tongue was worsethan 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 hewould, and simply defy him as a slanderer. The man would soon show himselfdisreputable enough to make people disbelieve him. “But not when he tells anyugly-looking truth about you,” said discerning consciousness. And again:it seemed no wrong to keep Raffles at a distance, but Mr. Bulstrode shrank fromthe direct falsehood of denying true statements. It was one thing to look backon forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax customs, andanother to enter deliberately on the necessity of falsehood.

But since Bulstrode did not speak, Raffles ran on, by way of using time to theutmost.

“I’ve not had such fine luck as you, by Jove! Things went confoundedly with mein New York; those Yankees are cool hands, and a man of gentlemanly feelingshas no chance with them. I married when I came back—a nice woman in the tobaccotrade—very fond of me—but the trade was restricted, as we say. She had beensettled there a good many years by a friend; but there was a son too much inthe case. Josh and I never hit it off. However, I made the most of theposition, and I’ve always taken my glass in good company. It’s been all on thesquare with me; I’m as open as the day. You won’t take it ill of me that Ididn’t look you up before. I’ve got a complaint that makes me a littledilatory. I thought you were trading and praying away in London still, anddidn’t find you there. But you see I was sent to you, Nick—perhaps for ablessing to both of us.”

Mr. Raffles ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect moresuperior to religious cant. And if the cunning which calculates on the meanestfeelings in men could be called intellect, he had his share, for under theblurting rallying tone with which he spoke to Bulstrode, there was an evidentselection of statements, as if they had been so many moves at chess. MeanwhileBulstrode 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 tooverreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage. Although I am not inany way bound to you, I am willing to supply you with a regular annuity—inquarterly payments—so long as you fulfil a promise to remain at a distance fromthis neighborhood. It is in your power to choose. If you insist on remaininghere, even for a short time, you will get nothing from me. I shall decline toknow you.”

“Ha, ha!” said Raffles, with an affected explosion, “that reminds me of a drolldog of a thief who declined to know the constable.”

“Your allusions are lost on me sir,” said Bulstrode, with white heat; “the lawhas 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 neverdecline to know you. But let us be serious. Your quarterly payment won’t quitesuit me. I like my freedom.”

Here Raffles rose and stalked once or twice up and down the room, swinging hisleg, and assuming an air of masterly meditation. At last he stopped oppositeBulstrode, and said, “I’ll tell you what! Give us a couple of hundreds—come,that’s modest—and I’ll go away—honor bright!—pick up my portmanteau and goaway. But I shall not give up my liberty for a dirty annuity. I shall come andgo where I like. Perhaps it may suit me to stay away, and correspond with afriend; perhaps not. Have you the money with you?”

“No, I have one hundred,” said Bulstrode, feeling the immediate riddance toogreat a relief to be rejected on the ground of future uncertainties. “I willforward 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 andhave a snack, and you’ll be back by that time.”

Mr. Bulstrode’s sickly body, shattered by the agitations he had gone throughsince the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of this loudinvulnerable man. At that moment he snatched at a temporary repose to be won onany 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 atender conscience about that pretty young woman. I didn’t find her, but I foundout her husband’s name, and I made a note of it. But hang it, I lost mypocketbook. However, if I heard it, I should know it again. I’ve got myfaculties as if I was in my prime, but names wear out, by Jove! Sometimes I’mno 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 dosomething for her, now she’s your step-daughter.”

“Doubtless,” said Mr. Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his light-grayeyes; “though that might reduce my power of assisting you.”

As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back, and thenturned towards the window to watch the banker riding away—virtually at hiscommand. His lips first curled with a smile and then opened with a shorttriumphant laugh.

“But what the deuce was the name?” he presently said, half aloud, scratchinghis head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally. He had not really cared orthought about this point of forgetfulness until it occurred to him in hisinvention of annoyances for Bulstrode.

“It began with L; it was almost all l’s I fancy,” he went on, with a sense thathe was getting hold of the slippery name. But the hold was too slight, and hesoon got tired of this mental chase; for few men were more impatient of privateoccupation or more in need of making themselves continually heard than Mr.Raffles. He preferred using his time in pleasant conversation with the bailiffand the housekeeper, from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know aboutMr. Bulstrode’s position in Middlemarch.

After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed relieving withbread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone with these resources inthe wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his knee, and exclaimed, “Ladislaw!”That action of memory which he had tried to set going, and had abandoned indespair, had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort—a commonexperience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is ofno value. Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down thename, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of not beingat 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. Rafflesthere is always probable good in a secret.

He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o’clock that day he hadtaken 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 notrelieving him of the dread that the black spot might reappear and becomeinseparable even from the vision of his hearth.

BOOK VI.
THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.

CHAPTER LIV.

By that delightful morning when the hay-ricks at Stone Court were scenting theair quite impartially, as if Mr. Raffles had been a guest worthy of finestincense, Dorothea had again taken up her abode at Lowick Manor. After threemonths Fresh*tt had become rather oppressive: to sit like a model for SaintCatherine looking rapturously at Celia’s baby would not do for many hours inthe day, and to remain in that momentous babe’s presence with persistentdisregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a childlesssister. Dorothea would have been capable of carrying baby joyfully for a mileif there had been need, and of loving it the more tenderly for that labor; butto an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothingto do for him but to admire, his behavior is apt to appear monotonous, and theinterest of watching him exhaustible. This possibility was quite hidden fromCelia, who felt that Dorothea’s childless widowhood fell in quite prettily withthe birth of little Arthur (baby was named after Mr. Brooke).

“Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of herown—children or anything!” said Celia to her husband. “And if she had had ababy, it never could have been such a dear as Arthur. Could it, James?

“Not if it had been like Casaubon,” said Sir James, conscious of someindirectness in his answer, and of holding a strictly private opinion as to theperfections of his first-born.

“No! just imagine! Really it was a mercy,” said Celia; “and I think it is verynice for Dodo to be a widow. She can be just as fond of our baby as if it wereher 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,” saidCelia, objecting to so laborious a flight of imagination. “I like her better asshe is.”

Hence, when she found that Dorothea was making arrangements for her finaldeparture to Lowick, Celia raised her eyebrows with disappointment, and in herquiet unemphatic way shot a needle-arrow of sarcasm.

“What will you do at Lowick, Dodo? You say yourself there is nothing to be donethere: everybody is so clean and well off, it makes you quite melancholy. Andhere you have been so happy going all about Tipton with Mr. Garth into theworst backyards. And now uncle is abroad, you and Mr. Garth can have it allyour 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,” saidDorothea.

“But you will never see him washed,” said Celia; “and that is quite the bestpart of the day.” She was almost pouting: it did seem to her very hard in Dodoto go away from the baby when she might stay.

“Dear Kitty, I will come and stay all night on purpose,” said Dorothea; “but Iwant to be alone now, and in my own home. I wish to know the Farebrothersbetter, and to talk to Mr. Farebrother about what there is to be done inMiddlemarch.”

Dorothea’s native strength of will was no longer all converted into resolutesubmission. She had a great yearning to be at Lowick, and was simply determinedto go, not feeling bound to tell all her reasons. But every one around herdisapproved. Sir James was much pained, and offered that they should allmigrate to Cheltenham for a few months with the sacred ark, otherwise called acradle: at that period a man could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenhamwere 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 acceptthe office of companion to Mrs. Casaubon: it was not credible that Dorothea asa young widow would think of living alone in the house at Lowick. Mrs. Vigo hadbeen reader and secretary to royal personages, and in point of knowledge andsentiments even Dorothea could have nothing to object to her.

Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, “You will certainly go mad in that housealone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves alittle to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people callthem by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sortof provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run intothat. I dare say you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but thinkwhat a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you werealways playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in thatlibrary at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a fewpeople round you who wouldn’t believe you if you told them. That is a goodlowering 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, “Istill 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 worldhas often had to come round from its opinion.”

Mrs. Cadwallader said no more on that point to Dorothea, but to her husband sheremarked, “It will be well for her to marry again as soon as it is proper, ifone could get her among the right people. Of course the Chettams would not wish*t. But I see clearly a husband is the best thing to keep her in order. If wewere not so poor I would invite Lord Triton. He will be marquis some day, andthere is no denying that she would make a good marchioness: she looks handsomerthan 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? Andit is a shame that her uncle should have run away and shut up the Grange justnow. There ought to be plenty of eligible matches invited to Fresh*tt and theGrange. Lord Triton is precisely the man: full of plans for making the peoplehappy 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 novariety to choose from? A woman’s choice usually means taking the only man shecan get. Mark my words, Humphrey. If her friends don’t exert themselves, therewill 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 pointwith Sir James. He would be deeply offended if you entered on it to himunnecessarily.”

“I have never entered on it,” said Mrs Cadwallader, opening her hands. “Celiatold 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 youngfellow is going out of the neighborhood.”

Mrs. Cadwallader said nothing, but gave her husband three significant nods,with a very sarcastic expression in her dark eyes.

Dorothea quietly persisted in spite of remonstrance and persuasion. So by theend of June the shutters were all opened at Lowick Manor, and the morning gazedcalmly into the library, shining on the rows of note-books as it shines on theweary waste planted with huge stones, the mute memorial of a forgotten faith;and the evening laden with roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoirwhere Dorothea chose oftenest to sit. At first she walked into every room,questioning the eighteen months of her married life, and carrying on herthoughts as if they were a speech to be heard by her husband. Then, shelingered in the library and could not be at rest till she had carefully rangedall the note-books as she imagined that he would wish to see them, in orderlysequence. The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her lifewith him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated with him inindignant thought and told him that he was unjust. One little act of hers mayperhaps be smiled at as superstitious. The Synoptical Tabulation for the use ofMrs. 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 toyours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in—Dorothea?” Then shedeposited the paper in her own desk.

That silent colloquy was perhaps only the more earnest because underneath andthrough it all there was always the deep longing which had really determinedher to come to Lowick. The longing was to see Will Ladislaw. She did not knowany good that could come of their meeting: she was helpless; her hands had beentied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot. But her soul thirstedto see him. How could it be otherwise? If a princess in the days of enchantmenthad seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come toher once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice andbeseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look forwhen the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and whichshe would know again. Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel anddaylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues oflonging and constancy. It was true that Dorothea wanted to know theFarebrothers better, and especially to talk to the new rector, but also truethat remembering what Lydgate had told her about Will Ladislaw and little MissNoble, 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 shehad seen him the last time she was there, alone in the clergyman’s pew; butwhen she entered his figure was gone.

In the week-days when she went to see the ladies at the Rectory, she listenedin vain for some word that they might let fall about Will; but it seemed to herthat Mrs. Farebrother talked of every one else in the neighborhood and out ofit.

“Probably some of Mr. Farebrother’s Middlemarch hearers may follow him toLowick sometimes. Do you not think so?” said Dorothea, rather despising herselffor having a secret motive in asking the question.

“If they are wise they will, Mrs. Casaubon,” said the old lady. “I see that youset a right value on my son’s preaching. His grandfather on my side was anexcellent clergyman, but his father was in the law:—most exemplary and honestnevertheless, which is a reason for our never being rich. They say Fortune is awoman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman and gives to those whomerit, which has been the case with you, Mrs. Casaubon, who have given a livingto my son.”

Mrs. Farebrother recurred to her knitting with a dignified satisfaction in herneat 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 atMiddlemarch, and there was no one whom she dared to ask, unless it wereLydgate. But just now she could not see Lydgate without sending for him orgoing to seek him. Perhaps Will Ladislaw, having heard of that strange banagainst him left by Mr. Casaubon, had felt it better that he and she should notmeet again, and perhaps she was wrong to wish for a meeting that others mightfind many good reasons against. Still “I do wish it” came at the end of thosewise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath. And themeeting 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 theland attached to the manor and other papers before her, which were to help herin making an exact statement for herself of her income and affairs. She had notyet applied herself to her work, but was seated with her hands folded on herlap, looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields. Every leafwas at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed torepresent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease—motiveless, if herown energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action. The widow’s cap ofthose times made an oval frame for the face, and had a crown standing up; thedress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavysolemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recoveredbloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.

Her reverie was broken by Tantripp, who came to say that Mr. Ladislaw wasbelow, 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 thedrawing-room.”

The drawing-room was the most neutral room in the house to her—the one leastassociated with the trials of her married life: the damask matched thewood-work, which was all white and gold; there were two tall mirrors and tableswith nothing on them—in brief, it was a room where you had no reason forsitting in one place rather than in another. It was below the boudoir, and hadalso a bow-window looking out on the avenue. But when Pratt showed WillLadislaw into it the window was open; and a winged visitor, buzzing in and outnow and then without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal anduninhabited.

“Glad to see you here again, sir,” said Pratt, lingering to adjust a blind.

“I am only come to say good-by, Pratt,” said Will, who wished even the butlerto know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs. Casaubon now she was a richwidow.

“Very sorry to hear it, sir,” said Pratt, retiring. Of course, as a servant whowas 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 betrothedTantripp 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 themourning’s over.”

There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat in his handbefore Dorothea entered. The meeting was very different from that first meetingin Rome when Will had been embarrassed and Dorothea calm. This time he feltmiserable but determined, while she was in a state of agitation which could notbe hidden. Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting wasafter all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her, the deepblush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness. Neither of them knewhow it was, but neither of them spoke. She gave her hand for a moment, and thenthey went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on anotheropposite. Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like Dorothea thatthe mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a change in her manner ofreceiving him; and he knew of no other condition which could have affectedtheir previous relation to each other—except that, as his imagination at oncetold him, her friends might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicionsof him.

“I hope I have not presumed too much in calling,” said Will; “I could not bearto leave the neighborhood and begin a new life without seeing you to saygood-by.”

“Presumed? Surely not. I should have thought it unkind if you had not wished tosee me,” said Dorothea, her habit of speaking with perfect genuinenessasserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation. “Are you going awayimmediately?”

“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 bea great deal of political work to be done by-and-by, and I mean to try and dosome of it. Other men have managed to win an honorable position for themselveswithout family or money.”

“And that will make it all the more honorable,” said Dorothea, ardently.“Besides, you have so many talents. I have heard from my uncle how well youspeak in public, so that every one is sorry when you leave off, and how clearlyyou 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 andart, and the things that adorn life for us who are well off. But now I know youthink about the rest of the world.”

While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment, and hadbecome like her former self. She looked at Will with a direct glance, full ofdelighted confidence.

“You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again tillI have made myself of some mark in the world?” said Will, trying hard toreconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get an expression ofstrong feeling from Dorothea.

She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had turned her headand was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which seemed to have inthem the summers of all the years when Will would be away. This was notjudicious behavior. But Dorothea never thought of studying her manners: shethought only of bowing to a sad necessity which divided her from Will. Thosefirst words of his about his intentions had seemed to make everything clear toher: he knew, she supposed, all about Mr. Casaubon’s final conduct in relationto him, and it had come to him with the same sort of shock as to herself. Hehad never felt more than friendship for her—had never had anything in his mindto 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 inwardsilent sob had gone on in Dorothea before she said with a pure voice, justtrembling 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 Ihear that you have made your value felt. But you must have patience. It willperhaps be a long while.”

Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at herfeet, when the “long while” came forth with its gentle tremor. He used to saythat the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely thesufficient 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 onewhom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to beso. And I have a great deal of space for memory at Lowick, haven’t I?” Shesmiled.

“Good God!” Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still in hishand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly turned and leanedhis back against it. The blood had mounted to his face and neck, and he lookedalmost angry. It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowlyturning to marble in each other’s presence, while their hearts were consciousand their eyes were yearning. But there was no help for it. It should never betrue of him that in this meeting to which he had come with bitter resolution hehad ended by a confession which might be interpreted into asking for herfortune. Moreover, it was actually true that he was fearful of the effect whichsuch confessions might have on Dorothea herself.

She looked at him from that distance in some trouble, imagining that theremight have been an offence in her words. But all the while there was a currentof thought in her about his probable want of money, and the impossibility ofher helping him. If her uncle had been at home, something might have been donethrough him! It was this preoccupation with the hardship of Will’s wantingmoney, 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—Imean that beautiful miniature of your grandmother. I think it is not right forme 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 isnot very consoling to have one’s own likeness. It would be more consoling ifothers wanted to have it.”

“I thought you would like to cherish her memory—I thought—” Dorothea broke offan instant, her imagination suddenly warning her away from Aunt Julia’shistory—“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 aportmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head.”

Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance; it was a little tooexasperating to have his grandmother’s portrait offered him at that moment. Butto Dorothea’s feeling his words had a peculiar sting. She rose and said with atouch of indignation as well as hauteur—

“You are much the happier of us two, Mr. Ladislaw, to have nothing.”

Will was startled. Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed like adismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked a little way towardsher. Their eyes met, but with a strange questioning gravity. Something waskeeping their minds aloof, and each was left to conjecture what was in theother. Will had really never thought of himself as having a claim ofinheritance on the property which was held by Dorothea, and would have requireda narrative to make him understand her present feeling.

“I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now,” he said. “But povertymay 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 atone of sad fellowship.

“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that—I mean ofthe unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes ussilent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shapingtheir lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked,but I have almost given it up,” she ended, smiling playfully.

“I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it,” said Will.He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of contradictory desiresand resolves—desiring some unmistakable proof that she loved him, and yetdreading the position into which such a proof might bring him. “The thing onemost 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 thesame electric shock had passed through her and Will. Each of them felt proudlyresistant, and neither looked at the other, while they awaited Sir James’sentrance.

After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible toLadislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards Dorothea,said—

“I must say good-by, Mrs. Casaubon; and probably for a long while.”

Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-by cordially. The sense that SirJames was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him, roused her resolutionand dignity: there was no touch of confusion in her manner. And when Will hadleft 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 withso much dislike from the association even in thought of Dorothea with Ladislawas her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an outwardshow of displeasure which would have recognized the disagreeable possibility.If any one had asked him why he shrank in that way, I am not sure that he wouldat first have said anything fuller or more precise than “ThatLadislaw!”—though on reflection he might have urged that Mr. Casaubon’scodicil, barring Dorothea’s marriage with Will, except under a penalty, wasenough to cast unfitness over any relation at all between them. His aversionwas all the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere.

But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at thatmoment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through which Will’spride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from Dorothea.

CHAPTER LV.

Hath she her faults? I would you had them too.
They are the fruity must of soundest wine;
Or say, they are regenerating fire
Such as hath turned the dense black element
Into a crystal pathway for the sun.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that ourelders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think itsemotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seemsfinal, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants inPeru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably seebeyond 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 fulllashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied as a freshlyopened passion-flower, that morning’s parting with Will Ladislaw seemed to bethe close of their personal relations. He was going away into the distance ofunknown years, and if ever he came back he would be another man. The actualstate of his mind—his proud resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicionthat he would play the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman—lay quite out ofher imagination, and she had interpreted all his behavior easily enough by hersupposition that Mr. Casaubon’s codicil seemed to him, as it did to her, agross and cruel interdict on any active friendship between them. Their youngdelight in speaking to each other, and saying what no one else would care tohear, was forever ended, and become a treasure of the past. For this veryreason she dwelt on it without inward check. That unique happiness too wasdead, and in its shadowed silent chamber she might vent the passionate griefwhich she herself wondered at. For the first time she took down the miniaturefrom the wall and kept it before her, liking to blend the woman who had beentoo hardly judged with the grandson whom her own heart and judgment defended.Can any one who has rejoiced in woman’s tenderness think it a reproach to herthat she took the little oval picture in her palm and made a bed for it there,and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would soothe the creatures who hadsuffered unjust condemnation? She did not know then that it was Love who hadcome to her briefly, as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning onhis wings—that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his imagewas banished by the blameless rigor of irresistible day. She only felt thatthere was something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughtsabout the future were the more readily shapen into resolve. Ardent souls, readyto construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilmentof their own visions.

One day that she went to Fresh*tt to fulfil her promise of staying all nightand seeing baby washed, Mrs. Cadwallader came to dine, the Rector being gone ona fishing excursion. It was a warm evening, and even in the delightfuldrawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped from the open window towards alilied pool and well-planted mounds, the heat was enough to make Celia in herwhite muslin and light curls reflect with pity on what Dodo must feel in herblack dress and close cap. But this was not until some episodes with baby wereover, and had left her mind at leisure. She had seated herself and taken up afan 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 feelill.”

“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 downher fan, and going to Dorothea. It was a pretty picture to see this little ladyin white muslin unfastening the widow’s cap from her more majestic sister, andtossing it on to a chair. Just as the coils and braids of dark-brown hair hadbeen set free, Sir James entered the room. He looked at the released head, andsaid, “Ah!” in a tone of satisfaction.

“It was I who did it, James,” said Celia. “Dodo need not make such a slavery ofher mourning; she need not wear that cap any more among her friends.”

“My dear Celia,” said Lady Chettam, “a widow must wear her mourning at least ayear.”

“Not if she marries again before the end of it,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, who hadsome 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 guardagainst such events. “No friend of ours ever committed herself in that wayexcept 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. Andseverely she was punished for it. They said Captain Beevor dragged her about bythe hair, and held up loaded pistols at her.”

“Oh, if she took the wrong man!” said Mrs. Cadwallader, who was in a decidedlywicked mood. “Marriage is always bad then, first or second. Priority is a poorrecommendation in a husband if he has got no other. I would rather have a goodsecond husband than an indifferent first.”

“My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you,” said Lady Chettam. “I am sureyou would be the last woman to marry again prematurely, if our dear Rector weretaken away.”

“Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy. It is lawful to marryagain, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos instead of Christians. Ofcourse if a woman accepts the wrong man, she must take the consequences, andone who does it twice over deserves her fate. But if she can marry blood,beauty, and bravery—the sooner the better.”

“I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen,” said Sir James,with a look of disgust. “Suppose we change it.”

“Not on my account, Sir James,” said Dorothea, determined not to lose theopportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to excellentmatches. “If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you that no questioncan be more indifferent and impersonal to me than second marriage. It is nomore to me than if you talked of women going fox-hunting: whether it isadmirable in them or not, I shall not follow them. Pray let Mrs. Cadwalladeramuse herself on that subject as much as on any other.”

“My dear Mrs. Casaubon,” said Lady Chettam, in her stateliest way, “you do not,I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my mentioning Mrs. Beevor. Itwas only an instance that occurred to me. She was step-daughter to LordGrinsell: he married Mrs. Teveroy for his second wife. There could be nopossible 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 ina widow’s cap, James.”

“Hush, my dear!” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “I will not offend again. I will noteven 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 ofrectors’ wives.”

Later in the evening, after Mrs. Cadwallader was gone, Celia said privately toDorothea, “Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made you like yourself again inmore ways than one. You spoke up just as you used to do, when anything was saidto displease you. But I could hardly make out whether it was James that youthought wrong, or Mrs. Cadwallader.”

“Neither,” said Dorothea. “James spoke out of delicacy to me, but he wasmistaken in supposing that I minded what Mrs. Cadwallader said. I should onlymind if there were a law obliging me to take any piece of blood and beauty thatshe or anybody else recommended.”

“But you know, Dodo, if you ever did marry, it would be all the better to haveblood and beauty,” said Celia, reflecting that Mr. Casaubon had not been richlyendowed with those gifts, and that it would be well to caution Dorothea intime.

“Don’t be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life. I shallnever marry again,” said Dorothea, touching her sister’s chin, and looking ather with indulgent affection. Celia was nursing her baby, and Dorothea had cometo say good-night to her.

“Really—quite?” said Celia. “Not anybody at all—if he were very wonderfulindeed?”

Dorothea shook her head slowly. “Not anybody at all. I have delightful plans. Ishould like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a littlecolony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. Ishould know every one of the people and be their friend. I am going to havegreat consultations with Mr. Garth: he can tell me almost everything I want toknow.”

“Then you will be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo?” said Celia. “Perhapslittle 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 setagainst 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 secretfeeling there was something repulsive in a woman’s second marriage, and nomatch would prevent him from feeling it a sort of desecration for Dorothea. Hewas aware that the world would regard such a sentiment as preposterous,especially in relation to a woman of one-and-twenty; the practice of “theworld” being to treat of a young widow’s second marriage as certain andprobably near, and to smile with meaning if the widow acts accordingly. But ifDorothea did choose to espouse her solitude, he felt that the resolution wouldwell become her.

CHAPTER LVI.

“How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another’s will;
Whose armor is his honest thought,
And simple truth his only skill!
. . . . . . .
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself though not of lands;
And having nothing yet hath all.”
—SIR HENRY WOTTON.

Dorothea’s confidence in Caleb Garth’s knowledge, which had begun on herhearing that he approved of her cottages, had grown fast during her stay atFresh*tt, Sir James having induced her to take rides over the two estates incompany with himself and Caleb, who quite returned her admiration, and told hiswife that Mrs. Casaubon had a head for business most uncommon in a woman. Itmust be remembered that by “business” Caleb never meant money transactions, butthe skilful application of labor.

“Most uncommon!” repeated Caleb. “She said a thing I often used to think myselfwhen I was a lad:—‘Mr. Garth, I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, thatI 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 isdone, men are the better for it.’ Those were the very words: she sees intothings in that way.”

“But womanly, I hope,” said Mrs. Garth, half suspecting that Mrs. Casaubonmight not hold the true principle of subordination.

“Oh, you can’t think!” said Caleb, shaking his head. “You would like to hearher speak, Susan. She speaks in such plain words, and a voice like music. Blessme! it reminds me of bits in the ‘Messiah’—‘and straightway there appeared amultitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying;’ it has a tone with itthat satisfies your ear.”

Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went to hear anoratorio that came within his reach, returning from it with a profoundreverence for this mighty structure of tones, which made him sit meditatively,looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable language into hisoutstretched hands.

With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Dorothea askedMr. Garth to undertake any business connected with the three farms and thenumerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed, his expectation of gettingwork for two was being fast fulfilled. As he said, “Business breeds.” And oneform of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction ofrailways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattlehad hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happenedthat the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs ofCaleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to twopersons 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 withclaims for damages not only measurable but sentimental. In the hundred to whichMiddlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill orthe imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views onthe subject were women and landholders. Women both old and young regardedtravelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it bysaying that nothing should induce them to get into a railway carriage; whileproprietors, differing from each other in their arguments as much as Mr.Solomon Featherstone differed from Lord Medlicote, were yet unanimous in theopinion that in selling land, whether to the Enemy of mankind or to a companyobliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made to pay a very highprice to landowners for permission to injure mankind.

But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule, who both occupied landof their own, took a long time to arrive at this conclusion, their mindshalting at the vivid conception of what it would be to cut the Big Pasture intwo, and turn it into three-cornered bits, which would be “nohow;” whileaccommodation-bridges and high payments were remote and incredible.

“The cows will all cast their calves, brother,” said Mrs. Waule, in a tone ofdeep melancholy, “if the railway comes across the Near Close; and I shouldn’twonder at the mare too, if she was in foal. It’s a poor tale if a widow’sproperty 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’tfight.”

“The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send ’em awaywith a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring,” said Solomon.“Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can understand. It’s all a pretence,if the truth was known, about their being forced to take one way. Let ’em gocutting in another parish. And I don’t believe in any pay to make amends forbringing 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 piecesright and left.”

“Well, there’s this to be said, Jane,” Mr. Solomon concluded, lowering hisvoice in a cautious manner—“the more spokes we put in their wheel, the morethey’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, hiscunning bearing about the same relation to the course of railways as thecunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or catarrh of the solarsystem. 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 thevillage, and the houses of the laboring people were either lone cottages orwere collected in a hamlet called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pitsmade a little centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.

In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public opinion inFrick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy corner had not theproverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding rather that it was likely tobe against the poor man, and that suspicion was the only wise attitude withregard to it. Even the rumor of Reform had not yet excited any millennialexpectations in Frick, there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitousgrains 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 threeneighboring farmers to raise wages during winter. And without distinct good ofthis kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing with the bragging ofpedlers, which was a hint for distrust to every knowing person. The men ofFrick were not ill-fed, and were less given to fanaticism than to a strongmuscular suspicion; less inclined to believe that they were peculiarly caredfor by heaven, than to regard heaven itself as rather disposed to take themin—a disposition observable in the weather.

Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr. Solomon Featherstone towork upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the same order, with a suspicionof heaven and earth which was better fed and more entirely at leisure. Solomonwas overseer of the roads at that time, and on his slow-paced cob often tookhis rounds by Frick to look at the workmen getting the stones there, pausingwith a mysterious deliberation, which might have misled you into supposing thathe 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 raisehis 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-handof a clock was quick by comparison with Mr. Solomon, who had an agreeable sensethat 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 wasespecially willing to listen even to news which he had heard before, feelinghimself at an advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them. Oneday, however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a wagoner, in which hehimself contributed information. He wished to know whether Hiram had seenfellows with staves and instruments spying about: they called themselvesrailroad people, but there was no telling what they were or what they meant todo. The least they pretended was that they were going to cut Lowick Parish intosixes and sevens.

“Why, there’ll be no stirrin’ from one pla-ace to another,” said Hiram,thinking of his wagon and horses.

“Not a bit,” said Mr. Solomon. “And cutting up fine land such as this parish!Let ’em go into Tipton, say I. But there’s no knowing what there is at thebottom of it. Traffic is what they put for’ard; but it’s to do harm to the landand the poor man in the long-run.”

“Why, they’re Lunnon chaps, I reckon,” said Hiram, who had a dim notion ofLondon 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 theycarry, and drove ’em away, so as they knew better than come again.”

“It war good foon, I’d be bound,” said Hiram, whose fun was much restricted bycirc*mstances.

“Well, I wouldn’t meddle with ’em myself,” said Solomon. “But some say thiscountry’s seen its best days, and the sign is, as it’s being overrun with thesefellows trampling right and left, and wanting to cut it up into railways; andall for the big traffic to swallow up the little, so as there shan’t be a teamleft on the land, nor a whip to crack.”

“I’ll crack my whip about their ear’n, afore they bring it to that,though,” said Hiram, while Mr. Solomon, shaking his bridle, moved onward.

Nettle-seed needs no digging. The ruin of this countryside by railroads wasdiscussed, not only at the “Weights and Scales,” but in the hay-field, wherethe muster of working hands gave opportunities for talk such as were rarely hadthrough the rural year.

One morning, not long after that interview between Mr. Farebrother and MaryGarth, in which she confessed to him her feeling for Fred Vincy, it happenedthat her father had some business which took him to Yoddrell’s farm in thedirection of Frick: it was to measure and value an outlying piece of landbelonging to Lowick Manor, which Caleb expected to dispose of advantageouslyfor Dorothea (it must be confessed that his bias was towards getting the bestpossible terms from railroad companies). He put up his gig at Yoddrell’s, andin walking with his assistant and measuring-chain to the scene of his work, heencountered the party of the company’s agents, who were adjusting theirspirit-level. After a little chat he left them, observing that by-and-by theywould reach him again where he was going to measure. It was one of those graymornings after light rains, which become delicious about twelve o’clock, whenthe clouds part a little, and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanesand by the hedgerows.

The scent would have been sweeter to Fred Vincy, who was coming along the laneson horseback, if his mind had not been worried by unsuccessful efforts toimagine what he was to do, with his father on one side expecting himstraightway to enter the Church, with Mary on the other threatening to forsakehim if he did enter it, and with the working-day world showing no eager needwhatever of a young gentleman without capital and generally unskilled. It wasthe harder to Fred’s disposition because his father, satisfied that he was nolonger rebellious, was in good humor with him, and had sent him on thispleasant ride to see after some greyhounds. Even when he had fixed on what heshould do, there would be the task of telling his father. But it must beadmitted that the fixing, which had to come first, was the more difficulttask:—what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friendscould not get him an “appointment”) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative,and to be followed without special knowledge? Riding along the lanes by Frickin this mood, and slackening his pace while he reflected whether he shouldventure to go round by Lowick Parsonage to call on Mary, he could see over thehedges from one field to another. Suddenly a noise roused his attention, and onthe far side of a field on his left hand he could see six or seven men insmock-frocks with hay-forks in their hands making an offensive approach towardsthe four railway agents who were facing them, while Caleb Garth and hisassistant 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 thespot before the party in smock-frocks, whose work of turning the hay had notbeen too pressing after swallowing their mid-day beer, were driving the men incoats before them with their hay-forks; while Caleb Garth’s assistant, a lad ofseventeen, who had snatched up the spirit-level at Caleb’s order, had beenknocked down and seemed to be lying helpless. The coated men had the advantageas runners, and Fred covered their retreat by getting in front of thesmock-frocks and charging them suddenly enough to throw their chase intoconfusion. “What do you confounded fools mean?” shouted Fred, pursuing thedivided group in a zigzag, and cutting right and left with his whip. “I’llswear to every one of you before the magistrate. You’ve knocked the lad downand killed him, for what I know. You’ll every one of you be hanged at the nextassizes, if you don’t mind,” said Fred, who afterwards laughed heartily as heremembered his own phrases.

The laborers had been driven through the gate-way into their hay-field, andFred had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford, observing himself at a safechallenging distance, turned back and shouted a defiance which he did not knowto be Homeric.

“Yo’re a coward, yo are. Yo git off your horse, young measter, and I’ll have around wi’ ye, I wull. Yo daredn’t come on wi’out your hoss an’ whip. I’d soonknock the breath out on ye, I would.”

“Wait a minute, and I’ll come back presently, and have a round with you all inturn, if you like,” said Fred, who felt confidence in his power of boxing withhis dearly beloved brethren. But just now he wanted to hasten back to Caleb andthe prostrate youth.

The lad’s ankle was strained, and he was in much pain from it, but he was nofurther hurt, and Fred placed him on the horse that he might ride to Yoddrell’sand be taken care of there.

“Let them put the horse in the stable, and tell the surveyors they can comeback 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, asTom rode away. “No knowing what might have happened if the cavalry had not comeup in time.”

“Ay, ay, it was lucky,” said Caleb, speaking rather absently, and lookingtowards 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 myday’s work. I can’t get along without somebody to help me with themeasuring-chain. However!” He was beginning to move towards the spot with alook of vexation, as if he had forgotten Fred’s presence, but suddenly heturned 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 asense 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 thathulky fellow who turned to challenge me. It would be a good lesson for him. Ishall not be five minutes.”

“Nonsense!” said Caleb, with his most peremptory intonation. “I shall go andspeak to the men myself. It’s all ignorance. Somebody has been telling themlies. 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 ofmyself.”

Caleb was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear of hurtingothers and the fear of having to speechify. But he felt it his duty at thismoment to try and give a little harangue. There was a striking mixture inhim—which came from his having always been a hard-working man himself—ofrigorous notions about workmen and practical indulgence towards them. To do agood day’s work and to do it well, he held to be part of their welfare, as itwas the chief part of his own happiness; but he had a strong sense offellowship with them. When he advanced towards the laborers they had not goneto work again, but were standing in that form of rural grouping which consistsin each turning a shoulder towards the other, at a distance of two or threeyards. They looked rather sulkily at Caleb, who walked quickly with one hand inhis pocket and the other thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, and hadhis every-day mild air when he paused among them.

“Why, my lads, how’s this?” he began, taking as usual to brief phrases, whichseemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts lying under them, likethe abundant roots of a plant that just manages to peep above the water. “Howcame 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 ofunreadiness.

“Nonsense! No such thing! They’re looking out to see which way the railroad isto take. Now, my lads, you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whetheryou like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you’ll get yourselvesinto trouble. The law gives those men leave to come here on the land. The ownerhas nothing to say against it, and if you meddle with them you’ll have to dowith the constable and Justice Blakesley, and with the handcuffs andMiddlemarch jail. And you might be in for it now, if anybody informed againstyou.”

Caleb paused here, and perhaps the greatest orator could not have chosen eitherhis pause or his images better for the occasion.

“But come, you didn’t mean any harm. Somebody told you the railroad was a badthing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and tothat; 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, whohad stayed behind turning his hay while the others had been gone on theirspree;—“I’n seen lots o’ things turn up sin’ I war a young un—the war an’ thepeace, and the canells, an’ the oald King George, an’ the Regen’, an’ the newKing George, an’ the new un as has got a new ne-ame—an’ it’s been all aloike tothe poor mon. What’s the canells been t’ him? They’n brought him neyther me-atnor be-acon, nor wage to lay by, if he didn’t save it wi’ clemmin’ his owninside. Times ha’ got wusser for him sin’ I war a young un. An’ so it’ll be wi’the railroads. They’ll on’y leave the poor mon furder behind. But them arefools as meddle, and so I told the chaps here. This is the big folks’s world,this is. But yo’re for the big folks, Muster Garth, yo are.”

Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times—who had hissavings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was not to be wroughton by any oratory, having as little of the feudal spirit, and believing aslittle, as if he had not been totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason andthe Rights of Man. Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting indark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are inpossession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process offeeling, and can let it fall like a giant’s club on your neatly carved argumentfor a social benefit which they do not feel. Caleb had no cant at command, evenif he could have chosen to use it; and he had been accustomed to meet all suchdifficulties in no other way than by doing his “business” faithfully. Heanswered—

“If you don’t think well of me, Tim, never mind; that’s neither here nor therenow. Things may be bad for the poor man—bad they are; but I want the lads herenot to do what will make things worse for themselves. The cattle may have aheavy load, but it won’t help ’em to throw it over into the roadside pit, whenit’s partly their own fodder.”

“We war on’y for a bit o’ foon,” said Hiram, who was beginning to seeconsequences. “That war all we war arter.”

“Well, promise me not to meddle again, and I’ll see that nobody informs againstyou.”

“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’tspare 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 inwhich Caleb got his pledges; and then he hastened back to Fred, who hadfollowed him, and watched him in the gateway.

They went to work, and Fred helped vigorously. His spirits had risen, and heheartily enjoyed a good slip in the moist earth under the hedgerow, whichsoiled his perfect summer trousers. Was it his successful onset which hadelated him, or the satisfaction of helping Mary’s father? Something more. Theaccidents of the morning had helped his frustrated imagination to shape anemployment for himself which had several attractions. I am not sure thatcertain fibres in Mr. Garth’s mind had not resumed their old vibration towardsthe very end which now revealed itself to Fred. For the effective accident isbut the touch of fire where there is oil and tow; and it always appeared toFred that the railway brought the needed touch. But they went on in silenceexcept when their business demanded speech. At last, when they had finished andwere 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. Hepaused a moment, and then added, more hesitatingly, “Do you think I am too oldto learn your business, Mr. Garth?”

“My business is of many sorts, my boy,” said Mr. Garth, smiling. “A good dealof what I know can only come from experience: you can’t learn it off as youlearn things out of a book. But you are young enough to lay a foundation yet.”Caleb pronounced the last sentence emphatically, but paused in someuncertainty. He had been under the impression lately that Fred had made up hismind to enter the Church.

“You do think I could do some good at it, if I were to try?” said Fred, moreeagerly.

“That depends,” said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering hisvoice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeplyreligious. “You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not bealways looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the otheris, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorableto you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work andin learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’sthat—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter whata 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 therick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.”

“I can never feel that I should do that in being a clergyman,” said Fred,meaning to take a step in argument.

“Then let it alone, my boy,” said Caleb, abruptly, “else you’ll never be easy.Or, if you are easy, you’ll be a poor stick.”

“That is very nearly what Mary thinks about it,” said Fred, coloring. “I thinkyou must know what I feel for Mary, Mr. Garth: I hope it does not displease youthat I have always loved her better than any one else, and that I shall neverlove any one as I love her.”

The expression of Caleb’s face was visibly softening while Fred spoke. But heswung his head with a solemn slowness, and said—

“That makes things more serious, Fred, if you want to take Mary’s happinessinto your keeping.”

“I know that, Mr. Garth,” said Fred, eagerly, “and I would do anything forher. She says she will never have me if I go into the Church; and Ishall 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 atall fit for, I would work hard, I would deserve your good opinion. I shouldlike to have to do with outdoor things. I know a good deal about land andcattle already. I used to believe, you know—though you will think me ratherfoolish for it—that I should have land of my own. I am sure knowledge of thatsort 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 doinstead of entering the Church. I am very sorry to disappoint him, but a manought to be allowed to judge for himself when he is four-and-twenty. How couldI know when I was fifteen, what it would be right for me to do now? Myeducation was a mistake.”

“But hearken to this, Fred,” said Caleb. “Are you sure Mary is fond of you, orwould ever have you?”

“I asked Mr. Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden me—I didn’tknow what else to do,” said Fred, apologetically. “And he says that I haveevery reason to hope, if I can put myself in an honorable position—I mean, outof the Church. I dare say you think it unwarrantable in me, Mr. Garth, to betroubling you and obtruding my own wishes about Mary, before I have doneanything at all for myself. Of course I have not the least claim—indeed, I havealready a debt to you which will never be discharged, even when I have beenable 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 wasyoung myself once and had to do without much help; but help would have beenwelcome to me, if it had been only for the fellow-feeling’s sake. But I mustconsider. 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 beconfessed that before he reached home he had taken his resolution. With regardto a large number of matters about which other men are decided or obstinate, hewas the most easily manageable man in the world. He never knew what meat hewould choose, and if Susan had said that they ought to live in a four-roomedcottage, in order to save, he would have said, “Let us go,” without inquiringinto details. But where Caleb’s feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, hewas a ruler; and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every oneabout him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he wasabsolute. He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on some one else’sbehalf. On ninety-nine points Mrs. Garth decided, but on the hundredth she wasoften aware that she would have to perform the singularly difficult task ofcarrying out her own principle, and to make herself subordinate.

“It is come round as I thought, Susan,” said Caleb, when they were seated alonein the evening. He had already narrated the adventure which had brought aboutFred’s sharing in his work, but had kept back the further result. “The childrenare fond of each other—I mean, Fred and Mary.”

Mrs. Garth laid her work on her knee, and fixed her penetrating eyes anxiouslyon her husband.

“After we’d done our work, Fred poured it all out to me. He can’t bear to be aclergyman, and Mary says she won’t have him if he is one; and the lad wouldlike to be under me and give his mind to business. And I’ve determined to takehim and make a man of him.”

“Caleb!” said Mrs. Garth, in a deep contralto, expressive of resignedastonishment.

“It’s a fine thing to do,” said Mr. Garth, settling himself firmly against theback of his chair, and grasping the elbows. “I shall have trouble with him, butI think I shall carry it through. The lad loves Mary, and a true love for agood 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 hurtthat 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. Butshe assured me she would never marry an idle self-indulgent man—nothing since.But it seems Fred set on Mr. Farebrother to talk to her, because she hadforbidden him to speak himself, and Mr. Farebrother has found out that she isfond of Fred, but says he must not be a clergyman. Fred’s heart is fixed onMary, that I can see: it gives me a good opinion of the lad—and we always likedhim, Susan.”

“It is a pity for Mary, I think,” said Mrs. Garth.

“Why—a pity?”

“Because, Caleb, she might have had a man who is worth twenty Fred Vincy’s.”

“Ah?” said Caleb, with surprise.

“I firmly believe that Mr. Farebrother is attached to her, and meant to makeher an offer; but of course, now that Fred has used him as an envoy, there isan end to that better prospect.” There was a severe precision in Mrs. Garth’sutterance. She was vexed and disappointed, but she was bent on abstaining fromuseless words.

Caleb was silent a few moments under a conflict of feelings. He looked at thefloor and moved his head and hands in accompaniment to some inwardargumentation. At last he said—

“That would have made me very proud and happy, Susan, and I should have beenglad for your sake. I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on alevel 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 thatmark.

“Well, perhaps others thought you might have done better. But it would havebeen worse for me. And that is what touches me close about Fred. The lad isgood at bottom, and clever enough to do, if he’s put in the right way; and heloves and honors my daughter beyond anything, and she has given him a sort ofpromise according to what he turns out. I say, that young man’s soul is in myhand; 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 herface before her husband had finished. It came from the pressure of variousfeelings, in which there was much affection and some vexation. She wiped itaway quickly, saying—

“Few men besides you would think it a duty to add to their anxieties in thatway, Caleb.”

“That signifies nothing—what other men would think. I’ve got a clear feelinginside me, and that I shall follow; and I hope your heart will go with me,Susan, in making everything as light as can be to Mary, poor child.”

Caleb, leaning back in his chair, looked with anxious appeal towards his wife.She rose and kissed him, saying, “God bless you, Caleb! Our children have agood father.”

But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression of herwords. She felt sure that her husband’s conduct would be misunderstood, andabout Fred she was rational and unhopeful. Which would turn out to have themore 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 gonethrough which he was not prepared for.

“Now Fred,” said Caleb, “you will have some desk-work. I have always done agood deal of writing myself, but I can’t do without help, and as I want you tounderstand the accounts and get the values into your head, I mean to do withoutanother 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 ofarithmetic, Mr. Garth: it always came easily to me. I think you know mywriting.”

“Let us see,” said Caleb, taking up a pen, examining it carefully and handingit, well dipped, to Fred with a sheet of ruled paper. “Copy me a line or two ofthat valuation, with the figures at the end.”

At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to writelegibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the linesdemanded 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 upor down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keepthe line—in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpretwhen you know beforehand what the writer means.

As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fredhanded him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the paperpassionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this dispelled allCaleb’s mildness.

“The deuce!” he exclaimed, snarlingly. “To think that this is a country where aman’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 theunfortunate scribe, “The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can’t put up withthis!”

“What can I do, Mr. Garth?” said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low, notonly at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of himself as liableto be ranked with office clerks.

“Do? Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line. What’s the useof writing at all if nobody can understand it?” asked Caleb, energetically,quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. “Is there so littlebusiness in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country? Butthat’s the way people are brought up. I should lose no end of time with theletters some people send me, if Susan did not make them out for me. It’sdisgusting.” Here Caleb tossed the paper from him.

Any stranger peeping into the office at that moment might have wondered whatwas the drama between the indignant man of business, and the fine-looking youngfellow whose blond complexion was getting rather patchy as he bit his lip withmortification. Fred was struggling with many thoughts. Mr. Garth had been sokind and encouraging at the beginning of their interview, that gratitude andhopefulness had been at a high pitch, and the downfall was proportionate. Hehad not thought of desk-work—in fact, like the majority of young gentlemen, hewanted an occupation which should be free from disagreeables. I cannot tellwhat might have been the consequences if he had not distinctly promised himselfthat he would go to Lowick to see Mary and tell her that he was engaged to workunder 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 wasalready relenting.

“We must make the best of it, Fred,” he began, with a return to his usual quiettone. “Every man can learn to write. I taught myself. Go at it with a will, andsit up at night if the day-time isn’t enough. We’ll be patient, my boy. Callumshall go on with the books for a bit, while you are learning. But now I must beoff,” said Caleb, rising. “You must let your father know our agreement. You’llsave me Callum’s salary, you know, when you can write; and I can afford to giveyou eighty pounds for the first year, and more after.”

When Fred made the necessary disclosure to his parents, the relative effect onthe two was a surprise which entered very deeply into his memory. He wentstraight from Mr. Garth’s office to the warehouse, rightly feeling that themost respectful way in which he could behave to his father was to make thepainful communication as gravely and formally as possible. Moreover, thedecision would be more certainly understood to be final, if the interview tookplace in his father’s gravest hours, which were always those spent in hisprivate room at the warehouse.

Fred entered on the subject directly, and declared briefly what he had done andwas resolved to do, expressing at the end his regret that he should be thecause of disappointment to his father, and taking the blame on his owndeficiencies. The regret was genuine, and inspired Fred with strong, simplewords.

Mr. Vincy listened in profound surprise without uttering even an exclamation, asilence which in his impatient temperament was a sign of unusual emotion. Hehad not been in good spirits about trade that morning, and the slightbitterness in his lips grew intense as he listened. When Fred had ended, therewas a pause of nearly a minute, during which Mr. Vincy replaced a book in hisdesk and turned the key emphatically. Then he looked at his son steadily, andsaid—

“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 youreducation, and gone down a step in life, when I had given you the means ofrising, that’s all.”

“I am very sorry that we differ, father. I think I can be quite as much of agentleman at the work I have undertaken, as if I had been a curate. But I amgrateful 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, whenyou have a son of your own he will make a better return for the pains you spendon him.”

This was very cutting to Fred. His father was using that unfair advantagepossessed by us all when we are in a pathetic situation and see our own past asif it were simply part of the pathos. In reality, Mr. Vincy’s wishes about hisson had had a great deal of pride, inconsiderateness, and egoistic folly inthem. But still the disappointed father held a strong lever; and Fred felt asif he were being banished with a malediction.

“I hope you will not object to my remaining at home, sir?” he said, afterrising to go; “I shall have a sufficient salary to pay for my board, as ofcourse I should wish to do.”

“Board be hanged!” said Mr. Vincy, recovering himself in his disgust at thenotion that Fred’s keep would be missed at his table. “Of course your motherwill want you to stay. But I shall keep no horse for you, you understand; andyou 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 Ihave caused you.”

Mr. Vincy from his chair threw a quick glance upward at his son, who hadadvanced near to him, and then gave his hand, saying hurriedly, “Yes, yes, letus say no more.”

Fred went through much more narrative and explanation with his mother, but shewas inconsolable, having before her eyes what perhaps her husband had neverthought of, the certainty that Fred would marry Mary Garth, that her life wouldhenceforth be spoiled by a perpetual infusion of Garths and their ways, andthat her darling boy, with his beautiful face and stylish air “beyond anybodyelse’s son in Middlemarch,” would be sure to get like that family in plainnessof appearance and carelessness about his clothes. To her it seemed that therewas a Garth conspiracy to get possession of the desirable Fred, but she darednot enlarge on this opinion, because a slight hint of it had made him “fly out”at her as he had never done before. Her temper was too sweet for her to showany anger, but she felt that her happiness had received a bruise, and forseveral days merely to look at Fred made her cry a little as if he were thesubject of some baleful prophecy. Perhaps she was the slower to recover herusual cheerfulness because Fred had warned her that she must not reopen thesore 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 intodefence of her darling. It was the end of the fourth day when Mr. Vincy said toher—

“Come, Lucy, my dear, don’t be so down-hearted. You always have spoiled theboy, and you must go on spoiling him.”

“Nothing ever did cut me so before, Vincy,” said the wife, her fair throat andchin 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 herselfwith a little shake as of a bird which lays down its ruffled plumage.

“It won’t do to begin making a fuss about one,” said Mr. Vincy, wishing tocombine a little grumbling with domestic cheerfulness. “There’s Rosamond aswell as Fred.”

“Yes, poor thing. I’m sure I felt for her being disappointed of her baby; butshe got over it nicely.”

“Baby, pooh! I can see Lydgate is making a mess of his practice, and gettinginto debt too, by what I hear. I shall have Rosamond coming to me with a prettytale one of these days. But they’ll get no money from me, I know. Lethis family help him. I never did like that marriage. But it’s no usetalking. Ring the bell for lemons, and don’t look dull any more, Lucy. I’lldrive you and Louisa to Riverston to-morrow.”

CHAPTER LVII.

They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
At penetration of the quickening air:
His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
Making the little world their childhood knew
Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur,
And larger yet with wonder, love, belief
Toward Walter Scott who living far away
Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
The book and they must part, but day by day,
In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran
They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.

The evening that Fred Vincy walked to Lowick parsonage (he had begun to seethat this was a world in which even a spirited young man must sometimes walkfor 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 newrelations willingly.

He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple-treein 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 heldit the most desirable thing in the world to be a tutor, to study allliteratures and be a regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism onpoor Fred, a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother.Christy himself, a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of hismother not much higher than Fred’s shoulder—which made it the harder that heshould be held superior—was always as simple as possible, and thought no moreof Fred’s disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe’s, wishing that hehimself were more of the same height. He was lying on the ground now by hismother’s chair, with his straw hat laid flat over his eyes, while Jim on theother side was reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief partin the happiness of many young lives. The volume was “Ivanhoe,” and Jim was inthe great archery scene at the tournament, but suffered much interruption fromBen, who had fetched his own old bow and arrows, and was making himselfdreadfully disagreeable, Letty thought, by begging all present to observe hisrandom shots, which no one wished to do except Brownie, the active-minded butprobably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled Newfoundland lying in the sunlooked 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 beenassisting at the gathering of the cherries which stood in a coral-heap on thetea-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 toLowick Parsonage, Ben, who had thrown down his bow, and snatched up a reluctanthalf-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 wasmuch checkered by resistance to her depreciation as a girl.

“I shall stay with Christy,” observed Jim; as much as to say that he had theadvantage of those simpletons; whereupon Letty put her hand up to her head andlooked 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 oldGlasgow suit of yours would never do. Besides, your father will come home. Wemust let Fred go alone. He can tell Mary that you are here, and she will comeback to-morrow.”

Christy glanced at his own threadbare knees, and then at Fred’s beautiful whitetrousers. Certainly Fred’s tailoring suggested the advantages of an Englishuniversity, and he had a graceful way even of looking warm and of pushing hishair back with his handkerchief.

“Children, run away,” said Mrs. Garth; “it is too warm to hang about yourfriends. Take your brother and show him the rabbits.”

The eldest understood, and led off the children immediately. Fred felt thatMrs. Garth wished to give him an opportunity of saying anything he had to say,but he could only begin by observing—

“How glad you must be to have Christy here!”

“Yes; he has come sooner than I expected. He got down from the coach at nineo’clock, just after his father went out. I am longing for Caleb to come andhear what wonderful progress Christy is making. He has paid his expenses forthe last year by giving lessons, carrying on hard study at the same time. Hehopes soon to get a private tutorship and go abroad.”

“He is a great fellow,” said Fred, to whom these cheerful truths had amedicinal 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 anyone would have thought of asking them to do,” answered Mrs. Garth. She wasknitting, and could either look at Fred or not, as she chose—always anadvantage when one is bent on loading speech with salutary meaning; and thoughMrs. Garth intended to be duly reserved, she did wish to say something thatFred might be the better for.

“I know you think me very undeserving, Mrs. Garth, and with good reason,” saidFred, his spirit rising a little at the perception of something like adisposition to lecture him. “I happen to have behaved just the worst to thepeople I can’t help wishing for the most from. But while two men like Mr. Garthand Mr. Farebrother have not given me up, I don’t see why I should give myselfup.” 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 suchelders had devoted themselves would indeed be culpable if he threw himself awayand made their sacrifices vain.”

Fred wondered a little at this strong language, but only said, “I hope it willnot be so with me, Mrs. Garth, since I have some encouragement to believe thatI may win Mary. Mr. Garth has told you about that? You were not surprised, Idare say?” Fred ended, innocently referring only to his own love as probablyevident enough.

“Not surprised that Mary has given you encouragement?” returned Mrs. Garth, whothought it would be well for Fred to be more alive to the fact that Mary’sfriends could not possibly have wished this beforehand, whatever the Vincysmight suppose. “Yes, I confess I was surprised.”

“She never did give me any—not the least in the world, when I talked to hermyself,” said Fred, eager to vindicate Mary. “But when I asked Mr. Farebrotherto 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 yetdischarged itself. It was a little too provoking even for herself-control that this blooming youngster should flourish on thedisappointments of sadder and wiser people—making a meal of a nightingale andnever knowing it—and that all the while his family should suppose that hers wasin eager need of this sprig; and her vexation had fermented the more activelybecause of its total repression towards her husband. Exemplary wives willsometimes find scapegoats in this way. She now said with energetic decision,“You made a great mistake, Fred, in asking Mr. Farebrother to speak for you.”

“Did I?” said Fred, reddening instantaneously. He was alarmed, but at a loss toknow what Mrs. Garth meant, and added, in an apologetic tone, “Mr. Farebrotherhas always been such a friend of ours; and Mary, I knew, would listen to himgravely; and he took it on himself quite readily.”

“Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, andseldom imagine how much those wishes cost others,” said Mrs. Garth. She did notmean to go beyond this salutary general doctrine, and threw her indignationinto a needless unwinding of her worsted, knitting her brow at it with a grandair.

“I cannot conceive how it could be any pain to Mr. Farebrother,” said Fred, whonevertheless felt that surprising conceptions were beginning to formthemselves.

“Precisely; you cannot conceive,” said Mrs. Garth, cutting her words as neatlyas possible.

For a moment Fred looked at the horizon with a dismayed anxiety, and thenturning with a quick movement said almost sharply—

“Do you mean to say, Mrs. Garth, that Mr. Farebrother is in love with Mary?”

“And if it were so, Fred, I think you are the last person who ought to besurprised,” returned Mrs. Garth, laying her knitting down beside her andfolding her arms. It was an unwonted sign of emotion in her that she should puther work out of her hands. In fact her feelings were divided between thesatisfaction of giving Fred his discipline and the sense of having gone alittle 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 atone which seemed to demand an answer.

Mrs. Garth could not speak immediately. She had brought herself into theunpleasant position of being called on to say what she really felt, yet whatshe knew there were strong reasons for concealing. And to her the consciousnessof having exceeded in words was peculiarly mortifying. Besides, Fred had givenout unexpected electricity, and he now added, “Mr. Garth seemed pleased thatMary should be attached to me. He could not have known anything of this.”

Mrs. Garth felt a severe twinge at this mention of her husband, the fear thatCaleb 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 thematter.”

But she hesitated to beg that he would keep entire silence on a subject whichshe had herself unnecessarily mentioned, not being used to stoop in that way;and while she was hesitating there was already a rush of unintendedconsequences under the apple-tree where the tea-things stood. Ben, bouncingacross the grass with Brownie at his heels, and seeing the kitten dragging theknitting by a lengthening line of wool, shouted and clapped his hands; Browniebarked, the kitten, desperate, jumped on the tea-table and upset the milk, thenjumped down again and swept half the cherries with it; and Ben, snatching upthe half-knitted sock-top, fitted it over the kitten’s head as a new source ofmadness, while Letty arriving cried out to her mother against this cruelty—itwas 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 thetête-à-tête with Fred was ended. He got away as soon as he could, andMrs. Garth could only imply some retractation of her severity by saying “Godbless 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 determinedto blame herself and confess all to him that very night. It was curious what anawful tribunal the mild Caleb’s was to her, whenever he set it up. But shemeant to point out to him that the revelation might do Fred Vincy a great dealof good.

No doubt it was having a strong effect on him as he walked to Lowick. Fred’slight hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a bruise as from thissuggestion that if he had been out of the way Mary might have made a thoroughlygood match. Also he was piqued that he had been what he called such a stupidlout as to ask that intervention from Mr. Farebrother. But it was not in alover’s nature—it was not in Fred’s, that the new anxiety raised about Mary’sfeeling should not surmount every other. Notwithstanding his trust in Mr.Farebrother’s generosity, notwithstanding what Mary had said to him, Fred couldnot help feeling that he had a rival: it was a new consciousness, and heobjected to it extremely, not being in the least ready to give up Mary for hergood, being ready rather to fight for her with any man whatsoever. But thefighting with Mr. Farebrother must be of a metaphorical kind, which was muchmore difficult to Fred than the muscular. Certainly this experience was adiscipline for Fred hardly less sharp than his disappointment about his uncle’swill. The iron had not entered into his soul, but he had begun to imagine whatthe sharp edge would be. It did not once occur to Fred that Mrs. Garth might bemistaken about Mr. Farebrother, but he suspected that she might be wrong aboutMary. Mary had been staying at the parsonage lately, and her mother might knowvery little of what had been passing in her mind.

He did not feel easier when he found her looking cheerful with the three ladiesin the drawing-room. They were in animated discussion on some subject which wasdropped when he entered, and Mary was copying the labels from a heap of shallowcabinet drawers, in a minute handwriting which she was skilled in. Mr.Farebrother was somewhere in the village, and the three ladies knew nothing ofFred’s peculiar relation to Mary: it was impossible for either of them topropose that they should walk round the garden, and Fred predicted to himselfthat he should have to go away without saying a word to her in private. He toldher 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. Shesaid hurriedly, “I am so glad,” and then bent over her writing to hinder anyone from noticing her face. But here was a subject which Mrs. Farebrother couldnot let pass.

“You don’t mean, my dear Miss Garth, that you are glad to hear of a young mangiving up the Church for which he was educated: you only mean that things beingso, 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, cleverlygetting rid of one rebellious tear. “I have a dreadfully secular mind. I neverliked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr. Farebrother.”

“Now why, my dear?” said Mrs. Farebrother, pausing on her large woodenknitting-needles and looking at Mary. “You have always a good reason for youropinions, but this astonishes me. Of course I put out of the question those whopreach new doctrine. But why should you dislike clergymen?”

“Oh dear,” said Mary, her face breaking into merriment as she seemed toconsider 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, becauseit is they who wear them.”

“How very puzzling!” said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect wasprobably deficient.

“My dear, you are joking. You would have better reasons than these forslighting so respectable a class of men,” said Mrs. Farebrother, majestically.

“Miss Garth has such severe notions of what people should be that it isdifficult to satisfy her,” said Fred.

“Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favor of my son,” saidthe old lady.

Mary was wondering at Fred’s piqued tone, when Mr. Farebrother came in and hadto hear the news about the engagement under Mr. Garth. At the end he said withquiet satisfaction, “That is right;” and then bent to look at Mary’slabels and praise her handwriting. Fred felt horribly jealous—was glad, ofcourse, that Mr. Farebrother was so estimable, but wished that he had been uglyand 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 allevidently encouraging the affair. He was feeling sure that he should have nochance of speaking to Mary, when Mr. Farebrother said—

“Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study—you have never seen myfine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth. I want you to see a stupendousspider I found this morning.”

Mary at once saw the Vicar’s intention. He had never since the memorableevening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her, and her momentarywonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep. Mary was accustomed to think ratherrigorously of what was probable, and if a belief flattered her vanity she feltwarned to dismiss it as ridiculous, having early had much exercise in suchdismissals. It was as she had foreseen: when Fred had been asked to admire thefittings 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 istall enough to hang for me. I shall be back in a few minutes.” And then he wentout. Nevertheless, the first word Fred said to Mary was—

“It is of no use, whatever I do, Mary. You are sure to marry Farebrother atlast.” There was some rage in his tone.

“What do you mean, Fred?” Mary exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply, andsurprised out of all her readiness in reply.

“It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough—you who seeeverything.”

“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 havetaken up such an idea?”

Fred was rather deep, in spite of his irritation. If Mary had really beenunsuspicious, there was no good in telling her what Mrs. Garth had said.

“It follows as a matter of course,” he replied. “When you are continuallyseeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom you set up above everybody, Ican 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 itwere not for this. I told your father everything, and he was very kind; hetreated me as if I were his son. I could go at the work with a will, writingand everything, if it were not for this.”

“For this? for what?” said Mary, imagining now that something specific musthave been said or done.

“This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Farebrother.” Mary wasappeased by her inclination to laugh.

“Fred,” she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were sulkily turnedaway from her, “you are too delightfully ridiculous. If you were not such acharming simpleton, what a temptation this would be to play the wickedcoquette, and let you suppose that somebody besides you has made love to me.”

“Do you really like me best, Mary?” said Fred, turning eyes full of affectionon her, and trying to take her hand.

“I don’t like you at all at this moment,” said Mary, retreating, and puttingher hands behind her. “I only said that no mortal ever made love to me besidesyou. 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,” saidFred.

“Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fred,” said Mary, getting seriousagain. “I don’t know whether it is more stupid or ungenerous in you not to seethat Mr. Farebrother has left us together on purpose that we might speakfreely. 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 theengraving; and Fred had to return to the drawing-room still with a jealousdread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from Mary’s words andmanner. 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 possibilityof new interpretations. She was in a position in which she seemed to herself tobe slighting Mr. Farebrother, and this, in relation to a man who is muchhonored, is always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman. To have areason for going home the next day was a relief, for Mary earnestly desired tobe always clear that she loved Fred best. When a tender affection has beenstoring itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could acceptany exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set awatch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

“Fred has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this,” Mary said toherself, with a smile curling her lips. It was impossible to help fleetingvisions of another kind—new dignities and an acknowledged value of which shehad often felt the absence. But these things with Fred outside them, Fredforsaken and looking sad for the want of her, could never tempt her deliberatethought.

CHAPTER LVIII.

“For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change:
In many’s looks the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
But Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell:
Whate’er thy thoughts or thy heart’s workings be
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.”
—SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

At the time when Mr. Vincy uttered that presentiment about Rosamond, sheherself had never had the idea that she should be driven to make the sort ofappeal 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 hadbeen born prematurely, and all the embroidered robes and caps had to be laid byin darkness. This misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted ingoing 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, orrudely told him that she would do as she liked.

What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from CaptainLydgate, the baronet’s third son, who, I am sorry to say, was detested by ourTertius of that name as a vapid fop “parting his hair from brow to nape in adespicable fashion” (not followed by Tertius himself), and showing an ignorantsecurity that he knew the proper thing to say on every topic. Lydgate inwardlycursed his own folly that he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go tohis uncle’s on the wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable toRosamond by saying so in private. For to Rosamond this visit was a source ofunprecedented but gracefully concealed exultation. She was so intenselyconscious of having a cousin who was a baronet’s son staying in the house, thatshe imagined the knowledge of what was implied by his presence to be diffusedthrough all other minds; and when she introduced Captain Lydgate to her guests,she had a placid sense that his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odor.The satisfaction was enough for the time to melt away some disappointment inthe conditions of marriage with a medical man even of good birth: it seemed nowthat her marriage was visibly as well as ideally floating her above theMiddlemarch level, and the future looked bright with letters and visits to andfrom Quallingham, and vague advancement in consequence for Tertius. Especiallyas, probably at the Captain’s suggestion, his married sister, Mrs. Mengan, hadcome with her maid, and stayed two nights on her way from town. Hence it wasclearly worth while for Rosamond to take pains with her music and the carefulselection of her lace.

As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose bent on oneside, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been disadvantageous in anyyoung gentleman who had not a military bearing and mustache to give him what isdoted on by some flower-like blond heads as “style.” He had, moreover, thatsort of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudesof middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms.Rosamond delighted in his admiration now even more than she had done atQuallingham, and he found it easy to spend several hours of the day in flirtingwith her. The visit altogether was one of the pleasantest larks he had everhad, not the less so perhaps because he suspected that his queer cousin Tertiuswished him away: though Lydgate, who would rather (hyperbolically speaking)have died than have failed in polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike, andonly pretended generally not to hear what the gallant officer said, consigningthe task of answering him to Rosamond. For he was not at all a jealous husband,and preferred leaving a feather-headed young gentleman alone with his wife tobearing him company.

“I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius,” said Rosamond,one evening when the important guest was gone to Loamford to see some brotherofficers stationed there. “You really look so absent sometimes—you seem to beseeing through his head into something behind it, instead of looking at him.”

“My dear Rosy, you don’t expect me to talk much to such a conceited ass asthat, I hope,” said Lydgate, brusquely. “If he got his head broken, I mightlook at it with interest, not before.”

“I cannot conceive why you should speak of your cousin so contemptuously,” saidRosamond, her fingers moving at her work while she spoke with a mild gravitywhich had a touch of disdain in it.

“Ask Ladislaw if he doesn’t think your Captain the greatest bore he ever metwith. Ladislaw has almost forsaken the house since he came.”

Rosamond thought she knew perfectly well why Mr. Ladislaw disliked the Captain:he was jealous, and she liked his being jealous.

“It is impossible to say what will suit eccentric persons,” she answered, “butin my opinion Captain Lydgate is a thorough gentleman, and I think you oughtnot, 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 helikes. He doesn’t want me.”

“Still, when he is in the room, you might show him more attention. He may notbe a phoenix of cleverness in your sense; his profession is different; but itwould be all the better for you to talk a little on his subjects. Ithink his conversation is quite agreeable. And he is anything but anunprincipled man.”

“The fact is, you would wish me to be a little more like him, Rosy,” saidLydgate, in a sort of resigned murmur, with a smile which was not exactlytender, and certainly not merry. Rosamond was silent and did not smile again;but the lovely curves of her face looked good-tempered enough without smiling.

Those words of Lydgate’s were like a sad milestone marking how far he hadtravelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be thatperfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband’s mind after thefashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass andsinging her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone. He had begun todistinguish between that imagined adoration and the attraction towards a man’stalent because it gives him prestige, and is like an order in his button-holeor an Honorable before his name.

It might have been supposed that Rosamond had travelled too, since she hadfound the pointless conversation of Mr. Ned Plymdale perfectly wearisome; butto most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity whichis altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?Captain Lydgate’s stupidity was delicately scented, carried itself with“style,” talked with a good accent, and was closely related to Sir Godwin.Rosamond found it quite agreeable and caught many of its phrases.

Therefore since Rosamond, as we know, was fond of horseback, there were plentyof reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding when Captain Lydgate,who had ordered his man with two horses to follow him and put up at the “GreenDragon,” begged her to go out on the gray which he warranted to be gentle andtrained to carry a lady—indeed, he had bought it for his sister, and was takingit to Quallingham. Rosamond went out the first time without telling herhusband, and came back before his return; but the ride had been so thorough asuccess, and she declared herself so much the better in consequence, that hewas informed of it with full reliance on his consent that she should go ridingagain.

On the contrary Lydgate was more than hurt—he was utterly confounded that shehad risked herself on a strange horse without referring the matter to his wish.After the first almost thundering exclamations of astonishment, whichsufficiently warned Rosamond of what was coming, he was silent for somemoments.

“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, mostfamiliar horse in the world, there would always be the chance of accident. Andyou know very well that I wished you to give up riding the roan on thataccount.”

“But there is the chance of accident indoors, Tertius.”

“My darling, don’t talk nonsense,” said Lydgate, in an imploring tone; “surelyI am the person to judge for you. I think it is enough that I say you are notto go again.”

Rosamond was arranging her hair before dinner, and the reflection of her headin the glass showed no change in its loveliness except a little turning asideof the long neck. Lydgate had been moving about with his hands in his pockets,and now paused near her, as if he awaited some assurance.

“I wish you would fasten up my plaits, dear,” said Rosamond, letting her armsfall with a little sigh, so as to make a husband ashamed of standing there likea brute. Lydgate had often fastened the plaits before, being among the deftestof men with his large finely formed fingers. He swept up the soft festoons ofplaits and fastened in the tall comb (to such uses do men come!); and whatcould he do then but kiss the exquisite nape which was shown in all itsdelicate curves? But when we do what we have done before, it is often with adifference. 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 hishorse,” he said, as he moved away.

“I beg you will not do anything of the kind, Tertius,” said Rosamond, lookingat him with something more marked than usual in her speech. “It will betreating me as if I were a child. Promise that you will leave the subject tome.”

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 promisingRosamond, and not with her promising him.

In fact, she had been determined not to promise. Rosamond had that victoriousobstinacy which never wastes its energy in impetuous resistance. What she likedto do was to her the right thing, and all her cleverness was directed togetting the means of doing it. She meant to go out riding again on the gray,and she did go on the next opportunity of her husband’s absence, not intendingthat he should know until it was late enough not to signify to her. Thetemptation was certainly great: she was very fond of the exercise, and thegratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate, Sir Godwin’sson, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met in this position byany one but her husband, was something as good as her dreams before marriage:moreover she was riveting the connection with the family at Quallingham, whichmust be a wise thing to do.

But the gentle gray, unprepared for the crash of a tree that was being felledon the edge of Halsell wood, took fright, and caused a worse fright toRosamond, leading finally to the loss of her baby. Lydgate could not show hisanger towards her, but he was rather bearish to the Captain, whose visitnaturally soon came to an end.

In all future conversations on the subject, Rosamond was mildly certain thatthe ride had made no difference, and that if she had stayed at home the samesymptoms would have come on and would have ended in the same way, because shehad felt something like them before.

Lydgate could only say, “Poor, poor darling!”—but he secretly wondered over theterrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him anamazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge andmental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on alloccasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regardedRosamond’s cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind which became a woman.He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was—what was the shapeinto which it had run as into a close network aloof and independent. No onequicker than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay within the track ofher own tastes and interests: she had seen clearly Lydgate’s preeminence inMiddlemarch society, and could go on imaginatively tracing still more agreeablesocial effects when his talent should have advanced him; but for her, hisprofessional and scientific ambition had no other relation to these desirableeffects 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 inher own opinion more than she did in his. Lydgate was astounded to find innumberless trifling matters, as well as in this last serious case of theriding, that affection did not make her compliant. He had no doubt that theaffection was there, and had no presentiment that he had done anything to repelit. 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 muchworried, and conscious of new elements in his life as noxious to him as aninlet of mud to a creature that has been used to breathe and bathe and dartafter its illuminated prey in the clearest of waters.

Rosamond was soon looking lovelier than ever at her worktable, enjoying drivesin her father’s phaeton and thinking it likely that she might be invited toQuallingham. She knew that she was a much more exquisite ornament to thedrawing-room there than any daughter of the family, and in reflecting that thegentlemen were aware of that, did not perhaps sufficiently consider whether theladies would be eager to see themselves surpassed.

Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she inwardlycalled his moodiness—a name which to her covered his thoughtful preoccupationwith other subjects than herself, as well as that uneasy look of the brow anddistaste for all ordinary things as if they were mixed with bitter herbs, whichreally made a sort of weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding. Theselatter states of mind had one cause amongst others, which he had generously butmistakenly avoided mentioning to Rosamond, lest it should affect her health andspirits. Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of eachother’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons whoare continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had beenspending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent andbest power to his tenderness for Rosamond; bearing her little claims andinterruptions without impatience, and, above all, bearing without betrayal ofbitterness to look through less and less of interfering illusion at the blankunreflecting surface her mind presented to his ardor for the more impersonalends of his profession and his scientific study, an ardor which he had fanciedthat the ideal wife must somehow worship as sublime, though not in the leastknowing why. But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent which, if weknow how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitternessunder grievances, wife or husband included. It always remains true that if wehad been greater, circ*mstance would have been less strong against us. Lydgatewas aware that his concessions to Rosamond were often little more than thelapse of slackening resolution, the creeping paralysis apt to seize anenthusiasm which is out of adjustment to a constant portion of our lives. Andon Lydgate’s enthusiasm there was constantly pressing not a simple weight ofsorrow, but the biting presence of a petty degrading care, such as casts theblight of irony over all higher effort.

This was the care which he had hitherto abstained from mentioning to Rosamond;and he believed, with some wonder, that it had never entered her mind, thoughcertainly no difficulty could be less mysterious. It was an inference with aconspicuous 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 mindfor long together that he was every day getting deeper into that swamp, whichtempts men towards it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure. It iswonderful how soon a man gets up to his chin there—in a condition in which, inspite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had ascheme of the universe in his soul.

Eighteen months ago Lydgate was poor, but had never known the eager want ofsmall sums, and felt rather a burning contempt for any one who descended a stepin order to gain them. He was now experiencing something worse than a simpledeficit: he was assailed by the vulgar hateful trials of a man who has boughtand used a great many things which might have been done without, and which heis 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 ofprices. When a man in setting up a house and preparing for marriage finds thathis furniture and other initial expenses come to between four and five hundredpounds more than he has capital to pay for; when at the end of a year itappears that his household expenses, horses and et caeteras, amount to nearly athousand, while the proceeds of the practice reckoned from the old books to beworth eight hundred per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly fivehundred, chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether heminds it or not, he is in debt. Those were less expensive times than our own,and provincial life was comparatively modest; but the ease with which a medicalman who had lately bought a practice, who thought that he was obliged to keeptwo horses, whose table was supplied without stint, and who paid an insuranceon his life and a high rent for house and garden, might find his expensesdoubling his receipts, can be conceived by any one who does not think thesedetails beneath his consideration. Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood toan extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply inordering the best of everything—nothing else “answered;” and Lydgate supposedthat “if things were done at all, they must be done properly”—he did not seehow they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had beenmentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that “it couldhardly come to much,” and if any one had suggested a saving on a particulararticle—for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear—it would haveappeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamond, even without suchan occasion as Captain Lydgate’s visit, was fond of giving invitations, andLydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not interfere. Thissociability seemed a necessary part of professional prudence, and theentertainment must be suitable. It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting thehomes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their small means;but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable—is it not ratherthat we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experiencelying side by side and never compare them with each other? Expenditure—likeugliness and errors—becomes a totally new thing when we attach our ownpersonality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (inour own sensations) between ourselves and others. Lydgate believed himself tobe careless about his dress, and he despised a man who calculated the effectsof his costume; it seemed to him only a matter of course that he had abundanceof fresh garments—such things were naturally ordered in sheaves. It must beremembered that he had never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, andhe walked by habit, not by self-criticism. But the check had come.

Its novelty made it the more irritating. He was amazed, disgusted thatconditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully disconnected with theobjects he cared to occupy himself with, should have lain in ambush andclutched him when he was unaware. And there was not only the actual debt; therewas the certainty that in his present position he must go on deepening it. Twofurnishing tradesmen at Brassing, whose bills had been incurred before hismarriage, and whom uncalculated current expenses had ever since prevented himfrom paying, had repeatedly sent him unpleasant letters which had forcedthemselves on his attention. This could hardly have been more galling to anydisposition than to Lydgate’s, with his intense pride—his dislike of asking afavor or being under an obligation to any one. He had scorned even to formconjectures about Mr. Vincy’s intentions on money matters, and nothing butextremity could have induced him to apply to his father-in-law, even if he hadnot 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 fromhim would be resented. Some men easily trust in the readiness of friends; ithad never in the former part of his life occurred to Lydgate that he shouldneed to do so: he had never thought what borrowing would be to him; but nowthat the idea had entered his mind, he felt that he would rather incur anyother hardship. In the mean time he had no money or prospects of money; and hispractice was not getting more lucrative.

No wonder that Lydgate had been unable to suppress all signs of inward troubleduring the last few months, and now that Rosamond was regaining brillianthealth, he meditated taking her entirely into confidence on his difficulties.New conversance with tradesmen’s bills had forced his reasoning into a newchannel of comparison: he had begun to consider from a new point of view whatwas necessary and unnecessary in goods ordered, and to see that there must besome change of habits. How could such a change be made without Rosamond’sconcurrence? The immediate occasion of opening the disagreeable fact to her wasforced upon him.

Having no money, and having privately sought advice as to what security couldpossibly be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered the one goodsecurity in his power to the less peremptory creditor, who was a silversmithand jeweller, and who consented to take on himself the upholsterer’s creditalso, accepting interest for a given term. The security necessary was a bill ofsale on the furniture of his house, which might make a creditor easy for areasonable time about a debt amounting to less than four hundred pounds; andthe silversmith, Mr. Dover, was willing to reduce it by taking back a portionof the plate and any other article which was as good as new. “Any otherarticle” was a phrase delicately implying jewellery, and more particularly somepurple amethysts costing thirty pounds, which Lydgate had bought as a bridalpresent.

Opinions may be divided as to his wisdom in making this present: some may thinkthat it was a graceful attention to be expected from a man like Lydgate, andthat the fault of any troublesome consequences lay in the pinched narrowness ofprovincial life at that time, which offered no conveniences for professionalpeople whose fortune was not proportioned to their tastes; also, in Lydgate’sridiculous fastidiousness about asking his friends for money.

However, it had seemed a question of no moment to him on that fine morning whenhe went to give a final order for plate: in the presence of other jewelsenormously expensive, and as an addition to orders of which the amount had notbeen exactly calculated, thirty pounds for ornaments so exquisitely suited toRosamond’s neck and arms could hardly appear excessive when there was no readycash for it to exceed. But at this crisis Lydgate’s imagination could not helpdwelling on the possibility of letting the amethysts take their place againamong Mr. Dover’s stock, though he shrank from the idea of proposing this toRosamond. Having been roused to discern consequences which he had never been inthe habit of tracing, he was preparing to act on this discernment with some ofthe rigor (by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment.He was nerving himself to this rigor as he rode from Brassing, and meditated onthe representations he must make to Rosamond.

It was evening when he got home. He was intensely miserable, this strong man ofnine-and-twenty and of many gifts. He was not saying angrily within himselfthat he had made a profound mistake; but the mistake was at work in him like arecognized chronic disease, mingling its uneasy importunities with everyprospect, and enfeebling every thought. As he went along the passage to thedrawing-room, he heard the piano and singing. Of course, Ladislaw was there. Itwas some weeks since Will had parted from Dorothea, yet he was still at the oldpost 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 heopened the door the two singers went on towards the key-note, raising theireyes and looking at him indeed, but not regarding his entrance as aninterruption. To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is notsoothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense thatthe painful day has still pains in store. His face, already paler than usual,took on a scowl as he walked across the room and flung himself into a chair.

The singers feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had only threebars to sing, now turned round.

“How are you, Lydgate?” said Will, coming forward to shake hands.

Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak.

“Have you dined, Tertius? I expected you much earlier,” said Rosamond, who hadalready seen that her husband was in a “horrible humor.” She seated herself inher usual place as she spoke.

“I have dined. I should like some tea, please,” said Lydgate, curtly, stillscowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched out before him.

Will was too quick to need more. “I shall be off,” he said, reaching his hat.

“Tea is coming,” said Rosamond; “pray don’t go.”

“Yes, Lydgate is bored,” said Will, who had more comprehension of Lydgate thanRosamond had, and was not offended by his manner, easily imagining outdoorcauses of annoyance.

“There is the more need for you to stay,” said Rosamond, playfully, and in herlightest accent; “he will not speak to me all the evening.”

“Yes, Rosamond, I shall,” said Lydgate, in his strong baritone. “I have someserious business to speak to you about.”

No introduction of the business could have been less like that which Lydgatehad intended; but her indifferent manner had been too provoking.

“There! you see,” said Will. “I’m going to the meeting about the Mechanics’Institute. Good-by;” and he went quickly out of the room.

Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her placebefore the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never seen him sodisagreeable. Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as shedelicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and looked at theobjects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yetwith an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasantmanners. For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculationabout this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself in thesylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign of a readyintelligent sensitiveness. His mind glancing back to Laure while he looked atRosamond, 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 whichgives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals, wasimmediately thwarted by Lydgate’s memory of wondering impressions from thebehavior of another woman—from Dorothea’s looks and tones of emotion about herhusband when Lydgate began to attend him—from her passionate cry to be taughtwhat would best comfort that man for whose sake it seemed as if she must quellevery impulse in her except the yearnings of faithfulness and compassion. Theserevived impressions succeeded each other quickly and dreamily in Lydgate’s mindwhile the tea was being brewed. He had shut his eyes in the last instant ofreverie while he heard Dorothea saying, “Advise me—think what I can do—he hasbeen all his life laboring and looking forward. He minds about nothing else—andI mind about nothing else.”

That voice of deep-souled womanhood had remained within him as the enkindlingconceptions of dead and sceptred genius had remained within him (is there not agenius for feeling nobly which also reigns over human spirits and theirconclusions?); the tones were a music from which he was falling away—he hadreally fallen into a momentary doze, when Rosamond said in her silvery neutralway, “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 hastyin attributing insensibility to her; after her own fashion, she was sensitiveenough, and took lasting impressions. Her impression now was one of offence andrepulsion. But then, Rosamond had no scowls and had never raised her voice: shewas 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 therewere strong reasons for not deferring his revelation, even if he had notalready begun it by that abrupt announcement; indeed some of the angry desireto rouse her into more sensibility on his account which had prompted him tospeak prematurely, still mingled with his pain in the prospect of her pain. Buthe waited till the tray was gone, the candles were lit, and the evening quietmight be counted on: the interval had left time for repelled tenderness toreturn into the old course. He spoke kindly.

“Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come to sit by me,” he said, gently, pushingaway the table, and stretching out his arm to draw a chair near his own.

Rosamond obeyed. As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent faintlytinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful; as she satdown by him and laid one hand on the elbow of his chair, at last looking at himand meeting his eyes, her delicate neck and cheek and purely cut lips never hadmore of that untarnished beauty which touches as in spring-time and infancy andall sweet freshness. It touched Lydgate now, and mingled the early moments ofhis love for her with all the other memories which were stirred in this crisisof deep trouble. He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying—

“Dear!” with the lingering utterance which affection gives to the word.Rosamond too was still under the power of that same past, and her husband wasstill in part the Lydgate whose approval had stirred delight. She put his hairlightly away from his forehead, then laid her other hand on his, and wasconscious of forgiving him.

“I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy. But there are things whichhusband and wife must think of together. I dare say it has occurred to youalready that I am short of money.”

Lydgate paused; but Rosamond turned her neck and looked at a vase on themantel-piece.

“I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before we were married,and there have been expenses since which I have been obliged to meet. Theconsequence is, there is a large debt at Brassing—three hundred and eightypounds—which has been pressing on me a good while, and in fact we are gettingdeeper every day, for people don’t pay me the faster because others want themoney. I took pains to keep it from you while you were not well; but now wemust think together about it, and you must help me.”

“What can I do, Tertius?” said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him again.That little speech of four words, like so many others in all languages, iscapable by varied vocal inflections of expressing all states of mind fromhelpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative perception, from the completestself-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness. Rosamond’s thinutterance threw into the words “What can—I—do!” as much neutrality as theycould hold. They fell like a mortal chill on Lydgate’s roused tenderness. Hedid not storm in indignation—he felt too sad a sinking of the heart. And whenhe spoke again it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to fulfil atask.

“It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security for a time,and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture.”

Rosamond colored deeply. “Have you not asked papa for money?” she said, as soonas she could speak.

“No.”

“Then I must ask him!” she said, releasing her hands from Lydgate’s, and risingto stand at two yards’ distance from him.

“No, Rosy,” said Lydgate, decisively. “It is too late to do that. The inventorywill be begun to-morrow. Remember it is a mere security: it will make nodifference: it is a temporary affair. I insist upon it that your father shallnot know, unless I choose to tell him,” added Lydgate, with a more peremptoryemphasis.

This certainly was unkind, but Rosamond had thrown him back on evil expectationas to what she would do in the way of quiet steady disobedience. The unkindnessseemed unpardonable to her: she was not given to weeping and disliked it, butnow her chin and lips began to tremble and the tears welled up. Perhaps it wasnot possible for Lydgate, under the double stress of outward materialdifficulty and of his own proud resistance to humiliating consequences, toimagine fully what this sudden trial was to a young creature who had knownnothing but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been of new indulgence, moreexactly to her taste. But he did wish to spare her as much as he could, and hertears cut him to the heart. He could not speak again immediately; but Rosamonddid not go on sobbing: she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away hertears, continuing to look before her at the mantel-piece.

“Try not to grieve, darling,” said Lydgate, turning his eyes up towards her.That she had chosen to move away from him in this moment of her trouble madeeverything harder to say, but he must absolutely go on. “We must braceourselves to do what is necessary. It is I who have been in fault: I ought tohave seen that I could not afford to live in this way. But many things havetold against me in my practice, and it really just now has ebbed to a lowpoint. I may recover it, but in the mean time we must pull up—we must changeour way of living. We shall weather it. When I have given this security I shallhave time to look about me; and you are so clever that if you turn your mind tomanaging you will school me into carefulness. I have been a thoughtless rascalabout squaring prices—but come, dear, sit down and forgive me.”

Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yoke like a creature who had talons, butwho had Reason too, which often reduces us to meekness. When he had spoken thelast words in an imploring tone, Rosamond returned to the chair by his side.His self-blame gave her some hope that he would attend to her opinion, and shesaid—

“Why can you not put off having the inventory made? You can send the men awayto-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 aswell.”

“But we are not going to leave Middlemarch.”

“I am sure, Tertius, it would be much better to do so. Why can we not go toLondon? Or near Durham, where your family is known?”

“We can go nowhere without money, Rosamond.”

“Your friends would not wish you to be without money. And surely these odioustradesmen might be made to understand that, and to wait, if you would makeproper representations to them.”

“This is idle Rosamond,” said Lydgate, angrily. “You must learn to take myjudgment on questions you don’t understand. I have made necessary arrangements,and they must be carried out. As to friends, I have no expectations whateverfrom them, and shall not ask them for anything.”

Rosamond sat perfectly still. The thought in her mind was that if she had knownhow Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him.

“We have no time to waste now on unnecessary words, dear,” said Lydgate, tryingto be gentle again. “There are some details that I want to consider with you.Dover says he will take a good deal of the plate back again, and any of thejewellery we like. He really behaves very well.”

“Are we to go without spoons and forks then?” said Rosamond, whose very lipsseemed to get thinner with the thinness of her utterance. She was determined tomake no further resistance or suggestions.

“Oh no, dear!” said Lydgate. “But look here,” he continued, drawing a paperfrom his pocket and opening it; “here is Dover’s account. See, I have marked anumber of articles, which if we returned them would reduce the amount by thirtypounds and more. I have not marked any of the jewellery.” Lydgate had reallyfelt this point of the jewellery very bitter to himself; but he had overcomethe feeling by severe argument. He could not propose to Rosamond that sheshould return any particular present of his, but he had told himself that hewas bound to put Dover’s offer before her, and her inward prompting might makethe affair easy.

“It is useless for me to look, Tertius,” said Rosamond, calmly; “you willreturn what you please.” She would not turn her eyes on the paper, and Lydgate,flushing up to the roots of his hair, drew it back and let it fall on his knee.Meanwhile Rosamond quietly went out of the room, leaving Lydgate helpless andwondering. Was she not coming back? It seemed that she had no more identifiedherself with him than if they had been creatures of different species andopposing interests. He tossed his head and thrust his hands deep into hispockets with a sort of vengeance. There was still science—there were still goodobjects to work for. He must give a tug still—all the stronger because othersatisfactions were going.

But the door opened and Rosamond re-entered. She carried the leather boxcontaining the amethysts, and a tiny ornamental basket which contained otherboxes, and laying them on the chair where she had been sitting, she said, withperfect propriety in her air—

“This is all the jewellery you ever gave me. You can return what you like ofit, and of the plate also. You will not, of course, expect me to stay at hometo-morrow. I shall go to papa’s.”

To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more terrible thanone of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the distance she wasplacing between them.

“And when shall you come back again?” he said, with a bitter edge on hisaccent.

“Oh, in the evening. Of course I shall not mention the subject to mamma.”Rosamond was convinced that no woman could behave more irreproachably than shewas behaving; and she went to sit down at her work-table. Lydgate satmeditating a minute or two, and the result was that he said, with some of theold emotion in his tone—

“Now we have been united, Rosy, you should not leave me to myself in the firsttrouble that has come.”

“Certainly not,” said Rosamond; “I shall do everything it becomes me to do.”

“It is not right that the thing should be left to servants, or that I shouldhave to speak to them about it. And I shall be obliged to go out—I don’t knowhow early. I understand your shrinking from the humiliation of these moneyaffairs. But, my dear Rosamond, as a question of pride, which I feel just asmuch as you can, it is surely better to manage the thing ourselves, and let theservants see as little of it as possible; and since you are my wife, there isno hindering your share in my disgraces—if there were disgraces.”

Rosamond did not answer immediately, but at last she said, “Very well, I willstay at home.”

“I shall not touch these jewels, Rosy. Take them away again. But I will writeout a list of plate that we may return, and that can be packed up and sent atonce.”

“The servants will know that,” said Rosamond, with the slightest touchof sarcasm.

“Well, we must meet some disagreeables as necessities. Where is the ink, Iwonder?” said Lydgate, rising, and throwing the account on the larger tablewhere he meant to write.

Rosamond went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table wasgoing to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by, put his arm roundher and drew her towards him, saying—

“Come, darling, let us make the best of things. It will only be for a time, Ihope, 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 ofmanliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact that an inexperienced girl hasgot into trouble by marrying him. She received his kiss and returned itfaintly, 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 futurediscussions about expenditure and the necessity for a complete change in theirway of living.

CHAPTER LIX.

“They said of old the Soul had human shape,
But smaller, subtler than the fleshly self,
So wandered forth for airing when it pleased.
And see! beside her cherub-face there floats
A pale-lipped form aerial whispering
Its promptings in that little shell her ear.”

News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen whichthe bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzingin search of their particular nectar. This fine comparison has reference toFred Vincy, who on that evening at Lowick Parsonage heard a lively discussionamong the ladies on the news which their old servant had got from Tantrippconcerning Mr. Casaubon’s strange mention of Mr. Ladislaw in a codicil to hiswill made not long before his death. Miss Winifred was astounded to find thather brother had known the fact before, and observed that Camden was the mostwonderful man for knowing things and not telling them; whereupon Mary Garthsaid that the codicil had perhaps got mixed up with the habits of spiders,which Miss Winifred never would listen to. Mrs. Farebrother considered that thenews had something to do with their having only once seen Mr. Ladislaw atLowick, and Miss Noble made many small compassionate mewings.

Fred knew little and cared less about Ladislaw and the Casaubons, and his mindnever recurred to that discussion till one day calling on Rosamond at hismother’s request to deliver a message as he passed, he happened to see Ladislawgoing away. Fred and Rosamond had little to say to each other now that marriagehad removed her from collision with the unpleasantness of brothers, andespecially now that he had taken what she held the stupid and evenreprehensible 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 indifferentnews, and “a propos of that young Ladislaw” mentioned what he had heard atLowick Parsonage.

Now Lydgate, like Mr. Farebrother, knew a great deal more than he told, andwhen he had once been set thinking about the relation between Will and Dorotheahis conjectures had gone beyond the fact. He imagined that there was apassionate attachment on both sides, and this struck him as much too serious togossip about. He remembered Will’s irritability when he had mentioned Mrs.Casaubon, and was the more circ*mspect. On the whole his surmises, in additionto what he knew of the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance towardsLadislaw, and made him understand the vacillation which kept him at Middlemarchafter he had said that he should go away. It was significant of theseparateness between Lydgate’s mind and Rosamond’s that he had no impulse tospeak to her on the subject; indeed, he did not quite trust her reticencetowards Will. And he was right there; though he had no vision of the way inwhich her mind would act in urging her to speak.

When she repeated Fred’s news to Lydgate, he said, “Take care you don’t dropthe faintest hint to Ladislaw, Rosy. He is likely to fly out as if you insultedhim. Of course it is a painful affair.”

Rosamond turned her neck and patted her hair, looking the image of placidindifference. But the next time Will came when Lydgate was away, she spokearchly about his not going to London as he had threatened.

“I know all about it. I have a confidential little bird,” said she, showingvery pretty airs of her head over the bit of work held high between her activefingers. “There is a powerful magnet in this neighborhood.”

“To be sure there is. Nobody knows that better than you,” said Will, with lightgallantry, but inwardly prepared to be angry.

“It is really the most charming romance: Mr. Casaubon jealous, and foreseeingthat there was no one else whom Mrs. Casaubon would so much like to marry, andno one who would so much like to marry her as a certain gentleman; and thenlaying a plan to spoil all by making her forfeit her property if she did marrythat gentleman—and then—and then—and then—oh, I have no doubt the end will bethoroughly romantic.”

“Great God! what do you mean?” said Will, flushing over face and ears, hisfeatures seeming to change as if he had had a violent shake. “Don’t joke; tellme what you mean.”

“You don’t really know?” said Rosamond, no longer playful, and desiring nothingbetter 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. Casaubonmarries 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 hischair and reached his hat.

“I dare say she likes you better than the property,” said Rosamond, looking athim from a distance.

“Pray don’t say any more about it,” said Will, in a hoarse undertone extremelyunlike his usual light voice. “It is a foul insult to her and to me.” Then hesat down absently, looking before him, but seeing nothing.

“Now you are angry with me,” said Rosamond. “It is too bad to bearme malice. You ought to be obliged to me for telling you.”

“So I am,” said Will, abruptly, speaking with that kind of double soul whichbelongs to dreamers who answer questions.

“I expect to hear of the marriage,” said Rosamond, playfully.

“Never! You will never hear of the marriage!”

With those words uttered impetuously, Will rose, put out his hand to Rosamond,still with the air of a somnambulist, and went away.

When he was gone, Rosamond left her chair and walked to the other end of theroom, leaning when she got there against a chiffonniere, and looking out of thewindow wearily. She was oppressed by ennui, and by that dissatisfaction whichin women’s minds is continually turning into a trivial jealousy, referring tono real claims, springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness ofegoism, and yet capable of impelling action as well as speech. “There really isnothing to care for much,” said poor Rosamond inwardly, thinking of the familyat Quallingham, who did not write to her; and that perhaps Tertius when he camehome would tease her about expenses. She had already secretly disobeyed him byasking her father to help them, and he had ended decisively by saying, “I ammore likely to want help myself.”

CHAPTER LX.

Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable.
—Justice Shallow.

A few days afterwards—it was already the end of August—there was an occasionwhich caused some excitement in Middlemarch: the public, if it chose, was tohave the advantage of buying, under the distinguished auspices of Mr. BorthropTrumbull, the furniture, books, and pictures which anybody might see by thehandbills to be the best in every kind, belonging to Edwin Larcher, Esq. Thiswas 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, whichwarranted his purchase of a mansion near Riverston already furnished in highstyle by an illustrious Spa physician—furnished indeed with such largeframefuls of expensive flesh-painting in the dining-room, that Mrs. Larcher wasnervous until reassured by finding the subjects to be Scriptural. Hence thefine opportunity to purchasers which was well pointed out in the handbills ofMr. Borthrop Trumbull, whose acquaintance with the history of art enabled himto state that the hall furniture, to be sold without reserve, comprised a pieceof 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 glasseswhich might lead to generous and cheerful bidding for undesirable articles. Mr.Larcher’s sale was the more attractive in the fine weather because the housestood just at the end of the town, with a garden and stables attached, in thatpleasant issue from Middlemarch called the London Road, which was also the roadto the New Hospital and to Mr. Bulstrode’s retired residence, known as theShrubs. In short, the auction was as good as a fair, and drew all classes withleisure at command: to some, who risked making bids in order simply to raiseprices, it was almost equal to betting at the races. The second day, when thebest furniture was to be sold, “everybody” was there; even Mr. Thesiger, therector of St. Peter’s, had looked in for a short time, wishing to buy thecarved table, and had rubbed elbows with Mr. Bambridge and Mr. Horrock. Therewas a wreath of Middlemarch ladies accommodated with seats round the largetable in the dining-room, where Mr. Borthrop Trumbull was mounted with desk andhammer; but the rows chiefly of masculine faces behind were often varied byincomings and outgoings both from the door and the large bow-window opening onto the lawn.

“Everybody” that day did not include Mr. Bulstrode, whose health could not wellendure crowds and draughts. But Mrs. Bulstrode had particularly wished to havea 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 atthe office of the “Pioneer,” of which he was now one of the proprietors, to begof Mr. Ladislaw as a great favor that he would obligingly use his remarkableknowledge of pictures on behalf of Mrs. Bulstrode, and judge of the value ofthis particular painting—“if,” added the scrupulously polite banker,“attendance at the sale would not interfere with the arrangements for yourdeparture, which I know is imminent.”

This proviso might have sounded rather satirically in Will’s ear if he had beenin a mood to care about such satire. It referred to an understanding enteredinto many weeks before with the proprietors of the paper, that he should be atliberty any day he pleased to hand over the management to the subeditor whom hehad been training; since he wished finally to quit Middlemarch. But indefinitevisions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual orbeguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolvewhen we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states ofmind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle:impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still—very wonderfulthings have happened! Will did not confess this weakness to himself, but helingered. What was the use of going to London at that time of the year? TheRugby men who would remember him were not there; and so far as politicalwriting was concerned, he would rather for a few weeks go on with the“Pioneer.” At the present moment, however, when Mr. Bulstrode was speaking tohim, he had both a strengthened resolve to go and an equally strong resolve notto go till he had once more seen Dorothea. Hence he replied that he had reasonsfor 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 thethought that the people who looked at him probably knew a fact tantamount to anaccusation against him as a fellow with low designs which were to be frustratedby a disposal of property. Like most people who assert their freedom withregard to conventional distinction, he was prepared to be sudden and quick atquarrel with any one who might hint that he had personal reasons for thatassertion—that there was anything in his blood, his bearing, or his characterto which he gave the mask of an opinion. When he was under an irritatingimpression of this kind he would go about for days with a defiant look, thecolor 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 hadonly seen him in his moods of gentle oddity or of bright enjoyment would havebeen struck with a contrast. He was not sorry to have this occasion forappearing in public before the Middlemarch tribes of Toller, Hackbutt, and therest, who looked down on him as an adventurer, and were in a state of brutalignorance about Dante—who sneered at his Polish blood, and were themselves of abreed very much in need of crossing. He stood in a conspicuous place not farfrom the auctioneer, with a fore-finger in each side-pocket and his head thrownbackward, not caring to speak to anybody, though he had been cordially welcomedas a connoissure by Mr. Trumbull, who was enjoying the utmost activityof his great faculties.

And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit their powersof speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial auctioneer keenly alive tohis own jokes and sensible of his encyclopedic knowledge. Some saturnine,sour-blooded persons might object to be constantly insisting on the merits ofall articles from boot-jacks to “Berghems;” but Mr. Borthrop Trumbull had akindly liquid in his veins; he was an admirer by nature, and would have likedto have the universe under his hammer, feeling that it would go at a higherfigure for his recommendation.

Meanwhile Mrs. Larcher’s drawing-room furniture was enough for him. When WillLadislaw had come in, a second fender, said to have been forgotten in its rightplace, suddenly claimed the auctioneer’s enthusiasm, which he distributed onthe equitable principle of praising those things most which were most in needof praise. The fender was of polished steel, with much lancet-shaped open-workand a sharp edge.

“Now, ladies,” said he, “I shall appeal to you. Here is a fender which at anyother sale would hardly be offered with out reserve, being, as I may say, forquality of steel and quaintness of design, a kind of thing”—here Mr. Trumbulldropped his voice and became slightly nasal, trimming his outlines with hisleft finger—“that might not fall in with ordinary tastes. Allow me to tell youthat by-and-by this style of workmanship will be the only one invogue—half-a-crown, you said? thank you—going at half-a-crown, thischaracteristic fender; and I have particular information that the antique styleis very much sought after in high quarters. Threeshillings—three-and-sixpence—hold it well up, Joseph! Look, ladies, at thechastity of the design—I have no doubt myself that it was turned out in thelast 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 edgeis like a knife.”

“Quite true,” rejoined Mr. Trumbull, quickly, “and most uncommonly useful tohave a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather shoe-tie or a bit ofstring that wants cutting and no knife at hand: many a man has been lefthanging because there was no knife to cut him down. Gentlemen, here’s a fenderthat if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in notime—with astonishing celerity—four-and-sixpence—five—five-and-sixpence—anappropriate thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guesta little out of his mind—six shillings—thank you, Mr. Clintup—going at sixshillings—going—gone!” The auctioneer’s glance, which had been searching roundhim with a preternatural susceptibility to all signs of bidding, here droppedon the paper before him, and his voice too dropped into a tone of indifferentdespatch as he said, “Mr. Clintup. Be handy, Joseph.”

“It was worth six shillings to have a fender you could always tell that jokeon,” said Mr. Clintup, laughing low and apologetically to his next neighbor. Hewas a diffident though distinguished nurseryman, and feared that the audiencemight regard his bid as a foolish one.

Meanwhile Joseph had brought a trayful of small articles. “Now, ladies,” saidMr. Trumbull, taking up one of the articles, “this tray contains a veryrecherchy lot—a collection of trifles for the drawing-room table—and triflesmake the sum of human things—nothing more important than trifles—(yes,Mr. Ladislaw, yes, by-and-by)—but pass the tray round, Joseph—these bijoux mustbe examined, ladies. This I have in my hand is an ingenious contrivance—a sortof practical rebus, I may call it: here, you see, it looks like an elegantheart-shaped box, portable—for the pocket; there, again, it becomes like asplendid double flower—an ornament for the table; and now”—Mr. Trumbull allowedthe flower to fall alarmingly into strings of heart-shaped leaves—“a book ofriddles! No less than five hundred printed in a beautiful red. Gentlemen, if Ihad less of a conscience, I should not wish you to bid high for this lot—I havea 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 thesociety of refined females. This ingenious article itself, without the elegantdomino-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. Fourshillings, sir?—four shillings for this remarkable collection of riddles withthe et caeteras. Here is a sample: ‘How must you spell honey to make it catchlady-birds? Answer—money.’ You hear?—lady-birds—honey money. This is anamusem*nt to sharpen the intellect; it has a sting—it has what we call satire,and wit without indecency. Four-and-sixpence—five shillings.”

The bidding ran on with warming rivalry. Mr. Bowyer was a bidder, and this wastoo exasperating. Bowyer couldn’t afford it, and only wanted to hinder everyother 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 littlesacrifice of his neutral expression, that the bid might not have been detectedas his but for the friendly oaths of Mr. Bambridge, who wanted to know whatHorrock would do with blasted stuff only fit for haberdashers given over tothat state of perdition which the horse-dealer so cordially recognized in themajority of earthly existences. The lot was finally knocked down at a guinea toMr. Spilkins, a young Slender of the neighborhood, who was reckless with hispocket-money and felt his want of memory for riddles.

“Come, Trumbull, this is too bad—you’ve been putting some old maid’s rubbishinto the sale,” murmured Mr. Toller, getting close to the auctioneer. “I wantto see how the prints go, and I must be off soon.”

“Immediately, Mr. Toller. It was only an act of benevolence which yournoble heart would approve. Joseph! quick with the prints—Lot 235. Now,gentlemen, you who are connoissures, you are going to have a treat. Hereis an engraving of the Duke of Wellington surrounded by his staff on the Fieldof 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 linemust not be blown about by political winds—that a finer subject—of the modernorder, belonging to our own time and epoch—the understanding of man couldhardly 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 hepursed up his lips and stared round him.

“I’ll bid a pound!” said Mr. Powderell, in a tone of resolved emotion, as of aman ready to put himself in the breach. Whether from awe or pity, nobody raisedthe price on him.

Next came two Dutch prints which Mr. Toller had been eager for, and after hehad secured them he went away. Other prints, and afterwards some paintings,were sold to leading Middlemarchers who had come with a special desire forthem, 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 quitenewly or from a temporary visit to the refreshments which were spread under themarquee 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 itspossession. On the last occasion of his return from it he was observed to bringwith him a new companion, a stranger to Mr. Trumbull and every one else, whoseappearance, however, led to the supposition that he might be a relative of thehorse-dealer’s—also “given to indulgence.” His large whiskers, imposingswagger, and swing of the leg, made him a striking figure; but his suit ofblack, rather shabby at the edges, caused the prejudicial inference that he wasnot 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 fromthe road.”

Mr. Horrock eyed the stranger, who was leaning back against his stick with onehand, using his toothpick with the other, and looking about him with a certainrestlessness apparently under the silence imposed on him by circ*mstances.

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 littleand leaned his shoulder against the wall just behind the auctioneer. He nowcame forward again, and his eye caught the conspicuous stranger, who, rather tohis surprise, was staring at him markedly. But Will was immediately appealed toby Mr. Trumbull.

“Yes, Mr. Ladislaw, yes; this interests you as a connoissure, I think.It is some pleasure,” the auctioneer went on with a rising fervor, “to have apicture like this to show to a company of ladies and gentlemen—a picture worthany sum to an individual whose means were on a level with his judgment. It is apainting of the Italian school—by the celebrated Guydo, the greatestpainter in the world, the chief of the Old Masters, as they are called—I takeit, because they were up to a thing or two beyond most of us—in possession ofsecrets now lost to the bulk of mankind. Let me tell you, gentlemen, I haveseen a great many pictures by the Old Masters, and they are not all up to thismark—some of them are darker than you might like and not family subjects. Buthere is a Guydo—the frame alone is worth pounds—which any lady might beproud to hang up—a suitable thing for what we call a refectory in a charitableinstitution, if any gentleman of the Corporation wished to show hismunificence. Turn it a little, sir? yes. Joseph, turn it a littletowards Mr. Ladislaw—Mr. Ladislaw, having been abroad, understands the merit ofthese things, you observe.”

All eyes were for a moment turned towards Will, who said, coolly, “Fivepounds.” The auctioneer burst out in deep remonstrance.

“Ah! Mr. Ladislaw! the frame alone is worth that. Ladies and gentlemen, for thecredit of the town! Suppose it should be discovered hereafter that a gem of arthas been amongst us in this town, and nobody in Middlemarch awake to it. Fiveguineas—five seven-six—five ten. Still, ladies, still! It is a gem, and ‘Fullmany a gem,’ as the poet says, has been allowed to go at a nominal pricebecause the public knew no better, because it was offered in circles wherethere was—I was going to say a low feeling, but no!—Six pounds—six guineas—aGuydo of the first order going at six guineas—it is an insult toreligion, ladies; it touches us all as Christians, gentlemen, that a subjectlike 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 stretchthe price to twelve pounds. But it was knocked down to him at ten guineas,whereupon he pushed his way towards the bow-window and went out. He chose to gounder the marquee to get a glass of water, being hot and thirsty: it was emptyof other visitors, and he asked the woman in attendance to fetch him some freshwater; but before she was well gone he was annoyed to see entering the floridstranger who had stared at him. It struck Will at this moment that the manmight be one of those political parasitic insects of the bloated kind who hadonce or twice claimed acquaintance with him as having heard him speak on theReform question, and who might think of getting a shilling by news. In thislight his person, already rather heating to behold on a summer’s day, appearedthe more disagreeable; and Will, half-seated on the elbow of a garden-chair,turned his eyes carefully away from the comer. But this signified little to ouracquaintance Mr. Raffles, who never hesitated to thrust himself on unwillingobservation, if it suited his purpose to do so. He moved a step or two till hewas 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 withsome 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 answerof the question and a challenge of the consequences. To have said, “What isthat to you?” in the first instance, would have seemed like shuffling—as if heminded who knew anything about his origin!

Raffles on his side had not the same eagerness for a collision which wasimplied in Ladislaw’s threatening air. The slim young fellow with his girl’scomplexion looked like a tiger-cat ready to spring on him. Under suchcirc*mstances Mr. Raffles’s pleasure in annoying his company was kept inabeyance.

“No offence, my good sir, no offence! I only remember your mother—knew her whenshe was a girl. But it is your father that you feature, sir. I had the pleasureof 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 tomeet again.”

Hereupon Raffles, who had lifted his hat with the last words, turned himselfround 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 bewalking towards the road. For an instant he thought that he had been foolishnot to let the man go on talking;—but no! on the whole he preferred doingwithout knowledge from that source.

Later in the evening, however, Raffles overtook him in the street, andappearing either to have forgotten the roughness of his former reception or tointend avenging it by a forgiving familiarity, greeted him jovially and walkedby his side, remarking at first on the pleasantness of the town andneighborhood. Will suspected that the man had been drinking and was consideringhow to shake him off when Raffles said—

“I’ve been abroad myself, Mr. Ladislaw—I’ve seen the world—used to parley-vousa little. It was at Boulogne I saw your father—a most uncommon likeness you areof him, by Jove! mouth—nose—eyes—hair turned off your brow just like his—alittle in the foreign style. John Bull doesn’t do much of that. But your fatherwas very ill when I saw him. Lord, lord! hands you might see through. You werea 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 fromher friends when she was a young lass—a proud-spirited lass, and pretty, byJove! I knew the reason why she ran away,” said Raffles, winking slowly as helooked sideways at Will.

“You know nothing dishonorable of her, sir,” said Will, turning on him rathersavagely. 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 toohonorable 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 therespectable thieving line—the high style of receiving-house—none of your holesand 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—fineboarding-school—fit for a lord’s wife—only Archie Duncan threw it at her out ofspite, because she would have nothing to do with him. And so she ran away fromthe whole concern. I travelled for ’em, sir, in a gentlemanly way—at a highsalary. They didn’t mind her running away at first—godly folks, sir, verygodly—and she was for the stage. The son was alive then, and the daughter wasat 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 intoLowick Gate, and almost running to get out of Raffles’s reach.

He walked a long while on the Lowick road away from the town, glad of thestarlit darkness when it came. He felt as if he had had dirt cast on him amidstshouts of scorn. There was this to confirm the fellow’s statement—that hismother 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 thatfamily to be the ugliest? His mother had braved hardship in order to separateherself from it. But if Dorothea’s friends had known this story—if the Chettamshad known it—they would have had a fine color to give their suspicions awelcome ground for thinking him unfit to come near her. However, let themsuspect what they pleased, they would find themselves in the wrong. They wouldfind out that the blood in his veins was as free from the taint of meanness astheirs.

CHAPTER LXI.

“Inconsistencies,” answered Imlac, “cannot both be right, but imputed to manthey may both be true.”—Rasselas.

The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing onbusiness, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him into hisprivate sitting-room.

“Nicholas,” she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, “there hasbeen such a disagreeable man here asking for you—it has made me quiteuncomfortable.”

“What kind of man, my dear,” said Mr. Bulstrode, dreadfully certain of theanswer.

“A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner. Hedeclared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be sorry not to seehim. He wanted to wait for you here, but I told him he could see you at theBank to-morrow morning. Most impudent he was!—stared at me, and said his friendNick had luck in wives. I don’t believe he would have gone away, if Blucher hadnot happened to break his chain and come running round on the gravel—for I wasin the garden; so I said, ‘You’d better go away—the dog is very fierce, and Ican’t hold him.’ Do you really know anything of such a man?”

“I believe I know who he is, my dear,” said Mr. Bulstrode, in his usual subduedvoice, “an unfortunate dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much in days goneby. However, I presume you will not be troubled by him again. He will probablycome to the Bank—to beg, doubtless.”

No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode hadreturned from the town and was dressing for dinner. His wife, not sure that hewas come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him with his coat andcravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and staring absently at theground. He started nervously and looked up as she entered.

“You look very ill, Nicholas. Is there anything the matter?”

“I have a good deal of pain in my head,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who was sofrequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this cause ofdepression.

“Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar.”

Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the affectionateattention soothed him. Though always polite, it was his habit to receive suchservices with marital coolness, as his wife’s duty. But to-day, while she wasbending over him, he said, “You are very good, Harriet,” in a tone which hadsomething 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 mightbe 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 donebetter. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature.”

“Is he quite gone away?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously; but for certainreasons she refrained from adding, “It was very disagreeable to hear himcalling himself a friend of yours.” At that moment she would not have liked tosay anything which implied her habitual consciousness that her husband’searlier connections were not quite on a level with her own. Not that she knewmuch about them. That her husband had at first been employed in a bank, that hehad afterwards entered into what he called city business and gained a fortunebefore he was three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much olderthan himself—a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that disadvantageousquality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired into with thedispassionate judgment of a second—was almost as much as she had cared to learnbeyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode’s narrative occasionally gave of hisearly bent towards religion, his inclination to be a preacher, and hisassociation with missionary and philanthropic efforts. She believed in him asan excellent man whose piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to alayman, whose influence had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whoseshare of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position. Butshe also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr. Bulstrode tohave won the hand of Harriet Vincy; whose family was undeniable in aMiddlemarch light—a better light surely than any thrown in London thoroughfaresor dissenting chapel-yards. The unreformed provincial mind distrusted London;and while true religion was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode wasconvinced that to be saved in the Church was more respectable. She so muchwished to ignore towards others that her husband had ever been a LondonDissenter, that she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him. Hewas quite aware of this; indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of thisingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were equallysincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had married out of athorough inclination still subsisting. But his fears were such as belong to aman who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy: the loss of highconsideration from his wife, as from every one else who did not clearly hatehim out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to him. Whenshe said—

“Is he quite gone away?”

“Oh, I trust so,” he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober unconcerninto his tone as possible!

But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust. In theinterview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his eagerness totorment was almost as strong in him as any other greed. He had frankly saidthat he had turned out of the way to come to Middlemarch, just to look abouthim and see whether the neighborhood would suit him to live in. He hadcertainly had a few debts to pay more than he expected, but the two hundredpounds were not gone yet: a cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go awaywith for the present. What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick andfamily, and know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so muchattached. By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay. This time Rafflesdeclined to be “seen off the premises,” as he expressed it—declined to quitMiddlemarch under Bulstrode’s eyes. He meant to go by coach the next day—if hechose.

Bulstrode felt himself helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing could avail: hecould not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise. On the contrary, hefelt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles—unless providence sent death tohinder him—would come back to Middlemarch before long. And that certainty was aterror.

It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he was indanger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors and themournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life which wouldrender him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the religion with which hehad diligently associated himself. The terror of being judged sharpens thememory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which hasbeen habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the lifeis bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intensememory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting likea reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outwornpreparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from thelife: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitterflavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Into this second life Bulstrode’s past had now risen, only the pleasures of itseeming to have lost their quality. Night and day, without interruption save ofbrief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, hefelt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, asobstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objectswe 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 eachmight 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, asclever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of theologicaldefinition: an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic dissenting churchat Highbury, having had striking experience in conviction of sin and sense ofpardon. Again he heard himself called for as Brother Bulstrode in prayermeetings, speaking on religious platforms, preaching in private houses. Againhe felt himself thinking of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclinedtowards missionary labor. That was the happiest time of his life: that was thespot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream. The peopleamong whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very few, but they werevery near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the more; his power stretchedthrough a narrow space, but he felt its effect the more intensely. He believedwithout effort in the peculiar work of grace within him, and in the signs thatGod intended him for special instrumentality.

Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion he hadwhen he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school, was invited to afine villa belonging to Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in the congregation. Soonhe became an intimate there, honored for his piety by the wife, marked out forhis ability by the husband, whose wealth was due to a flourishing city andwest-end trade. That was the setting-in of a new current for his ambition,directing his prospects of “instrumentality” towards the uniting ofdistinguished religious gifts with successful business.

By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate partnerdied, and nobody seemed to the principal so well fitted to fill the severelyfelt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode, if he would become confidentialaccountant. The offer was accepted. The business was a pawnbroker’s, of themost magnificent sort both in extent and profits; and on a short acquaintancewith it Bulstrode became aware that one source of magnificent profit was theeasy reception of any goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where theycame from. But there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness ordinginess to give suggestions of shame.

He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and werefilled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer. The businesswas established and had old roots; is it not one thing to set up a newgin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one? The profits madeout of lost souls—where can the line be drawn at which they begin in humantransactions? Was it not even God’s way of saving His chosen? “Thouknowest,”—the young Bulstrode had said then, as the older Bulstrode was sayingnow—“Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from these things—how I view them allas implements for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from thewilderness.”

Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual experiences werenot wanting which at last made the retention of his position seem a servicedemanded of him: the vista of a fortune had already opened itself, andBulstrode’s shrinking remained private. Mr. Dunkirk had never expected thatthere would be any shrinking at all: he had never conceived that trade hadanything to do with the scheme of salvation. And it was true that Bulstrodefound himself carrying on two distinct lives; his religious activity could notbe incompatible with his business as soon as he had argued himself into notfeeling it incompatible.

Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same pleas—indeed,the years had been perpetually spinning them into intricate thickness, likemasses of spider-web, padding the moral sensibility; nay, as age made egoismmore eager but less enjoying, his soul had become more saturated with thebelief that he did everything for God’s sake, being indifferent to it for hisown. And yet—if he could be back in that far-off spot with his youthfulpoverty—why, then he would choose to be a missionary.

But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on. There wastrouble in the fine villa at Highbury. Years before, the only daughter had runaway, defied her parents, and gone on the stage; and now the only boy died, andafter a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also. The wife, a simple pious woman, leftwith all the wealth in and out of the magnificent trade, of which she neverknew the precise nature, had come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adorehim as women often adore their priest or “man-made” minister. It was naturalthat after a time marriage should have been thought of between them. But Mrs.Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter, who had long been regardedas lost both to God and her parents. It was known that the daughter hadmarried, but she was utterly gone out of sight. The mother, having lost herboy, 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—inthe provision for several grandchildren. Efforts to find her must be madebefore Mrs. Dunkirk would marry again. Bulstrode concurred; but afteradvertisem*nt as well as other modes of inquiry had been tried, the motherbelieved that her daughter was not to be found, and consented to marry withoutreservation of property.

The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew it, and hewas paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.

That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the rigidoutline with which acts present themselves to onlookers. But for himself atthat distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact was broken intolittle sequences, each justified as it came by reasonings which seemed to proveit righteous. Bulstrode’s course up to that time had, he thought, beensanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point the way for him to bethe agent in making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it fromperversion. Death and other striking dispositions, such as femininetrustfulness, had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell’s words—“Doyou call these bare events? The Lord pity you!” The events were comparativelysmall, but the essential condition was there—namely, that they were in favor ofhis own ends. It was easy for him to settle what was due from him to others byinquiring what were God’s intentions with regard to himself. Could it be forGod’s service that this fortune should in any considerable proportion go to ayoung woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits, andmight scatter it abroad in triviality—people who seemed to lie outside the pathof remarkable providences? Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, “Thedaughter shall not be found”—nevertheless when the moment came he kept herexistence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed the mother withconsolation in the probability that the unhappy young woman might be no more.

There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was unrighteous; buthow could he go back? He had mental exercises, called himself nought, laid holdon redemption, and went on in his course of instrumentality. And after fiveyears Death again came to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He didgradually withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite toput an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwardsbefore it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundredthousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important—a banker, aChurchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns, inwhich his ability was directed to economy in the raw material, as in the caseof the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy’s silk. And now, when this respectabilityhad lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years—when all that preceded it hadlong lain benumbed in the consciousness—that past had risen and immersed histhought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening thefeeble being.

Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned somethingmomentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his longingsand terrors. There, he thought, lay an opening towards spiritual, perhapstowards material rescue.

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarsehypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gullingthe world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desireshad been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explainedthe gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with thosebeliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionallyin us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in thefuture perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of theworld; 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 theground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been the motivewhich he had poured out in his prayers. Who would use money and position betterthan he meant to use them? Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence andexaltation of God’s cause? And to Mr. Bulstrode God’s cause was somethingdistinct from his own rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination ofGod’s enemies, who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would beas well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence. Also,profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince of this worldshowed its most active devices, became sanctified by a right application of theprofits in the hands of God’s servant.

This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical beliefthan 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 ifunchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individualfellow-men.

But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has necessarily aconscience or standard to which he more or less adapts himself. Bulstrode’sstandard had been his serviceableness to God’s cause: “I am sinful and nought—avessel to be consecrated by use—but use me!”—had been the mould into which hehad constrained his immense need of being something important andpredominating. And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in dangerof being broken and utterly cast away.

What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made him a strongerinstrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of the scoffer, anda darkening of that glory? If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he wascast out from the temple as one who had brought unclean offerings.

He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But today a repentance hadcome which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening Providence urged him toa kind of propitiation which was not simply a doctrinal transaction. The divinetribunal 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 thatBulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a greatdread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shamewrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day, while the resurgentthreatening past was making a conscience within him, he was thinking by whatmeans 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 didsomething right, God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. Forreligion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and thereligion 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 atemporary relief; it removed the pressure of an immediate dread, but did notput an end to the spiritual conflict and the need to win protection. At last hecame to a difficult resolve, and wrote a letter to Will Ladislaw, begging himto be at the Shrubs that evening for a private interview at nine o’clock. Willhad felt no particular surprise at the request, and connected it with some newnotions about the “Pioneer;” but when he was shown into Mr. Bulstrode’s privateroom, he was struck with the painfully worn look on the banker’s face, and wasgoing to say, “Are you ill?” when, checking himself in that abruptness, he onlyinquired after Mrs. Bulstrode, and her satisfaction with the picture bought forher.

“Thank you, she is quite satisfied; she has gone out with her daughters thisevening. I begged you to come, Mr. Ladislaw, because I have a communication ofa very private—indeed, I will say, of a sacredly confidential nature, which Idesire to make to you. Nothing, I dare say, has been farther from your thoughtsthan that there had been important ties in the past which could connect yourhistory with mine.”

Will felt something like an electric shock. He was already in a state of keensensitiveness and hardly allayed agitation on the subject of ties in the past,and his presentiments were not agreeable. It seemed like the fluctuations of adream—as if the action begun by that loud bloated stranger were being carriedon by this pale-eyed sickly looking piece of respectability, whose subdued toneand glib formality of speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him astheir remembered contrast. He answered, with a marked change of color—

“No, indeed, nothing.”

“You see before you, Mr. Ladislaw, a man who is deeply stricken. But for theurgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am before the bar of One whoseeth not as man seeth, I should be under no compulsion to make the disclosurewhich has been my object in asking you to come here to-night. So far as humanlaws go, you have no claim on me whatever.”

Will was even more uncomfortable than wondering. Mr. Bulstrode had paused,leaning his head on his hand, and looking at the floor. But he now fixed hisexamining glance on Will and said—

“I am told that your mother’s name was Sarah Dunkirk, and that she ran awayfrom her friends to go on the stage. Also, that your father was at one timemuch 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 inquiryhad come, that might have been expected to be preliminary to the banker’sprevious hints. But Mr. Bulstrode had to-night followed the order of hisemotions; he entertained no doubt that the opportunity for restitution hadcome, and he had an overpowering impulse towards the penitential expression bywhich he was deprecating chastisem*nt.

“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, honorablewoman,” said Will, almost angrily.

“I do not wish to allege anything against her. Did she never mention her motherto you at all?”

“I have heard her say that she thought her mother did not know the reason ofher running away. She said ‘poor mother’ in a pitying tone.”

“That mother became my wife,” said Bulstrode, and then paused a moment beforehe added, “you have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw: as I said before, not a legalclaim, but one which my conscience recognizes. I was enriched by thatmarriage—a result which would probably not have taken place—certainly not tothe same extent—if your grandmother could have discovered her daughter. Thatdaughter, I gather, is no longer living!”

“No,” said Will, feeling suspicion and repugnance rising so strongly withinhim, that without quite knowing what he did, he took his hat from the floor andstood up. The impulse within him was to reject the disclosed connection.

“Pray be seated, Mr. Ladislaw,” said Bulstrode, anxiously. “Doubtless you arestartled by the suddenness of this discovery. But I entreat your patience withone who is already bowed down by inward trial.”

Will reseated himself, feeling some pity which was half contempt for thisvoluntary self-abasem*nt of an elderly man.

“It is my wish, Mr. Ladislaw, to make amends for the deprivation which befellyour mother. I know that you are without fortune, and I wish to supply youadequately from a store which would have probably already been yours had yourgrandmother 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 ofscrupulosity in the judgment of his auditor, and a penitential act in the eyesof God. He had no clew to the state of Will Ladislaw’s mind, smarting as it wasfrom the clear hints of Raffles, and with its natural quickness in constructionstimulated by the expectation of discoveries which he would have been glad toconjure 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, nowraised 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 havebeen found.”

Bulstrode shrank—there was a visible quivering in his face and hands. He wastotally unprepared to have his advances met in this way, or to find himselfurged into more revelation than he had beforehand set down as needful. But atthat moment he dared not tell a lie, and he felt suddenly uncertain of hisground which he had trodden with some confidence before.

“I will not deny that you conjecture rightly,” he answered, with a faltering inhis tone. “And I wish to make atonement to you as the one still remaining whohas 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 Ihave already said, is entirely independent of any legal compulsion. I am readyto narrow my own resources and the prospects of my family by binding myself toallow you five hundred pounds yearly during my life, and to leave you aproportional capital at my death—nay, to do still more, if more should bedefinitely necessary to any laudable project on your part.” Mr. Bulstrode hadgone on to particulars in the expectation that these would work strongly onLadislaw, and merge other feelings in grateful acceptance.

But Will was looking as stubborn as possible, with his lip pouting and hisfingers 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 toanswer a question or two. Were you connected with the business by which thatfortune you speak of was originally made?”

Mr. Bulstrode’s thought was, “Raffles has told him.” How could he refuse toanswer when he had volunteered what drew forth the question? He answered,“Yes.”

“And was that business—or was it not—a thoroughly dishonorable one—nay, onethat, if its nature had been made public, might have ranked those concerned init with thieves and convicts?”

Will’s tone had a cutting bitterness: he was moved to put his question asnakedly as he could.

Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger. He had been prepared for a sceneof self-abasem*nt, but his intense pride and his habit of supremacy overpoweredpenitence, and even dread, when this young man, whom he had meant to benefit,turned on him with the air of a judge.

“The business was established before I became connected with it, sir; nor is itfor you to institute an inquiry of that kind,” he answered, not raising hisvoice, but speaking with quick defiantness.

“Yes, it is,” said Will, starting up again with his hat in his hand. “It iseminently mine to ask such questions, when I have to decide whether I will havetransactions with you and accept your money. My unblemished honor is importantto me. It is important to me to have no stain on my birth and connections. Andnow I find there is a stain which I can’t help. My mother felt it, and tried tokeep as clear of it as she could, and so will I. You shall keep your ill-gottenmoney. If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to any one whocould disprove what you have told me. What I have to thank you for is that youkept the money till now, when I can refuse it. It ought to lie with a man’sself that he is a gentleman. Good-night, sir.”

Bulstrode was going to speak, but Will, with determined quickness, was out ofthe room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had closed behind him. Hewas too strongly possessed with passionate rebellion against this inheritedblot which had been thrust on his knowledge to reflect at present whether hehad not been too hard on Bulstrode—too arrogantly merciless towards a man ofsixty, who was making efforts at retrieval when time had rendered them vain.

No third person listening could have thoroughly understood the impetuosity ofWill’s repulse or the bitterness of his words. No one but himself then knew howeverything connected with the sentiment of his own dignity had an immediatebearing for him on his relation to Dorothea and to Mr. Casaubon’s treatment ofhim. And in the rush of impulses by which he flung back that offer ofBulstrode’s there was mingled the sense that it would have been impossible forhim ever to tell Dorothea that he had accepted it.

As for Bulstrode—when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction, and weptlike a woman. It was the first time he had encountered an open expression ofscorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with that scorn hurrying like venomthrough his system, there was no sensibility left to consolations. But therelief of weeping had to be checked. His wife and daughters soon came home fromhearing the address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret thatpapa had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which theytried to repeat to him.

Perhaps, through all other hidden thoughts, the one that breathed most comfortwas, that Will Ladislaw at least was not likely to publish what had taken placethat evening.

CHAPTER LXII.

He was a squyer of lowe degre,
That loved the king’s daughter of Hungrie.
—Old Romance.

Will Ladislaw’s mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again, andforthwith quitting Middlemarch. The morning after his agitating scene withBulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that various causes haddetained him in the neighborhood longer than he had expected, and asking herpermission to call again at Lowick at some hour which she would mention on theearliest possible day, he being anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so untilshe had granted him an interview. He left the letter at the office, orderingthe messenger to carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for an answer.

Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words. His formerfarewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam, and had beenannounced as final even to the butler. It is certainly trying to a man’sdignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell haspathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy, and itwas possible even that there might be bitter sneers afloat about Will’s motivesfor lingering. Still it was on the whole more satisfactory to his feeling totake the directest means of seeing Dorothea, than to use any device which mightgive an air of chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that itwas what he earnestly sought. When he had parted from her before, he had beenin ignorance of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation between them, andmade a more absolute severance than he had then believed in. He knew nothing ofDorothea’s private fortune, and being little used to reflect on such matters,took it for granted that according to Mr. Casaubon’s arrangement marriage tohim, Will Ladislaw, would mean that she consented to be penniless. That was notwhat he could wish for even in his secret heart, or even if she had been readyto meet such hard contrast for his sake. And then, too, there was the freshsmart of that disclosure about his mother’s family, which if known would be anadded reason why Dorothea’s friends should look down upon him as utterly belowher. The secret hope that after some years he might come back with the sensethat he had at least a personal value equal to her wealth, seemed now thedreamy continuation of a dream. This change would surely justify him in askingDorothea to receive him once more.

But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will’s note. Inconsequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to be at homein a week, she had driven first to Fresh*tt to carry the news, meaning to go onto the Grange to deliver some orders with which her uncle had intrustedher—thinking, as he said, “a little mental occupation of this sort good for awidow.”

If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Fresh*tt thatmorning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed as to the readinessof certain people to sneer at his lingering in the neighborhood. Sir James,indeed, though much relieved concerning Dorothea, had been on the watch tolearn Ladislaw’s movements, and had an instructed informant in Mr. Standish,who was necessarily in his confidence on this matter. That Ladislaw had stayedin Middlemarch nearly two months after he had declared that he was goingimmediately, was a fact to embitter Sir James’s suspicions, or at least tojustify his aversion to a “young fellow” whom he represented to himself asslight, volatile, and likely enough to show such recklessness as naturally wentalong with a position unriveted by family ties or a strict profession. But hehad just heard something from Standish which, while it justified these surmisesabout Will, offered a means of nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea.

Unwonted circ*mstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there areconditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and ouremotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner. Good SirJames was this morning so far unlike himself that he was irritably anxious tosay something to Dorothea on a subject which he usually avoided as if it hadbeen 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 hismind; 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 hiscommunication. Her unexpected presence brought him to utter hopelessness in hisown power of saying anything unpleasant; but desperation suggested a resource;he sent the groom on an unsaddled horse across the park with a pencilled noteto Mrs. Cadwallader, who already knew the gossip, and would think it nocompromise of herself to repeat it as often as required.

Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr. Garth, whom she wanted tosee, was expected at the hall within the hour, and she was still talking toCaleb on the gravel when Sir James, on the watch for the rector’s wife, saw hercoming and met her with the needful hints.

“Enough! I understand,”—said Mrs. Cadwallader. “You shall be innocent. I amsuch a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself.”

“I don’t mean that it’s of any consequence,” said Sir James, disliking thatMrs. Cadwallader should understand too much. “Only it is desirable thatDorothea 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 meetthem, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped across the park by themerest chance in the world, just to chat with Celia in a matronly way about thebaby. And so Mr. Brooke was coming back? Delightful!—coming back, it was to behoped, quite cured of Parliamentary fever and pioneering. Apropos of the“Pioneer”—somebody had prophesied that it would soon be like a dying dolphin,and turn all colors for want of knowing how to help itself, because Mr.Brooke’s protege, the brilliant young Ladislaw, was gone or going. Had SirJames heard that?

The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James, turning aside towhip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.

“All false!” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “He is not gone, or going, apparently; the‘Pioneer’ keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw is making a sad dark-bluescandal by warbling continually with your Mr. Lydgate’s wife, who they tell meis as pretty as pretty can be. It seems nobody ever goes into the house withoutfinding this young gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano. But thepeople in manufacturing towns are always disreputable.”

“You began by saying that one report was false, Mrs. Cadwallader, and I believethis is false too,” said Dorothea, with indignant energy; “at least, I feelsure it is a misrepresentation. I will not hear any evil spoken of Mr.Ladislaw; he has already suffered too much injustice.”

Dorothea when thoroughly moved cared little what any one thought of herfeelings; and even if she had been able to reflect, she would have held itpetty to keep silence at injurious words about Will from fear of being herselfmisunderstood. Her face was flushed and her lip trembled.

Sir James, glancing at her, repented of his stratagem; but Mrs. Cadwallader,equal to all occasions, spread the palms of her hands outward and said—“Heavengrant it, my dear!—I mean that all bad tales about anybody may be false. But itis a pity that young Lydgate should have married one of these Middlemarchgirls. Considering he’s a son of somebody, he might have got a woman with goodblood in her veins, and not too young, who would have put up with hisprofession. There’s Clara Harfa*ger, for instance, whose friends don’t know whatto do with her; and she has a portion. Then we might have had her among us.However!—it’s no use being wise for other people. Where is Celia? Pray let usgo in.”

“I am going on immediately to Tipton,” said Dorothea, rather haughtily.“Good-by.”

Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage. He wasaltogether discontented with the result of a contrivance which had cost himsome secret humiliation beforehand.

Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn corn-fields,not seeing or hearing anything around. The tears came and rolled down hercheeks, but she did not know it. The world, it seemed, was turning ugly andhateful, and there was no place for her trustfulness. “It is not true—it is nottrue!” was the voice within her that she listened to; but all the while aremembrance to which there had always clung a vague uneasiness would thrustit*elf on her attention—the remembrance of that day when she had found WillLadislaw with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard his voice accompanied by the piano.

“He said he would never do anything that I disapproved—I wish I could have toldhim that I disapproved of that,” said poor Dorothea, inwardly, feeling astrange alternation between anger with Will and the passionate defence of him.“They all try to blacken him before me; but I will care for no pain, if he isnot to blame. I always believed he was good.”—These were her last thoughtsbefore she felt that the carriage was passing under the archway of thelodge-gate at the Grange, when she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief to herface and began to think of her errands. The coachman begged leave to take outthe horses for half an hour as there was something wrong with a shoe; andDorothea, having the sense that she was going to rest, took off her gloves andbonnet, while she was leaning against a statue in the entrance-hall, andtalking to the housekeeper. At last she said—

“I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell. I will go into the library and write yousome memoranda from my uncle’s letter, if you will open the shutters for me.”

“The shutters are open, madam,” said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea, who hadwalked along as she spoke. “Mr. Ladislaw is there, looking for something.”

(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he had missed inthe act of packing his movables, and did not choose to leave behind.)

Dorothea’s heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow, but she was notperceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will was there was for the momentall-satisfying to her, like the sight of something precious that one has lost.When she reached the door she said to Mrs. Kell—

“Go in first, and tell him that I am here.”

Will had found his portfolio, and had laid it on the table at the far end ofthe room, to turn over the sketches and please himself by looking at thememorable piece of art which had a relation to nature too mysterious forDorothea. He was smiling at it still, and shaking the sketches into order withthe thought that he might find a letter from her awaiting him at Middlemarch,when Mrs. Kell close to his elbow said—

“Mrs. Casaubon is coming in, sir.”

Will turned round quickly, and the next moment Dorothea was entering. As Mrs.Kell closed the door behind her they met: each was looking at the other, andconsciousness was overflowed by something that suppressed utterance. It was notconfusion that kept them silent, for they both felt that parting was near, andthere is no shamefacedness in a sad parting.

She moved automatically towards her uncle’s chair against the writing-table,and Will, after drawing it out a little for her, went a few paces off and stoodopposite to her.

“Pray sit down,” said Dorothea, crossing her hands on her lap; “I am very gladyou were here.” Will thought that her face looked just as it did when she firstshook hands with him in Rome; for her widow’s cap, fixed in her bonnet, hadgone off with it, and he could see that she had lately been shedding tears. Butthe mixture of anger in her agitation had vanished at the sight of him; she hadbeen used, when they were face to face, always to feel confidence and the happyfreedom which comes with mutual understanding, and how could other people’swords hinder that effect on a sudden? Let the music which can take possessionof our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more—what does itsignify that we heard it found fault with in its absence?

“I have sent a letter to Lowick Manor to-day, asking leave to see you,” saidWill, seating himself opposite to her. “I am going away immediately, and Icould not go without speaking to you again.”

“I thought we had parted when you came to Lowick many weeks ago—you thought youwere going then,” said Dorothea, her voice trembling a little.

“Yes; but I was in ignorance then of things which I know now—things which havealtered my feelings about the future. When I saw you before, I was dreamingthat I might come back some day. I don’t think I ever shall—now.” Will pausedhere.

“You wished me to know the reasons?” said Dorothea, timidly.

“Yes,” said Will, impetuously, shaking his head backward, and looking away fromher with irritation in his face. “Of course I must wish it. I have been grosslyinsulted in your eyes and in the eyes of others. There has been a meanimplication against my character. I wish you to know that under nocirc*mstances would I have lowered myself by—under no circ*mstances would Ihave given men the chance of saying that I sought money under the pretext ofseeking—something else. There was no need of other safeguard against me—thesafeguard of wealth was enough.”

Will rose from his chair with the last word and went—he hardly knew where; butit was to the projecting window nearest him, which had been open as now aboutthe same season a year ago, when he and Dorothea had stood within it and talkedtogether. Her whole heart was going out at this moment in sympathy with Will’sindignation: she only wanted to convince him that she had never done himinjustice, and he seemed to have turned away from her as if she too had beenpart of the unfriendly world.

“It would be very unkind of you to suppose that I ever attributed any meannessto you,” she began. Then in her ardent way, wanting to plead with him, shemoved from her chair and went in front of him to her old place in the window,saying, “Do you suppose that I ever disbelieved in you?”

When Will saw her there, he gave a start and moved backward out of the window,without meeting her glance. Dorothea was hurt by this movement following up theprevious anger of his tone. She was ready to say that it was as hard on her ason him, and that she was helpless; but those strange particulars of theirrelation which neither of them could explicitly mention kept her always indread of saying too much. At this moment she had no belief that Will would inany case have wanted to marry her, and she feared using words which might implysuch a belief. She only said earnestly, recurring to his last word—

“I am sure no safeguard was ever needed against you.”

Will did not answer. In the stormy fluctuation of his feelings these words ofhers seemed to him cruelly neutral, and he looked pale and miserable after hisangry outburst. He went to the table and fastened up his portfolio, whileDorothea looked at him from the distance. They were wasting these last momentstogether in wretched silence. What could he say, since what had got obstinatelyuppermost in his mind was the passionate love for her which he forbade himselfto utter? What could she say, since she might offer him no help—since she wasforced to keep the money that ought to have been his?—since to-day he seemednot to respond as he used to do to her thorough trust and liking?

But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached the windowagain.

“I must go,” he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which sometimesaccompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired and burned with gazingtoo close at a light.

“What shall you do in life?” said Dorothea, timidly. “Have your intentionsremained just the same as when we said good-by before?”

“Yes,” said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as uninteresting.“I shall work away at the first thing that offers. I suppose one gets a habitof doing without happiness or hope.”

“Oh, what sad words!” said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob. Thentrying to smile, she added, “We used to agree that we were alike in speakingtoo strongly.”

“I have not spoken too strongly now,” said Will, leaning back against the angleof the wall. “There are certain things which a man can only go through once inhis life; and he must know some time or other that the best is over with him.This experience has happened to me while I am very young—that is all. What Icare more for than I can ever care for anything else is absolutely forbidden tome—I don’t mean merely by being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if itwere within my reach, by my own pride and honor—by everything I respect myselffor. Of course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in atrance.”

Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea tomisunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself andoffending against his self-approval in speaking to her so plainly; but still—itcould not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never wooher. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.

But Dorothea’s mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another visionthan his. The thought that she herself might be what Will most cared for didthrob through her an instant, but then came doubt: the memory of the littlethey had lived through together turned pale and shrank before the memory whichsuggested how much fuller might have been the intercourse between Will and someone else with whom he had had constant companionship. Everything he had saidmight refer to that other relation, and whatever had passed between him andherself was thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as theirsimple friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband’sinjurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down dreamily, whileimages crowded upon her which left the sickening certainty that Will wasreferring to Mrs. Lydgate. But why sickening? He wanted her to know that heretoo his conduct should be above suspicion.

Will was not surprised at her silence. His mind also was tumultuously busywhile he watched her, and he was feeling rather wildly that something musthappen to hinder their parting—some miracle, clearly nothing in their owndeliberate speech. Yet, after all, had she any love for him?—he could notpretend to himself that he would rather believe her to be without that pain. Hecould not deny that a secret longing for the assurance that she loved him wasat the root of all his words.

Neither of them knew how long they stood in that way. Dorothea was raising hereyes, and was about to speak, when the door opened and her footman came to say—

“The horses are ready, madam, whenever you like to start.”

“Presently,” said Dorothea. Then turning to Will, she said, “I have somememoranda to write for the housekeeper.”

“I must go,” said Will, when the door had closed again—advancing towards her.“The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch.”

“You have acted in every way rightly,” said Dorothea, in a low tone, feeling apressure at her heart which made it difficult to speak.

She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant without speaking, for herwords had seemed to him cruelly cold and unlike herself. Their eyes met, butthere was discontent in his, and in hers there was only sadness. He turned awayand took his portfolio under his arm.

“I have never done you injustice. Please remember me,” said Dorothea,repressing a rising sob.

“Why should you say that?” said Will, with irritation. “As if I were not indanger of forgetting everything else.”

He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it impelledhim to go away without pause. It was all one flash to Dorothea—his lastwords—his distant bow to her as he reached the door—the sense that he was nolonger there. She sank into the chair, and for a few moments sat like a statue,while images and emotions were hurrying upon her. Joy came first, in spite ofthe threatening train behind it—joy in the impression that it was reallyherself whom Will loved and was renouncing, that there was really no other loveless permissible, more blameworthy, which honor was hurrying him away from.They were parted all the same, but—Dorothea drew a deep breath and felt herstrength return—she could think of him unrestrainedly. At that moment theparting was easy to bear: the first sense of loving and being loved excludedsorrow. It was as if some hard icy pressure had melted, and her consciousnesshad room to expand: her past was come back to her with larger interpretation.The joy was not the less—perhaps it was the more complete just then—because ofthe irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach, no contemptuous wonder toimagine in any eye or from any lips. He had acted so as to defy reproach, andmake wonder respectful.

Any one watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying thought withinher. Just as when inventive power is working with glad ease some small claim onthe attention is fully met as if it were only a cranny opened to the sunlight,it was easy now for Dorothea to write her memoranda. She spoke her last wordsto the housekeeper in cheerful tones, and when she seated herself in thecarriage her eyes were bright and her cheeks blooming under the dismal bonnet.She threw back the heavy “weepers,” and looked before her, wondering which roadWill had taken. It was in her nature to be proud that he was blameless, andthrough all her feelings there ran this vein—“I was right to defend him.”

The coachman was used to drive his grays at a good pace, Mr. Casaubon beingunenjoying and impatient in everything away from his desk, and wanting to getto the end of all journeys; and Dorothea was now bowled along quickly. Drivingwas pleasant, for rain in the night had laid the dust, and the blue sky lookedfar off, away from the region of the great clouds that sailed in masses. Theearth looked like a happy place under the vast heavens, and Dorothea waswishing that she might overtake Will and see him once more.

After a turn of the road, there he was with the portfolio under his arm; butthe next moment she was passing him while he raised his hat, and she felt apang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation, leaving him behind. Shecould not look back at him. It was as if a crowd of indifferent objects hadthrust them asunder, and forced them along different paths, taking them fartherand farther away from each other, and making it useless to look back. She couldno more make any sign that would seem to say, “Need we part?” than she couldstop the carriage to wait for him. Nay, what a world of reasons crowded uponher against any movement of her thought towards a future that might reverse thedecision of this day!

“I only wish I had known before—I wish he knew—then we could be quite happy inthinking of each other, though we are forever parted. And if I could but havegiven him the money, and made things easier for him!”—were the longings thatcame back the most persistently. And yet, so heavily did the world weigh on herin spite of her independent energy, that with this idea of Will as in need ofsuch help and at a disadvantage with the world, there came always the vision ofthat unfittingness of any closer relation between them which lay in the opinionof every one connected with her. She felt to the full all the imperativeness ofthe motives which urged Will’s conduct. How could he dream of her defying thebarrier that her husband had placed between them?—how could she ever say toherself that she would defy it?

Will’s certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance, had much morebitterness in it. Very slight matters were enough to gall him in his sensitivemood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he felt himself ploddingalong as a poor devil seeking a position in a world which in his present temperoffered him little that he coveted, made his conduct seem a mere matter ofnecessity, and took away the sustainment of resolve. After all, he had noassurance that she loved him: could any man pretend that he was simply glad insuch a case to have the suffering all on his own side?

That evening Will spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he was gone.

BOOK VII.
TWO TEMPTATIONS.

CHAPTER LXIII.

These little things are great to little man.—GOLDSMITH.

“Have you seen much of your scientific phoenix, Lydgate, lately?” said Mr.Toller at one of his Christmas dinner-parties, speaking to Mr. Farebrother onhis right hand.

“Not much, I am sorry to say,” answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry Mr.Toller’s banter about his belief in the new medical light. “I am out of the wayand he is too busy.”

“Is he? I am glad to hear it,” said Dr. Minchin, with mingled suavity andsurprise.

“He gives a great deal of time to the New Hospital,” said Mr. Farebrother, whohad his reasons for continuing the subject: “I hear of that from my neighbor,Mrs. Casaubon, who goes there often. She says Lydgate is indefatigable, and ismaking a fine thing of Bulstrode’s institution. He is preparing a new ward incase of the cholera coming to us.”

“And preparing theories of treatment to try on the patients, I suppose,” saidMr. Toller.

“Come, Toller, be candid,” said Mr. Farebrother. “You are too clever not to seethe good of a bold fresh mind in medicine, as well as in everything else; andas to cholera, I fancy, none of you are very sure what you ought to do. If aman goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harmsmore than any one else.”

“I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him,” said Dr. Minchin,looking towards Toller, “for he has sent you the cream of Peaco*ck’s patients.”

“Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner,” said Mr. HarryToller, the brewer. “I suppose his relations in the North back him up.”

“I hope so,” said Mr. Chichely, “else he ought not to have married that nicegirl we were all so fond of. Hang it, one has a grudge against a man whocarries off the prettiest girl in the town.”

“Ay, by God! and the best too,” said Mr. Standish.

“My friend Vincy didn’t half like the marriage, I know that,” said Mr.Chichely. “He wouldn’t do much. How the relations on the other side mayhave come down I can’t say.” There was an emphatic kind of reticence in Mr.Chichely’s manner of speaking.

“Oh, I shouldn’t think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living,” said Mr.Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject was dropped.

This was not the first time that Mr. Farebrother had heard hints of Lydgate’sexpenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice, but he thought itnot unlikely that there were resources or expectations which excused the largeoutlay at the time of Lydgate’s marriage, and which might hinder any badconsequences from the disappointment in his practice. One evening, when he tookthe pains to go to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as ofold, he noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy wayof keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever he had anythingto say. Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his work-room, puttingarguments for and against the probability of certain biological views; but hehad none of those definite things to say or to show which give the waymarks ofa patient uninterrupted pursuit, such as he used himself to insist on, sayingthat “there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” and that “a man’smind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole humanhorizon and the horizon of an object-glass.” That evening he seemed to betalking widely for the sake of resisting any personal bearing; and before longthey went into the drawing room, where Lydgate, having asked Rosamond to givethem music, sank back in his chair in silence, but with a strange light in hiseyes. “He may have been taking an opiate,” was a thought that crossed Mr.Farebrother’s mind—“tic-douloureux perhaps—or medical worries.”

It did not occur to him that Lydgate’s marriage was not delightful: hebelieved, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable, docile creature,though he had always thought her rather uninteresting—a little too much thepattern-card of the finishing-school; and his mother could not forgive Rosamondbecause she never seemed to see that Henrietta Noble was in the room. “However,Lydgate fell in love with her,” said the Vicar to himself, “and she must be tohis taste.”

Mr. Farebrother was aware that Lydgate was a proud man, but having very littlecorresponding fibre in himself, and perhaps too little care about personaldignity, except the dignity of not being mean or foolish, he could hardly allowenough for the way in which Lydgate shrank, as from a burn, from the utteranceof any word about his private affairs. And soon after that conversation at Mr.Toller’s, the Vicar learned something which made him watch the more eagerly foran opportunity of indirectly letting Lydgate know that if he wanted to openhimself about any difficulty there was a friendly ear ready.

The opportunity came at Mr. Vincy’s, where, on New Year’s Day, there was aparty, to which Mr. Farebrother was irresistibly invited, on the plea that hemust not forsake his old friends on the first new year of his being a greaterman, and Rector as well as Vicar. And this party was thoroughly friendly: allthe ladies of the Farebrother family were present; the Vincy children all dinedat the table, and Fred had persuaded his mother that if she did not invite MaryGarth, the Farebrothers would regard it as a slight to themselves, Mary beingtheir particular friend. Mary came, and Fred was in high spirits, though hisenjoyment was of a checkered kind—triumph that his mother should see Mary’simportance with the chief personages in the party being much streaked withjealousy when Mr. Farebrother sat down by her. Fred used to be much more easyabout his own accomplishments in the days when he had not begun to dread being“bowled out by Farebrother,” and this terror was still before him. Mrs. Vincy,in her fullest matronly bloom, looked at Mary’s little figure, rough wavy hair,and visage quite without lilies and roses, and wondered; trying unsuccessfullyto fancy herself caring about Mary’s appearance in wedding clothes, or feelingcomplacency in grandchildren who would “feature” the Garths. However, the partywas a merry one, and Mary was particularly bright; being glad, for Fred’s sake,that his friends were getting kinder to her, and being also quite willing thatthey should see how much she was valued by others whom they must admit to bejudges.

Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy spoke aslittle as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly graceful and calm,and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar had not been roused to bestowon her would have perceived the total absence of that interest in her husband’spresence which a loving wife is sure to betray, even if etiquette keeps heraloof from him. When Lydgate was taking part in the conversation, she neverlooked towards him any more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modelledto look another way: and when, after being called out for an hour or two, here-entered the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact, which eighteen monthsbefore would have had the effect of a numeral before ciphers. In reality,however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate’s voice and movements; and herpretty good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which shesatisfied her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety. Whenthe ladies were in the drawing-room after Lydgate had been called away from thedessert, Mrs. Farebrother, when Rosamond happened to be near her, said—“Youhave to give up a great deal of your husband’s society, Mrs. Lydgate.”

“Yes, the life of a medical man is very arduous: especially when he is sodevoted to his profession as Mr. Lydgate is,” said Rosamond, who was standing,and moved easily away at the end of this correct little speech.

“It is dreadfully dull for her when there is no company,” said Mrs. Vincy, whowas seated at the old lady’s side. “I am sure I thought so when Rosamond wasill, and I was staying with her. You know, Mrs. Farebrother, ours is a cheerfulhouse. I am of a cheerful disposition myself, and Mr. Vincy always likessomething to be going on. That is what Rosamond has been used to. Verydifferent from a husband out at odd hours, and never knowing when he will comehome, and of a close, proud disposition, I think”—indiscreet Mrs. Vincydid lower her tone slightly with this parenthesis. “But Rosamond always had anangel of a temper; her brothers used very often not to please her, but she wasnever the girl to show temper; from a baby she was always as good as good, andwith a complexion beyond anything. But my children are all good-tempered, thankGod.”

This was easily credible to any one looking at Mrs. Vincy as she threw back herbroad cap-strings, and smiled towards her three little girls, aged from sevento eleven. But in that smiling glance she was obliged to include Mary Garth,whom the three girls had got into a corner to make her tell them stories. Marywas just finishing the delicious tale of Rumpelstiltskin, which she had well byheart, because Letty was never tired of communicating it to her ignorant eldersfrom a favorite red volume. Louisa, Mrs. Vincy’s darling, now ran to her withwide-eyed serious excitement, crying, “Oh mamma, mamma, the little man stampedso hard on the floor he couldn’t get his leg out again!”

“Bless you, my cherub!” said mamma; “you shall tell me all about it to-morrow.Go and listen!” and then, as her eyes followed Louisa back towards theattractive corner, she thought that if Fred wished her to invite Mary again shewould make no objection, the children being so pleased with her.

But presently the corner became still more animated, for Mr. Farebrother camein, and seating himself behind Louisa, took her on his lap; whereupon the girlsall insisted that he must hear Rumpelstiltskin, and Mary must tell it overagain. He insisted too, and Mary, without fuss, began again in her neatfashion, with precisely the same words as before. Fred, who had also seatedhimself near, would have felt unmixed triumph in Mary’s effectiveness if Mr.Farebrother had not been looking at her with evident admiration, while hedramatized an intense interest in the tale to please the children.

“You will never care any more about my one-eyed giant, Loo,” said Fred at theend.

“Yes, I shall. Tell about him now,” said Louisa.

“Oh, I dare say; I am quite cut out. Ask Mr. Farebrother.”

“Yes,” added Mary; “ask Mr. Farebrother to tell you about the ants whosebeautiful house was knocked down by a giant named Tom, and he thought theydidn’t mind because he couldn’t hear them cry, or see them use theirpocket-handkerchiefs.”

“Please,” said Louisa, looking up at the Vicar.

“No, no, I am a grave old parson. If I try to draw a story out of my bag asermon comes instead. Shall I preach you a sermon?” said he, putting on hisshort-sighted glasses, and pursing up his lips.

“Yes,” said Louisa, falteringly.

“Let me see, then. Against cakes: how cakes are bad things, especially if theyare sweet and have plums in them.”

Louisa took the affair rather seriously, and got down from the Vicar’s knee togo to Fred.

“Ah, I see it will not do to preach on New Year’s Day,” said Mr. Farebrother,rising and walking away. He had discovered of late that Fred had become jealousof him, and also that he himself was not losing his preference for Mary aboveall other women.

“A delightful young person is Miss Garth,” said Mrs. Farebrother, who had beenwatching her son’s movements.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Vincy, obliged to reply, as the old lady turned to herexpectantly. “It is a pity she is not better-looking.”

“I cannot say that,” said Mrs. Farebrother, decisively. “I like hercountenance. We must not always ask for beauty, when a good God has seen fit tomake an excellent young woman without it. I put good manners first, and MissGarth will know how to conduct herself in any station.”

The old lady was a little sharp in her tone, having a prospective reference toMary’s becoming her daughter-in-law; for there was this inconvenience in Mary’sposition with regard to Fred, that it was not suitable to be made public, andhence the three ladies at Lowick Parsonage were still hoping that Camden wouldchoose Miss Garth.

New visitors entered, and the drawing-room was given up to music and games,while whist-tables were prepared in the quiet room on the other side of thehall. Mr. Farebrother played a rubber to satisfy his mother, who regarded heroccasional whist as a protest against scandal and novelty of opinion, in whichlight even a revoke had its dignity. But at the end he got Mr. Chichely to takehis place, and left the room. As he crossed the hall, Lydgate had just come inand was taking off his great-coat.

“You are the man I was going to look for,” said the Vicar; and instead ofentering the drawing-room, they walked along the hall and stood against thefireplace, where the frosty air helped to make a glowing bank. “You see, I canleave the whist-table easily enough,” he went on, smiling at Lydgate, “now Idon’t play for money. I owe that to you, Mrs. Casaubon says.”

“How?” said Lydgate, coldly.

“Ah, you didn’t mean me to know it; I call that ungenerous reticence. Youshould let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have done him a goodturn. I don’t enter into some people’s dislike of being under an obligation:upon my word, I prefer being under an obligation to everybody for behaving wellto me.”

“I can’t tell what you mean,” said Lydgate, “unless it is that I once spoke ofyou to Mrs. Casaubon. But I did not think that she would break her promise notto mention that I had done so,” said Lydgate, leaning his back against thecorner of the mantel-piece, and showing no radiance in his face.

“It was Brooke who let it out, only the other day. He paid me the compliment ofsaying that he was very glad I had the living though you had come across histactics, and had praised me up as a Ken and a Tillotson, and that sort ofthing, till Mrs. Casaubon would hear of no one else.”

“Oh, Brooke is such a leaky-minded fool,” said Lydgate, contemptuously.

“Well, I was glad of the leakiness then. I don’t see why you shouldn’t like meto know that you wished to do me a service, my dear fellow. And you certainlyhave done me one. It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to findhow much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money. A man willnot be tempted to say the Lord’s Prayer backward to please the devil, if hedoesn’t want the devil’s services. I have no need to hang on the smiles ofchance now.”

“I don’t see that there’s any money-getting without chance,” said Lydgate; “ifa man gets it in a profession, it’s pretty sure to come by chance.”

Mr. Farebrother thought he could account for this speech, in striking contrastwith Lydgate’s former way of talking, as the perversity which will often springfrom the moodiness of a man ill at ease in his affairs. He answered in a toneof good-humored admission—

“Ah, there’s enormous patience wanted with the way of the world. But it is theeasier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends who love him, and askfor nothing better than to help him through, so far as it lies in their power.”

“Oh yes,” said Lydgate, in a careless tone, changing his attitude and lookingat his watch. “People make much more of their difficulties than they need todo.”

He knew as distinctly as possible that this was an offer of help to himselffrom Mr. Farebrother, and he could not bear it. So strangely determined are wemortals, that, after having been long gratified with the sense that he hadprivately done the Vicar a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned hisneed of a service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.Besides, behind all making of such offers what else must come?—that he should“mention his case,” imply that he wanted specific things. At that moment,suicide seemed easier.

Mr. Farebrother was too keen a man not to know the meaning of that reply, andthere was a certain massiveness in Lydgate’s manner and tone, correspondingwith his physique, which if he repelled your advances in the first instanceseemed to put persuasive devices out of question.

“What time are you?” said the Vicar, devouring his wounded feeling.

“After eleven,” said Lydgate. And they went into the drawing-room.

CHAPTER LXIV.

Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs, he knewthat it would have hardly been in Mr. Farebrother’s power to give him the helphe immediately wanted. With the year’s bills coming in from his tradesmen, withDover’s threatening hold on his furniture, and with nothing to depend on butslow dribbling payments from patients who must not be offended—for the handsomefees he had had from Fresh*tt Hall and Lowick Manor had been easilyabsorbed—nothing less than a thousand pounds would have freed him from actualembarrassment, and left a residue which, according to the favorite phrase ofhopefulness in such circ*mstances, would have given him “time to look abouthim.”

Naturally, the merry Christmas bringing the happy New Year, whenfellow-citizens expect to be paid for the trouble and goods they have smilinglybestowed on their neighbors, had so tightened the pressure of sordid cares onLydgate’s mind that it was hardly possible for him to think unbrokenly of anyother subject, even the most habitual and soliciting. He was not anill-tempered man; his intellectual activity, the ardent kindness of his heart,as well as his strong frame, would always, under tolerably easy conditions,have kept him above the petty uncontrolled susceptibilities which make badtemper. But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simplyfrom annoyances, but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances,of wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of allhis former purposes. “This is what I am thinking of; and that iswhat I might have been thinking of,” was the bitter incessant murmur withinhim, making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontentwith the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallenby mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world mayhave its consolations. Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear: it was thesense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lyingaround him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation ofegoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid, and beneath the attention oflofty persons who can know nothing of debt except on a magnificent scale.Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority, who are not lofty, there isno escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all itsbase hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, itshorse-dealer’s desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for functionwhich ought to be another’s, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shapeof a wide calamity.

It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck beneath thisvile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state which was continuallywidening Rosamond’s alienation from him. After the first disclosure about thebill of sale, he had made many efforts to draw her into sympathy with him aboutpossible measures for narrowing their expenses, and with the threateningapproach of Christmas his propositions grew more and more definite. “We two cando with only one servant, and live on very little,” he said, “and I shallmanage with one horse.” For Lydgate, as we have seen, had begun to reason, witha more distinct vision, about the expenses of living, and any share of pride hehad given to appearances of that sort was meagre compared with the pride whichmade him revolt from exposure as a debtor, or from asking men to help him withtheir money.

“Of course you can dismiss the other two servants, if you like,” said Rosamond;“but I should have thought it would be very injurious to your position for usto live in a poor way. You must expect your practice to be lowered.”

“My dear Rosamond, it is not a question of choice. We have begun tooexpensively. Peaco*ck, you know, lived in a much smaller house than this. It ismy fault: I ought to have known better, and I deserve a thrashing—if there wereanybody who had a right to give it me—for bringing you into the necessity ofliving in a poorer way than you have been used to. But we married because weloved each other, I suppose. And that may help us to pull along till things getbetter. Come, dear, put down that work and come to me.”

He was really in chill gloom about her at that moment, but he dreaded a futurewithout affection, and was determined to resist the oncoming of divisionbetween them. Rosamond obeyed him, and he took her on his knee, but in hersecret soul she was utterly aloof from him. The poor thing saw only that theworld was not ordered to her liking, and Lydgate was part of that world. But heheld her waist with one hand and laid the other gently on both of hers; forthis rather abrupt man had much tenderness in his manners towards women,seeming to have always present in his imagination the weakness of their framesand the delicate poise of their health both in body and mind. And he beganagain to speak persuasively.

“I find, now I look into things a little, Rosy, that it is wonderful what anamount of money slips away in our housekeeping. I suppose the servants arecareless, and we have had a great many people coming. But there must be many inour rank who manage with much less: they must do with commoner things, Isuppose, and look after the scraps. It seems, money goes but a little way inthese matters, for Wrench has everything as plain as possible, and he has avery large practice.”

“Oh, if you think of living as the Wrenches do!” said Rosamond, with a littleturn of her neck. “But I have heard you express your disgust at that way ofliving.”

“Yes, they have bad taste in everything—they make economy look ugly. We needn’tdo that. I only meant that they avoid expenses, although Wrench has a capitalpractice.”

“Why should not you have a good practice, Tertius? Mr. Peaco*ck had. You shouldbe more careful not to offend people, and you should send out medicines as theothers do. I am sure you began well, and you got several good houses. It cannotanswer to be eccentric; you should think what will be generally liked,” saidRosamond, in a decided little tone of admonition.

Lydgate’s anger rose: he was prepared to be indulgent towards feminineweakness, but not towards feminine dictation. The shallowness of a waternixie’ssoul may have a charm until she becomes didactic. But he controlled himself,and only said, with a touch of despotic firmness—

“What I am to do in my practice, Rosy, it is for me to judge. That is not thequestion between us. It is enough for you to know that our income is likely tobe a very narrow one—hardly four hundred, perhaps less, for a long time tocome, and we must try to re-arrange our lives in accordance with that fact.”

Rosamond was silent for a moment or two, looking before her, and then said, “Myuncle Bulstrode ought to allow you a salary for the time you give to theHospital: it is not right that you should work for nothing.”

“It was understood from the beginning that my services would be gratuitous.That, again, need not enter into our discussion. I have pointed out what is theonly probability,” said Lydgate, impatiently. Then checking himself, he went onmore quietly—

“I think I see one resource which would free us from a good deal of the presentdifficulty. I hear that young Ned Plymdale is going to be married to Miss SophyToller. They are rich, and it is not often that a good house is vacant inMiddlemarch. I feel sure that they would be glad to take this house from uswith most of our furniture, and they would be willing to pay handsomely for thelease. I can employ Trumbull to speak to Plymdale about it.”

Rosamond left her husband’s knee and walked slowly to the other end of theroom; when she turned round and walked towards him it was evident that thetears had come, and that she was biting her under-lip and clasping her hands tokeep herself from crying. Lydgate was wretched—shaken with anger and yetfeeling that it would be unmanly to vent the anger just now.

“I am very sorry, Rosamond; I know this is painful.”

“I thought, at least, when I had borne to send the plate back and have that mantaking an inventory of the furniture—I should have thought that wouldsuffice.”

“I explained it to you at the time, dear. That was only a security and behindthat security there is a debt. And that debt must be paid within the next fewmonths, else we shall have our furniture sold. If young Plymdale will take ourhouse and most of our furniture, we shall be able to pay that debt, and someothers too, and we shall be quit of a place too expensive for us. We might takea smaller house: Trumbull, I know, has a very decent one to let at thirtypounds a-year, and this is ninety.” Lydgate uttered this speech in the curthammering way with which we usually try to nail down a vague mind to imperativefacts. Tears rolled silently down Rosamond’s cheeks; she just pressed herhandkerchief against them, and stood looking at the large vase on themantel-piece. It was a moment of more intense bitterness than she had ever feltbefore. At last she said, without hurry and with careful emphasis—

“I never could have believed that you would like to act in that way.”

“Like it?” burst out Lydgate, rising from his chair, thrusting his hands in hispockets and stalking away from the hearth; “it’s not a question of liking. Ofcourse, I don’t like it; it’s the only thing I can do.” He wheeled round there,and turned towards her.

“I should have thought there were many other means than that,” said Rosamond.“Let us have a sale and leave Middlemarch altogether.”

“To do what? What is the use of my leaving my work in Middlemarch to go where Ihave none? We should be just as penniless elsewhere as we are here,” saidLydgate still more angrily.

“If we are to be in that position it will be entirely your own doing, Tertius,”said Rosamond, turning round to speak with the fullest conviction. “You willnot behave as you ought to do to your own family. You offended Captain Lydgate.Sir Godwin was very kind to me when we were at Quallingham, and I am sure ifyou showed proper regard to him and told him your affairs, he would do anythingfor you. But rather than that, you like giving up our house and furniture toMr. Ned Plymdale.”

There was something like fierceness in Lydgate’s eyes, as he answered with newviolence, “Well, then, if you will have it so, I do like it. I admit that Ilike it better than making a fool of myself by going to beg where it’s of nouse. Understand then, that it is what I like to do.”

There was a tone in the last sentence which was equivalent to the clutch of hisstrong hand on Rosamond’s delicate arm. But for all that, his will was not awhit stronger than hers. She immediately walked out of the room in silence, butwith an intense determination to hinder what Lydgate liked to do.

He went out of the house, but as his blood cooled he felt that the chief resultof the discussion was a deposit of dread within him at the idea of opening withhis wife in future subjects which might again urge him to violent speech. Itwas as if a fracture in delicate crystal had begun, and he was afraid of anymovement that might make it fatal. His marriage would be a mere piece of bitterirony if they could not go on loving each other. He had long ago made up hismind to what he thought was her negative character—her want of sensibility,which showed itself in disregard both of his specific wishes and of his generalaims. The first great disappointment had been borne: the tender devotedness anddocile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced, and life must be taken upon a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs. Butthe real wife had not only her claims, she had still a hold on his heart, andit was his intense desire that the hold should remain strong. In marriage, thecertainty, “She will never love me much,” is easier to bear than the fear, “Ishall love her no more.” Hence, after that outburst, his inward effort wasentirely to excuse her, and to blame the hard circ*mstances which were partlyhis fault. He tried that evening, by petting her, to heal the wound he had madein the morning, and it was not in Rosamond’s nature to be repellent or sulky;indeed, she welcomed the signs that her husband loved her and was undercontrol. But this was something quite distinct from loving him. Lydgatewould not have chosen soon to recur to the plan of parting with the house; hewas resolved to carry it out, and say as little more about it as possible. ButRosamond herself touched on it at breakfast by saying, mildly—

“Have you spoken to Trumbull yet?”

“No,” said Lydgate, “but I shall call on him as I go by this morning. No timemust be lost.” He took Rosamond’s question as a sign that she withdrew herinward opposition, and kissed her head caressingly when he got up to go away.

As soon as it was late enough to make a call, Rosamond went to Mrs. Plymdale,Mr. Ned’s mother, and entered with pretty congratulations into the subject ofthe coming marriage. Mrs. Plymdale’s maternal view was, that Rosamond mightpossibly now have retrospective glimpses of her own folly; and feeling theadvantages to be at present all on the side of her son, was too kind a womannot to behave graciously.

“Yes, Ned is most happy, I must say. And Sophy Toller is all I could desire ina daughter-in-law. Of course her father is able to do something handsome forher—that is only what would be expected with a brewery like his. And theconnection is everything we should desire. But that is not what I look at. Sheis such a very nice girl—no airs, no pretensions, though on a level with thefirst. I don’t mean with the titled aristocracy. I see very little good inpeople aiming out of their own sphere. I mean that Sophy is equal to the bestin the town, and she is contented with that.”

“I have always thought her very agreeable,” said Rosamond.

“I look upon it as a reward for Ned, who never held his head too high, that heshould have got into the very best connection,” continued Mrs. Plymdale, hernative sharpness softened by a fervid sense that she was taking a correct view.“And such particular people as the Tollers are, they might have objectedbecause some of our friends are not theirs. It is well known that your auntBulstrode and I have been intimate from our youth, and Mr. Plymdale has beenalways on Mr. Bulstrode’s side. And I myself prefer serious opinions. But theTollers have welcomed Ned all the same.”

“I am sure he is a very deserving, well-principled young man,” said Rosamond,with a neat air of patronage in return for Mrs. Plymdale’s wholesomecorrections.

“Oh, he has not the style of a captain in the army, or that sort of carriage asif everybody was beneath him, or that showy kind of talking, and singing, andintellectual talent. But I am thankful he has not. It is a poor preparationboth for here and Hereafter.”

“Oh dear, yes; appearances have very little to do with happiness,” saidRosamond. “I think there is every prospect of their being a happy couple. Whathouse will they take?”

“Oh, as for that, they must put up with what they can get. They have beenlooking at the house in St. Peter’s Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt’s; it belongsto him, and he is putting it nicely in repair. I suppose they are not likely tohear of a better. Indeed, I think Ned will decide the matter to-day.”

“I should think it is a nice house; I like St. Peter’s Place.”

“Well, it is near the Church, and a genteel situation. But the windows arenarrow, and it is all ups and downs. You don’t happen to know of any other thatwould be at liberty?” said Mrs. Plymdale, fixing her round black eyes onRosamond with the animation of a sudden thought in them.

“Oh no; I hear so little of those things.”

Rosamond had not foreseen that question and answer in setting out to pay hervisit; she had simply meant to gather any information which would help her toavert the parting with her own house under circ*mstances thoroughlydisagreeable to her. As to the untruth in her reply, she no more reflected onit than she did on the untruth there was in her saying that appearances hadvery little to do with happiness. Her object, she was convinced, was thoroughlyjustifiable: it was Lydgate whose intention was inexcusable; and there was aplan in her mind which, when she had carried it out fully, would prove how veryfalse a step it would have been for him to have descended from his position.

She returned home by Mr. Borthrop Trumbull’s office, meaning to call there. Itwas the first time in her life that Rosamond had thought of doing anything inthe form of business, but she felt equal to the occasion. That she should beobliged to do what she intensely disliked, was an idea which turned her quiettenacity into active invention. Here was a case in which it could not be enoughsimply to disobey and be serenely, placidly obstinate: she must act accordingto her judgment, and she said to herself that her judgment was right—“indeed,if it had not been, she would not have wished to act on it.”

Mr. Trumbull was in the back-room of his office, and received Rosamond with hisfinest manners, not only because he had much sensibility to her charms, butbecause the good-natured fibre in him was stirred by his certainty that Lydgatewas in difficulties, and that this uncommonly pretty woman—this young lady withthe highest personal attractions—was likely to feel the pinch of trouble—tofind herself involved in circ*mstances beyond her control. He begged her to dohim the honor to take a seat, and stood before her trimming and comportinghimself with an eager solicitude, which was chiefly benevolent. Rosamond’sfirst question was, whether her husband had called on Mr. Trumbull thatmorning, to speak about disposing of their house.

“Yes, ma’am, yes, he did; he did so,” said the good auctioneer, trying to throwsomething soothing into his iteration. “I was about to fulfil his order, ifpossible, this afternoon. He wished me not to procrastinate.”

“I called to tell you not to go any further, Mr. Trumbull; and I beg of you notto mention what has been said on the subject. Will you oblige me?”

“Certainly I will, Mrs. Lydgate, certainly. Confidence is sacred with me onbusiness or any other topic. I am then to consider the commission withdrawn?”said Mr. Trumbull, adjusting the long ends of his blue cravat with both hands,and looking at Rosamond deferentially.

“Yes, if you please. I find that Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house—the one inSt. Peter’s Place next to Mr. Hackbutt’s. Mr. Lydgate would be annoyed that hisorders should be fulfilled uselessly. And besides that, there are othercirc*mstances which render the proposal unnecessary.”

“Very good, Mrs. Lydgate, very good. I am at your commands, whenever yourequire any service of me,” said Mr. Trumbull, who felt pleasure inconjecturing that some new resources had been opened. “Rely on me, I beg. Theaffair shall go no further.”

That evening Lydgate was a little comforted by observing that Rosamond was morelively than she had usually been of late, and even seemed interested in doingwhat would please him without being asked. He thought, “If she will be happyand I can rub through, what does it all signify? It is only a narrow swamp thatwe have to pass in a long journey. If I can get my mind clear again, I shalldo.”

He was so much cheered that he began to search for an account of experimentswhich he had long ago meant to look up, and had neglected out of that creepingself-despair which comes in the train of petty anxieties. He felt again some ofthe old delightful absorption in a far-reaching inquiry, while Rosamond playedthe quiet music which was as helpful to his meditation as the plash of an oaron the evening lake. It was rather late; he had pushed away all the books, andwas looking at the fire with his hands clasped behind his head in forgetfulnessof everything except the construction of a new controlling experiment, whenRosamond, who had left the piano and was leaning back in her chair watchinghim, said—

“Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house already.”

Lydgate, startled and jarred, looked up in silence for a moment, like a man whohas been disturbed in his sleep. Then flushing with an unpleasantconsciousness, he asked—

“How do you know?”

“I called at Mrs. Plymdale’s this morning, and she told me that he had takenthe house in St. Peter’s Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt’s.”

Lydgate was silent. He drew his hands from behind his head and pressed themagainst the hair which was hanging, as it was apt to do, in a mass on hisforehead, while he rested his elbows on his knees. He was feeling bitterdisappointment, as if he had opened a door out of a suffocating place and hadfound it walled up; but he also felt sure that Rosamond was pleased with thecause of his disappointment. He preferred not looking at her and not speaking,until he had got over the first spasm of vexation. After all, he said in hisbitterness, what can a woman care about so much as house and furniture? ahusband without them is an absurdity. When he looked up and pushed his hairaside, his dark eyes had a miserable blank non-expectance of sympathy in them,but he only said, coolly—

“Perhaps some one else may turn up. I told Trumbull to be on the look-out if hefailed with Plymdale.”

Rosamond made no remark. She trusted to the chance that nothing more would passbetween her husband and the auctioneer until some issue should have justifiedher interference; at any rate, she had hindered the event which she immediatelydreaded. After a pause, she said—

“How much money is it that those disagreeable people want?”

“What disagreeable people?”

“Those who took the list—and the others. I mean, how much money would satisfythem so that you need not be troubled any more?”

Lydgate surveyed her for a moment, as if he were looking for symptoms, and thensaid, “Oh, if I could have got six hundred from Plymdale for furniture and aspremium, I might have managed. I could have paid off Dover, and given enough onaccount to the others to make them wait patiently, if we contracted ourexpenses.”

“But I mean how much should you want if we stayed in this house?”

“More than I am likely to get anywhere,” said Lydgate, with rather a gratingsarcasm in his tone. It angered him to perceive that Rosamond’s mind waswandering over impracticable wishes instead of facing possible efforts.

“Why should you not mention the sum?” said Rosamond, with a mild indicationthat she did not like his manners.

“Well,” said Lydgate in a guessing tone, “it would take at least a thousand toset me at ease. But,” he added, incisively, “I have to consider what I shall dowithout it, not with it.”

Rosamond said no more.

But the next day she carried out her plan of writing to Sir Godwin Lydgate.Since the Captain’s visit, she had received a letter from him, and also onefrom Mrs. Mengan, his married sister, condoling with her on the loss of herbaby, and expressing vaguely the hope that they should see her again atQuallingham. Lydgate had told her that this politeness meant nothing; but shewas secretly convinced that any backwardness in Lydgate’s family towards himwas due to his cold and contemptuous behavior, and she had answered the lettersin her most charming manner, feeling some confidence that a specific invitationwould follow. But there had been total silence. The Captain evidently was not agreat penman, and Rosamond reflected that the sisters might have been abroad.However, the season was come for thinking of friends at home, and at any rateSir Godwin, who had chucked her under the chin, and pronounced her to be likethe celebrated beauty, Mrs. Croly, who had made a conquest of him in 1790,would be touched by any appeal from her, and would find it pleasant for hersake to behave as he ought to do towards his nephew. Rosamond was naivelyconvinced of what an old gentleman ought to do to prevent her from sufferingannoyance. And she wrote what she considered the most judicious letterpossible—one which would strike Sir Godwin as a proof of her excellentsense—pointing out how desirable it was that Tertius should quit such a placeas Middlemarch for one more fitted to his talents, how the unpleasant characterof the inhabitants had hindered his professional success, and how inconsequence he was in money difficulties, from which it would require athousand pounds thoroughly to extricate him. She did not say that Tertius wasunaware of her intention to write; for she had the idea that his supposedsanction of her letter would be in accordance with what she did say of hisgreat regard for his uncle Godwin as the relative who had always been his bestfriend. Such was the force of Poor Rosamond’s tactics now she applied them toaffairs.

This had happened before the party on New Year’s Day, and no answer had yetcome from Sir Godwin. But on the morning of that day Lydgate had to learn thatRosamond had revoked his order to Borthrop Trumbull. Feeling it necessary thatshe should be gradually accustomed to the idea of their quitting the house inLowick Gate, he overcame his reluctance to speak to her again on the subject,and when they were breakfasting said—

“I shall try to see Trumbull this morning, and tell him to advertise the housein the ‘Pioneer’ and the ‘Trumpet.’ If the thing were advertised, some onemight be inclined to take it who would not otherwise have thought of a change.In these country places many people go on in their old houses when theirfamilies are too large for them, for want of knowing where they can findanother. And Trumbull seems to have got no bite at all.”

Rosamond knew that the inevitable moment was come. “I ordered Trumbull not toinquire further,” she said, with a careful calmness which was evidentlydefensive.

Lydgate stared at her in mute amazement. Only half an hour before he had beenfastening up her plaits for her, and talking the “little language” ofaffection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, accepted as if she had beena serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling towards hervotary. With such fibres still astir in him, the shock he received could not atonce be distinctly anger; it was confused pain. He laid down the knife and forkwith which he was carving, and throwing himself back in his chair, said atlast, with a cool irony in his tone—

“May I ask when and why you did so?”

“When I knew that the Plymdales had taken a house, I called to tell him not tomention ours to them; and at the same time I told him not to let the affair goon any further. I knew that it would be very injurious to you if it were knownthat you wished to part with your house and furniture, and I had a very strongobjection to it. I think that was reason enough.”

“It was of no consequence then that I had told you imperative reasons ofanother kind; of no consequence that I had come to a different conclusion, andgiven an order accordingly?” said Lydgate, bitingly, the thunder and lightninggathering about his brow and eyes.

The effect of any one’s anger on Rosamond had always been to make her shrink incold dislike, and to become all the more calmly correct, in the conviction thatshe was not the person to misbehave whatever others might do. She replied—

“I think I had a perfect right to speak on a subject which concerns me at leastas much as you.”

“Clearly—you had a right to speak, but only to me. You had no right tocontradict my orders secretly, and treat me as if I were a fool,” said Lydgate,in the same tone as before. Then with some added scorn, “Is it possible to makeyou understand what the consequences will be? Is it of any use for me to tellyou again why we must try to part with the house?”

“It is not necessary for you to tell me again,” said Rosamond, in a voice thatfell and trickled like cold water-drops. “I remembered what you said. You spokejust as violently as you do now. But that does not alter my opinion that youought to try every other means rather than take a step which is so painful tome. And as to advertising the house, I think it would be perfectly degrading toyou.”

“And suppose I disregard your opinion as you disregard mine?”

“You can do so, of course. But I think you ought to have told me before we weremarried that you would place me in the worst position, rather than give up yourown will.”

Lydgate did not speak, but tossed his head on one side, and twitched thecorners of his mouth in despair. Rosamond, seeing that he was not looking ather, rose and set his cup of coffee before him; but he took no notice of it,and went on with an inward drama and argument, occasionally moving in his seat,resting one arm on the table, and rubbing his hand against his hair. There wasa conflux of emotions and thoughts in him that would not let him either givethorough way to his anger or persevere with simple rigidity of resolve.Rosamond took advantage of his silence.

“When we were married everyone felt that your position was very high. I couldnot have imagined then that you would want to sell our furniture, and take ahouse in Bride Street, where the rooms are like cages. If we are to live inthat way let us at least leave Middlemarch.”

“These would be very strong considerations,” said Lydgate, halfironically—still there was a withered paleness about his lips as he looked athis coffee, and did not drink—“these would be very strong considerations if Idid not happen to be in debt.”

“Many persons must have been in debt in the same way, but if they arerespectable, people trust them. I am sure I have heard papa say that theTorbits were in debt, and they went on very well. It cannot be good to actrashly,” said Rosamond, with serene wisdom.

Lydgate sat paralyzed by opposing impulses: since no reasoning he could applyto Rosamond seemed likely to conquer her assent, he wanted to smash and grindsome object on which he could at least produce an impression, or else to tellher brutally that he was master, and she must obey. But he not only dreaded theeffect of such extremities on their mutual life—he had a growing dread ofRosamond’s quiet elusive obstinacy, which would not allow any assertion ofpower to be final; and again, she had touched him in a spot of keenest feelingby implying that she had been deluded with a false vision of happiness inmarrying him. As to saying that he was master, it was not the fact. The veryresolution to which he had wrought himself by dint of logic and honorable pridewas beginning to relax under her torpedo contact. He swallowed half his cup ofcoffee, and then rose to go.

“I may at least request that you will not go to Trumbull at present—until ithas been seen that there are no other means,” said Rosamond. Although she wasnot subject to much fear, she felt it safer not to betray that she had writtento Sir Godwin. “Promise me that you will not go to him for a few weeks, orwithout telling me.”

Lydgate gave a short laugh. “I think it is I who should exact a promise thatyou will do nothing without telling me,” he said, turning his eyes sharply uponher, and then moving to the door.

“You remember that we are going to dine at papa’s,” said Rosamond, wishing thathe should turn and make a more thorough concession to her. But he only said “Ohyes,” impatiently, and went away. She held it to be very odious in him that hedid not think the painful propositions he had had to make to her were enough,without showing so unpleasant a temper. And when she put the moderate requestthat he would defer going to Trumbull again, it was cruel in him not to assureher of what he meant to do. She was convinced of her having acted in every wayfor the best; and each grating or angry speech of Lydgate’s served only as anaddition to the register of offences in her mind. Poor Rosamond for months hadbegun to associate her husband with feelings of disappointment, and theterribly inflexible relation of marriage had lost its charm of encouragingdelightful dreams. It had freed her from the disagreeables of her father’shouse, but it had not given her everything that she had wished and hoped. TheLydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions forher, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken byevery-day details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, notfloated through with a rapid selection of favorable aspects. The habits ofLydgate’s profession, his home preoccupation with scientific subjects, whichseemed to her almost like a morbid vampire’s taste, his peculiar views ofthings which had never entered into the dialogue of courtship—all thesecontinually alienating influences, even without the fact of his having placedhimself at a disadvantage in the town, and without that first shock ofrevelation about Dover’s debt, would have made his presence dull to her. Therewas another presence which ever since the early days of her marriage, untilfour months ago, had been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone: Rosamondwould not confess to herself how much the consequent blank had to do with herutter ennui; and it seemed to her (perhaps she was right) that an invitation toQuallingham, and an opening for Lydgate to settle elsewhere than inMiddlemarch—in London, or somewhere likely to be free from unpleasantness—wouldsatisfy her quite well, and make her indifferent to the absence of WillLadislaw, towards whom she felt some resentment for his exaltation of Mrs.Casaubon.

That was the state of things with Lydgate and Rosamond on the New Year’s Daywhen they dined at her father’s, she looking mildly neutral towards him inremembrance of his ill-tempered behavior at breakfast, and he carrying a muchdeeper effect from the inward conflict in which that morning scene was only oneof many epochs. His flushed effort while talking to Mr. Farebrother—his effortafter the cynical pretence that all ways of getting money are essentially thesame, and that chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool’sillusion—was but the symptom of a wavering resolve, a benumbed response to theold stimuli of enthusiasm.

What was he to do? He saw even more keenly than Rosamond did the dreariness oftaking her into the small house in Bride Street, where she would have scantyfurniture around her and discontent within: a life of privation and life withRosamond were two images which had become more and more irreconcilable eversince the threat of privation had disclosed itself. But even if his resolveshad forced the two images into combination, the useful preliminaries to thathard change were not visibly within reach. And though he had not given thepromise which his wife had asked for, he did not go again to Trumbull. He evenbegan to think of taking a rapid journey to the North and seeing Sir Godwin. Hehad once believed that nothing would urge him into making an application formoney to his uncle, but he had not then known the full pressure of alternativesyet more disagreeable. He could not depend on the effect of a letter; it wasonly in an interview, however disagreeable this might be to himself, that hecould give a thorough explanation and could test the effectiveness of kinship.No sooner had Lydgate begun to represent this step to himself as the easiestthan there was a reaction of anger that he—he who had long ago determined tolive aloof from such abject calculations, such self-interested anxiety aboutthe inclinations and the pockets of men with whom he had been proud to have noaims in common—should have fallen not simply to their level, but to the levelof soliciting them.

CHAPTER LXV.

One of us two must bowen douteless,
And, sith a man is more reasonable
Than woman is, ye [men] moste be suffrable.
—CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.

The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over thepresent quickening in the general pace of things: what wonder then that in 1832old Sir Godwin Lydgate was slow to write a letter which was of consequence toothers rather than to himself? Nearly three weeks of the new year were gone,and Rosamond, awaiting an answer to her winning appeal, was every daydisappointed. Lydgate, in total ignorance of her expectations, was seeing thebills come in, and feeling that Dover’s use of his advantage over othercreditors was imminent. He had never mentioned to Rosamond his brooding purposeof going to Quallingham: he did not want to admit what would appear to her aconcession to her wishes after indignant refusal, until the last moment; but hewas really expecting to set off soon. A slice of the railway would enable himto manage the whole journey and back in four days.

But one morning after Lydgate had gone out, a letter came addressed to him,which Rosamond saw clearly to be from Sir Godwin. She was full of hope. Perhapsthere might be a particular note to her enclosed; but Lydgate was naturallyaddressed on the question of money or other aid, and the fact that he waswritten to, nay, the very delay in writing at all, seemed to certify that theanswer was thoroughly compliant. She was too much excited by these thoughts todo anything but light stitching in a warm corner of the dining-room, with theoutside of this momentous letter lying on the table before her. About twelveshe heard her husband’s step in the passage, and tripping to open the door, shesaid in her lightest tones, “Tertius, come in here—here is a letter for you.”

“Ah?” he said, not taking off his hat, but just turning her round within hisarm to walk towards the spot where the letter lay. “My uncle Godwin!” heexclaimed, while Rosamond reseated herself, and watched him as he opened theletter. She had expected him to be surprised.

While Lydgate’s eyes glanced rapidly over the brief letter, she saw his face,usually of a pale brown, taking on a dry whiteness; with nostrils and lipsquivering he tossed down the letter before her, and said violently—

“It will be impossible to endure life with you, if you will always be actingsecretly—acting in opposition to me and hiding your actions.”

He checked his speech and turned his back on her—then wheeled round and walkedabout, sat down, and got up again restlessly, grasping hard the objects deepdown in his pockets. He was afraid of saying something irremediably cruel.

Rosamond too had changed color as she read. The letter ran in this way:—

“DEAR TERTIUS,—Don’t set your wife to write to me when you have anything toask. It is a roundabout wheedling sort of thing which I should not havecredited you with. I never choose to write to a woman on matters of business.As to my supplying you with a thousand pounds, or only half that sum, I can donothing of the sort. My own family drains me to the last penny. With twoyounger sons and three daughters, I am not likely to have cash to spare. Youseem to have got through your own money pretty quickly, and to have made a messwhere you are; the sooner you go somewhere else the better. But I have nothingto do with men of your profession, and can’t help you there. I did the best Icould for you as guardian, and let you have your own way in taking to medicine.You might have gone into the army or the Church. Your money would have held outfor that, and there would have been a surer ladder before you. Your uncleCharles has had a grudge against you for not going into his profession, but notI. I have always wished you well, but you must consider yourself on your ownlegs entirely now.

Your affectionate uncle,
GODWIN LYDGATE.”

When Rosamond had finished reading the letter she sat quite still, with herhands folded before her, restraining any show of her keen disappointment, andintrenching herself in quiet passivity under her husband’s wrath. Lydgatepaused in his movements, looked at her again, and said, with biting severity—

“Will this be enough to convince you of the harm you may do by secret meddling?Have you sense enough to recognize now your incompetence to judge and act forme—to interfere with your ignorance in affairs which it belongs to me to decideon?”

The words were hard; but this was not the first time that Lydgate had beenfrustrated by her. She did not look at him, and made no reply.

“I had nearly resolved on going to Quallingham. It would have cost me painenough to do it, yet it might have been of some use. But it has been of no usefor me to think of anything. You have always been counteracting me secretly.You delude me with a false assent, and then I am at the mercy of your devices.If you mean to resist every wish I express, say so and defy me. I shall atleast know what I am doing then.”

It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love’s bond hasturned to this power of galling. In spite of Rosamond’s self-control a tearfell silently and rolled over her lips. She still said nothing; but under thatquietude was hidden an intense effect: she was in such entire disgust with herhusband that she wished she had never seen him. Sir Godwin’s rudeness towardsher and utter want of feeling ranged him with Dover and all othercreditors—disagreeable people who only thought of themselves, and did not mindhow annoying they were to her. Even her father was unkind, and might have donemore for them. In fact there was but one person in Rosamond’s world whom shedid not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature with blondplaits and with little hands crossed before her, who had never expressedherself unbecomingly, and had always acted for the best—the best naturallybeing what she best liked.

Lydgate pausing and looking at her began to feel that half-maddening sense ofhelplessness which comes over passionate people when their passion is met by aninnocent-looking silence whose meek victimized air seems to put them in thewrong, and at last infects even the justest indignation with a doubt of itsjustice. He needed to recover the full sense that he was in the right bymoderating his words.

“Can you not see, Rosamond,” he began again, trying to be simply grave and notbitter, “that nothing can be so fatal as a want of openness and confidencebetween us? It has happened again and again that I have expressed a decidedwish, and you have seemed to assent, yet after that you have secretly disobeyedmy wish. In that way I can never know what I have to trust to. There would besome hope for us if you would admit this. Am I such an unreasonable, furiousbrute? Why should you not be open with me?” Still silence.

“Will you only say that you have been mistaken, and that I may depend on yournot acting secretly in future?” said Lydgate, urgently, but with something ofrequest in his tone which Rosamond was quick to perceive. She spoke withcoolness.

“I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such words as youhave used towards me. I have not been accustomed to language of that kind. Youhave spoken of my ‘secret meddling,’ and my ‘interfering ignorance,’ and my‘false assent.’ I have never expressed myself in that way to you, and I thinkthat you ought to apologize. You spoke of its being impossible to live with me.Certainly you have not made my life pleasant to me of late. I think it was tobe expected that I should try to avert some of the hardships which our marriagehas brought on me.” Another tear fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and shepressed it away as quietly as the first.

Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated. What place was there inher mind for a remonstrance to lodge in? He laid down his hat, flung an armover the back of his chair, and looked down for some moments without speaking.Rosamond had the double purchase over him of insensibility to the point ofjustice in his reproach, and of sensibility to the undeniable hardships nowpresent in her married life. Although her duplicity in the affair of the househad exceeded what he knew, and had really hindered the Plymdales from knowingof it, she had no consciousness that her action could rightly be called false.We are not obliged to identify our own acts according to a strictclassification, any more than the materials of our grocery and clothes.Rosamond felt that she was aggrieved, and that this was what Lydgate had torecognize.

As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which wasinflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers. He hadbegun to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss of love for him, andthe consequent dreariness of their life. The ready fulness of his emotions madethis dread alternate quickly with the first violent movements of his anger. Itwould assuredly have been a vain boast in him to say that he was her master.

“You have not made my life pleasant to me of late”—“the hardships which ourmarriage has brought on me”—these words were stinging his imagination as a painmakes an exaggerated dream. If he were not only to sink from his highestresolve, but to sink into the hideous fettering of domestic hate?

“Rosamond,” he said, turning his eyes on her with a melancholy look, “youshould allow for a man’s words when he is disappointed and provoked. You and Icannot have opposite interests. I cannot part my happiness from yours. If I amangry with you, it is that you seem not to see how any concealment divides us.How could I wish to make anything hard to you either by my words or conduct?When I hurt you, I hurt part of my own life. I should never be angry with youif you would be quite open with me.”

“I have only wished to prevent you from hurrying us into wretchedness withoutany necessity,” said Rosamond, the tears coming again from a softened feelingnow that her husband had softened. “It is so very hard to be disgraced hereamong all the people we know, and to live in such a miserable way. I wish I haddied with the baby.”

She spoke and wept with that gentleness which makes such words and tearsomnipotent over a loving-hearted man. Lydgate drew his chair near to hers andpressed her delicate head against his cheek with his powerful tender hand. Heonly caressed her; he did not say anything; for what was there to say? He couldnot promise to shield her from the dreaded wretchedness, for he could see nosure means of doing so. When he left her to go out again, he told himself thatit was ten times harder for her than for him: he had a life away from home, andconstant appeals to his activity on behalf of others. He wished to excuseeverything in her if he could—but it was inevitable that in that excusing moodhe should think of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species.Nevertheless she had mastered him.

CHAPTER LXVI.

’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall.
—Measure for Measure.

Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service his practice didhim in counteracting his personal cares. He had no longer free energy enoughfor spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside ofpatients, the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought theadded impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply thatbeneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably andunhappy men to live calmly—it was a perpetual claim on the immediate freshapplication of thought, and on the consideration of another’s need and trial.Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we haveever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact,directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need with a moresublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessedmercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses,serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under his anxieties andhis sense of mental degeneracy.

Mr. Farebrother’s suspicion as to the opiate was true, however. Under the firstgalling pressure of foreseen difficulties, and the first perception that hismarriage, if it were not to be a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort togo on loving without too much care about being loved, he had once or twicetried a dose of opium. But he had no hereditary constitutional craving aftersuch transient escapes from the hauntings of misery. He was strong, could drinka great deal of wine, but did not care about it; and when the men round himwere drinking spirits, he took sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity evenfor the earliest stages of excitement from drink. It was the same withgambling. He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris, watching it asif it had been a disease. He was no more tempted by such winning than he was bydrink. He had said to himself that the only winning he cared for must beattained by a conscious process of high, difficult combination tending towardsa beneficent result. The power he longed for could not be represented byagitated fingers clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous,half-idiotic triumph in the eyes of a man who sweeps within his arms theventures of twenty chapfallen companions.

But just as he had tried opium, so his thought now began to turn upongambling—not with appetite for its excitement, but with a sort of wistfulinward gaze after that easy way of getting money, which implied no asking andbrought no responsibility. If he had been in London or Paris at that time, itis probable that such thoughts, seconded by opportunity, would have taken himinto a gambling-house, no longer to watch the gamblers, but to watch with themin kindred eagerness. Repugnance would have been surmounted by the immense needto win, if chance would be kind enough to let him. An incident which happenednot very long after that airy notion of getting aid from his uncle had beenexcluded, was a strong sign of the effect that might have followed any extantopportunity of gambling.

The billiard-room at the Green Dragon was the constant resort of a certain set,most of whom, like our acquaintance Mr. Bambridge, were regarded as men ofpleasure. It was here that poor Fred Vincy had made part of his memorable debt,having lost money in betting, and been obliged to borrow of that gay companion.It was generally known in Middlemarch that a good deal of money was lost andwon in this way; and the consequent repute of the Green Dragon as a place ofdissipation naturally heightened in some quarters the temptation to go there.Probably its regular visitants, like the initiates of freemasonry, wished thatthere were something a little more tremendous to keep to themselves concerningit; but they were not a closed community, and many decent seniors as well asjuniors occasionally turned into the billiard-room to see what was going on.Lydgate, who had the muscular aptitude for billiards, and was fond of the game,had once or twice in the early days after his arrival in Middlemarch taken histurn with the cue at the Green Dragon; but afterwards he had no leisure for thegame, and no inclination for the socialities there. One evening, however, hehad occasion to seek Mr. Bambridge at that resort. The horsedealer had engagedto get him a customer for his remaining good horse, for which Lydgate haddetermined to substitute a cheap hack, hoping by this reduction of style to getperhaps twenty pounds; and he cared now for every small sum, as a help towardsfeeding the patience of his tradesmen. To run up to the billiard-room, as hewas passing, would save time.

Mr. Bambridge was not yet come, but would be sure to arrive by-and-by, said hisfriend Mr. Horrock; and Lydgate stayed, playing a game for the sake of passingthe time. That evening he had the peculiar light in the eyes and the unusualvivacity which had been once noticed in him by Mr. Farebrother. The exceptionalfact of his presence was much noticed in the room, where there was a good dealof Middlemarch company; and several lookers-on, as well as some of the players,were betting with animation. Lydgate was playing well, and felt confident; thebets were dropping round him, and with a swift glancing thought of the probablegain which might double the sum he was saving from his horse, he began to beton his own play, and won again and again. Mr. Bambridge had come in, butLydgate did not notice him. He was not only excited with his play, but visionswere gleaming on him of going the next day to Brassing, where there wasgambling on a grander scale to be had, and where, by one powerful snatch at thedevil’s bait, he might carry it off without the hook, and buy his rescue fromhis daily solicitings.

He was still winning when two new visitors entered. One of them was a youngHawley, just come from his law studies in town, and the other was Fred Vincy,who had spent several evenings of late at this old haunt of his. Young Hawley,an accomplished billiard-player, brought a cool fresh hand to the cue. But FredVincy, startled at seeing Lydgate, and astonished to see him betting with anexcited air, stood aside, and kept out of the circle round the table.

Fred had been rewarding resolution by a little laxity of late. He had beenworking heartily for six months at all outdoor occupations under Mr. Garth, andby dint of severe practice had nearly mastered the defects of his handwriting,this practice being, perhaps, a little the less severe that it was oftencarried on in the evening at Mr. Garth’s under the eyes of Mary. But the lastfortnight Mary had been staying at Lowick Parsonage with the ladies there,during Mr. Farebrother’s residence in Middlemarch, where he was carrying outsome parochial plans; and Fred, not seeing anything more agreeable to do, hadturned into the Green Dragon, partly to play at billiards, partly to taste theold flavor of discourse about horses, sport, and things in general, consideredfrom a point of view which was not strenuously correct. He had not been outhunting once this season, had had no horse of his own to ride, and had gonefrom place to place chiefly with Mr. Garth in his gig, or on the sober cobwhich Mr. Garth could lend him. It was a little too bad, Fred began to think,that he should be kept in the traces with more severity than if he had been aclergyman. “I will tell you what, Mistress Mary—it will be rather harder workto learn surveying and drawing plans than it would have been to write sermons,”he had said, wishing her to appreciate what he went through for her sake; “andas to Hercules and Theseus, they were nothing to me. They had sport, and neverlearned to write a bookkeeping hand.” And now, Mary being out of the way for alittle while, Fred, like any other strong dog who cannot slip his collar, hadpulled up the staple of his chain and made a small escape, not of coursemeaning to go fast or far. There could be no reason why he should not play atbilliards, but he was determined not to bet. As to money just now, Fred had inhis mind the heroic project of saving almost all of the eighty pounds that Mr.Garth offered him, and returning it, which he could easily do by giving up allfutile money-spending, since he had a superfluous stock of clothes, and noexpense in his board. In that way he could, in one year, go a good way towardsrepaying the ninety pounds of which he had deprived Mrs. Garth, unhappily at atime when she needed that sum more than she did now. Nevertheless, it must beacknowledged that on this evening, which was the fifth of his recent visits tothe billiard-room, Fred had, not in his pocket, but in his mind, the ten poundswhich he meant to reserve for himself from his half-year’s salary (havingbefore him the pleasure of carrying thirty to Mrs. Garth when Mary was likelyto be come home again)—he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund from whichhe might risk something, if there were a chance of a good bet. Why? Well, whensovereigns were flying about, why shouldn’t he catch a few? He would never gofar along that road again; but a man likes to assure himself, and men ofpleasure generally, what he could do in the way of mischief if he chose, andthat if he abstains from making himself ill, or beggaring himself, or talkingwith the utmost looseness which the narrow limits of human capacity will allow,it is not because he is a spooney. Fred did not enter into formal reasons,which are a very artificial, inexact way of representing the tingling returnsof old habit, and the caprices of young blood: but there was lurking in him aprophetic sense that evening, that when he began to play he should also beginto bet—that he should enjoy some punch-drinking, and in general prepare himselffor feeling “rather seedy” in the morning. It is in such indefinable movementsthat action often begins.

But the last thing likely to have entered Fred’s expectation was that he shouldsee his brother-in-law Lydgate—of whom he had never quite dropped the oldopinion that he was a prig, and tremendously conscious of hissuperiority—looking excited and betting, just as he himself might have done.Fred felt a shock greater than he could quite account for by the vagueknowledge that Lydgate was in debt, and that his father had refused to helphim; and his own inclination to enter into the play was suddenly checked. Itwas a strange reversal of attitudes: Fred’s blond face and blue eyes, usuallybright and careless, ready to give attention to anything that held out apromise of amusem*nt, looking involuntarily grave and almost embarrassed as ifby the sight of something unfitting; while Lydgate, who had habitually an airof self-possessed strength, and a certain meditativeness that seemed to liebehind his most observant attention, was acting, watching, speaking with thatexcited narrow consciousness which reminds one of an animal with fierce eyesand retractile claws.

Lydgate, by betting on his own strokes, had won sixteen pounds; but youngHawley’s arrival had changed the poise of things. He made first-rate strokeshimself, and began to bet against Lydgate’s strokes, the strain of whose nerveswas thus changed from simple confidence in his own movements to defying anotherperson’s doubt in them. The defiance was more exciting than the confidence, butit was less sure. He continued to bet on his own play, but began often to fail.Still he went on, for his mind was as utterly narrowed into that precipitouscrevice of play as if he had been the most ignorant lounger there. Fredobserved that Lydgate was losing fast, and found himself in the new situationof puzzling his brains to think of some device by which, without beingoffensive, he could withdraw Lydgate’s attention, and perhaps suggest to him areason for quitting the room. He saw that others were observing Lydgate’sstrange unlikeness to himself, and it occurred to him that merely to touch hiselbow and call him aside for a moment might rouse him from his absorption. Hecould think of nothing cleverer than the daring improbability of saying that hewanted to see Rosy, and wished to know if she were at home this evening; and hewas going desperately to carry out this weak device, when a waiter came up tohim with a message, saying that Mr. Farebrother was below, and begged to speakwith him.

Fred was surprised, not quite comfortably, but sending word that he would bedown immediately, he went with a new impulse up to Lydgate, said, “Can I speakto you a moment?” and drew him aside.

“Farebrother has just sent up a message to say that he wants to speak to me. Heis below. I thought you might like to know he was there, if you had anything tosay to him.”

Fred had simply snatched up this pretext for speaking, because he could notsay, “You are losing confoundedly, and are making everybody stare at you; youhad better come away.” But inspiration could hardly have served him better.Lydgate had not before seen that Fred was present, and his sudden appearancewith an announcement of Mr. Farebrother had the effect of a sharp concussion.

“No, no,” said Lydgate; “I have nothing particular to say to him. But—the gameis up—I must be going—I came in just to see Bambridge.”

“Bambridge is over there, but he is making a row—I don’t think he’s ready forbusiness. Come down with me to Farebrother. I expect he is going to blow me up,and you will shield me,” said Fred, with some adroitness.

Lydgate felt shame, but could not bear to act as if he felt it, by refusing tosee Mr. Farebrother; and he went down. They merely shook hands, however, andspoke of the frost; and when all three had turned into the street, the Vicarseemed quite willing to say good-by to Lydgate. His present purpose was clearlyto talk with Fred alone, and he said, kindly, “I disturbed you, younggentleman, because I have some pressing business with you. Walk with me to St.Botolph’s, will you?”

It was a fine night, the sky thick with stars, and Mr. Farebrother proposedthat they should make a circuit to the old church by the London road. The nextthing he said was—

“I thought Lydgate never went to the Green Dragon?”

“So did I,” said Fred. “But he said that he went to see Bambridge.”

“He was not playing, then?”

Fred had not meant to tell this, but he was obliged now to say, “Yes, he was.But I suppose it was an accidental thing. I have never seen him there before.”

“You have been going often yourself, then, lately?”

“Oh, about five or six times.”

“I think you had some good reason for giving up the habit of going there?”

“Yes. You know all about it,” said Fred, not liking to be catechised in thisway. “I made a clean breast to you.”

“I suppose that gives me a warrant to speak about the matter now. It isunderstood between us, is it not?—that we are on a footing of open friendship:I have listened to you, and you will be willing to listen to me. I may take myturn in talking a little about myself?”

“I am under the deepest obligation to you, Mr. Farebrother,” said Fred, in astate of uncomfortable surmise.

“I will not affect to deny that you are under some obligation to me. But I amgoing to confess to you, Fred, that I have been tempted to reverse all that bykeeping silence with you just now. When somebody said to me, ‘Young Vincy hastaken to being at the billiard-table every night again—he won’t bear the curblong;’ I was tempted to do the opposite of what I am doing—to hold my tongueand wait while you went down the ladder again, betting first and then—”

“I have not made any bets,” said Fred, hastily.

“Glad to hear it. But I say, my prompting was to look on and see you take thewrong turning, wear out Garth’s patience, and lose the best opportunity of yourlife—the opportunity which you made some rather difficult effort to secure. Youcan guess the feeling which raised that temptation in me—I am sure you know it.I am sure you know that the satisfaction of your affections stands in the wayof mine.”

There was a pause. Mr. Farebrother seemed to wait for a recognition of thefact; and the emotion perceptible in the tones of his fine voice gave solemnityto his words. But no feeling could quell Fred’s alarm.

“I could not be expected to give her up,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation:it was not a case for any pretence of generosity.

“Clearly not, when her affection met yours. But relations of this sort, evenwhen they are of long standing, are always liable to change. I can easilyconceive that you might act in a way to loosen the tie she feels towards you—itmust be remembered that she is only conditionally bound to you—and that in thatcase, another man, who may flatter himself that he has a hold on her regard,might succeed in winning that firm place in her love as well as respect whichyou had let slip. I can easily conceive such a result,” repeated Mr.Farebrother, emphatically. “There is a companionship of ready sympathy, whichmight get the advantage even over the longest associations.” It seemed to Fredthat if Mr. Farebrother had had a beak and talons instead of his very capabletongue, his mode of attack could hardly be more cruel. He had a horribleconviction that behind all this hypothetic statement there was a knowledge ofsome actual change in Mary’s feeling.

“Of course I know it might easily be all up with me,” he said, in a troubledvoice. “If she is beginning to compare—” He broke off, not liking to betray allhe felt, and then said, by the help of a little bitterness, “But I thought youwere friendly to me.”

“So I am; that is why we are here. But I have had a strong disposition to beotherwise. I have said to myself, ‘If there is a likelihood of that youngsterdoing himself harm, why should you interfere? Aren’t you worth as much as heis, and don’t your sixteen years over and above his, in which you have gonerather hungry, give you more right to satisfaction than he has? If there’s achance of his going to the dogs, let him—perhaps you could nohow hinder it—anddo you take the benefit.’”

There was a pause, in which Fred was seized by a most uncomfortable chill. Whatwas coming next? He dreaded to hear that something had been said to Mary—hefelt as if he were listening to a threat rather than a warning. When the Vicarbegan again there was a change in his tone like the encouraging transition to amajor key.

“But I had once meant better than that, and I am come back to my old intention.I thought that I could hardly secure myself in it better, Fred, than bytelling you just what had gone on in me. And now, do you understand me? I wantyou to make the happiness of her life and your own, and if there is any chancethat a word of warning from me may turn aside any risk to the contrary—well, Ihave uttered it.”

There was a drop in the Vicar’s voice when he spoke the last words. Hepaused—they were standing on a patch of green where the road diverged towardsSt. Botolph’s, and he put out his hand, as if to imply that the conversationwas closed. Fred was moved quite newly. Some one highly susceptible to thecontemplation of a fine act has said, that it produces a sort of regeneratingshudder through the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new life. A gooddegree of that effect was just then present in Fred Vincy.

“I will try to be worthy,” he said, breaking off before he could say “of you aswell as of her.” And meanwhile Mr. Farebrother had gathered the impulse to saysomething more.

“You must not imagine that I believe there is at present any decline in herpreference of you, Fred. Set your heart at rest, that if you keep right, otherthings will keep right.”

“I shall never forget what you have done,” Fred answered. “I can’t say anythingthat seems worth saying—only I will try that your goodness shall not be thrownaway.”

“That’s enough. Good-by, and God bless you.”

In that way they parted. But both of them walked about a long while before theywent out of the starlight. Much of Fred’s rumination might be summed up in thewords, “It certainly would have been a fine thing for her to marryFarebrother—but if she loves me best and I am a good husband?”

Perhaps Mr. Farebrother’s might be concentrated into a single shrug and onelittle speech. “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of aman, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and towin her may be a discipline!”

CHAPTER LXVII.

Now is there civil war within the soul:
Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne
By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier
Makes humble compact, plays the supple part
Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist
For hungry rebels.

Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought away noencouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary, he felt unmixed disgustwith himself the next day when he had to pay four or five pounds over and abovehis gains, and he carried about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figurehe had made, not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon butbehaving just as they did. A philosopher fallen to betting is hardlydistinguishable from a Philistine under the same circ*mstances: the differencewill chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections, and Lydgate chewed a verydisagreeable cud in that way. His reason told him how the affair might havebeen magnified into ruin by a slight change of scenery—if it had been agambling-house that he had turned into, where chance could be clutched withboth hands instead of being picked up with thumb and fore-finger. Nevertheless,though reason strangled the desire to gamble, there remained the feeling that,with an assurance of luck to the needful amount, he would have liked to gamble,rather than take the alternative which was beginning to urge itself asinevitable.

That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode. Lydgate had so many timesboasted both to himself and others that he was totally independent ofBulstrode, to whose plans he had lent himself solely because they enabled himto carry out his own ideas of professional work and public benefit—he had soconstantly in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sensethat he was making a good social use of this predominating banker, whoseopinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him anabsurd mixture of contradictory impressions—that he had been creating forhimself strong ideal obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request tohim on his own account.

Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin to saythat their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive that the actwhich they had called impossible to them is becoming manifestly possible. WithDover’s ugly security soon to be put in force, with the proceeds of hispractice immediately absorbed in paying back debts, and with the chance, if theworst were known, of daily supplies being refused on credit, above all with thevision of Rosamond’s hopeless discontent continually haunting him, Lydgate hadbegun to see that he should inevitably bend himself to ask help from somebodyor other. At first he had considered whether he should write to Mr. Vincy; buton questioning Rosamond he found that, as he had suspected, she had alreadyapplied twice to her father, the last time being since the disappointment fromSir Godwin; and papa had said that Lydgate must look out for himself. “Papasaid he had come, with one bad year after another, to trade more and more onborrowed capital, and had had to give up many indulgences; he could not spare asingle hundred from the charges of his family. He said, let Lydgate askBulstrode: they have always been hand and glove.”

Indeed, Lydgate himself had come to the conclusion that if he must end byasking for a free loan, his relations with Bulstrode, more at least than withany other man, might take the shape of a claim which was not purely personal.Bulstrode had indirectly helped to cause the failure of his practice, and hadalso been highly gratified by getting a medical partner in his plans:—but whoamong us ever reduced himself to the sort of dependence in which Lydgate nowstood, without trying to believe that he had claims which diminished thehumiliation of asking? It was true that of late there had seemed to be a newlanguor of interest in Bulstrode about the Hospital; but his health had gotworse, and showed signs of a deep-seated nervous affection. In other respectshe did not appear to be changed: he had always been highly polite, but Lydgatehad observed in him from the first a marked coldness about his marriage andother private circ*mstances, a coldness which he had hitherto preferred to anywarmth of familiarity between them. He deferred the intention from day to day,his habit of acting on his conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance toevery possible conclusion and its consequent act. He saw Mr. Bulstrode often,but he did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose. At one momenthe thought, “I will write a letter: I prefer that to any circuitous talk;” atanother he thought, “No; if I were talking to him, I could make a retreatbefore any signs of disinclination.”

Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special interview sought.In his shrinking from the humiliation of a dependent attitude towardsBulstrode, he began to familiarize his imagination with another step even moreunlike his remembered self. He began spontaneously to consider whether it wouldbe possible to carry out that puerile notion of Rosamond’s which had often madehim angry, namely, that they should quit Middlemarch without seeing anythingbeyond that preface. The question came—“Would any man buy the practice of meeven now, for as little as it is worth? Then the sale might happen as anecessary preparation for going away.”

But against his taking this step, which he still felt to be a contemptiblerelinquishment of present work, a guilty turning aside from what was a real andmight be a widening channel for worthy activity, to start again without anyjustified destination, there was this obstacle, that the purchaser, ifprocurable at all, might not be quickly forthcoming. And afterwards? Rosamondin a poor lodging, though in the largest city or most distant town, would notfind the life that could save her from gloom, and save him from the reproach ofhaving plunged her into it. For when a man is at the foot of the hill in hisfortunes, he may stay a long while there in spite of professionalaccomplishment. In the British climate there is no incompatibility betweenscientific insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility is chieflybetween scientific ambition and a wife who objects to that kind of residence.

But in the midst of his hesitation, opportunity came to decide him. A note fromMr. Bulstrode requested Lydgate to call on him at the Bank. A hypochondriacaltendency had shown itself in the banker’s constitution of late; and a lack ofsleep, which was really only a slight exaggeration of an habitual dyspepticsymptom, had been dwelt on by him as a sign of threatening insanity. He wantedto consult Lydgate without delay on that particular morning, although he hadnothing to tell beyond what he had told before. He listened eagerly to whatLydgate had to say in dissipation of his fears, though this too was onlyrepetition; and this moment in which Bulstrode was receiving a medical opinionwith a sense of comfort, seemed to make the communication of a personal need tohim easier than it had been in Lydgate’s contemplation beforehand. He had beeninsisting that it would be well for Mr. Bulstrode to relax his attention tobusiness.

“One sees how any mental strain, however slight, may affect a delicate frame,”said Lydgate at that stage of the consultation when the remarks tend to passfrom the personal to the general, “by the deep stamp which anxiety will makefor a time even on the young and vigorous. I am naturally very strong; yet Ihave been thoroughly shaken lately by an accumulation of trouble.”

“I presume that a constitution in the susceptible state in which mine atpresent is, would be especially liable to fall a victim to cholera, if itvisited our district. And since its appearance near London, we may well besiegethe Mercy-seat for our protection,” said Mr. Bulstrode, not intending to evadeLydgate’s allusion, but really preoccupied with alarms about himself.

“You have at all events taken your share in using good practical precautionsfor the town, and that is the best mode of asking for protection,” saidLydgate, with a strong distaste for the broken metaphor and bad logic of thebanker’s religion, somewhat increased by the apparent deafness of his sympathy.But his mind had taken up its long-prepared movement towards getting help, andwas not yet arrested. He added, “The town has done well in the way ofcleansing, and finding appliances; and I think that if the cholera should come,even our enemies will admit that the arrangements in the Hospital are a publicgood.”

“Truly,” said Mr. Bulstrode, with some coldness. “With regard to what you say,Mr. Lydgate, about the relaxation of my mental labor, I have for some time beenentertaining a purpose to that effect—a purpose of a very decided character. Icontemplate at least a temporary withdrawal from the management of muchbusiness, whether benevolent or commercial. Also I think of changing myresidence for a time: probably I shall close or let ‘The Shrubs,’ and take someplace near the coast—under advice of course as to salubrity. That would be ameasure which you would recommend?”

“Oh yes,” said Lydgate, falling backward in his chair, with ill-repressedimpatience under the banker’s pale earnest eyes and intense preoccupation withhimself.

“I have for some time felt that I should open this subject with you in relationto our Hospital,” continued Bulstrode. “Under the circ*mstances I haveindicated, of course I must cease to have any personal share in the management,and it is contrary to my views of responsibility to continue a largeapplication of means to an institution which I cannot watch over and to someextent regulate. I shall therefore, in case of my ultimate decision to leaveMiddlemarch, consider that I withdraw other support to the New Hospital thanthat which will subsist in the fact that I chiefly supplied the expenses ofbuilding it, and have contributed further large sums to its successfulworking.”

Lydgate’s thought, when Bulstrode paused according to his wont, was, “He hasperhaps been losing a good deal of money.” This was the most plausibleexplanation of a speech which had caused rather a startling change in hisexpectations. He said in reply—

“The loss to the Hospital can hardly be made up, I fear.”

“Hardly,” returned Bulstrode, in the same deliberate, silvery tone; “except bysome changes of plan. The only person who may be certainly counted on aswilling to increase her contributions is Mrs. Casaubon. I have had an interviewwith her on the subject, and I have pointed out to her, as I am about to do toyou, that it will be desirable to win a more general support to the NewHospital by a change of system.” Another pause, but Lydgate did not speak.

“The change I mean is an amalgamation with the Infirmary, so that the NewHospital shall be regarded as a special addition to the elder institution,having the same directing board. It will be necessary, also, that the medicalmanagement of the two shall be combined. In this way any difficulty as to theadequate maintenance of our new establishment will be removed; the benevolentinterests of the town will cease to be divided.”

Mr. Bulstrode had lowered his eyes from Lydgate’s face to the buttons of hiscoat as he again paused.

“No doubt that is a good device as to ways and means,” said Lydgate, with anedge of irony in his tone. “But I can’t be expected to rejoice in it at once,since one of the first results will be that the other medical men will upset orinterrupt my methods, if it were only because they are mine.”

“I myself, as you know, Mr. Lydgate, highly valued the opportunity of new andindependent procedure which you have diligently employed: the original plan, Iconfess, was one which I had much at heart, under submission to the DivineWill. But since providential indications demand a renunciation from me, Irenounce.”

Bulstrode showed a rather exasperating ability in this conversation. The brokenmetaphor and bad logic of motive which had stirred his hearer’s contempt werequite consistent with a mode of putting the facts which made it difficult forLydgate to vent his own indignation and disappointment. After some rapidreflection, he only asked—

“What did Mrs. Casaubon say?”

“That was the further statement which I wished to make to you,” said Bulstrode,who had thoroughly prepared his ministerial explanation. “She is, you areaware, a woman of most munificent disposition, and happily in possession—not Ipresume of great wealth, but of funds which she can well spare. She hasinformed me that though she has destined the chief part of those funds toanother purpose, she is willing to consider whether she cannot fully take myplace in relation to the Hospital. But she wishes for ample time to mature herthoughts on the subject, and I have told her that there is no need forhaste—that, in fact, my own plans are not yet absolute.”

Lydgate was ready to say, “If Mrs. Casaubon would take your place, there wouldbe gain, instead of loss.” But there was still a weight on his mind whicharrested this cheerful candor. He replied, “I suppose, then, that I may enterinto the subject with Mrs. Casaubon.”

“Precisely; that is what she expressly desires. Her decision, she says, willmuch depend on what you can tell her. But not at present: she is, I believe,just setting out on a journey. I have her letter here,” said Mr. Bulstrode,drawing it out, and reading from it. “‘I am immediately otherwise engaged,’ shesays. ‘I am going into Yorkshire with Sir James and Lady Chettam; and theconclusions I come to about some land which I am to see there may affect mypower of contributing to the Hospital.’ Thus, Mr. Lydgate, there is no hastenecessary in this matter; but I wished to apprise you beforehand of what maypossibly occur.”

Mr. Bulstrode returned the letter to his side-pocket, and changed his attitudeas if his business were closed. Lydgate, whose renewed hope about the Hospitalonly made him more conscious of the facts which poisoned his hope, felt thathis effort after help, if made at all, must be made now and vigorously.

“I am much obliged to you for giving me full notice,” he said, with a firmintention in his tone, yet with an interruptedness in his delivery which showedthat he spoke unwillingly. “The highest object to me is my profession, and Ihad identified the Hospital with the best use I can at present make of myprofession. But the best use is not always the same with monetary success.Everything which has made the Hospital unpopular has helped with other causes—Ithink they are all connected with my professional zeal—to make me unpopular asa practitioner. I get chiefly patients who can’t pay me. I should like thembest, if I had nobody to pay on my own side.” Lydgate waited a little, butBulstrode only bowed, looking at him fixedly, and he went on with the sameinterrupted enunciation—as if he were biting an objectional leek.

“I have slipped into money difficulties which I can see no way out of, unlesssome one who trusts me and my future will advance me a sum without othersecurity. I had very little fortune left when I came here. I have no prospectsof money from my own family. My expenses, in consequence of my marriage, havebeen very much greater than I had expected. The result at this moment is thatit would take a thousand pounds to clear me. I mean, to free me from the riskof having all my goods sold in security of my largest debt—as well as to pay myother debts—and leave anything to keep us a little beforehand with our smallincome. I find that it is out of the question that my wife’s father should makesuch an advance. That is why I mention my position to—to the only other man whomay be held to have some personal connection with my prosperity or ruin.”

Lydgate hated to hear himself. But he had spoken now, and had spoken withunmistakable directness. Mr. Bulstrode replied without haste, but also withouthesitation.

“I am grieved, though, I confess, not surprised by this information, Mr.Lydgate. For my own part, I regretted your alliance with my brother-in-law’sfamily, which has always been of prodigal habits, and which has already beenmuch indebted to me for sustainment in its present position. My advice to you,Mr. Lydgate, would be, that instead of involving yourself in furtherobligations, and continuing a doubtful struggle, you should simply become abankrupt.”

“That would not improve my prospect,” said Lydgate, rising and speakingbitterly, “even if it were a more agreeable thing in itself.”

“It is always a trial,” said Mr. Bulstrode; “but trial, my dear sir, is ourportion here, and is a needed corrective. I recommend you to weigh the advice Ihave given.”

“Thank you,” said Lydgate, not quite knowing what he said. “I have occupied youtoo long. Good-day.”

CHAPTER LXVIII.

What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
Which all this mighty volume of events
The world, the universal map of deeds,
Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,
That the directest course still best succeeds.
For should not grave and learn’d Experience
That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,
And with all ages holds intelligence,
Go safer than Deceit without a guide!
—DANIEL: Musophilus.

That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated or betrayedin his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him by some severeexperience which he had gone through since the epoch of Mr. Larcher’s sale,when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw, and when the banker had in vainattempted an act of restitution which might move Divine Providence to arrestpainful consequences.

His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to Middlemarchbefore long, had been justified. On Christmas Eve he had reappeared at TheShrubs. Bulstrode was at home to receive him, and hinder his communication withthe rest of the family, but he could not altogether hinder the circ*mstances ofthe visit from compromising himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved moreunmanageable than he had shown himself to be in his former appearances, hischronic state of mental restlessness, the growing effect of habitualintemperance, quickly shaking off every impression from what was said to him.He insisted on staying in the house, and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of evils,felt that this was at least not a worse alternative than his going into thetown. He kept him in his own room for the evening and saw him to bed, Rafflesall the while amusing himself with the annoyance he was causing this decent andhighly prosperous fellow-sinner, an amusem*nt which he facetiously expressed assympathy with his friend’s pleasure in entertaining a man who had beenserviceable to him, and who had not had all his earnings. There was a cunningcalculation under this noisy joking—a cool resolve to extract something thehandsomer from Bulstrode as payment for release from this new application oftorture. But his cunning had a little overcast its mark.

Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles couldenable him to imagine. He had told his wife that he was simply taking care ofthis wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might otherwise injure himself;he implied, without the direct form of falsehood, that there was a family tiewhich bound him to this care, and that there were signs of mental alienation inRaffles which urged caution. He would himself drive the unfortunate being awaythe next morning. In these hints he felt that he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrodewith precautionary information for his daughters and servants, and accountingfor his allowing no one but himself to enter the room even with food and drink.But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles should be overheard in his loud andplain references to past facts—lest Mrs. Bulstrode should be even tempted tolisten at the door. How could he hinder her, how betray his terror by openingthe door to detect her? She was a woman of honest direct habits, and littlelikely to take so low a course in order to arrive at painful knowledge; butfear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far, and produced an effectwhich had not been in his plan. By showing himself hopelessly unmanageable hehad made Bulstrode feel that a strong defiance was the only resource left.After taking Raffles to bed that night the banker ordered his closed carriageto be ready at half-past seven the next morning. At six o’clock he had alreadybeen long dressed, and had spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleadinghis motives for averting the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity andspoken what was not true before God. For Bulstrode shrank from a direct liewith an intensity disproportionate to the number of his more indirect misdeeds.But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which arenot taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end thatwe fix our mind on and desire. And it is only what we are vividly conscious ofthat we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omniscience.

Bulstrode carried his candle to the bedside of Raffles, who was apparently in apainful dream. He stood silent, hoping that the presence of the light wouldserve to waken the sleeper gradually and gently, for he feared some noise asthe consequence of a too sudden awakening. He had watched for a couple ofminutes or more the shudderings and pantings which seemed likely to end inwaking, when Raffles, with a long half-stifled moan, started up and staredround him in terror, trembling and gasping. But he made no further noise, andBulstrode, setting down the candle, awaited his recovery.

It was a quarter of an hour later before Bulstrode, with a cold peremptorinessof manner which he had not before shown, said, “I came to call you thus early,Mr. Raffles, because I have ordered the carriage to be ready at half-pastseven, and intend myself to conduct you as far as Ilsely, where you can eithertake the railway or await a coach.” Raffles was about to speak, but Bulstrodeanticipated him imperiously with the words, “Be silent, sir, and hear what Ihave to say. I shall supply you with money now, and I will furnish you with areasonable sum from time to time, on your application to me by letter; but ifyou choose to present yourself here again, if you return to Middlemarch, if youuse your tongue in a manner injurious to me, you will have to live on suchfruits as your malice can bring you, without help from me. Nobody will pay youwell for blasting my name: I know the worst you can do against me, and I shallbrave it if you dare to thrust yourself upon me again. Get up, sir, and do as Iorder you, without noise, or I will send for a policeman to take you off mypremises, and you may carry your stories into every pothouse in the town, butyou shall have no sixpence from me to pay your expenses there.”

Bulstrode had rarely in his life spoken with such nervous energy: he had beendeliberating on this speech and its probable effects through a large part ofthe night; and though he did not trust to its ultimately saving him from anyreturn of Raffles, he had concluded that it was the best throw he could make.It succeeded in enforcing submission from the jaded man this morning: hisempoisoned system at this moment quailed before Bulstrode’s cold, resolutebearing, and he was taken off quietly in the carriage before the familybreakfast time. The servants imagined him to be a poor relation, and were notsurprised that a strict man like their master, who held his head high in theworld, should be ashamed of such a cousin and want to get rid of him. Thebanker’s drive of ten miles with his hated companion was a dreary beginning ofthe Christmas day; but at the end of the drive, Raffles had recovered hisspirits, and parted in a contentment for which there was the good reason thatthe banker had given him a hundred pounds. Various motives urged Bulstrode tothis open-handedness, but he did not himself inquire closely into all of them.As he had stood watching Raffles in his uneasy sleep, it had certainly enteredhis mind that the man had been much shattered since the first gift of twohundred pounds.

He had taken care to repeat the incisive statement of his resolve not to beplayed on any more; and had tried to penetrate Raffles with the fact that hehad shown the risks of bribing him to be quite equal to the risks of defyinghim. But when, freed from his repulsive presence, Bulstrode returned to hisquiet home, he brought with him no confidence that he had secured more than arespite. It was as if he had had a loathsome dream, and could not shake off itsimages with their hateful kindred of sensations—as if on all the pleasantsurroundings of his life a dangerous reptile had left his slimy traces.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts hebelieves other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion isthreatened with ruin?

Bulstrode was only the more conscious that there was a deposit of uneasypresentiment in his wife’s mind, because she carefully avoided any allusion toit. He had been used every day to taste the flavor of supremacy and the tributeof complete deference: and the certainty that he was watched or measured with ahidden suspicion of his having some discreditable secret, made his voice totterwhen he was speaking to edification. Foreseeing, to men of Bulstrode’s anxioustemperament, is often worse than seeing; and his imagination continuallyheightened the anguish of an imminent disgrace. Yes, imminent; for if hisdefiance of Raffles did not keep the man away—and though he prayed for thisresult he hardly hoped for it—the disgrace was certain. In vain he said tohimself that, if permitted, it would be a divine visitation, a chastisem*nt, apreparation; he recoiled from the imagined burning; and he judged that it mustbe more for the Divine glory that he should escape dishonor. That recoil had atlast urged him to make preparations for quitting Middlemarch. If evil truthmust be reported of him, he would then be at a less scorching distance from thecontempt of his old neighbors; and in a new scene, where his life would nothave gathered the same wide sensibility, the tormentor, if he pursued him,would be less formidable. To leave the place finally would, he knew, beextremely painful to his wife, and on other grounds he would have preferred tostay where he had struck root. Hence he made his preparations at first in aconditional way, wishing to leave on all sides an opening for his return afterbrief absence, if any favorable intervention of Providence should dissipate hisfears. He was preparing to transfer his management of the Bank, and to give upany active control of other commercial affairs in the neighborhood, on theground of his failing health, but without excluding his future resumption ofsuch work. The measure would cause him some added expense and some diminutionof income beyond what he had already undergone from the general depression oftrade; and the Hospital presented itself as a principal object of outlay onwhich he could fairly economize.

This was the experience which had determined his conversation with Lydgate. Butat this time his arrangements had most of them gone no farther than a stage atwhich he could recall them if they proved to be unnecessary. He continuallydeferred the final steps; in the midst of his fears, like many a man who is indanger of shipwreck or of being dashed from his carriage by runaway horses, hehad a clinging impression that something would happen to hinder the worst, andthat to spoil his life by a late transplantation might be over-hasty—especiallysince it was difficult to account satisfactorily to his wife for the project oftheir indefinite exile from the only place where she would like to live.

Among the affairs Bulstrode had to care for, was the management of the farm atStone Court in case of his absence; and on this as well as on all other mattersconnected with any houses and land he possessed in or about Middlemarch, he hadconsulted Caleb Garth. Like every one else who had business of that sort, hewanted to get the agent who was more anxious for his employer’s interests thanhis own. With regard to Stone Court, since Bulstrode wished to retain his holdon the stock, and to have an arrangement by which he himself could, if hechose, resume his favorite recreation of superintendence, Caleb had advised himnot to trust to a mere bailiff, but to let the land, stock, and implementsyearly, and take a proportionate share of the proceeds.

“May I trust to you to find me a tenant on these terms, Mr. Garth?” saidBulstrode. “And will you mention to me the yearly sum which would repay you formanaging these affairs which we have discussed together?”

“I’ll think about it,” said Caleb, in his blunt way. “I’ll see how I can makeit out.”

If it had not been that he had to consider Fred Vincy’s future, Mr. Garth wouldnot probably have been glad of any addition to his work, of which his wife wasalways fearing an excess for him as he grew older. But on quitting Bulstrodeafter that conversation, a very alluring idea occurred to him about this saidletting of Stone Court. What if Bulstrode would agree to his placing Fred Vincythere on the understanding that he, Caleb Garth, should be responsible for themanagement? It would be an excellent schooling for Fred; he might make a modestincome there, and still have time left to get knowledge by helping in otherbusiness. He mentioned his notion to Mrs. Garth with such evident delight thatshe could not bear to chill his pleasure by expressing her constant fear of hisundertaking too much.

“The lad would be as happy as two,” he said, throwing himself back in hischair, and looking radiant, “if I could tell him it was all settled. Think;Susan! His mind had been running on that place for years before oldFeatherstone died. And it would be as pretty a turn of things as could be thathe should hold the place in a good industrious way after all—by his taking tobusiness. For it’s likely enough Bulstrode might let him go on, and graduallybuy the stock. He hasn’t made up his mind, I can see, whether or not he shallsettle somewhere else as a lasting thing. I never was better pleased with anotion in my life. And then the children might be married by-and-by, Susan.”

“You will not give any hint of the plan to Fred, until you are sure thatBulstrode would agree to the plan?” said Mrs. Garth, in a tone of gentlecaution. “And as to marriage, Caleb, we old people need not help to hasten it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Caleb, swinging his head aside. “Marriage is a tamingthing. Fred would want less of my bit and bridle. However, I shall say nothingtill I know the ground I’m treading on. I shall speak to Bulstrode again.”

He took his earliest opportunity of doing so. Bulstrode had anything but a warminterest in his nephew Fred Vincy, but he had a strong wish to secure Mr.Garth’s services on many scattered points of business at which he was sure tobe a considerable loser, if they were under less conscientious management. Onthat ground he made no objection to Mr. Garth’s proposal; and there was alsoanother reason why he was not sorry to give a consent which was to benefit oneof the Vincy family. It was that Mrs. Bulstrode, having heard of Lydgate’sdebts, had been anxious to know whether her husband could not do something forpoor Rosamond, and had been much troubled on learning from him that Lydgate’saffairs were not easily remediable, and that the wisest plan was to let them“take their course.” Mrs. Bulstrode had then said for the first time, “I thinkyou are always a little hard towards my family, Nicholas. And I am sure I haveno reason to deny any of my relatives. Too worldly they may be, but no one everhad to say that they were not respectable.”

“My dear Harriet,” said Mr. Bulstrode, wincing under his wife’s eyes, whichwere filling with tears, “I have supplied your brother with a great deal ofcapital. I cannot be expected to take care of his married children.”

That seemed to be true, and Mrs. Bulstrode’s remonstrance subsided into pityfor poor Rosamond, whose extravagant education she had always foreseen thefruits of.

But remembering that dialogue, Mr. Bulstrode felt that when he had to talk tohis wife fully about his plan of quitting Middlemarch, he should be glad totell her that he had made an arrangement which might be for the good of hernephew Fred. At present he had merely mentioned to her that he thought ofshutting up The Shrubs for a few months, and taking a house on the SouthernCoast.

Hence Mr. Garth got the assurance he desired, namely, that in case ofBulstrode’s departure from Middlemarch for an indefinite time, Fred Vincyshould be allowed to have the tenancy of Stone Court on the terms proposed.

Caleb was so elated with his hope of this “neat turn” being given to things,that if his self-control had not been braced by a little affectionate wifelyscolding, he would have betrayed everything to Mary, wanting “to give the childcomfort.” However, he restrained himself, and kept in strict privacy from Fredcertain visits which he was making to Stone Court, in order to look morethoroughly into the state of the land and stock, and take a preliminaryestimate. He was certainly more eager in these visits than the probable speedof events required him to be; but he was stimulated by a fatherly delight inoccupying his mind with this bit of probable happiness which he held in storelike a hidden birthday gift for Fred and Mary.

“But suppose the whole scheme should turn out to be a castle in the air?” saidMrs. Garth.

“Well, well,” replied Caleb; “the castle will tumble about nobody’s head.”

CHAPTER LXIX.

“If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee.”
—Ecclesiasticus.

Mr. Bulstrode was still seated in his manager’s room at the Bank, about threeo’clock of the same day on which he had received Lydgate there, when the clerkentered to say that his horse was waiting, and also that Mr. Garth was outsideand begged to speak with him.

“By all means,” said Bulstrode; and Caleb entered. “Pray sit down, Mr. Garth,”continued the banker, in his suavest tone.

“I am glad that you arrived just in time to find me here. I know you count yourminutes.”

“Oh,” said Caleb, gently, with a slow swing of his head on one side, as heseated himself and laid his hat on the floor.

He looked at the ground, leaning forward and letting his long fingers droopbetween his legs, while each finger moved in succession, as if it were sharingsome thought which filled his large quiet brow.

Mr. Bulstrode, like every one else who knew Caleb, was used to his slowness inbeginning to speak on any topic which he felt to be important, and ratherexpected that he was about to recur to the buying of some houses in Blindman’sCourt, for the sake of pulling them down, as a sacrifice of property whichwould be well repaid by the influx of air and light on that spot. It was bypropositions of this kind that Caleb was sometimes troublesome to hisemployers; but he had usually found Bulstrode ready to meet him in projects ofimprovement, and they had got on well together. When he spoke again, however,it was to say, in rather a subdued voice—

“I have just come away from Stone Court, Mr. Bulstrode.”

“You found nothing wrong there, I hope,” said the banker; “I was there myselfyesterday. Abel has done well with the lambs this year.”

“Why, yes,” said Caleb, looking up gravely, “there is something wrong—astranger, who is very ill, I think. He wants a doctor, and I came to tell youof that. His name is Raffles.”

He saw the shock of his words passing through Bulstrode’s frame. On thissubject the banker had thought that his fears were too constantly on the watchto be taken by surprise; but he had been mistaken.

“Poor wretch!” he said in a compassionate tone, though his lips trembled alittle. “Do you know how he came there?”

“I took him myself,” said Caleb, quietly—“took him up in my gig. He had gotdown from the coach, and was walking a little beyond the turning from thetoll-house, and I overtook him. He remembered seeing me with you once before,at Stone Court, and he asked me to take him on. I saw he was ill: it seemed tome the right thing to do, to carry him under shelter. And now I think youshould lose no time in getting advice for him.” Caleb took up his hat from thefloor as he ended, and rose slowly from his seat.

“Certainly,” said Bulstrode, whose mind was very active at this moment.“Perhaps you will yourself oblige me, Mr. Garth, by calling at Mr. Lydgate’s asyou pass—or stay! he may at this hour probably be at the Hospital. I will firstsend my man on the horse there with a note this instant, and then I will myselfride to Stone Court.”

Bulstrode quickly wrote a note, and went out himself to give the commission tohis man. When he returned, Caleb was standing as before with one hand on theback of the chair, holding his hat with the other. In Bulstrode’s mind thedominant thought was, “Perhaps Raffles only spoke to Garth of his illness.Garth may wonder, as he must have done before, at this disreputable fellow’sclaiming intimacy with me; but he will know nothing. And he is friendly to me—Ican be of use to him.”

He longed for some confirmation of this hopeful conjecture, but to have askedany question as to what Raffles had said or done would have been to betrayfear.

“I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mr. Garth,” he said, in his usual tone ofpoliteness. “My servant will be back in a few minutes, and I shall then gomyself to see what can be done for this unfortunate man. Perhaps you had someother business with me? If so, pray be seated.”

“Thank you,” said Caleb, making a slight gesture with his right hand to waivethe invitation. “I wish to say, Mr. Bulstrode, that I must request you to putyour business into some other hands than mine. I am obliged to you for yourhandsome way of meeting me—about the letting of Stone Court, and all otherbusiness. But I must give it up.” A sharp certainty entered like a stab intoBulstrode’s soul.

“This is sudden, Mr. Garth,” was all he could say at first.

“It is,” said Caleb; “but it is quite fixed. I must give it up.”

He spoke with a firmness which was very gentle, and yet he could see thatBulstrode seemed to cower under that gentleness, his face looking dried and hiseyes swerving away from the glance which rested on him. Caleb felt a deep pityfor him, but he could have used no pretexts to account for his resolve, even ifthey would have been of any use.

“You have been led to this, I apprehend, by some slanders concerning me utteredby that unhappy creature,” said Bulstrode, anxious now to know the utmost.

“That is true. I can’t deny that I act upon what I heard from him.”

“You are a conscientious man, Mr. Garth—a man, I trust, who feels himselfaccountable to God. You would not wish to injure me by being too ready tobelieve a slander,” said Bulstrode, casting about for pleas that might beadapted to his hearer’s mind. “That is a poor reason for giving up a connectionwhich I think I may say will be mutually beneficial.”

“I would injure no man if I could help it,” said Caleb; “even if I thought Godwinked at it. I hope I should have a feeling for my fellow-creature. But, sir—Iam obliged to believe that this Raffles has told me the truth. And I can’t behappy in working with you, or profiting by you. It hurts my mind. I must begyou to seek another agent.”

“Very well, Mr. Garth. But I must at least claim to know the worst that he hastold you. I must know what is the foul speech that I am liable to be the victimof,” said Bulstrode, a certain amount of anger beginning to mingle with hishumiliation before this quiet man who renounced his benefits.

“That’s needless,” said Caleb, waving his hand, bowing his head slightly, andnot swerving from the tone which had in it the merciful intention to spare thispitiable man. “What he has said to me will never pass from my lips, unlesssomething now unknown forces it from me. If you led a harmful life for gain,and kept others out of their rights by deceit, to get the more for yourself, Idare say you repent—you would like to go back, and can’t: that must be a bitterthing”—Caleb paused a moment and shook his head—“it is not for me to make yourlife harder to you.”

“But you do—you do make it harder to me,” said Bulstrode constrained into agenuine, pleading cry. “You make it harder to me by turning your back on me.”

“That I’m forced to do,” said Caleb, still more gently, lifting up his hand. “Iam sorry. I don’t judge you and say, he is wicked, and I am righteous. Godforbid. I don’t know everything. A man may do wrong, and his will may riseclear out of it, though he can’t get his life clear. That’s a bad punishment.If it is so with you,—well, I’m very sorry for you. But I have that feelinginside me, that I can’t go on working with you. That’s all, Mr. Bulstrode.Everything else is buried, so far as my will goes. And I wish you good-day.”

“One moment, Mr. Garth!” said Bulstrode, hurriedly. “I may trust then to yoursolemn assurance that you will not repeat either to man or woman what—even ifit have any degree of truth in it—is yet a malicious representation?” Caleb’swrath was stirred, and he said, indignantly—

“Why should I have said it if I didn’t mean it? I am in no fear of you. Suchtales as that will never tempt my tongue.”

“Excuse me—I am agitated—I am the victim of this abandoned man.”

“Stop a bit! you have got to consider whether you didn’t help to make himworse, when you profited by his vices.”

“You are wronging me by too readily believing him,” said Bulstrode, oppressed,as by a nightmare, with the inability to deny flatly what Raffles might havesaid; and yet feeling it an escape that Caleb had not so stated it to him as toask for that flat denial.

“No,” said Caleb, lifting his hand deprecatingly; “I am ready to believebetter, when better is proved. I rob you of no good chance. As to speaking, Ihold it a crime to expose a man’s sin unless I’m clear it must be done to savethe innocent. That is my way of thinking, Mr. Bulstrode, and what I say, I’veno need to swear. I wish you good-day.”

Some hours later, when he was at home, Caleb said to his wife, incidentally,that he had had some little differences with Bulstrode, and that inconsequence, he had given up all notion of taking Stone Court, and indeed hadresigned doing further business for him.

“He was disposed to interfere too much, was he?” said Mrs. Garth, imaginingthat her husband had been touched on his sensitive point, and not been allowedto do what he thought right as to materials and modes of work.

“Oh,” said Caleb, bowing his head and waving his hand gravely. And Mrs. Garthknew that this was a sign of his not intending to speak further on the subject.

As for Bulstrode, he had almost immediately mounted his horse and set off forStone Court, being anxious to arrive there before Lydgate.

His mind was crowded with images and conjectures, which were a language to hishopes and fears, just as we hear tones from the vibrations which shake ourwhole system. The deep humiliation with which he had winced under Caleb Garth’sknowledge of his past and rejection of his patronage, alternated with andalmost gave way to the sense of safety in the fact that Garth, and no other,had been the man to whom Raffles had spoken. It seemed to him a sort of earnestthat Providence intended his rescue from worse consequences; the way being thusleft open for the hope of secrecy. That Raffles should be afflicted withillness, that he should have been led to Stone Court rather thanelsewhere—Bulstrode’s heart fluttered at the vision of probabilities whichthese events conjured up. If it should turn out that he was freed from alldanger of disgrace—if he could breathe in perfect liberty—his life should bemore consecrated than it had ever been before. He mentally lifted up this vowas if it would urge the result he longed for—he tried to believe in the potencyof that prayerful resolution—its potency to determine death. He knew that heought to say, “Thy will be done;” and he said it often. But the intense desireremained that the will of God might be the death of that hated man.

Yet when he arrived at Stone Court he could not see the change in Raffleswithout a shock. But for his pallor and feebleness, Bulstrode would have calledthe change in him entirely mental. Instead of his loud tormenting mood, heshowed an intense, vague terror, and seemed to deprecate Bulstrode’s anger,because the money was all gone—he had been robbed—it had half of it been takenfrom him. He had only come here because he was ill and somebody was huntinghim—somebody was after him, he had told nobody anything, he had kept his mouthshut. Bulstrode, not knowing the significance of these symptoms, interpretedthis new nervous susceptibility into a means of alarming Raffles into trueconfessions, and taxed him with falsehood in saying that he had not toldanything, since he had just told the man who took him up in his gig and broughthim to Stone Court. Raffles denied this with solemn adjurations; the fact beingthat the links of consciousness were interrupted in him, and that his minuteterror-stricken narrative to Caleb Garth had been delivered under a set ofvisionary impulses which had dropped back into darkness.

Bulstrode’s heart sank again at this sign that he could get no grasp over thewretched man’s mind, and that no word of Raffles could be trusted as to thefact which he most wanted to know, namely, whether or not he had really keptsilence to every one in the neighborhood except Caleb Garth. The housekeeperhad told him without the least constraint of manner that since Mr. Garth left,Raffles had asked her for beer, and after that had not spoken, seeming veryill. On that side it might be concluded that there had been no betrayal. Mrs.Abel thought, like the servants at The Shrubs, that the strange man belonged tothe unpleasant “kin” who are among the troubles of the rich; she had at firstreferred the kinship to Mr. Rigg, and where there was property left, thebuzzing presence of such large blue-bottles seemed natural enough. How he couldbe “kin” to Bulstrode as well was not so clear, but Mrs. Abel agreed with herhusband that there was “no knowing,” a proposition which had a great deal ofmental food for her, so that she shook her head over it without furtherspeculation.

In less than an hour Lydgate arrived. Bulstrode met him outside the wainscotedparlor, where Raffles was, and said—

“I have called you in, Mr. Lydgate, to an unfortunate man who was once in myemployment, many years ago. Afterwards he went to America, and returned I fearto an idle dissolute life. Being destitute, he has a claim on me. He wasslightly connected with Rigg, the former owner of this place, and inconsequence found his way here. I believe he is seriously ill: apparently hismind is affected. I feel bound to do the utmost for him.”

Lydgate, who had the remembrance of his last conversation with Bulstrodestrongly upon him, was not disposed to say an unnecessary word to him, andbowed slightly in answer to this account; but just before entering the room heturned automatically and said, “What is his name?”—to know names being as mucha part of the medical man’s accomplishment as of the practical politician’s.

“Raffles, John Raffles,” said Bulstrode, who hoped that whatever became ofRaffles, Lydgate would never know any more of him.

When he had thoroughly examined and considered the patient, Lydgate orderedthat he should go to bed, and be kept there in as complete quiet as possible,and then went with Bulstrode into another room.

“It is a serious case, I apprehend,” said the banker, before Lydgate began tospeak.

“No—and yes,” said Lydgate, half dubiously. “It is difficult to decide as tothe possible effect of long-standing complications; but the man had a robustconstitution to begin with. I should not expect this attack to be fatal, thoughof course the system is in a ticklish state. He should be well watched andattended to.”

“I will remain here myself,” said Bulstrode. “Mrs. Abel and her husband areinexperienced. I can easily remain here for the night, if you will oblige me bytaking a note for Mrs. Bulstrode.”

“I should think that is hardly necessary,” said Lydgate. “He seems tame andterrified enough. He might become more unmanageable. But there is a man here—isthere not?”

“I have more than once stayed here a few nights for the sake of seclusion,”said Bulstrode, indifferently; “I am quite disposed to do so now. Mrs. Abel andher husband can relieve or aid me, if necessary.”

“Very well. Then I need give my directions only to you,” said Lydgate, notfeeling surprised at a little peculiarity in Bulstrode.

“You think, then, that the case is hopeful?” said Bulstrode, when Lydgate hadended giving his orders.

“Unless there turn out to be further complications, such as I have not atpresent detected—yes,” said Lydgate. “He may pass on to a worse stage; but Ishould not wonder if he got better in a few days, by adhering to the treatmentI have prescribed. There must be firmness. Remember, if he calls for liquors ofany sort, not to give them to him. In my opinion, men in his condition areoftener killed by treatment than by the disease. Still, new symptoms may arise.I shall come again to-morrow morning.”

After waiting for the note to be carried to Mrs. Bulstrode, Lydgate rode away,forming no conjectures, in the first instance, about the history of Raffles,but rehearsing the whole argument, which had lately been much stirred by thepublication of Dr. Ware’s abundant experience in America, as to the right wayof treating cases of alcoholic poisoning such as this. Lydgate, when abroad,had already been interested in this question: he was strongly convinced againstthe prevalent practice of allowing alcohol and persistently administering largedoses of opium; and he had repeatedly acted on this conviction with a favorableresult.

“The man is in a diseased state,” he thought, “but there’s a good deal of wearin him still. I suppose he is an object of charity to Bulstrode. It is curiouswhat patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions.Bulstrode seems the most unsympathetic fellow I ever saw about some people, andyet he has taken no end of trouble, and spent a great deal of money, onbenevolent objects. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whomHeaven cares for—he has made up his mind that it doesn’t care for me.”

This streak of bitterness came from a plenteous source, and kept widening inthe current of his thought as he neared Lowick Gate. He had not been theresince his first interview with Bulstrode in the morning, having been found atthe Hospital by the banker’s messenger; and for the first time he was returningto his home without the vision of any expedient in the background which lefthim a hope of raising money enough to deliver him from the coming destitutionof everything which made his married life tolerable—everything which saved himand Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they would be forced torecognize how little of a comfort they could be to each other. It was morebearable to do without tenderness for himself than to see that his owntenderness could make no amends for the lack of other things to her. Thesufferings of his own pride from humiliations past and to come were keenenough, yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself from that more acutepain which dominated them—the pain of foreseeing that Rosamond would come toregard him chiefly as the cause of disappointment and unhappiness to her. Hehad never liked the makeshifts of poverty, and they had never before enteredinto his prospects for himself; but he was beginning now to imagine how twocreatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, mightlaugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they couldafford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry seemed as far off fromhim as the carelessness of the golden age; in poor Rosamond’s mind there wasnot room enough for luxuries to look small in. He got down from his horse in avery sad mood, and went into the house, not expecting to be cheered except byhis dinner, and reflecting that before the evening closed it would be wise totell Rosamond of his application to Bulstrode and its failure. It would be wellnot to lose time in preparing her for the worst.

But his dinner waited long for him before he was able to eat it. For onentering he found that Dover’s agent had already put a man in the house, andwhen he asked where Mrs. Lydgate was, he was told that she was in her bedroom.He went up and found her stretched on the bed pale and silent, without ananswer even in her face to any word or look of his. He sat down by the bed andleaning over her said with almost a cry of prayer—

“Forgive me for this misery, my poor Rosamond! Let us only love one another.”

She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face; but thenthe tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled. The strong man hadhad too much to bear that day. He let his head fall beside hers and sobbed.

He did not hinder her from going to her father early in the morning—it seemednow that he ought not to hinder her from doing as she pleased. In half an hourshe came back, and said that papa and mamma wished her to go and stay with themwhile things were in this miserable state. Papa said he could do nothing aboutthe debt—if he paid this, there would be half-a-dozen more. She had better comeback home again till Lydgate had got a comfortable home for her. “Do youobject, Tertius?”

“Do as you like,” said Lydgate. “But things are not coming to a crisisimmediately. There is no hurry.”

“I should not go till to-morrow,” said Rosamond; “I shall want to pack myclothes.”

“Oh, I would wait a little longer than to-morrow—there is no knowing what mayhappen,” said Lydgate, with bitter irony. “I may get my neck broken, and thatmay make things easier to you.”

It was Lydgate’s misfortune and Rosamond’s too, that his tenderness towardsher, which was both an emotional prompting and a well-considered resolve, wasinevitably interrupted by these outbursts of indignation either ironical orremonstrant. She thought them totally unwarranted, and the repulsion which thisexceptional severity excited in her was in danger of making the more persistenttenderness unacceptable.

“I see you do not wish me to go,” she said, with chill mildness; “why can younot say so, without that kind of violence? I shall stay until you request me todo otherwise.”

Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds. He felt bruised andshattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which Rosamond had not seenbefore. She could not bear to look at him. Tertius had a way of taking thingswhich made them a great deal worse for her.

CHAPTER LXX.

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.”

Bulstrode’s first object after Lydgate had left Stone Court was to examineRaffles’s pockets, which he imagined were sure to carry signs in the shape ofhotel-bills of the places he had stopped in, if he had not told the truth insaying that he had come straight from Liverpool because he was ill and had nomoney. There were various bills crammed into his pocketbook, but none of alater date than Christmas at any other place, except one, which bore date thatmorning. This was crumpled up with a hand-bill about a horse-fair in one of histail-pockets, and represented the cost of three days’ stay at an inn atBilkley, where the fair was held—a town at least forty miles from Middlemarch.The bill was heavy, and since Raffles had no luggage with him, it seemedprobable that he had left his portmanteau behind in payment, in order to savemoney for his travelling fare; for his purse was empty, and he had only acouple of sixpences and some loose pence in his pockets.

Bulstrode gathered a sense of safety from these indications that Raffles hadreally kept at a distance from Middlemarch since his memorable visit atChristmas. At a distance and among people who were strangers to Bulstrode, whatsatisfaction could there be to Raffles’s tormenting, self-magnifying vein intelling old scandalous stories about a Middlemarch banker? And what harm if hedid talk? The chief point now was to keep watch over him as long as there wasany danger of that intelligible raving, that unaccountable impulse to tell,which seemed to have acted towards Caleb Garth; and Bulstrode felt much anxietylest some such impulse should come over him at the sight of Lydgate. He sat upalone with him through the night, only ordering the housekeeper to lie down inher clothes, so as to be ready when he called her, alleging his ownindisposition to sleep, and his anxiety to carry out the doctor’s orders. Hedid carry them out faithfully, although Raffles was incessantly asking forbrandy, and declaring that he was sinking away—that the earth was sinking awayfrom under him. He was restless and sleepless, but still quailing andmanageable. On the offer of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, andthe denial of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate all histerror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger, his revenge on him bystarvation, and declaring with strong oaths that he had never told any mortal aword against him. Even this Bulstrode felt that he would not have liked Lydgateto hear; but a more alarming sign of fitful alternation in his delirium was,that in-the morning twilight Raffles suddenly seemed to imagine a doctorpresent, addressing him and declaring that Bulstrode wanted to starve him todeath out of revenge for telling, when he never had told.

Bulstrode’s native imperiousness and strength of determination served him well.This delicate-looking man, himself nervously perturbed, found the neededstimulus in his strenuous circ*mstances, and through that difficult night andmorning, while he had the air of an animated corpse returned to movementwithout warmth, holding the mastery by its chill impassibility, his mind wasintensely at work thinking of what he had to guard against and what would winhim security. Whatever prayers he might lift up, whatever statements he mightinwardly make of this man’s wretched spiritual condition, and the duty hehimself was under to submit to the punishment divinely appointed for him ratherthan to wish for evil to another—through all this effort to condense words intoa solid mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible vividness theimages of the events he desired. And in the train of those images came theirapology. He could not but see the death of Raffles, and see in it his owndeliverance. What was the removal of this wretched creature? He wasimpenitent—but were not public criminals impenitent?—yet the law decided ontheir fate. Should Providence in this case award death, there was no sin incontemplating death as the desirable issue—if he kept his hands from hasteningit—if he scrupulously did what was prescribed. Even here there might be amistake: human prescriptions were fallible things: Lydgate had said thattreatment had hastened death,—why not his own method of treatment? But ofcourse intention was everything in the question of right and wrong.

And Bulstrode set himself to keep his intention separate from his desire. Heinwardly declared that he intended to obey orders. Why should he have got intoany argument about the validity of these orders? It was only the common trickof desire—which avails itself of any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger roomfor itself in all uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks likethe absence of law. Still, he did obey the orders.

His anxieties continually glanced towards Lydgate, and his remembrance of whathad taken place between them the morning before was accompanied withsensibilities which had not been roused at all during the actual scene. He hadthen cared but little about Lydgate’s painful impressions with regard to thesuggested change in the Hospital, or about the disposition towards himselfwhich what he held to be his justifiable refusal of a rather exorbitant requestmight call forth. He recurred to the scene now with a perception that he hadprobably made Lydgate his enemy, and with an awakened desire to propitiate him,or rather to create in him a strong sense of personal obligation. He regrettedthat he had not at once made even an unreasonable money-sacrifice. For in caseof unpleasant suspicions, or even knowledge gathered from the raving ofRaffles, Bulstrode would have felt that he had a defence in Lydgate’s mind byhaving conferred a momentous benefit on him. But the regret had perhaps cometoo late.

Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed foryears to be better than he was—who had taken his selfish passions intodiscipline and clad them in severe robes, so that he had walked with them as adevout choir, till now that a terror had risen among them, and they could chantno longer, but threw out their common cries for safety.

It was nearly the middle of the day before Lydgate arrived: he had meant tocome earlier, but had been detained, he said; and his shattered looks werenoticed by Balstrode. But he immediately threw himself into the considerationof the patient, and inquired strictly into all that had occurred. Raffles wasworse, would take hardly any food, was persistently wakeful and restlesslyraving; but still not violent. Contrary to Bulstrode’s alarmed expectation, hetook little notice of Lydgate’s presence, and continued to talk or murmurincoherently.

“What do you think of him?” said Bulstrode, in private.

“The symptoms are worse.”

“You are less hopeful?”

“No; I still think he may come round. Are you going to stay here yourself?”said Lydgate, looking at Bulstrode with an abrupt question, which made himuneasy, though in reality it was not due to any suspicious conjecture.

“Yes, I think so,” said Bulstrode, governing himself and speaking withdeliberation. “Mrs. Bulstrode is advised of the reasons which detain me. Mrs.Abel and her husband are not experienced enough to be left quite alone, andthis kind of responsibility is scarcely included in their service of me. Youhave some fresh instructions, I presume.”

The chief new instruction that Lydgate had to give was on the administration ofextremely moderate doses of opium, in case of the sleeplessness continuingafter several hours. He had taken the precaution of bringing opium in hispocket, and he gave minute directions to Bulstrode as to the doses, and thepoint at which they should cease. He insisted on the risk of not ceasing; andrepeated his order that no alcohol should be given.

“From what I see of the case,” he ended, “narcotism is the only thing I shouldbe much afraid of. He may wear through even without much food. There’s a gooddeal of strength in him.”

“You look ill yourself, Mr. Lydgate—a most unusual, I may say unprecedentedthing in my knowledge of you,” said Bulstrode, showing a solicitude as unlikehis indifference the day before, as his present recklessness about his ownfatigue was unlike his habitual self-cherishing anxiety. “I fear you areharassed.”

“Yes, I am,” said Lydgate, brusquely, holding his hat, and ready to go.

“Something new, I fear,” said Bulstrode, inquiringly. “Pray be seated.”

“No, thank you,” said Lydgate, with some hauteur. “I mentioned to you yesterdaywhat was the state of my affairs. There is nothing to add, except that theexecution has since then been actually put into my house. One can tell a gooddeal of trouble in a short sentence. I will say good morning.”

“Stay, Mr. Lydgate, stay,” said Bulstrode; “I have been reconsidering thissubject. I was yesterday taken by surprise, and saw it superficially. Mrs.Bulstrode is anxious for her niece, and I myself should grieve at a calamitouschange in your position. Claims on me are numerous, but on reconsideration, Iesteem it right that I should incur a small sacrifice rather than leave youunaided. You said, I think, that a thousand pounds would suffice entirely tofree you from your burthens, and enable you to recover a firm stand?”

“Yes,” said Lydgate, a great leap of joy within him surmounting every otherfeeling; “that would pay all my debts, and leave me a little on hand. I couldset about economizing in our way of living. And by-and-by my practice mightlook up.”

“If you will wait a moment, Mr. Lydgate, I will draw a check to that amount. Iam aware that help, to be effectual in these cases, should be thorough.”

While Bulstrode wrote, Lydgate turned to the window thinking of hishome—thinking of his life with its good start saved from frustration, its goodpurposes still unbroken.

“You can give me a note of hand for this, Mr. Lydgate,” said the banker,advancing towards him with the check. “And by-and-by, I hope, you may be incirc*mstances gradually to repay me. Meanwhile, I have pleasure in thinkingthat you will be released from further difficulty.”

“I am deeply obliged to you,” said Lydgate. “You have restored to me theprospect of working with some happiness and some chance of good.”

It appeared to him a very natural movement in Bulstrode that he should havereconsidered his refusal: it corresponded with the more munificent side of hischaracter. But as he put his hack into a canter, that he might get the soonerhome, and tell the good news to Rosamond, and get cash at the bank to pay overto Dover’s agent, there crossed his mind, with an unpleasant impression, asfrom a dark-winged flight of evil augury across his vision, the thought of thatcontrast in himself which a few months had brought—that he should be overjoyedat being under a strong personal obligation—that he should be overjoyed atgetting money for himself from Bulstrode.

The banker felt that he had done something to nullify one cause of uneasiness,and yet he was scarcely the easier. He did not measure the quantity of diseasedmotive which had made him wish for Lydgate’s good-will, but the quantity wasnone the less actively there, like an irritating agent in his blood. A manvows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that hedistinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to breakit are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relaxhis muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again thereasons for his vow. Raffles, recovering quickly, returning to the free use ofhis odious powers—how could Bulstrode wish for that? Raffles dead was the imagethat brought release, and indirectly he prayed for that way of release,beseeching that, if it were possible, the rest of his days here below might befreed from the threat of an ignominy which would break him utterly as aninstrument of God’s service. Lydgate’s opinion was not on the side of promisethat this prayer would be fulfilled; and as the day advanced, Bulstrode felthimself getting irritated at the persistent life in this man, whom he wouldfain have seen sinking into the silence of death: imperious will stirredmurderous impulses towards this brute life, over which will, by itself, had nopower. He said inwardly that he was getting too much worn; he would not sit upwith the patient to-night, but leave him to Mrs. Abel, who, if necessary, couldcall her husband.

At six o’clock, Raffles, having had only fitful perturbed snatches of sleep,from which he waked with fresh restlessness and perpetual cries that he wassinking away, Bulstrode began to administer the opium according to Lydgate’sdirections. At the end of half an hour or more he called Mrs. Abel and told herthat he found himself unfit for further watching. He must now consign thepatient to her care; and he proceeded to repeat to her Lydgate’s directions asto the quantity of each dose. Mrs. Abel had not before known anything ofLydgate’s prescriptions; she had simply prepared and brought whatever Bulstrodeordered, and had done what he pointed out to her. She began now to ask whatelse she should do besides administering the opium.

“Nothing at present, except the offer of the soup or the soda-water: you cancome to me for further directions. Unless there is any important change, Ishall not come into the room again to-night. You will ask your husband for helpif necessary. I must go to bed early.”

“You’ve much need, sir, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Abel, “and to take something morestrengthening than what you’ve done.”

Bulstrode went away now without anxiety as to what Raffles might say in hisraving, which had taken on a muttering incoherence not likely to create anydangerous belief. At any rate he must risk this. He went down into thewainscoted parlor first, and began to consider whether he would not have hishorse saddled and go home by the moonlight, and give up caring for earthlyconsequences. Then, he wished that he had begged Lydgate to come again thatevening. Perhaps he might deliver a different opinion, and think that Raffleswas getting into a less hopeful state. Should he send for Lydgate? If Raffleswere really getting worse, and slowly dying, Bulstrode felt that he could go tobed and sleep in gratitude to Providence. But was he worse? Lydgate might comeand simply say that he was going on as he expected, and predict that he wouldby-and-by fall into a good sleep, and get well. What was the use of sending forhim? Bulstrode shrank from that result. No ideas or opinions could hinder himfrom seeing the one probability to be, that Raffles recovered would be just thesame man as before, with his strength as a tormentor renewed, obliging him todrag away his wife to spend her years apart from her friends and native place,carrying an alienating suspicion against him in her heart.

He had sat an hour and a half in this conflict by the firelight only, when asudden thought made him rise and light the bed-candle, which he had broughtdown with him. The thought was, that he had not told Mrs. Abel when the dosesof opium must cease.

He took hold of the candlestick, but stood motionless for a long while. Shemight already have given him more than Lydgate had prescribed. But it wasexcusable in him, that he should forget part of an order, in his presentwearied condition. He walked up-stairs, candle in hand, not knowing whether heshould straightway enter his own room and go to bed, or turn to the patient’sroom and rectify his omission. He paused in the passage, with his face turnedtowards Raffles’s room, and he could hear him moaning and murmuring. He was notasleep, then. Who could know that Lydgate’s prescription would not be betterdisobeyed than followed, since there was still no sleep?

He turned into his own room. Before he had quite undressed, Mrs. Abel rapped atthe door; he opened it an inch, so that he could hear her speak low.

“If you please, sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give the poorcreetur? He feels sinking away, and nothing else will he swaller—and but littlestrength in it, if he did—only the opium. And he says more and more he’ssinking down through the earth.”

To her surprise, Mr. Bulstrode did not answer. A struggle was going on withinhim.

“I think he must die for want o’ support, if he goes on in that way. When Inursed my poor master, Mr. Robisson, I had to give him port-wine and brandyconstant, and a big glass at a time,” added Mrs. Abel, with a touch ofremonstrance in her tone.

But again Mr. Bulstrode did not answer immediately, and she continued, “It’snot a time to spare when people are at death’s door, nor would you wish it,sir, I’m sure. Else I should give him our own bottle o’ rum as we keep by us.But a sitter-up so as you’ve been, and doing everything as laid in your power—”

Here a key was thrust through the inch of doorway, and Mr. Bulstrode saidhuskily, “That is the key of the wine-cooler. You will find plenty of brandythere.”

Early in the morning—about six—Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent some time inprayer. Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarilycandid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudiblespeech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is,even in his own reflections? Bulstrode had not yet unravelled in his thoughtthe confused promptings of the last four-and-twenty hours.

He listened in the passage, and could hear hard stertorous breathing. Then hewalked out in the garden, and looked at the early rime on the grass and freshspring leaves. When he re-entered the house, he felt startled at the sight ofMrs. Abel.

“How is your patient—asleep, I think?” he said, with an attempt at cheerfulnessin his tone.

“He’s gone very deep, sir,” said Mrs. Abel. “He went off gradual between threeand four o’clock. Would you please to go and look at him? I thought it no harmto leave him. My man’s gone afield, and the little girl’s seeing to thekettles.”

Bulstrode went up. At a glance he knew that Raffles was not in the sleep whichbrings revival, but in the sleep which streams deeper and deeper into the gulfof death.

He looked round the room and saw a bottle with some brandy in it, and thealmost empty opium phial. He put the phial out of sight, and carried thebrandy-bottle down-stairs with him, locking it again in the wine-cooler.

While breakfasting he considered whether he should ride to Middlemarch at once,or wait for Lydgate’s arrival. He decided to wait, and told Mrs. Abel that shemight go about her work—he could watch in the bed-chamber.

As he sat there and beheld the enemy of his peace going irrevocably intosilence, he felt more at rest than he had done for many months. His consciencewas soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed just then like anangel sent down for his relief. He drew out his pocket-book to review variousmemoranda there as to the arrangements he had projected and partly carried outin the prospect of quitting Middlemarch, and considered how far he would letthem stand or recall them, now that his absence would be brief. Some economieswhich he felt desirable might still find a suitable occasion in his temporarywithdrawal from management, and he hoped still that Mrs. Casaubon would take alarge share in the expenses of the Hospital. In that way the moments passed,until a change in the stertorous breathing was marked enough to draw hisattention wholly to the bed, and forced him to think of the departing life,which had once been subservient to his own—which he had once been glad to findbase enough for him to act on as he would. It was his gladness then whichimpelled him now to be glad that the life was at an end.

And who could say that the death of Raffles had been hastened? Who knew whatwould have saved him?

Lydgate arrived at half-past ten, in time to witness the final pause of thebreath. When he entered the room Bulstrode observed a sudden expression in hisface, which was not so much surprise as a recognition that he had not judgedcorrectly. He stood by the bed in silence for some time, with his eyes turnedon the dying man, but with that subdued activity of expression which showedthat he was carrying on an inward debate.

“When did this change begin?” said he, looking at Bulstrode.

“I did not watch by him last night,” said Bulstrode. “I was over-worn, and lefthim under Mrs. Abel’s care. She said that he sank into sleep between three andfour o’clock. When I came in before eight he was nearly in this condition.”

Lydgate did not ask another question, but watched in silence until he said,“It’s all over.”

This morning Lydgate was in a state of recovered hope and freedom. He had setout on his work with all his old animation, and felt himself strong enough tobear all the deficiencies of his married life. And he was conscious thatBulstrode had been a benefactor to him. But he was uneasy about this case. Hehad not expected it to terminate as it had done. Yet he hardly knew how to puta question on the subject to Bulstrode without appearing to insult him; and ifhe examined the housekeeper—why, the man was dead. There seemed to be no use inimplying that somebody’s ignorance or imprudence had killed him. And after all,he himself might be wrong.

He and Bulstrode rode back to Middlemarch together, talking of manythings—chiefly cholera and the chances of the Reform Bill in the House ofLords, and the firm resolve of the political Unions. Nothing was said aboutRaffles, except that Bulstrode mentioned the necessity of having a grave forhim in Lowick churchyard, and observed that, so far as he knew, the poor manhad no connections, except Rigg, whom he had stated to be unfriendly towardshim.

On returning home Lydgate had a visit from Mr. Farebrother. The Vicar had notbeen in the town the day before, but the news that there was an execution inLydgate’s house had got to Lowick by the evening, having been carried by Mr.Spicer, shoemaker and parish-clerk, who had it from his brother, therespectable bell-hanger in Lowick Gate. Since that evening when Lydgate hadcome down from the billiard room with Fred Vincy, Mr. Farebrother’s thoughtsabout him had been rather gloomy. Playing at the Green Dragon once or oftenermight have been a trifle in another man; but in Lydgate it was one of severalsigns that he was getting unlike his former self. He was beginning to do thingsfor which he had formerly even an excessive scorn. Whatever certaindissatisfactions in marriage, which some silly tinklings of gossip had givenhim hints of, might have to do with this change, Mr. Farebrother felt sure thatit was chiefly connected with the debts which were being more and moredistinctly reported, and he began to fear that any notion of Lydgate’s havingresources or friends in the background must be quite illusory. The rebuff hehad met with in his first attempt to win Lydgate’s confidence, disinclined himto a second; but this news of the execution being actually in the house,determined the Vicar to overcome his reluctance.

Lydgate had just dismissed a poor patient, in whom he was much interested, andhe came forward to put out his hand—with an open cheerfulness which surprisedMr. Farebrother. Could this too be a proud rejection of sympathy and help?Never mind; the sympathy and help should be offered.

“How are you, Lydgate? I came to see you because I had heard something whichmade me anxious about you,” said the Vicar, in the tone of a good brother, onlythat there was no reproach in it. They were both seated by this time, andLydgate answered immediately—

“I think I know what you mean. You had heard that there was an execution in thehouse?”

“Yes; is it true?”

“It was true,” said Lydgate, with an air of freedom, as if he did not mindtalking about the affair now. “But the danger is over; the debt is paid. I amout of my difficulties now: I shall be freed from debts, and able, I hope, tostart afresh on a better plan.”

“I am very thankful to hear it,” said the Vicar, falling back in his chair, andspeaking with that low-toned quickness which often follows the removal of aload. “I like that better than all the news in the ‘Times.’ I confess I came toyou with a heavy heart.”

“Thank you for coming,” said Lydgate, cordially. “I can enjoy the kindness allthe more because I am happier. I have certainly been a good deal crushed. I’mafraid I shall find the bruises still painful by-and by,” he added, smilingrather sadly; “but just now I can only feel that the torture-screw is off.”

Mr. Farebrother was silent for a moment, and then said earnestly, “My dearfellow, let me ask you one question. Forgive me if I take a liberty.”

“I don’t believe you will ask anything that ought to offend me.”

“Then—this is necessary to set my heart quite at rest—you have not—have you?—inorder to pay your debts, incurred another debt which may harass you worsehereafter?”

“No,” said Lydgate, coloring slightly. “There is no reason why I should nottell you—since the fact is so—that the person to whom I am indebted isBulstrode. He has made me a very handsome advance—a thousand pounds—and he canafford to wait for repayment.”

“Well, that is generous,” said Mr. Farebrother, compelling himself to approveof the man whom he disliked. His delicate feeling shrank from dwelling even inhis thought on the fact that he had always urged Lydgate to avoid any personalentanglement with Bulstrode. He added immediately, “And Bulstrode mustnaturally feel an interest in your welfare, after you have worked with him in away which has probably reduced your income instead of adding to it. I am gladto think that he has acted accordingly.”

Lydgate felt uncomfortable under these kindly suppositions. They made moredistinct within him the uneasy consciousness which had shown its first dimstirrings only a few hours before, that Bulstrode’s motives for his suddenbeneficence following close upon the chillest indifference might be merelyselfish. He let the kindly suppositions pass. He could not tell the history ofthe loan, but it was more vividly present with him than ever, as well as thefact which the Vicar delicately ignored—that this relation of personalindebtedness to Bulstrode was what he had once been most resolved to avoid.

He began, instead of answering, to speak of his projected economies, and of hishaving come to look at his life from a different point of view.

“I shall set up a surgery,” he said. “I really think I made a mistaken effortin that respect. And if Rosamond will not mind, I shall take an apprentice. Idon’t like these things, but if one carries them out faithfully they are notreally lowering. I have had a severe galling to begin with: that will make thesmall rubs seem easy.”

Poor Lydgate! the “if Rosamond will not mind,” which had fallen from himinvoluntarily as part of his thought, was a significant mark of the yoke hebore. But Mr. Farebrother, whose hopes entered strongly into the same currentwith Lydgate’s, and who knew nothing about him that could now raise amelancholy presentiment, left him with affectionate congratulation.

CHAPTER LXXI.

Clown. . . . ’Twas in the Bunch of Grapes, where, indeed,
you have a delight to sit, have you not?
Froth. I have so: because it is an open room, and good for winter.
Clo. Why, very well then: I hope here be truths.
—Measure for Measure.

Five days after the death of Raffles, Mr. Bambridge was standing at his leisureunder the large archway leading into the yard of the Green Dragon. He was notfond of solitary contemplation, but he had only just come out of the house, andany human figure standing at ease under the archway in the early afternoon wasas certain to attract companionship as a pigeon which has found something worthpecking at. In this case there was no material object to feed upon, but the eyeof reason saw a probability of mental sustenance in the shape of gossip. Mr.Hopkins, the meek-mannered draper opposite, was the first to act on this inwardvision, being the more ambitious of a little masculine talk because hiscustomers were chiefly women. Mr. Bambridge was rather curt to the draper,feeling that Hopkins was of course glad to talk to him, but that he wasnot going to waste much of his talk on Hopkins. Soon, however, there was asmall cluster of more important listeners, who were either deposited from thepassers-by, or had sauntered to the spot expressly to see if there wereanything going on at the Green Dragon; and Mr. Bambridge was finding it worthhis while to say many impressive things about the fine studs he had been seeingand the purchases he had made on a journey in the north from which he had justreturned. Gentlemen present were assured that when they could show him anythingto cut out a blood mare, a bay, rising four, which was to be seen at Doncasterif they chose to go and look at it, Mr. Bambridge would gratify them by beingshot “from here to Hereford.” Also, a pair of blacks which he was going to putinto the break recalled vividly to his mind a pair which he had sold toFaulkner in ’19, for a hundred guineas, and which Faulkner had sold for ahundred and sixty two months later—any gent who could disprove this statementbeing offered the privilege of calling Mr. Bambridge by a very ugly name untilthe exercise made his throat dry.

When the discourse was at this point of animation, came up Mr. Frank Hawley. Hewas not a man to compromise his dignity by lounging at the Green Dragon, buthappening to pass along the High Street and seeing Bambridge on the other side,he took some of his long strides across to ask the horsedealer whether he hadfound the first-rate gig-horse which he had engaged to look for. Mr. Hawley wasrequested to wait until he had seen a gray selected at Bilkley: if that did notmeet his wishes to a hair, Bambridge did not know a horse when he saw it, whichseemed to be the highest conceivable unlikelihood. Mr. Hawley, standing withhis back to the street, was fixing a time for looking at the gray and seeing ittried, when a horseman passed slowly by.

“Bulstrode!” said two or three voices at once in a low tone, one of them, whichwas the draper’s, respectfully prefixing the “Mr.;” but nobody having moreintention in this interjectural naming than if they had said “the Riverstoncoach” when that vehicle appeared in the distance. Mr. Hawley gave a carelessglance round at Bulstrode’s back, but as Bambridge’s eyes followed it he made asarcastic grimace.

“By jingo! that reminds me,” he began, lowering his voice a little, “I pickedup something else at Bilkley besides your gig-horse, Mr. Hawley. I picked up afine story about Bulstrode. Do you know how he came by his fortune? Anygentleman wanting a bit of curious information, I can give it him free ofexpense. If everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode might have had to say hisprayers at Botany Bay.”

“What do you mean?” said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his hands into his pockets, andpushing a little forward under the archway. If Bulstrode should turn out to bea rascal, Frank Hawley had a prophetic soul.

“I had it from a party who was an old chum of Bulstrode’s. I’ll tell you whereI first picked him up,” said Bambridge, with a sudden gesture of hisfore-finger. “He was at Larcher’s sale, but I knew nothing of him then—heslipped through my fingers—was after Bulstrode, no doubt. He tells me he cantap Bulstrode to any amount, knows all his secrets. However, he blabbed to meat Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass. Damme if I think he meant to turn king’sevidence; but he’s that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedgeand ditch with him, till he’d brag of a spavin as if it ’ud fetch money. A manshould know when to pull up.” Mr. Bambridge made this remark with an air ofdisgust, satisfied that his own bragging showed a fine sense of the marketable.

“What’s the man’s name? Where can he be found?” said Mr. Hawley.

“As to where he is to be found, I left him to it at the Saracen’s Head; but hisname is Raffles.”

“Raffles!” exclaimed Mr. Hopkins. “I furnished his funeral yesterday. He wasburied at Lowick. Mr. Bulstrode followed him. A very decent funeral.” There wasa strong sensation among the listeners. Mr. Bambridge gave an ejacul*tion inwhich “brimstone” was the mildest word, and Mr. Hawley, knitting his brows andbending his head forward, exclaimed, “What?—where did the man die?”

“At Stone Court,” said the draper. “The housekeeper said he was a relation ofthe master’s. He came there ill on Friday.”

“Why, it was on Wednesday I took a glass with him,” interposed Bambridge.

“Did any doctor attend him?” said Mr. Hawley

“Yes. Mr. Lydgate. Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night. He died the thirdmorning.”

“Go on, Bambridge,” said Mr. Hawley, insistently. “What did this fellow sayabout Bulstrode?”

The group had already become larger, the town-clerk’s presence being aguarantee that something worth listening to was going on there; and Mr.Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven. It was mainly whatwe know, including the fact about Will Ladislaw, with some local color andcirc*mstance added: it was what Bulstrode had dreaded the betrayal of—and hopedto have buried forever with the corpse of Raffles—it was that haunting ghost ofhis earlier life which as he rode past the archway of the Green Dragon he wastrusting that Providence had delivered him from. Yes, Providence. He had notconfessed to himself yet that he had done anything in the way of contrivance tothis end; he had accepted what seemed to have been offered. It was impossibleto prove that he had done anything which hastened the departure of that man’ssoul.

But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like the smell offire. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending a clerk whom hecould trust to Stone Court on a pretext of inquiring about hay, but really togather all that could be learned about Raffles and his illness from Mrs. Abel.In this way it came to his knowledge that Mr. Garth had carried the man toStone Court in his gig; and Mr. Hawley in consequence took an opportunity ofseeing Caleb, calling at his office to ask whether he had time to undertake anarbitration if it were required, and then asking him incidentally aboutRaffles. Caleb was betrayed into no word injurious to Bulstrode beyond the factwhich he was forced to admit, that he had given up acting for him within thelast week. Mr Hawley drew his inferences, and feeling convinced that Raffleshad told his story to Garth, and that Garth had given up Bulstrode’s affairs inconsequence, said so a few hours later to Mr. Toller. The statement was passedon until it had quite lost the stamp of an inference, and was taken asinformation coming straight from Garth, so that even a diligent historian mighthave concluded Caleb to be the chief publisher of Bulstrode’s misdemeanors.

Mr. Hawley was not slow to perceive that there was no handle for the law eitherin the revelations made by Raffles or in the circ*mstances of his death. He hadhimself ridden to Lowick village that he might look at the register and talkover the whole matter with Mr. Farebrother, who was not more surprised than thelawyer that an ugly secret should have come to light about Bulstrode, though hehad always had justice enough in him to hinder his antipathy from turning intoconclusions. But while they were talking another combination was silently goingforward in Mr. Farebrother’s mind, which foreshadowed what was soon to beloudly spoken of in Middlemarch as a necessary “putting of two and twotogether.” With the reasons which kept Bulstrode in dread of Raffles thereflashed the thought that the dread might have something to do with hismunificence towards his medical man; and though he resisted the suggestion thatit had been consciously accepted in any way as a bribe, he had a forebodingthat this complication of things might be of malignant effect on Lydgate’sreputation. He perceived that Mr. Hawley knew nothing at present of the suddenrelief from debt, and he himself was careful to glide away from all approachestowards the subject.

“Well,” he said, with a deep breath, wanting to wind up the illimitablediscussion of what might have been, though nothing could be legally proven, “itis a strange story. So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer genealogy! Ahigh-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot made a likely enoughstock for him to spring from, but I should never have suspected a grafting ofthe Jew pawnbroker. However, there’s no knowing what a mixture will turn outbeforehand. Some sorts of dirt serve to clarify.”

“It’s just what I should have expected,” said Mr. Hawley, mounting his horse.“Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy.”

“I know he’s one of your black sheep, Hawley. But he is really a disinterested,unworldly fellow,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.

“Ay, ay, that is your Whiggish twist,” said Mr. Hawley, who had been in thehabit of saying apologetically that Farebrother was such a damned pleasantgood-hearted fellow you would mistake him for a Tory.

Mr. Hawley rode home without thinking of Lydgate’s attendance on Raffles in anyother light than as a piece of evidence on the side of Bulstrode. But the newsthat Lydgate had all at once become able not only to get rid of the executionin his house but to pay all his debts in Middlemarch was spreading fast,gathering round it conjectures and comments which gave it new body and impetus,and soon filling the ears of other persons besides Mr. Hawley, who were notslow to see a significant relation between this sudden command of money andBulstrode’s desire to stifle the scandal of Raffles. That the money came fromBulstrode would infallibly have been guessed even if there had been no directevidence of it; for it had beforehand entered into the gossip about Lydgate’saffairs, that neither his father-in-law nor his own family would do anythingfor him, and direct evidence was furnished not only by a clerk at the Bank, butby innocent Mrs. Bulstrode herself, who mentioned the loan to Mrs. Plymdale,who mentioned it to her daughter-in-law of the house of Toller, who mentionedit generally. The business was felt to be so public and important that itrequired dinners to feed it, and many invitations were just then issued andaccepted on the strength of this scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate;wives, widows, and single ladies took their work and went out to tea oftenerthan usual; and all public conviviality, from the Green Dragon to Dollop’s,gathered a zest which could not be won from the question whether the Lordswould throw out the Reform Bill.

For hardly anybody doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at thebottom of Bulstrode’s liberality to Lydgate. Mr. Hawley indeed, in the firstinstance, invited a select party, including the two physicians, with Mr Tollerand Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold a close discussion as to the probabilities ofRaffles’s illness, reciting to them all the particulars which had been gatheredfrom Mrs. Abel in connection with Lydgate’s certificate, that the death was dueto delirium tremens; and the medical gentlemen, who all stood undisturbedly onthe old paths in relation to this disease, declared that they could see nothingin these particulars which could be transformed into a positive ground ofsuspicion. But the moral grounds of suspicion remained: the strong motivesBulstrode clearly had for wishing to be rid of Raffles, and the fact that atthis critical moment he had given Lydgate the help which he must for some timehave known the need for; the disposition, moreover, to believe that Bulstrodewould be unscrupulous, and the absence of any indisposition to believe thatLydgate might be as easily bribed as other haughty-minded men when they havefound themselves in want of money. Even if the money had been given merely tomake him hold his tongue about the scandal of Bulstrode’s earlier life, thefact threw an odious light on Lydgate, who had long been sneered at as makinghimself subservient to the banker for the sake of working himself intopredominance, and discrediting the elder members of his profession. Hence, inspite of the negative as to any direct sign of guilt in relation to the deathat Stone Court, Mr. Hawley’s select party broke up with the sense that theaffair had “an ugly look.”

But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep upmuch head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professionalseniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact.Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it;for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a moreliberal allowance for the incompatible. Even the more definite scandalconcerning Bulstrode’s earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the massof mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to takesuch fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.

This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. Dollop, the spiritedlandlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had often to resist the shallowpragmatism of customers disposed to think that their reports from the outerworld were of equal force with what had “come up” in her mind. How it had beenbrought to her she didn’t know, but it was there before her as if it had been“scored with the chalk on the chimney-board—” as Bulstrode should say, “hisinside was that black as if the hairs of his head knowed the thoughts ofhis heart, he’d tear ’em up by the roots.”

“That’s odd,” said Mr. Limp, a meditative shoemaker, with weak eyes and apiping voice. “Why, I read in the ‘Trumpet’ that was what the Duke ofWellington said when he turned his coat and went over to the Romans.”

“Very like,” said Mrs. Dollop. “If one raskill said it, it’s more reason whyanother should. But hypocrite as he’s been, and holding things with thathigh hand, as there was no parson i’ the country good enough for him, he wasforced to take Old Harry into his counsel, and Old Harry’s been too many forhim.”

“Ay, ay, he’s a ’complice you can’t send out o’ the country,” said Mr. Crabbe,the glazier, who gathered much news and groped among it dimly. “But by what Ican make out, there’s them says Bulstrode was for running away, for fear o’being found out, before now.”

“He’ll be drove away, whether or no,” said Mr. Dill, the barber, who had justdropped in. “I shaved Fletcher, Hawley’s clerk, this morning—he’s got a badfinger—and he says they’re all of one mind to get rid of Bulstrode. Mr.Thesiger is turned against him, and wants him out o’ the parish. And there’sgentlemen in this town says they’d as soon dine with a fellow from the hulks.‘And a deal sooner I would,’ says Fletcher; ‘for what’s more against one’sstomach than a man coming and making himself bad company with his religion, andgiving out as the Ten Commandments are not enough for him, and all the whilehe’s worse than half the men at the tread-mill?’ Fletcher said so himself.”

“It’ll be a bad thing for the town though, if Bulstrode’s money goes out ofit,” said Mr. Limp, quaveringly.

“Ah, there’s better folks spend their money worse,” said a firm-voiced dyer,whose crimson hands looked out of keeping with his good-natured face.

“But he won’t keep his money, by what I can make out,” said the glazier. “Don’tthey say as there’s somebody can strip it off him? By what I can understan’,they could take every penny off him, if they went to lawing.”

“No such thing!” said the barber, who felt himself a little above his companyat Dollop’s, but liked it none the worse. “Fletcher says it’s no such thing. Hesays they might prove over and over again whose child this young Ladislaw was,and they’d do no more than if they proved I came out of the Fens—he couldn’ttouch a penny.”

“Look you there now!” said Mrs. Dollop, indignantly. “I thank the Lord he tookmy children to Himself, if that’s all the law can do for the motherless. Thenby that, it’s o’ no use who your father and mother is. But as to listening towhat one lawyer says without asking another—I wonder at a man o’ yourcleverness, Mr. Dill. It’s well known there’s always two sides, if no more;else who’d go to law, I should like to know? It’s a poor tale, with all the lawas there is up and down, if it’s no use proving whose child you are. Fletchermay say that if he likes, but I say, don’t Fletcher me!”

Mr. Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs. Dollop, as a womanwho was more than a match for the lawyers; being disposed to submit to muchtwitting from a landlady who had a long score against him.

“If they come to lawing, and it’s all true as folks say, there’s more to belooked to nor money,” said the glazier. “There’s this poor creetur as is deadand gone; by what I can make out, he’d seen the day when he was a deal finergentleman nor Bulstrode.”

“Finer gentleman! I’ll warrant him,” said Mrs. Dollop; “and a far personablerman, by what I can hear. As I said when Mr. Baldwin, the tax-gatherer, comesin, a-standing where you sit, and says, ‘Bulstrode got all his money as hebrought into this town by thieving and swindling,’—I said, ‘You don’t make meno wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it’s set my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin’here he came into Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head: folksdon’t look the color o’ the dough-tub and stare at you as if they wanted to seeinto your backbone for nothingk.’ That was what I said, and Mr. Baldwin canbear me witness.”

“And in the rights of it too,” said Mr. Crabbe. “For by what I can make out,this Raffles, as they call him, was a lusty, fresh-colored man as you’d wish tosee, and the best o’ company—though dead he lies in Lowick churchyard sureenough; and by what I can understan’, there’s them knows more than theyshould know about how he got there.”

“I’ll believe you!” said Mrs. Dollop, with a touch of scorn at Mr. Crabbe’sapparent dimness. “When a man’s been ’ticed to a lone house, and there’s themcan pay for hospitals and nurses for half the country-side choose to besitters-up night and day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known tostick at nothingk, and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flusho’ money as he can pay off Mr. Byles the butcher as his bill has been runningon for the best o’ joints since last Michaelmas was a twelvemonth—I don’t wantanybody to come and tell me as there’s been more going on nor the Prayer-book’sgot a service for—I don’t want to stand winking and blinking and thinking.”

Mrs. Dollop looked round with the air of a landlady accustomed to dominate hercompany. There was a chorus of adhesion from the more courageous; but Mr. Limp,after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hardbetween his knees, looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as ifthe scorching power of Mrs. Dollop’s speech had quite dried up and nullifiedhis wits until they could be brought round again by further moisture.

“Why shouldn’t they dig the man up and have the Crowner?” said the dyer. “It’sbeen done many and many’s the time. If there’s been foul play they might findit out.”

“Not they, Mr. Jonas!” said Mrs Dollop, emphatically. “I know what doctors are.They’re a deal too cunning to be found out. And this Doctor Lydgate that’s beenfor cutting up everybody before the breath was well out o’ their body—it’splain enough what use he wanted to make o’ looking into respectable people’sinsides. He knows drugs, you may be sure, as you can neither smell nor see,neither before they’re swallowed nor after. Why, I’ve seen drops myself orderedby Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has broughtmore live children into the world nor ever another i’ Middlemarch—I say I’veseen drops myself as made no difference whether they was in the glass or out,and yet have griped you the next day. So I’ll leave your own sense to judge.Don’t tell me! All I say is, it’s a mercy they didn’t take this Doctor Lydgateon to our club. There’s many a mother’s child might ha’ rued it.”

The heads of this discussion at “Dollop’s” had been the common theme among allclasses in the town, had been carried to Lowick Parsonage on one side and toTipton Grange on the other, had come fully to the ears of the Vincy family, andhad been discussed with sad reference to “poor Harriet” by all Mrs. Bulstrode’sfriends, before Lydgate knew distinctly why people were looking strangely athim, and before Bulstrode himself suspected the betrayal of his secrets. He hadnot been accustomed to very cordial relations with his neighbors, and hence hecould not miss the signs of cordiality; moreover, he had been taking journeyson business of various kinds, having now made up his mind that he need not quitMiddlemarch, and feeling able consequently to determine on matters which he hadbefore left in suspense.

“We will make a journey to Cheltenham in the course of a month or two,” he hadsaid to his wife. “There are great spiritual advantages to be had in that townalong with the air and the waters, and six weeks there will be eminentlyrefreshing to us.”

He really believed in the spiritual advantages, and meant that his lifehenceforth should be the more devoted because of those later sins which herepresented to himself as hypothetic, praying hypothetically for theirpardon:—“if I have herein transgressed.”

As to the Hospital, he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate, fearing tomanifest a too sudden change of plans immediately on the death of Raffles. Inhis secret soul he believed that Lydgate suspected his orders to have beenintentionally disobeyed, and suspecting this he must also suspect a motive. Butnothing had been betrayed to him as to the history of Raffles, and Bulstrodewas anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefinedsuspicions. As to any certainty that a particular method of treatment wouldeither save or kill, Lydgate himself was constantly arguing against suchdogmatism; he had no right to speak, and he had every motive for being silent.Hence Bulstrode felt himself providentially secured. The only incident he hadstrongly winced under had been an occasional encounter with Caleb Garth, who,however, had raised his hat with mild gravity.

Meanwhile, on the part of the principal townsmen a strong determination wasgrowing against him.

A meeting was to be held in the Town-Hall on a sanitary question which hadrisen into pressing importance by the occurrence of a cholera case in the town.Since the Act of Parliament, which had been hurriedly passed, authorizingassessments for sanitary measures, there had been a Board for thesuperintendence of such measures appointed in Middlemarch, and much cleansingand preparation had been concurred in by Whigs and Tories. The question nowwas, whether a piece of ground outside the town should be secured as aburial-ground by means of assessment or by private subscription. The meetingwas to be open, and almost everybody of importance in the town was expected tobe there.

Mr. Bulstrode was a member of the Board, and just before twelve o’clock hestarted from the Bank with the intention of urging the plan of privatesubscription. Under the hesitation of his projects, he had for some time kepthimself in the background, and he felt that he should this morning resume hisold position as a man of action and influence in the public affairs of the townwhere he expected to end his days. Among the various persons going in the samedirection, he saw Lydgate; they joined, talked over the object of the meeting,and entered it together.

It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they. But there werestill spaces left near the head of the large central table, and they made theirway thither. Mr. Farebrother sat opposite, not far from Mr. Hawley; all themedical men were there; Mr. Thesiger was in the chair, and Mr. Brooke of Tiptonwas on his right hand.

Lydgate noticed a peculiar interchange of glances when he and Bulstrode tooktheir seats.

After the business had been fully opened by the chairman, who pointed out theadvantages of purchasing by subscription a piece of ground large enough to beultimately used as a general cemetery, Mr. Bulstrode, whose rather high-pitchedbut subdued and fluent voice the town was used to at meetings of this sort,rose and asked leave to deliver his opinion. Lydgate could see again thepeculiar interchange of glances before Mr. Hawley started up, and said in hisfirm resonant voice, “Mr. Chairman, I request that before any one delivers hisopinion on this point I may be permitted to speak on a question of publicfeeling, which not only by myself, but by many gentlemen present, is regardedas preliminary.”

Mr. Hawley’s mode of speech, even when public decorum repressed his “awfullanguage,” was formidable in its curtness and self-possession. Mr. Thesigersanctioned the request, Mr. Bulstrode sat down, and Mr. Hawley continued.

“In what I have to say, Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking simply on my ownbehalf: I am speaking with the concurrence and at the express request of nofewer than eight of my fellow-townsmen, who are immediately around us. It isour united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode should be called upon—and I do now callupon him—to resign public positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer,but as a gentleman among gentlemen. There are practices and there are actswhich, owing to circ*mstances, the law cannot visit, though they may be worsethan many things which are legally punishable. Honest men and gentlemen, ifthey don’t want the company of people who perpetrate such acts, have got todefend themselves as they best can, and that is what I and the friends whom Imay call my clients in this affair are determined to do. I don’t say that Mr.Bulstrode has been guilty of shameful acts, but I call upon him either publiclyto deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a man nowdead, and who died in his house—the statement that he was for many yearsengaged in nefarious practices, and that he won his fortune by dishonestprocedures—or else to withdraw from positions which could only have beenallowed him as a gentleman among gentlemen.”

All eyes in the room were turned on Mr. Bulstrode, who, since the first mentionof his name, had been going through a crisis of feeling almost too violent forhis delicate frame to support. Lydgate, who himself was undergoing a shock asfrom the terrible practical interpretation of some faint augury, felt,nevertheless, that his own movement of resentful hatred was checked by thatinstinct of the Healer which thinks first of bringing rescue or relief to thesufferer, when he looked at the shrunken misery of Bulstrode’s livid face.

The quick vision that his life was after all a failure, that he was adishonored man, and must quail before the glance of those towards whom he hadhabitually assumed the attitude of a reprover—that God had disowned him beforemen and left him unscreened to the triumphant scorn of those who were glad tohave their hatred justified—the sense of utter futility in that equivocationwith his conscience in dealing with the life of his accomplice, an equivocationwhich now turned venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discoveredlie:—all this rushed through him like the agony of terror which fails to kill,and leaves the ears still open to the returning wave of execration. The suddensense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety came—not to thecoarse organization of a criminal, but to the susceptible nerve of a man whoseintensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of hislife had shaped for him.

But in that intense being lay the strength of reaction. Through all his bodilyinfirmity there ran a tenacious nerve of ambitious self-preserving will, whichhad continually leaped out like a flame, scattering all doctrinal fears, andwhich, even while he sat an object of compassion for the merciful, wasbeginning to stir and glow under his ashy paleness. Before the last words wereout of Mr. Hawley’s mouth, Bulstrode felt that he should answer, and that hisanswer would be a retort. He dared not get up and say, “I am not guilty, thewhole story is false”—even if he had dared this, it would have seemed to him,under his present keen sense of betrayal, as vain as to pull, for covering tohis nakedness, a frail rag which would rend at every little strain.

For a few moments there was total silence, while every man in the room waslooking at Bulstrode. He sat perfectly still, leaning hard against the back ofhis chair; he could not venture to rise, and when he began to speak he pressedhis hands upon the seat on each side of him. But his voice was perfectlyaudible, though hoarser than usual, and his words were distinctly pronounced,though he paused between sentence as if short of breath. He said, turning firsttoward Mr. Thesiger, and then looking at Mr. Hawley—

“I protest before you, sir, as a Christian minister, against the sanction ofproceedings towards me which are dictated by virulent hatred. Those who arehostile to me are glad to believe any libel uttered by a loose tongue againstme. And their consciences become strict against me. Say that the evil-speakingof which I am to be made the victim accuses me of malpractices—” hereBulstrode’s voice rose and took on a more biting accent, till it seemed a lowcry—“who shall be my accuser? Not men whose own lives are unchristian, nay,scandalous—not men who themselves use low instruments to carry out theirends—whose profession is a tissue of chicanery—who have been spending theirincome on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have been devoting mine toadvance the best objects with regard to this life and the next.”

After the word chicanery there was a growing noise, half of murmurs and half ofhisses, while four persons started up at once—Mr. Hawley, Mr. Toller, Mr.Chichely, and Mr. Hackbutt; but Mr. Hawley’s outburst was instantaneous, andleft the others behind in silence.

“If you mean me, sir, I call you and every one else to the inspection of myprofessional life. As to Christian or unchristian, I repudiate your cantingpalavering Christianity; and as to the way in which I spend my income, it isnot my principle to maintain thieves and cheat offspring of their dueinheritance in order to support religion and set myself up as a saintlyKilljoy. I affect no niceness of conscience—I have not found any nice standardsnecessary yet to measure your actions by, sir. And I again call upon you toenter into satisfactory explanations concerning the scandals against you, orelse to withdraw from posts in which we at any rate decline you as a colleague.I say, sir, we decline to co-operate with a man whose character is not clearedfrom infamous lights cast upon it, not only by reports but by recent actions.”

“Allow me, Mr. Hawley,” said the chairman; and Mr. Hawley, still fuming, bowedhalf impatiently, and sat down with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

“Mr. Bulstrode, it is not desirable, I think, to prolong the presentdiscussion,” said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid trembling man; “I must sofar concur with what has fallen from Mr. Hawley in expression of a generalfeeling, as to think it due to your Christian profession that you should clearyourself, if possible, from unhappy aspersions. I for my part should be willingto give you full opportunity and hearing. But I must say that your presentattitude is painfully inconsistent with those principles which you have soughtto identify yourself with, and for the honor of which I am bound to care. Irecommend you at present, as your clergyman, and one who hopes for yourreinstatement in respect, to quit the room, and avoid further hindrance tobusiness.”

Bulstrode, after a moment’s hesitation, took his hat from the floor and slowlyrose, but he grasped the corner of the chair so totteringly that Lydgate feltsure there was not strength enough in him to walk away without support. Whatcould he do? He could not see a man sink close to him for want of help. He roseand gave his arm to Bulstrode, and in that way led him out of the room; yetthis act, which might have been one of gentle duty and pure compassion, was atthis moment unspeakably bitter to him. It seemed as if he were putting hissign-manual to that association of himself with Bulstrode, of which he now sawthe full meaning as it must have presented itself to other minds. He now feltthe conviction that this man who was leaning tremblingly on his arm, had givenhim the thousand pounds as a bribe, and that somehow the treatment of Raffleshad been tampered with from an evil motive. The inferences were closely linkedenough; the town knew of the loan, believed it to be a bribe, and believed thathe took it as a bribe.

Poor Lydgate, his mind struggling under the terrible clutch of this revelation,was all the while morally forced to take Mr. Bulstrode to the Bank, send a manoff for his carriage, and wait to accompany him home.

Meanwhile the business of the meeting was despatched, and fringed off intoeager discussion among various groups concerning this affair of Bulstrode—andLydgate.

Mr. Brooke, who had before heard only imperfect hints of it, and was veryuneasy that he had “gone a little too far” in countenancing Bulstrode, now gothimself fully informed, and felt some benevolent sadness in talking to Mr.Farebrother about the ugly light in which Lydgate had come to be regarded. Mr.Farebrother was going to walk back to Lowick.

“Step into my carriage,” said Mr. Brooke. “I am going round to see Mrs.Casaubon. She was to come back from Yorkshire last night. She will like to seeme, you know.”

So they drove along, Mr. Brooke chatting with good-natured hope that there hadnot really been anything black in Lydgate’s behavior—a young fellow whom he hadseen to be quite above the common mark, when he brought a letter from his uncleSir Godwin. Mr. Farebrother said little: he was deeply mournful: with a keenperception of human weakness, he could not be confident that under the pressureof humiliating needs Lydgate had not fallen below himself.

When the carriage drove up to the gate of the Manor, Dorothea was out on thegravel, and came to greet them.

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, “we have just come from a meeting—a sanitarymeeting, you know.”

“Was Mr. Lydgate there?” said Dorothea, who looked full of health andanimation, and stood with her head bare under the gleaming April lights. “Iwant to see him and have a great consultation with him about the Hospital. Ihave engaged with Mr. Bulstrode to do so.”

“Oh, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, “we have been hearing bad news—bad news, youknow.”

They walked through the garden towards the churchyard gate, Mr. Farebrotherwanting to go on to the parsonage; and Dorothea heard the whole sad story.

She listened with deep interest, and begged to hear twice over the facts andimpressions concerning Lydgate. After a short silence, pausing at thechurchyard gate, and addressing Mr. Farebrother, she said energetically—

“You don’t believe that Mr. Lydgate is guilty of anything base? I will notbelieve it. Let us find out the truth and clear him!”

BOOK VIII.
SUNSET AND SUNRISE.

CHAPTER LXXII.

Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.

Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to thevindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a bribe,underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the circ*mstances ofthe case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.

“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to inquire intoit? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work,or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is nosolid ground to go upon, else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to openingthe subject with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probablytake it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the difficulty ofspeaking to him on personal matters. And—one should know the truth about hisconduct beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”

“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that peopleare almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea.Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mindstrongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for thefirst time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked thiscautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts ofjustice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force. Two daysafterwards, he was dining at the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, andwhen the dessert was standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, andMr. Brooke was nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewedvivacity.

“Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about himtheir first wish must be to justify him. What do we live for, if it is not tomake life less difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troublesof a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness.”

Dorothea’s tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been when shewas at the head of her uncle’s table nearly three years before, and herexperience since had given her more right to express a decided opinion. But SirJames Chettam was no longer the diffident and acquiescent suitor: he was theanxious brother-in-law, with a devout admiration for his sister, but with aconstant alarm lest she should fall under some new illusion almost as bad asmarrying Casaubon. He smiled much less; when he said “Exactly” it was moreoften an introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissivebachelor days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve notto be afraid of him—all the more because he was really her best friend. Hedisagreed with her now.

“But, Dorothea,” he said, remonstrantly, “you can’t undertake to manage a man’slife for him in that way. Lydgate must know—at least he will soon come to knowhow he stands. If he can clear himself, he will. He must act for himself.”

“I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity,” added Mr.Farebrother. “It is possible—I have often felt so much weakness in myself thatI can conceive even a man of honorable disposition, such as I have alwaysbelieved Lydgate to be, succumbing to such a temptation as that of acceptingmoney which was offered more or less indirectly as a bribe to insure hissilence about scandalous facts long gone by. I say, I can conceive this, if hewere under the pressure of hard circ*mstances—if he had been harassed as I feelsure Lydgate has been. I would not believe anything worse of him except understringent proof. But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors,that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into acrime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own consciousness andassertion.”

“Oh, how cruel!” said Dorothea, clasping her hands. “And would you not like tobe the one person who believed in that man’s innocence, if the rest of theworld belied him? Besides, there is a man’s character beforehand to speak forhim.”

“But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at herardor, “character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid andunalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased asour bodies do.”

“Then it may be rescued and healed,” said Dorothea “I should not be afraid ofasking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help him. Why should I beafraid? Now that I am not to have the land, James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrodeproposed, and take his place in providing for the Hospital; and I have toconsult Mr. Lydgate, to know thoroughly what are the prospects of doing good bykeeping up the present plans. There is the best opportunity in the world for meto ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things which mightmake all the circ*mstances clear. Then we would all stand by him and bring himout of his trouble. People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery theymight show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.” Dorothea’s eyes had a moistbrightness in them, and the changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, whobegan to listen.

“It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which wouldhardly succeed if we men undertook them,” said Mr. Farebrother, almostconverted by Dorothea’s ardor.

“Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know the worldbetter than she does.” said Sir James, with his little frown. “Whatever you doin the end, Dorothea, you should really keep back at present, and not volunteerany meddling with this Bulstrode business. We don’t know yet what may turn up.You must agree with me?” he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.

“I do think it would be better to wait,” said the latter.

“Yes, yes, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point thediscussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution which wasgenerally appropriate. “It is easy to go too far, you know. You must not letyour ideas run away with you. And as to being in a hurry to put money intoschemes—it won’t do, you know. Garth has drawn me in uncommonly with repairs,draining, that sort of thing: I’m uncommonly out of pocket with one thing oranother. I must pull up. As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune onthose oak fences round your demesne.”

Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with Celia into thelibrary, which was her usual drawing-room.

“Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says,” said Celia, “else you will begetting into a scrape. You always did, and you always will, when you set aboutdoing as you please. And I think it is a mercy now after all that you have gotJames to think for you. He lets you have your plans, only he hinders you frombeing taken in. And that is the good of having a brother instead of a husband.A husband would not let you have your plans.”

“As if I wanted a husband!” said Dorothea. “I only want not to have my feelingschecked at every turn.” Mrs. Casaubon was still undisciplined enough to burstinto angry tears.

“Now, really, Dodo,” said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than usual, “youare contradictory: first one thing and then another. You used to submitto Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you would have given up ever comingto see me if he had asked you.”

“Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my feeling forhim,” said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.

“Then why can’t you think it your duty to submit a little to what Jameswishes?” said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument. “Because heonly wishes what is for your own good. And, of course, men know best abouteverything, except what women know better.” Dorothea laughed and forgot hertears.

“Well, I mean about babies and those things,” explained Celia. “I should notgive up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do to Mr. Casaubon.”

CHAPTER LXXIII.

Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.

When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode’s anxiety by telling her that herhusband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he trusted soonto see him better and would call again the next day, unless she sent for himearlier, he went directly home, got on his horse, and rode three miles out ofthe town for the sake of being out of reach.

He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under the painof stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come to Middlemarch.Everything that had happened to him there seemed a mere preparation for thishateful fatality, which had come as a blight on his honorable ambition, andmust make even people who had only vulgar standards regard his reputation asirrevocably damaged. In such moments a man can hardly escape being unloving.Lydgate thought of himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who hadinjured his lot. He had meant everything to turn out differently; and othershad thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes. His marriageseemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond beforehe had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight of her shouldexasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably. There are episodes in mostmen’s lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadowover the objects that fill their inward vision: Lydgate’s tenderheartedness waspresent just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as anemotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable. Only thosewho know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed ofennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one whofalls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle withworldly annoyances.

How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who suspectedhim of baseness? How could he go silently away from Middlemarch as if he wereretreating before a just condemnation? And yet how was he to set aboutvindicating himself?

For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it hadtold him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation thoroughlyclear to him. Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous disclosures on the partof Raffles. Lydgate could now construct all the probabilities of the case. “Hewas afraid of some betrayal in my hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to himby a strong obligation: that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness toliberality. And he may have tampered with the patient—he may have disobeyed myorders. I fear he did. But whether he did or not, the world believes that hesomehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I didn’thelp in it. And yet—and yet he may not be guilty of the last offence; and it isjust possible that the change towards me may have been a genuine relenting—theeffect of second thoughts such as he alleged. What we call the ‘just possible’is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.In his last dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, inspite of my suspicion to the contrary.”

There was a benumbing cruelty in his position. Even if he renounced every otherconsideration than that of justifying himself—if he met shrugs, cold glances,and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public statement of all the facts ashe knew them, who would be convinced? It would be playing the part of a fool tooffer his own testimony on behalf of himself, and say, “I did not take themoney as a bribe.” The circ*mstances would always be stronger than hisassertion. And besides, to come forward and tell everything about himself mustinclude declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions ofothers against him. He must tell that he had not known of Raffles’s existencewhen he first mentioned his pressing need of money to Bulstrode, and that hetook the money innocently as a result of that communication, not knowing that anew motive for the loan might have arisen on his being called in to this man.And after all, the suspicion of Bulstrode’s motives might be unjust.

But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely the sameway if he had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had continued aliveand susceptible of further treatment when he arrived, and he had then imaginedany disobedience to his orders on the part of Bulstrode, he would have made astrict inquiry, and if his conjecture had been verified he would have thrown upthe case, in spite of his recent heavy obligation. But if he had not receivedany money—if Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation ofbankruptcy—would he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on findingthe man dead?—would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode—would thedubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own treatmentwould pass for the wrong with most members of his profession—have had just thesame force or significance with him?

That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate’s consciousness while he was reviewingthe facts and resisting all reproach. If he had been independent, this matterof a patient’s treatment and the distinct rule that he must do or see done thatwhich he believed best for the life committed to him, would have been the pointon which he would have been the sturdiest. As it was, he had rested in theconsideration that disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen,could not be considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to hisorders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply one ofetiquette. Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he had denouncedthe perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and had said—“the purestexperiment in treatment may still be conscientious: my business is to take careof life, and to do the best I can think of for it. Science is properly morescrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath ofscience is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” Alas!the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligationand selfish respects.

“Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question himselfas I do?” said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of rebellion against theoppression of his lot. “And yet they will all feel warranted in making a widespace between me and them, as if I were a leper! My practice and my reputationare utterly damned—I can see that. Even if I could be cleared by validevidence, it would make little difference to the blessed world here. I havebeen set down as tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same.”

Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him, that justwhen he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully on his feet, thetownsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at him, and in two instances itcame to his knowledge that patients of his had called in another practitioner.The reasons were too plain now. The general black-balling had begun.

No wonder that in Lydgate’s energetic nature the sense of a hopelessmisconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance. The scowl whichoccasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a meaningless accident.Already when he was re-entering the town after that ride taken in the firsthours of stinging pain, he was setting his mind on remaining in Middlemarch inspite of the worst that could be done against him. He would not retreat beforecalumny, as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no actof his should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well asdefiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from showing to thefull his sense of obligation to Bulstrode. It was true that the associationwith this man had been fatal to him—true that if he had had the thousand poundsstill in his hands with all his debts unpaid he would have returned the moneyto Bulstrode, and taken beggary rather than the rescue which had been sulliedwith the suspicion of a bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest amongthe sons of men)—nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushedfellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get acquittalfor himself by howling against another. “I shall do as I think right, andexplain to nobody. They will try to starve me out, but—” he was going on withan obstinate resolve, but he was getting near home, and the thought of Rosamondurged itself again into that chief place from which it had been thrust by theagonized struggles of wounded honor and pride.

How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to drag, andpoor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery. He had no impulseto tell her the trouble which must soon be common to them both. He preferredwaiting for the incidental disclosure which events must soon bring about.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

“Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together.”
—BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.

In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a badopinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so faras to make a plain statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known orbelieved about her husband; but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisuregot them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to herneighbors, various moral impulses were called into play which tended tostimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology,meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you didnot take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position;and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again,there was the love of truth—a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, alively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s characterwarranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot—the poor thing shouldhave some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have lesscomplacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Strongerthan all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimescalled her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom,uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a mannerimplying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard tothe feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charitywas at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.

There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes wouldin different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral activity thanRosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs. Bulstrode was not an object of dislike,and had never consciously injured any human being. Men had always thought her ahandsome comfortable woman, and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode’shypocrisy that he had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly andmelancholy person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When thescandal about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her—“Ah, poor woman!She’s as honest as the day—she never suspected anything wrong in him,you may depend on it.” Women, who were intimate with her, talked together muchof “poor Harriet,” imagined what her feelings must be when she came to knoweverything, and conjectured how much she had already come to know. There was nospiteful disposition towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxiousto ascertain what it would be well for her to feel and do under thecirc*mstances, which of course kept the imagination occupied with her characterand history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy till now. With the reviewof Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was inevitable to associate Rosamond,whose prospects were under the same blight with her aunt’s. Rosamond was moreseverely criticised and less pitied, though she too, as one of the good oldVincy family who had always been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victimto marriage with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then theylay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be “found out” concerningthem. Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance to her husband.Harriet’s faults were her own.

“She has always been showy,” said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for a small party,“though she has got into the way of putting her religion forward, to conform toher husband; she has tried to hold her head up above Middlemarch by making itknown that she invites clergymen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and thoseplaces.”

“We can hardly blame her for that,” said Mrs. Sprague; “because few of the bestpeople in the town cared to associate with Bulstrode, and she must havesomebody to sit down at her table.”

“Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him,” said Mrs. Hackbutt. “I think hemust be sorry now.”

“But he was never fond of him in his heart—that every one knows,” said Mrs. TomToller. “Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes. He keeps to the truth in whatis evangelical. It is only clergymen like Mr. Tyke, who want to use Dissentinghymn-books and that low kind of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to theirtaste.”

“I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him,” said Mrs. Hackbutt.“And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes have half kept the Tyke family.”

“And of course it is a discredit to his doctrines,” said Mrs. Sprague, who waselderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.

“People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch for a goodwhile to come.”

“I think we must not set down people’s bad actions to their religion,” saidfalcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.

“Oh, my dear, we are forgetting,” said Mrs. Sprague. “We ought not to betalking of this before you.”

“I am sure I have no reason to be partial,” said Mrs. Plymdale, coloring. “It’strue Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms with Mr. Bulstrode, and HarrietVincy was my friend long before she married him. But I have always kept my ownopinions and told her where she was wrong, poor thing. Still, in point ofreligion, I must say, Mr. Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse, andyet have been a man of no religion. I don’t say that there has not been alittle too much of that—I like moderation myself. But truth is truth. The mentried at the assizes are not all over-religious, I suppose.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, “all I can say is, that I thinkshe ought to separate from him.”

“I can’t say that,” said Mrs. Sprague. “She took him for better or worse, youknow.”

“But ‘worse’ can never mean finding out that your husband is fit for Newgate,”said Mrs. Hackbutt. “Fancy living with such a man! I should expect to bepoisoned.”

“Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are to betaken care of and waited on by good wives,” said Mrs. Tom Toller.

“And a good wife poor Harriet has been,” said Mrs. Plymdale. “She thinks herhusband the first of men. It’s true he has never denied her anything.”

“Well, we shall see what she will do,” said Mrs. Hackbutt. “I suppose she knowsnothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust I shall not see her, for Ishould be frightened to death lest I should say anything about her husband. Doyou think any hint has reached her?”

“I should hardly think so,” said Mrs. Tom Toller. “We hear that he isill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting on Thursday; butshe was with her girls at church yesterday, and they had new Tuscan bonnets.Her own had a feather in it. I have never seen that her religion made anydifference in her dress.”

“She wears very neat patterns always,” said Mrs. Plymdale, a little stung. “Andthat feather I know she got dyed a pale lavender on purpose to be consistent. Imust say it of Harriet that she wishes to do right.”

“As to her knowing what has happened, it can’t be kept from her long,” saidMrs. Hackbutt. “The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the meeting. It will be agreat blow to him. There is his daughter as well as his sister.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Sprague. “Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate can go onholding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black about the thousandpounds he took just at that man’s death. It really makes one shudder.”

“Pride must have a fall,” said Mrs. Hackbutt.

“I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,” said Mrs.Plymdale. “She needed a lesson.”

“I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,” said Mrs.Sprague. “That is what is generally done when there is anything disgraceful ina family.”

“And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet,” said Mrs. Plymdale. “If ever awoman was crushed, she will be. I pity her from my heart. And with all herfaults, few women are better. From a girl she had the neatest ways, and wasalways good-hearted, and as open as the day. You might look into her drawerswhen you would—always the same. And so she has brought up Kate and Ellen. Youmay think how hard it will be for her to go among foreigners.”

“The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,” saidMrs. Sprague. “He says Lydgate ought to have kept among the French.”

“That would suit her well enough, I dare say,” said Mrs. Plymdale;“there is that kind of lightness about her. But she got that from her mother;she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always gave her good advice, andto my knowledge would rather have had her marry elsewhere.”

Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication of feeling.There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode, but also a profitablebusiness relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house with Mr. Bulstrode, whichon the one hand would have inclined her to desire that the mildest view of hischaracter should be the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid ofseeming to palliate his culpability. Again, the late alliance of her familywith the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle, whichgratified her in every direction except in the inclination to those seriousviews which she believed to be the best in another sense. The sharp littlewoman’s conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these opposing“bests,” and of her griefs and satisfactions under late events, which werelikely to humble those who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her oldfriend whose faults she would have preferred seeing on a background ofprosperity.

Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the oncomingtread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret uneasiness whichhad always been present in her since the last visit of Raffles to The Shrubs.That the hateful man had come ill to Stone Court, and that her husband hadchosen to remain there and watch over him, she allowed to be explained by thefact that Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that thismade a tie of benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness; and she hadbeen since then innocently cheered by her husband’s more hopeful speech abouthis own health and ability to continue his attention to business. The calm wasdisturbed when Lydgate had brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spiteof comforting assurances during the next few days, she cried in private fromthe conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily illness merely,but from something that afflicted his mind. He would not allow her to read tohim, and scarcely to sit with him, alleging nervous susceptibility to soundsand movements; yet she suspected that in shutting himself up in his privateroom he wanted to be busy with his papers. Something, she felt sure, hadhappened. Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in thedark. Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth dayafter the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church—

“Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth. Has anythinghappened to Mr. Bulstrode?”

“Some little nervous shock,” said Lydgate, evasively. He felt that it was notfor him to make the painful revelation.

“But what brought it on?” said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly at him with herlarge dark eyes.

“There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,” said Lydgate.“Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people in proportion to the delicacyof their systems. It is often impossible to account for the precise moment ofan attack—or rather, to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment.”

Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer. There remained in her thebelief that some calamity had befallen her husband, of which she was to be keptin ignorance; and it was in her nature strongly to object to such concealment.She begged leave for her daughters to sit with their father, and drove into thetown to pay some visits, conjecturing that if anything were known to have gonewrong in Mr. Bulstrode’s affairs, she should see or hear some sign of it.

She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then drove to Mrs.Hackbutt’s on the other side of the churchyard. Mrs. Hackbutt saw her comingfrom an up-stairs window, and remembering her former alarm lest she should meetMrs. Bulstrode, felt almost bound in consistency to send word that she was notat home; but against that, there was a sudden strong desire within her for theexcitement of an interview in which she was quite determined not to make theslightest allusion to what was in her mind.

Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt went toher, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than was usuallyobservable in her, these being precautions adopted against freedom of speech.She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.

“I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week,” said Mrs.Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks. “But Mr. Bulstrode was taken soill at the meeting on Thursday that I have not liked to leave the house.”

Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other heldagainst her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern on the rug.

“Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?” persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.

“Yes, he was,” said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude. “The land is to bebought by subscription, I believe.”

“Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be buried in it,”said Mrs. Bulstrode. “It is an awful visitation. But I always think Middlemarcha very healthy spot. I suppose it is being used to it from a child; but I neversaw the town I should like to live at better, and especially our end.”

“I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch, Mrs.Bulstrode,” said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh. “Still, we must learn toresign ourselves, wherever our lot may be cast. Though I am sure there willalways be people in this town who will wish you well.”

Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, “if you take my advice you will part from yourhusband,” but it seemed clear to her that the poor woman knew nothing of thethunder ready to bolt on her head, and she herself could do no more thanprepare her a little. Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly rather chill and trembling:there was evidently something unusual behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt’s;but though she had set out with the desire to be fully informed, she foundherself unable now to pursue her brave purpose, and turning the conversation byan inquiry about the young Hackbutts, she soon took her leave saying that shewas going to see Mrs. Plymdale. On her way thither she tried to imagine thatthere might have been some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr.Bulstrode and some of his frequent opponents—perhaps Mr. Hackbutt might havebeen one of them. That would account for everything.

But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting explanationseemed no longer tenable. “Selina” received her with a patheticaffectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on the commonesttopics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary quarrel of which themost important consequence was a perturbation of Mr. Bulstrode’s health.Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought that she would sooner question Mrs.Plymdale than any one else; but she found to her surprise that an old friend isnot always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was thebarrier of remembered communication under other circ*mstances—there was thedislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been long wont to allow herthe superiority. For certain words of mysterious appropriateness that Mrs.Plymdale let fall about her resolution never to turn her back on her friends,convinced Mrs. Bulstrode that what had happened must be some kind ofmisfortune, and instead of being able to say with her native directness, “Whatis it that you have in your mind?” she found herself anxious to get away beforeshe had heard anything more explicit. She began to have an agitating certaintythat the misfortune was something more than the mere loss of money, beingkeenly sensitive to the fact that Selina now, just as Mrs. Hackbutt had donebefore, avoided noticing what she said about her husband, as they would haveavoided noticing a personal blemish.

She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive to Mr.Vincy’s warehouse. In that short drive her dread gathered so much force fromthe sense of darkness, that when she entered the private counting-house whereher brother sat at his desk, her knees trembled and her usually florid face wasdeathly pale. Something of the same effect was produced in him by the sight ofher: he rose from his seat to meet her, took her by the hand, and said, withhis impulsive rashness—

“God help you, Harriet! you know all.”

That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after. It contained thatconcentrated experience which in great crises of emotion reveals the bias of anature, and is prophetic of the ultimate act which will end an intermediatestruggle. Without that memory of Raffles she might still have thought only ofmonetary ruin, but now along with her brother’s look and words there dartedinto her mind the idea of some guilt in her husband—then, under the working ofterror came the image of her husband exposed to disgrace—and then, after aninstant of scorching shame in which she felt only the eyes of the world, withone leap of her heart she was at his side in mournful but unreproachingfellowship with shame and isolation. All this went on within her in a mereflash of time—while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes to herbrother, who stood over her. “I know nothing, Walter. What is it?” she said,faintly.

He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments, making heraware that the scandal went much beyond proof, especially as to the end ofRaffles.

“People will talk,” he said. “Even if a man has been acquitted by a jury,they’ll talk, and nod and wink—and as far as the world goes, a man might oftenas well be guilty as not. It’s a breakdown blow, and it damages Lydgate as muchas Bulstrode. I don’t pretend to say what is the truth. I only wish we hadnever heard the name of either Bulstrode or Lydgate. You’d better have been aVincy all your life, and so had Rosamond.” Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.

“But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet. People don’t blameyou. And I’ll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,” saidthe brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.

“Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter,” said Mrs. Bulstrode. “I feel veryweak.”

And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, “I am not well,my dear; I must go and lie down. Attend to your papa. Leave me in quiet. Ishall take no dinner.”

She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimedconsciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to theplace allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband’scharacter, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which shehad believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came backwith particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her withthat bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest hisinnocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious naturemade the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.

But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an oddpatchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she hadshared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her—nowthat punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense toforsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lieson the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unlovingproximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it readyto go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt,I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength;she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life.When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little actswhich might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressingto all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in whichshe embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plainblack gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair,she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her looksuddenly like an early Methodist.

Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that shewas not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers. He had lookedforward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in thatprobability, as something easier to him than any confession. But now that heimagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish.His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he hadallowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it. He felt himselfperishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he should never see his wife’sface with affection in it again. And if he turned to God there seemed to be noanswer but the pressure of retribution.

It was eight o’clock in the evening before the door opened and his wifeentered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and asshe went towards him she thought he looked smaller—he seemed so withered andshrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her likea great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair,and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly—

“Look up, Nicholas.”

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for amoment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about hermouth, all said, “I know;” and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. Heburst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They couldnot yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or ofthe acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and herpromise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she neverthelessshrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, asshe would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, “How much is onlyslander and false suspicion?” and he did not say, “I am innocent.”

CHAPTER LXXV.

“Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de la vanitédes plaisirs absents causent l’inconstance.”—PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed fromthe threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors were paid. Butshe was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none of her hopes, and hadbeen quite spoiled for her imagination. In this brief interval of calm,Lydgate, remembering that he had often been stormy in his hours ofperturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond had had to bear, was carefullygentle towards her; but he, too, had lost some of his old spirit, and he stillfelt it necessary to refer to an economical change in their way of living as amatter of course, trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing hisanger when she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London. When shedid not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she hadthat was worth living for. The hard and contemptuous words which had fallenfrom her husband in his anger had deeply offended that vanity which he had atfirst called into active enjoyment; and what she regarded as his perverse wayof looking at things, kept up a secret repulsion, which made her receive allhis tenderness as a poor substitute for the happiness he had failed to giveher. They were at a disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longerany outlook towards Quallingham—there was no outlook anywhere except in anoccasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and disappointed byWill’s resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of what she knew andguessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she secretly cherished the beliefthat he had, or would necessarily come to have, much more admiration forherself; Rosamond being one of those women who live much in the idea that eachman they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not beenhopeless. Mrs. Casaubon was all very well; but Will’s interest in her datedbefore he knew Mrs. Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, whichwas a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as thedisguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that agreeabletitillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which Lydgate’s presence hadno longer the magic to create. She even fancied—what will not men and womenfancy in these matters?—that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubonin order to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond’s brain had been busybefore Will’s departure. He would have made, she thought, a much more suitablehusband for her than she had found in Lydgate. No notion could have been falserthan this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditionsof marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and notto the nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had asentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed a little romancewhich was to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be abachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understoodthough never fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending outlambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure had beena proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased her weariness ofMiddlemarch; but at first she had the alternative dream of pleasures in storefrom her intercourse with the family at Quallingham. Since then the troubles ofher married life had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged herregretful rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on. Men andwomen make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasylongings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for amighty love. Will Ladislaw had written chatty letters, half to her and half toLydgate, and she had replied: their separation, she felt, was not likely to befinal, and the change she now most longed for was that Lydgate should go tolive in London; everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set towork with quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,delightful promise which inspirited her.

It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was nothingless than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned indeed chieflyon his new interest in plans of colonization, but mentioned incidentally, thathe might find it necessary to pay a visit to Middlemarch within the next fewweeks—a very pleasant necessity, he said, almost as good as holidays to aschoolboy. He hoped there was his old place on the rug, and a great deal ofmusic in store for him. But he was quite uncertain as to the time. WhileLydgate was reading the letter to Rosamond, her face looked like a revivingflower—it grew prettier and more blooming. There was nothing unendurable now:the debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw was coming, and Lydgate would be persuaded toleave Middlemarch and settle in London, which was “so different from aprovincial town.”

That was a bright bit of morning. But soon the sky became black over poorRosamond. The presence of a new gloom in her husband, about which he wasentirely reserved towards her—for he dreaded to expose his lacerated feeling toher neutrality and misconception—soon received a painfully strange explanation,alien to all her previous notions of what could affect her happiness. In thenew gayety of her spirits, thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit ofmoodiness than usual, causing him to leave her remarks unanswered, andevidently to keep out of her way as much as possible, she chose, a few daysafter the meeting, and without speaking to him on the subject, to send outnotes of invitation for a small evening party, feeling convinced that this wasa judicious step, since people seemed to have been keeping aloof from them, andwanted restoring to the old habit of intercourse. When the invitations had beenaccepted, she would tell Lydgate, and give him a wise admonition as to how amedical man should behave to his neighbors; for Rosamond had the gravest littleairs possible about other people’s duties. But all the invitations weredeclined, and the last answer came into Lydgate’s hands.

“This is Chichely’s scratch. What is he writing to you about?” said Lydgate,wonderingly, as he handed the note to her. She was obliged to let him see it,and, looking at her severely, he said—

“Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me,Rosamond? I beg, I insist that you will not invite any one to this house. Isuppose you have been inviting others, and they have refused too.” She saidnothing.

“Do you hear me?” thundered Lydgate.

“Yes, certainly I hear you,” said Rosamond, turning her head aside with themovement of a graceful long-necked bird.

Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room, feelinghimself dangerous. Rosamond’s thought was, that he was getting more and moreunbearable—not that there was any new special reason for this peremptoriness.His indisposition to tell her anything in which he was sure beforehand that shewould not be interested was growing into an unreflecting habit, and she was inignorance of everything connected with the thousand pounds except that the loanhad come from her uncle Bulstrode. Lydgate’s odious humors and their neighbors’apparent avoidance of them had an unaccountable date for her in their relieffrom money difficulties. If the invitations had been accepted she would havegone to invite her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen nothing of for severaldays; and she now put on her bonnet to go and inquire what had become of themall, suddenly feeling as if there were a conspiracy to leave her in isolationwith a husband disposed to offend everybody. It was after the dinner hour, andshe found her father and mother seated together alone in the drawing-room. Theygreeted her with sad looks, saying “Well, my dear!” and no more. She had neverseen her father look so downcast; and seating herself near him she said—

“Is there anything the matter, papa?”

He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, “Oh, my dear, have you heard nothing?It won’t be long before it reaches you.”

“Is it anything about Tertius?” said Rosamond, turning pale. The idea oftrouble immediately connected itself with what had been unaccountable to her inhim.

“Oh, my dear, yes. To think of your marrying into this trouble. Debt was badenough, but this will be worse.”

“Stay, stay, Lucy,” said Mr. Vincy. “Have you heard nothing about your uncleBulstrode, Rosamond?”

“No, papa,” said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not anything shehad before experienced, but some invisible power with an iron grasp that madeher soul faint within her.

Her father told her everything, saying at the end, “It’s better for you toknow, my dear. I think Lydgate must leave the town. Things have gone againsthim. I dare say he couldn’t help it. I don’t accuse him of any harm,” said Mr.Vincy. He had always before been disposed to find the utmost fault withLydgate.

The shock to Rosamond was terrible. It seemed to her that no lot could be socruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the centre ofinfamous suspicions. In many cases it is inevitable that the shame is felt tobe the worst part of crime; and it would have required a great deal ofdisentangling reflection, such as had never entered into Rosamond’s life, forher in these moments to feel that her trouble was less than if her husband hadbeen certainly known to have done something criminal. All the shame seemed tobe there. And she had innocently married this man with the belief that he andhis family were a glory to her! She showed her usual reticence to her parents,and only said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have leftMiddlemarch long ago.

“She bears it beyond anything,” said her mother when she was gone.

“Ah, thank God!” said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.

But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards herhusband. What had he really done—how had he really acted? She did not know. Whyhad he not told her everything? He did not speak to her on the subject, and ofcourse she could not speak to him. It came into her mind once that she wouldask her father to let her go home again; but dwelling on that prospect made itseem utter dreariness to her: a married woman gone back to live with herparents—life seemed to have no meaning for her in such a position: she couldnot contemplate herself in it.

The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that she hadheard the bad news. Would she speak to him about it, or would she go on foreverin the silence which seemed to imply that she believed him guilty? We mustremember that he was in a morbid state of mind, in which almost all contact waspain. Certainly Rosamond in this case had equal reason to complain of reserveand want of confidence on his part; but in the bitterness of his soul heexcused himself;—was he not justified in shrinking from the task of tellingher, since now she knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him? But adeeper-lying consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and thesilence between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they were bothadrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.

He thought, “I am a fool. Haven’t I given up expecting anything? I have marriedcare, not help.” And that evening he said—

“Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?”

“Yes,” she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying on witha languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.

“What have you heard?”

“Everything, I suppose. Papa told me.”

“That people think me disgraced?”

“Yes,” said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.

There was silence. Lydgate thought, “If she has any trust in me—any notion ofwhat I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not believe I havedeserved disgrace.”

But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly. Whatever was tobe said on the subject she expected to come from Tertius. What did she know?And if he were innocent of any wrong, why did he not do something to clearhimself?

This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in whichLydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in him—even Farebrotherhad not come forward. He had begun to question her with the intent that theirconversation should disperse the chill fog which had gathered between them, buthe felt his resolution checked by despairing resentment. Even this trouble,like the rest, she seemed to regard as if it were hers alone. He was always toher a being apart, doing what she objected to. He started from his chair withan angry impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and downthe room. There was an underlying consciousness all the while that he shouldhave to master this anger, and tell her everything, and convince her of thefacts. For he had almost learned the lesson that he must bend himself to hernature, and that because she came short in her sympathy, he must give the more.Soon he recurred to his intention of opening himself: the occasion must not belost. If he could bring her to feel with some solemnity that here was a slanderwhich must be met and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had comeout of his desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfullyon her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little money aspossible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep themselvesindependent. He would mention the definite measures which he desired to take,and win her to a willing spirit. He was bound to try this—and what else wasthere for him to do?

He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and forwards,but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would sit down. She toohad begun to think this an opportunity for urging on Tertius what he ought todo. Whatever might be the truth about all this misery, there was one dreadwhich asserted itself.

Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one nearer toRosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her gravely before hereopened the sad subject. He had conquered himself so far, and was about tospeak with a sense of solemnity, as on an occasion which was not to berepeated. He had even opened his lips, when Rosamond, letting her hands fall,looked at him and said—

“Surely, Tertius—”

“Well?”

“Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in Middlemarch. Icannot go on living here. Let us go to London. Papa, and every one else, saysyou had better go. Whatever misery I have to put up with, it will be easieraway from here.”

Lydgate felt miserably jarred. Instead of that critical outpouring for which hehad prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be gone throughagain. He could not bear it. With a quick change of countenance he rose andwent out of the room.

Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to be themore because she was less, that evening might have had a better issue. If hisenergy could have borne down that check, he might still have wrought onRosamond’s vision and will. We cannot be sure that any natures, howeverinflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a more massive being thantheir own. They may be taken by storm and for the moment converted, becomingpart of the soul which enwraps them in the ardor of its movement. But poorLydgate had a throbbing pain within him, and his energy had fallen short of itstask.

The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as ever;nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort. They lived onfrom day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate going about what workhe had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond feeling, with some justification,that he was behaving cruelly. It was of no use to say anything to Tertius; butwhen Will Ladislaw came, she was determined to tell him everything. In spite ofher general reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.

CHAPTER LXXVI.

To mercy, pity, peace, and love
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight,
Return their thankfulness.
. . . . . .
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
—WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.

Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence of asummons from Dorothea. The summons had not been unexpected, since it hadfollowed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated that he had resumedhis arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must remind Lydgate of hisprevious communications about the Hospital, to the purport of which he stilladhered. It had been his duty, before taking further steps, to reopen thesubject with Mrs. Casaubon, who now wished, as before, to discuss the questionwith Lydgate. “Your views may possibly have undergone some change,” wrote Mr.Bulstrode; “but, in that case also, it is desirable that you should lay thembefore her.”

Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest. Though, in deference to hermasculine advisers, she had refrained from what Sir James had called“interfering in this Bulstrode business,” the hardship of Lydgate’s positionwas continually in her mind, and when Bulstrode applied to her again about thehospital, she felt that the opportunity was come to her which she had beenhindered from hastening. In her luxurious home, wandering under the boughs ofher own great trees, her thought was going out over the lot of others, and heremotions were imprisoned. The idea of some active good within her reach,“haunted her like a passion,” and another’s need having once come to her as adistinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give relief, andmade her own ease tasteless. She was full of confident hope about thisinterview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of his personal reserve;never heeding that she was a very young woman. Nothing could have seemed moreirrelevant to Dorothea than insistence on her youth and sex when she was movedto show her human fellowship.

As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live through againall the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her memories. They all owedtheir significance to her marriage and its troubles—but no; there were twooccasions in which the image of Lydgate had come painfully in connection withhis wife and some one else. The pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it hadleft in her an awakened conjecture as to what Lydgate’s marriage might be tohim, a susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate. These thoughtswere like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright, and gave an attitude ofsuspense to her whole frame, though she was only looking out from the brownlibrary on to the turf and the bright green buds which stood in relief againstthe dark evergreens.

When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face, whichwas strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for two months. It wasnot the change of emaciation, but that effect which even young faces will verysoon show from the persistent presence of resentment and despondency. Hercordial look, when she put out her hand to him, softened his expression, butonly with melancholy.

“I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,” saidDorothea when they were seated opposite each other; “but I put off asking youto come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about the Hospital. I know thatthe advantage of keeping the management of it separate from that of theInfirmary depends on you, or, at least, on the good which you are encouraged tohope for from having it under your control. And I am sure you will not refuseto tell me exactly what you think.”

“You want to decide whether you should give a generous support to theHospital,” said Lydgate. “I cannot conscientiously advise you to do it independence on any activity of mine. I may be obliged to leave the town.”

He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able to carry outany purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.

“Not because there is no one to believe in you?” said Dorothea, pouring out herwords in clearness from a full heart. “I know the unhappy mistakes about you. Iknew them from the first moment to be mistakes. You have never done anythingvile. You would not do anything dishonorable.”

It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on Lydgate’s ears.He drew a deep breath, and said, “Thank you.” He could say no more: it wassomething very new and strange in his life that these few words of trust from awoman should be so much to him.

“I beseech you to tell me how everything was,” said Dorothea, fearlessly. “I amsure that the truth would clear you.”

Lydgate started up from his chair and went towards the window, forgetting wherehe was. He had so often gone over in his mind the possibility of explainingeverything without aggravating appearances that would tell, perhaps unfairly,against Bulstrode, and had so often decided against it—he had so often said tohimself that his assertions would not change people’s impressions—thatDorothea’s words sounded like a temptation to do something which in hissoberness he had pronounced to be unreasonable.

“Tell me, pray,” said Dorothea, with simple earnestness; “then we can consulttogether. It is wicked to let people think evil of any one falsely, when it canbe hindered.”

Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea’s face looking up athim with a sweet trustful gravity. The presence of a noble nature, generous inits wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to seethings again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can beseen and judged in the wholeness of our character. That influence was beginningto act on Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one who isdragged and struggling amid the throng. He sat down again, and felt that he wasrecovering his old self in the consciousness that he was with one who believedin it.

“I don’t want,” he said, “to bear hard on Bulstrode, who has lent me money ofwhich I was in need—though I would rather have gone without it now. He ishunted down and miserable, and has only a poor thread of life in him. But Ishould like to tell you everything. It will be a comfort to me to speak wherebelief has gone beforehand, and where I shall not seem to be offeringassertions of my own honesty. You will feel what is fair to another, as youfeel what is fair to me.”

“Do trust me,” said Dorothea; “I will not repeat anything without your leave.But at the very least, I could say that you have made all the circ*mstancesclear to me, and that I know you are not in any way guilty. Mr. Farebrotherwould believe me, and my uncle, and Sir James Chettam. Nay, there are personsin Middlemarch to whom I could go; although they don’t know much of me, theywould believe me. They would know that I could have no other motive than truthand justice. I would take any pains to clear you. I have very little to do.There is nothing better that I can do in the world.”

Dorothea’s voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would do,might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it effectively. Thesearching tenderness of her woman’s tones seemed made for a defence againstready accusers. Lydgate did not stay to think that she was Quixotic: he gavehimself up, for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaningentirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve. And hetold her everything, from the time when, under the pressure of hisdifficulties, he unwillingly made his first application to Bulstrode;gradually, in the relief of speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance ofwhat had gone on in his mind—entering fully into the fact that his treatment ofthe patient was opposed to the dominant practice, into his doubts at the last,his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy consciousness that the acceptance ofthe money had made some difference in his private inclination and professionalbehavior, though not in his fulfilment of any publicly recognized obligation.

“It has come to my knowledge since,” he added, “that Hawley sent some one toexamine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said that she gave the patientall the opium in the phial I left, as well as a good deal of brandy. But thatwould not have been opposed to ordinary prescriptions, even of first-rate men.The suspicions against me had no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledgethat I took money, that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man todie, and that he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices orother against the patient—that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold mytongue. They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately, becausethey lie in people’s inclination and can never be disproved. How my orders cameto be disobeyed is a question to which I don’t know the answer. It is stillpossible that Bulstrode was innocent of any criminal intention—even possiblethat he had nothing to do with the disobedience, and merely abstained frommentioning it. But all that has nothing to do with the public belief. It is oneof those cases on which a man is condemned on the ground of his character—it isbelieved that he has committed a crime in some undefined way, because he hadthe motive for doing it; and Bulstrode’s character has enveloped me, because Itook his money. I am simply blighted—like a damaged ear of corn—the business isdone and can’t be undone.”

“Oh, it is hard!” said Dorothea. “I understand the difficulty there is in yourvindicating yourself. And that all this should have come to you who had meantto lead a higher life than the common, and to find out better ways—I cannotbear to rest in this as unchangeable. I know you meant that. I remember whatyou said to me when you first spoke to me about the hospital. There is nosorrow I have thought more about than that—to love what is great, and try toreach it, and yet to fail.”

“Yes,” said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full meaningof his grief. “I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me.I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles aresuch as nobody can see except oneself.”

“Suppose,” said Dorothea, meditatively,—“suppose we kept on the Hospitalaccording to the present plan, and you stayed here though only with thefriendship and support of a few, the evil feeling towards you would graduallydie out; there would come opportunities in which people would be forced toacknowledge that they had been unjust to you, because they would see that yourpurposes were pure. You may still win a great fame like the Louis and Laennec Ihave heard you speak of, and we shall all be proud of you,” she ended, with asmile.

“That might do if I had my old trust in myself,” said Lydgate, mournfully.“Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round and running away beforethis slander, leaving it unchecked behind me. Still, I can’t ask any one to puta great deal of money into a plan which depends on me.”

“It would be quite worth my while,” said Dorothea, simply. “Only think. I amvery uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I have too little forany great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I have too much. I don’t knowwhat to do. I have seven hundred a-year of my own fortune, and nineteen hundreda-year that Mr. Casaubon left me, and between three and four thousand of readymoney in the bank. I wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of myincome which I don’t want, to buy land with and found a village which should bea school of industry; but Sir James and my uncle have convinced me that therisk would be too great. So you see that what I should most rejoice at would beto have something good to do with my money: I should like it to make otherpeople’s lives better to them. It makes me very uneasy—coming all to me whodon’t want it.”

A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate’s face. The childlike grave-eyedearnestness with which Dorothea said all this was irresistible—blent into anadorable whole with her ready understanding of high experience. (Of lowerexperience such as plays a great part in the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had avery blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by her imagination.) But shetook the smile as encouragement of her plan.

“I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously,” she said, in a tone ofpersuasion. “The hospital would be one good; and making your life quite wholeand well again would be another.”

Lydgate’s smile had died away. “You have the goodness as well as the money todo all that; if it could be done,” he said. “But—”

He hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window; and she sat insilent expectation. At last he turned towards her and said impetuously—

“Why should I not tell you?—you know what sort of bond marriage is. You willunderstand everything.”

Dorothea felt her heart beginning to beat faster. Had he that sorrow too? Butshe feared to say any word, and he went on immediately.

“It is impossible for me now to do anything—to take any step withoutconsidering my wife’s happiness. The thing that I might like to do if I werealone, is become impossible to me. I can’t see her miserable. She married mewithout knowing what she was going into, and it might have been better for herif she had not married me.”

“I know, I know—you could not give her pain, if you were not obliged to do it,”said Dorothea, with keen memory of her own life.

“And she has set her mind against staying. She wishes to go. The troubles shehas had here have wearied her,” said Lydgate, breaking off again, lest heshould say too much.

“But when she saw the good that might come of staying—” said Dorothea,remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if he had forgotten the reasons which hadjust been considered. He did not speak immediately.

“She would not see it,” he said at last, curtly, feeling at first that thisstatement must do without explanation. “And, indeed, I have lost all spiritabout carrying on my life here.” He paused a moment and then, following theimpulse to let Dorothea see deeper into the difficulty of his life, he said,“The fact is, this trouble has come upon her confusedly. We have not been ableto speak to each other about it. I am not sure what is in her mind about it:she may fear that I have really done something base. It is my fault; I ought tobe more open. But I have been suffering cruelly.”

“May I go and see her?” said Dorothea, eagerly. “Would she accept my sympathy?I would tell her that you have not been blamable before any one’s judgment butyour own. I would tell her that you shall be cleared in every fair mind. Iwould cheer her heart. Will you ask her if I may go to see her? I did see heronce.”

“I am sure you may,” said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some hope. “Shewould feel honored—cheered, I think, by the proof that you at least have somerespect for me. I will not speak to her about your coming—that she may notconnect it with my wishes at all. I know very well that I ought not to haveleft anything to be told her by others, but—”

He broke off, and there was a moment’s silence. Dorothea refrained from sayingwhat was in her mind—how well she knew that there might be invisible barriersto speech between husband and wife. This was a point on which even sympathymight make a wound. She returned to the more outward aspect of Lydgate’sposition, saying cheerfully—

“And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in you andsupport you, she might then be glad that you should stay in your place andrecover your hopes—and do what you meant to do. Perhaps then you would see thatit was right to agree with what I proposed about your continuing at theHospital. Surely you would, if you still have faith in it as a means of makingyour knowledge useful?”

Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.

“You need not decide immediately,” she said, gently. “A few days hence it willbe early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode.”

Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most decisive tones.

“No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering. I am nolonger sure enough of myself—I mean of what it would be possible for me to dounder the changed circ*mstances of my life. It would be dishonorable to letothers engage themselves to anything serious in dependence on me. I might beobliged to go away after all; I see little chance of anything else. The wholething is too problematic; I cannot consent to be the cause of your goodnessbeing wasted. No—let the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, andeverything go on as it might have done if I had never come. I have kept avaluable register since I have been there; I shall send it to a man who willmake use of it,” he ended bitterly. “I can think of nothing for a long whilebut getting an income.”

“It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly,” said Dorothea. “Itwould be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future, in your powerto do great things, if you would let them save you from that. Think how muchmoney I have; it would be like taking a burthen from me if you took some of itevery year till you got free from this fettering want of income. Why should notpeople do these things? It is so difficult to make shares at all even. This isone way.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!” said Lydgate, rising as if with the sameimpulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the back of thegreat leather chair he had been sitting in. “It is good that you should havesuch feelings. But I am not the man who ought to allow himself to benefit bythem. I have not given guarantees enough. I must not at least sink into thedegradation of being pensioned for work that I never achieved. It is very clearto me that I must not count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarchas soon as I can manage it. I should not be able for a long while, at the verybest, to get an income here, and—and it is easier to make necessary changes ina new place. I must do as other men do, and think what will please the worldand bring in money; look for a little opening in the London crowd, and pushmyself; set up in a watering-place, or go to some southern town where there areplenty of idle English, and get myself puffed,—that is the sort of shell I mustcreep into and try to keep my soul alive in.”

“Now that is not brave,” said Dorothea,—“to give up the fight.”

“No, it is not brave,” said Lydgate, “but if a man is afraid of creepingparalysis?” Then, in another tone, “Yet you have made a great difference in mycourage by believing in me. Everything seems more bearable since I have talkedto you; and if you can clear me in a few other minds, especially inFarebrother’s, I shall be deeply grateful. The point I wish you not to mentionis the fact of disobedience to my orders. That would soon get distorted. Afterall, there is no evidence for me but people’s opinion of me beforehand. You canonly repeat my own report of myself.”

“Mr. Farebrother will believe—others will believe,” said Dorothea. “I can sayof you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be bribed to do awickedness.”

“I don’t know,” said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice. “I havenot taken a bribe yet. But there is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimescalled prosperity. You will do me another great kindness, then, and come to seemy wife?”

“Yes, I will. I remember how pretty she is,” said Dorothea, into whose mindevery impression about Rosamond had cut deep. “I hope she will like me.”

As Lydgate rode away, he thought, “This young creature has a heart large enoughfor the Virgin Mary. She evidently thinks nothing of her own future, and wouldpledge away half her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but achair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear eyes at the poormortals who pray to her. She seems to have what I never saw in any womanbefore—a fountain of friendship towards men—a man can make a friend of her.Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her. I wonder if shecould have any other sort of passion for a man? Ladislaw?—there was certainlyan unusual feeling between them. And Casaubon must have had a notion of it.Well—her love might help a man more than her money.”

Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate fromhis obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part, though small, ofthe galling pressure he had to bear. She sat down at once under the inspirationof their interview, and wrote a brief note, in which she pleaded that she hadmore claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to the satisfaction of providing the moneywhich had been serviceable to Lydgate—that it would be unkind in Lydgate not togrant her the position of being his helper in this small matter, the favorbeing entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her todo with her superfluous money. He might call her a creditor or by any othername if it did but imply that he granted her request. She enclosed a check fora thousand pounds, and determined to take the letter with her the next day whenshe went to see Rosamond.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion.”
—Henry V.

The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he should beaway until the evening. Of late she had never gone beyond her own house andgarden, except to church, and once to see her papa, to whom she said, “IfTertius goes away, you will help us to move, will you not, papa? I suppose weshall have very little money. I am sure I hope some one will help us.” And Mr.Vincy had said, “Yes, child, I don’t mind a hundred or two. I can see the endof that.” With these exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy andsuspense, fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw’s coming as the one point of hopeand interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to makeimmediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London, till shefelt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the going, without atall seeing how. This way of establishing sequences is too common to be fairlyregarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond. And it is precisely this sort ofsequence which causes the greatest shock when it is sundered: for to see how aneffect may be produced is often to see possible missings and checks; but to seenothing except the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect,rids us of doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the processgoing on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her with thesame nicety as ever, only with more slowness—or sat down to the piano, meaningto play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the music stool with her whitefingers suspended on the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy ennui.Her melancholy had become so marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity beforeit, as a perpetual silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keensensibilities towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehowto have bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it hadbeen momentarily expelled by exasperation.

But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs—where she sometimessat the whole day when Lydgate was out—equipped for a walk in the town. She hada letter to post—a letter addressed to Mr. Ladislaw and written with charmingdiscretion, but intended to hasten his arrival by a hint of trouble. Theservant-maid, their sole house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs inher walking dress, and thought “there never did anybody look so pretty in abonnet poor thing.”

Meanwhile Dorothea’s mind was filled with her project of going to Rosamond, andwith the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable future, whichgathered round the idea of that visit. Until yesterday when Lydgate had openedto her a glimpse of some trouble in his married life, the image of Mrs. Lydgatehad always been associated for her with that of Will Ladislaw. Even in her mostuneasy moments—even when she had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader’s painfullygraphic report of gossip—her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting,had been towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his words as aprobable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he was determined tocut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick, sad, excusing vision ofthe charm there might be in his constant opportunities of companionship withthat fair creature, who most likely shared his other tastes as she evidentlydid his delight in music. But there had followed his parting words—the fewpassionate words in which he had implied that she herself was the object ofwhom his love held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he wasresolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment. From the time ofthat parting, Dorothea, believing in Will’s love for her, believing with aproud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his determination that no oneshould impeach him justly, felt her heart quite at rest as to the regard hemight have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was sure that the regard was blameless.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sortof baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by theirpure belief about us; and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege whichtears down the invisible altar of trust. “If you are not good, none isgood”—those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility, mayhold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.

Dorothea’s nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along theeasily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she was full ofpity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet any material withinher experience for subtle constructions and suspicions of hidden wrong. Butthat simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believingconception of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. And it hadfrom the first acted strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted fromher, that the brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feelingabout herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would onlyprofit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that inher mind he had found his highest estimate.

And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had felt adelicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as one which wasinwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active force of antagonismwithin her, when the antagonism turned on the defence either of plans orpersons that she believed in; and the wrongs which she felt that Will hadreceived from her husband, and the external conditions which to others weregrounds for slighting him, only gave the more tenacity to her affection andadmiring judgment. And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had comeanother fact affecting Will’s social position, which roused afresh Dorothea’sinward resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world whichlay within park palings.

“Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker” was a phrase whichhad entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode business, atLowick, Tipton, and Fresh*tt, and was a worse kind of placard on poor Will’sback than the “Italian with white mice.” Upright Sir James Chettam wasconvinced that his own satisfaction was righteous when he thought with somecomplacency that here was an added league to that mountainous distance betweenLadislaw and Dorothea, which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in thatdirection as too absurd. And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointingMr. Brooke’s attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw’s genealogy, as a freshcandle for him to see his own folly by. Dorothea had observed the animus withwhich Will’s part in the painful story had been recalled more than once; butshe had uttered no word, being checked now, as she had not been formerly inspeaking of Will, by the consciousness of a deeper relation between them whichmust always remain in consecrated secrecy. But her silence shrouded herresistant emotion into a more thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will’s lotwhich, it seemed, others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium,only gave something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.

She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and yet shehad taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her whole relation toWill very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and would have thought itvery sinful in her to keep up an inward wail because she was not completelyhappy, being rather disposed to dwell on the superfluities of her lot. Shecould bear that the chief pleasures of her tenderness should lie in memory, andthe idea of marriage came to her solely as a repulsive proposition from somesuitor of whom she at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by herfriends, would be a source of torment to her:—“somebody who will manage yourproperty for you, my dear,” was Mr. Brooke’s attractive suggestion of suitablecharacteristics. “I should like to manage it myself, if I knew what to do withit,” said Dorothea. No—she adhered to her declaration that she would never bemarried again, and in the long valley of her life which looked so flat andempty of waymarks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and sawher fellow-passengers by the way.

This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in all herwaking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs. Lydgate, making asort of background against which she saw Rosamond’s figure presented to herwithout hindrances to her interest and compassion. There was evidently somemental separation, some barrier to complete confidence which had arisen betweenthis wife and the husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him. That wasa trouble which no third person must directly touch. But Dorothea thought withdeep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon Rosamond from thesuspicions cast on her husband; and there would surely be help in themanifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy with her.

“I shall talk to her about her husband,” thought Dorothea, as she was beingdriven towards the town. The clear spring morning, the scent of the moistearth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth of greenery fromout their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the cheerfulness she was feelingfrom a long conversation with Mr. Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted thejustifying explanation of Lydgate’s conduct. “I shall take Mrs. Lydgate goodnews, and perhaps she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me.”

Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new fine-toned bellfor the school-house, and as she had to get out of her carriage very near toLydgate’s, she walked thither across the street, having told the coachman towait for some packages. The street door was open, and the servant was takingthe opportunity of looking out at the carriage which was pausing within sightwhen it became apparent to her that the lady who “belonged to it” was comingtowards her.

“Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?” said Dorothea.

“I’m not sure, my lady; I’ll see, if you’ll please to walk in,” said Martha, alittle confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but collected enough to besure that “mum” was not the right title for this queenly young widow with acarriage and pair. “Will you please to walk in, and I’ll go and see.”

“Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon,” said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward intendingto show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to see if Rosamondhad returned from her walk.

They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the passagewhich led to the garden. The drawing-room door was unlatched, and Martha,pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs. Casaubon to enter andthen turned away, the door having swung open and swung back again withoutnoise.

Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being filled withimages of things as they had been and were going to be. She found herself onthe other side of the door without seeing anything remarkable, but immediatelyshe heard a voice speaking in low tones which startled her as with a sense ofdreaming in daylight, and advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond theprojecting slab of a bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of acertainty which filled up all outlines, something which made her pause,motionless, without self-possession enough to speak.

Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall on aline with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will Ladislaw: close byhim and turned towards him with a flushed tearfulness which gave a newbrilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her bonnet hanging back, while Willleaning towards her clasped both her upraised hands in his and spoke withlow-toned fervor.

Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently advancingfigure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable instant of this vision,moved confusedly backward and found herself impeded by some piece of furniture,Rosamond was suddenly aware of her presence, and with a spasmodic movementsnatched away her hands and rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarilyarrested. Will Ladislaw, starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea’seyes with a new lightning in them, seemed changing to marble. But sheimmediately turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice—

“Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here. I calledto deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished to put into yourown hands.”

She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her retreat, andthen including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and bow, she wentquickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the surprised Martha, who saidshe was sorry the mistress was not at home, and then showed the strange ladyout with an inward reflection that grand people were probably more impatientthan others.

Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was quickly inher carriage again.

“Drive on to Fresh*tt Hall,” she said to the coachman, and any one looking ather might have thought that though she was paler than usual she was neveranimated by a more self-possessed energy. And that was really her experience.It was as if she had drunk a great draught of scorn that stimulated her beyondthe susceptibility to other feelings. She had seen something so far below herbelief, that her emotions rushed back from it and made an excited throngwithout an object. She needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.She felt power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink. And she wouldcarry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of going toFresh*tt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that she wished them toknow about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under his trial now presenteditself to her with new significance, and made her more ardent in readiness tobe his champion. She had never felt anything like this triumphant power ofindignation in the struggle of her married life, in which there had always beena quickly subduing pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.

“Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!” said Celia, when Sir James was gone outof the room. “And you don’t see anything you look at, Arthur or anything. Youare going to do something uncomfortable, I know. Is it all about Mr. Lydgate,or has something else happened?” Celia had been used to watch her sister withexpectation.

“Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,” said Dodo, in her full tones.

“I wonder what,” said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning forward uponthem.

“Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth,” said Dorothea,lifting her arms to the back of her head.

“Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?” said Celia, a littleuneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.

But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange, and shefinished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution until shedescended at her own door.

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

“Would it were yesterday and I i’ the grave,
With her sweet faith above for monument.”

Rosamond and Will stood motionless—they did not know how long—he lookingtowards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking towards him withdoubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in whose inmost soul there washardly so much annoyance as gratification from what had just happened. Shallownatures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitlyin their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by prettygestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were. Sheknew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used toimagining other people’s states of mind except as a material cut into shape byher own wishes; and she believed in her own power to soothe or subdue. EvenTertius, that most perverse of men, was always subdued in the long-run: eventshad been obstinate, but still Rosamond would have said now, as she did beforeher marriage, that she never gave up what she had set her mind on.

She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will’s coat-sleeve.

“Don’t touch me!” he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash, dartingfrom her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if his whole framewere tingling with the pain of the sting. He wheeled round to the other side ofthe room and stood opposite to her, with the tips of his fingers in his pocketsand his head thrown back, looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a fewinches away from her.

She was keenly offended, but the signs she made of this were such as onlyLydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet and seated herself,untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her shawl. Her little handswhich she folded before her were very cold.

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken up hishat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the contrary, hehad a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond with his anger. Itseemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him withoutventing his fury as it would be to a panther to bear the javelin-wound withoutspringing and biting. And yet—how could he tell a woman that he was ready tocurse her? He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced toacknowledge: he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond’s voice now brought thedecisive vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said—

“You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference.”

“Go after her!” he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. “Do you think shewould turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again at morethan a dirty feather?—Explain! How can a man explain at the expense of awoman?”

“You can tell her what you please,” said Rosamond with more tremor.

“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is not awoman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—to believe that I mustbe true to her because I was a dastard to you.”

He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees preybut cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again—

“I had no hope before—not much—of anything better to come. But I had onecertainty—that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or done about me,she believed in me.—That’s gone! She’ll never again think me anything but apaltry pretence—too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, andyet selling myself for any devil’s change by the sly. She’ll think of me as anincarnate insult to her, from the first moment we—”

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must not bethrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage by snatching upRosamond’s words again, as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off.

“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain mypreference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have apreference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I wouldrather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’sliving.”

Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was almostlosing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into some newterrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticentself-justification such as she had known under Lydgate’s most stormydispleasure: all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain;she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before. Whatanother nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten intoher consciousness. When Will had ceased to speak she had become an image ofsickened misery: her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay inthem. If it had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of miserywould have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comforther, with that strong-armed comfort which she had often held very cheap.

Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity. He had felt nobond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal treasure of his life,and he held himself blameless. He knew that he was cruel, but he had norelenting in him yet.

After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of mind, andRosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to bethink himself, tookup his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute. He had spoken to her in a waythat made a phrase of common politeness difficult to utter; and yet, now thathe had come to the point of going away from her without further speech, heshrank from it as a brutality; he felt checked and stultified in his anger. Hewalked towards the mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silencefor—he hardly knew what. The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and hecould utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his mind thathaving come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a caressing friendship hehad found calamity seated there—he had had suddenly revealed to him a troublethat lay outside the home as well as within it. And what seemed a forebodingwas pressing upon him as with slow pincers:—that his life might come to beenslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown herself upon him in the drearysadness of her heart. But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that hisquick apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell onRosamond’s blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of thetwo; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turninto compassion.

And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart, insilence; Will’s face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond’s by a mutemisery. The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion in return; theterrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her hope had been strainedwas a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken her: her little world was inruins, and she felt herself tottering in the midst as a lonely bewilderedconsciousness.

Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow across hisown cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both in mockery of anyattempt at revived fellowship. But she said nothing, and at last with adesperate effort over himself, he asked, “Shall I come in and see Lydgate thisevening?”

“If you like,” Rosamond answered, just audibly.

And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had been in.

After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell backfainting. When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to make the exertionof rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless until the girl, surprisedat her long absence, thought for the first time of looking for her in all thedown-stairs rooms. Rosamond said that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, andwanted to be helped up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with herclothes on, and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on amemorable day of grief.

Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five, and foundher there. The perception that she was ill threw every other thought into thebackground. When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested on him with morepersistence than they had done for a long while, as if she felt some contentthat he was there. He perceived the difference in a moment, and seating himselfby her put his arm gently under her, and bending over her said, “My poorRosamond! has something agitated you?” Clinging to him she fell into hystericalsobbings and cries, and for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tendher. He imagined that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect onher nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards himself,was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that visit had raised.

CHAPTER LXXIX.

“Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their talk, they drew nighto a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain; and they, beingheedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough wasDespond.”—BUNYAN.

When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she might soonsleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the drawing-room to fetch abook which he had left there, meaning to spend the evening in his work-room,and he saw on the table Dorothea’s letter addressed to him. He had not venturedto ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon had called, but the reading of this letterassured him of the fact, for Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried byherself.

When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a surprise whichmade it clear that he had not been told of the earlier visit, and Will couldnot say, “Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I came this morning?”

“Poor Rosamond is ill,” Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.

“Not seriously, I hope,” said Will.

“No—only a slight nervous shock—the effect of some agitation. She has beenoverwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky devil. We have gonethrough several rounds of purgatory since you left, and I have lately got on toa worse ledge of it than ever. I suppose you are only just come down—you lookrather battered—you have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?”

“I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o’clock this morning.I have been shutting myself up and resting,” said Will, feeling himself asneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.

And then he heard Lydgate’s account of the troubles which Rosamond had alreadydepicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned the fact of Will’s name beingconnected with the public story—this detail not immediately affecting her—andhe now heard it for the first time.

“I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with thedisclosures,” said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men howLadislaw might be stung by the revelation. “You will be sure to hear it as soonas you turn out into the town. I suppose it is true that Raffles spoke to you.”

“Yes,” said Will, sardonically. “I shall be fortunate if gossip does not makeme the most disreputable person in the whole affair. I should think the latestversion must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder Bulstrode, and ran awayfrom Middlemarch for the purpose.”

He was thinking “Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to recommend it inher hearing; however—what does it signify now?”

But he said nothing of Bulstrode’s offer to him. Will was very open andcareless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more exquisitetouches in nature’s modelling of him that he had a delicate generosity whichwarned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying that he had rejectedBulstrode’s money, in the moment when he was learning that it was Lydgate’smisfortune to have accepted it.

Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no allusion toRosamond’s feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he only said, “Mrs.Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and say that she had no beliefin any of the suspicions against me.” Observing a change in Will’s face, heavoided any further mention of her, feeling himself too ignorant of theirrelation to each other not to fear that his words might have some hiddenpainful bearing on it. And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real causeof the present visit to Middlemarch.

The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed theextent of his companion’s trouble. When Lydgate spoke with desperateresignation of going to settle in London, and said with a faint smile, “Weshall have you again, old fellow,” Will felt inexpressibly mournful, and saidnothing. Rosamond had that morning entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate;and it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future wherehe himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the smallsolicitations of circ*mstance, which is a commoner history of perdition thanany single momentous bargain.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our futureselves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing andshabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly groaning on that margin, and Willwas arriving at it. It seemed to him this evening as if the cruelty of hisoutburst to Rosamond had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded theobligation: he dreaded Lydgate’s unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his owndistaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

CHAPTER LXXX.

Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
—WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.

When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised to goand dine at the parsonage on her return from Fresh*tt. There was a frequentinterchange of visits between her and the Farebrother family, which enabled herto say that she was not at all lonely at the Manor, and to resist for thepresent the severe prescription of a lady companion. When she reached home andremembered her engagement, she was glad of it; and finding that she had stillan hour before she could dress for dinner, she walked straight to theschoolhouse and entered into a conversation with the master and mistress aboutthe new bell, giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions,and getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy. She paused on herway back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some garden-seeds, anddiscoursed wisely with that rural sage about the crops that would make the mostreturn on a perch of ground, and the result of sixty years’ experience as tosoils—namely, that if your soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if therecame wet, wet, wet to make it all of a mummy, why then—

Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late, shedressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than wasnecessary. That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like another White ofSelborne, having continually something new to tell of his inarticulate guestsand proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not to torment; and he hadjust set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets of the village in general, andto walk at large as sacred animals. The evening went by cheerfully till aftertea, Dorothea talking more than usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on thepossible histories of creatures that converse compendiously with theirantennae, and for aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenlysome inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody’s attention.

“Henrietta Noble,” said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister moving aboutthe furniture-legs distressfully, “what is the matter?”

“I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has rolled itaway,” said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her beaver-like notes.

“Is it a great treasure, aunt?” said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his glassesand looking at the carpet.

“Mr. Ladislaw gave it me,” said Miss Noble. “A German box—very pretty, but ifit falls it always spins away as far as it can.”

“Oh, if it is Ladislaw’s present,” said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone ofcomprehension, getting up and hunting. The box was found at last under achiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, “it was under afender the last time.”

“That is an affair of the heart with my aunt,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling atDorothea, as he reseated himself.

“If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,” said hismother, emphatically,—“she is like a dog—she would take their shoes for apillow and sleep the better.”

“Mr. Ladislaw’s shoes, I would,” said Henrietta Noble.

Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised and annoyed tofind that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it was quite useless totry after a recovery of her former animation. Alarmed at herself—fearing somefurther betrayal of a change so marked in its occasion, she rose and said in alow voice with undisguised anxiety, “I must go; I have overtired myself.”

Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, “It is true; you must havehalf-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate. That sort of work tells uponone after the excitement is over.”

He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to speak,even when he said good-night.

The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless within theclutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a few faint words, shelocked her door, and turning away from it towards the vacant room she pressedher hands hard on the top of her head, and moaned out—

“Oh, I did love him!”

Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too thoroughly toleave any power of thought. She could only cry in loud whispers, between hersobs, after her lost belief which she had planted and kept alive from a verylittle seed since the days in Rome—after her lost joy of clinging with silentlove and faith to one who, misprized by others, was worthy in her thought—afterher lost woman’s pride of reigning in his memory—after her sweet dimperspective of hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchangedrecognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.

In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on forages in the spiritual struggles of man—she besought hardness and coldness andaching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might ofher anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her;while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been adespairing child.

There were two images—two living forms that tore her heart in two, as if it hadbeen the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided by the sword, andpresses one bleeding half to her breast while her gaze goes forth in agonytowards the half which is carried away by the lying woman that has never knownthe mother’s pang.

Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the vibrating bondof mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had trusted—who had come toher like the spirit of morning visiting the dim vault where she sat as thebride of a worn-out life; and now, with a full consciousness which had neverawakened before, she stretched out her arms towards him and cried with bittercries that their nearness was a parting vision: she discovered her passion toherself in the unshrinking utterance of despair.

And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved, was theWill Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a detectedillusion—no, a living man towards whom there could not yet struggle any wail ofregretful pity, from the midst of scorn and indignation and jealous offendedpride. The fire of Dorothea’s anger was not easily spent, and it flamed out infitful returns of spurning reproach. Why had he come obtruding his life intohers, hers that might have been whole enough without him? Why had he broughthis cheap regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to givein exchange? He knew that he was deluding her—wished, in the very moment offarewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of her heart,and knew that he had spent it half before. Why had he not stayed among thecrowd of whom she asked nothing—but only prayed that they might be lesscontemptible?

But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and moans: shesubsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep.

In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, sheawoke—not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, butwith the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow.She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and seated herself in a greatchair where she had often watched before. She was vigorous enough to have bornethat hard night without feeling ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue;but she had waked to a new condition: she felt as if her soul had beenliberated from its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with hergrief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharerin her thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea’snature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the narrow cellof her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only seesanother’s lot as an accident of its own.

She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again,forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning. Was shealone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced herself to think of itas bound up with another woman’s life—a woman towards whom she had set out witha longing to carry some clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. In herfirst outleap of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hatefulroom, she had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken thatvisit. She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and itseemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever. But thatbase prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a faithlesslover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when the dominantspirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult and had once shownher the truer measure of things. All the active thought with which she hadbefore been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot, and this youngmarriage union which, like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well asevident troubles—all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as apower: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not letus see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own irremediablegrief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back fromeffort.

And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact withhers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants bearing thesacred branch? The objects of her rescue were not to be sought out by herfancy: they were chosen for her. She yearned towards the perfect Right, that itmight make a throne within her, and rule her errant will. “What should I do—howshould I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own pain, and compel itto silence, and think of those three?”

It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was lightpiercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bitof road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On theroad there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby;in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog.Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness ofthe world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was apart of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on itfrom her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfishcomplaining.

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, butsomething that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmurwhich would soon gather distinctness. She took off the clothes which seemed tohave some of the weariness of a hard watching in them, and began to make hertoilet. Presently she rang for Tantripp, who came in her dressing-gown.

“Why, madam, you’ve never been in bed this blessed night,” burst out Tantripp,looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea’s face, which in spite of bathinghad the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater dolorosa. “You’ll killyourself, you will. Anybody might think now you had a right to giveyourself a little comfort.”

“Don’t be alarmed, Tantripp,” said Dorothea, smiling. “I have slept; I am notill. I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible. And I want you tobring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want my new bonnet to-day.”

“They’ve lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most thankful Ishall be to see you with a couple o’ pounds’ worth less of crape,” saidTantripp, stooping to light the fire. “There’s a reason in mourning, as I’vealways said; and three folds at the bottom of your skirt and a plain quillingin your bonnet—and if ever anybody looked like an angel, it’s you in a netquilling—is what’s consistent for a second year. At least, that’s mythinking,” ended Tantripp, looking anxiously at the fire; “and if anybody wasto marry me flattering himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two yearsfor him, he’d be deceived by his own vanity, that’s all.”

“The fire will do, my good Tan,” said Dorothea, speaking as she used to do inthe old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; “get me the coffee.”

She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it infatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this strangecontrariness in her young mistress—that just the morning when she had more of awidow’s face than ever, she should have asked for her lighter mourning whichshe had waived before. Tantripp would never have found the clew to thismystery. Dorothea wished to acknowledge that she had not the less an activelife before her because she had buried a private joy; and the tradition thatfresh garments belonged to all initiation, haunting her mind, made her graspafter even that slight outward help towards calm resolve. For the resolve wasnot easy.

Nevertheless at eleven o’clock she was walking towards Middlemarch, having madeup her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably as possible hersecond attempt to see and save Rosamond.

CHAPTER LXXXI.

Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht beständig,
Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füssen,
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschliessen
Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
—Faust: 2r Theil.

When Dorothea was again at Lydgate’s door speaking to Martha, he was in theroom close by with the door ajar, preparing to go out. He heard her voice, andimmediately came to her.

“Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this morning?” she said, havingreflected that it would be better to leave out all allusion to her previousvisit.

“I have no doubt she will,” said Lydgate, suppressing his thought aboutDorothea’s looks, which were as much changed as Rosamond’s, “if you will bekind enough to come in and let me tell her that you are here. She has not beenvery well since you were here yesterday, but she is better this morning, and Ithink it is very likely that she will be cheered by seeing you again.”

It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected, knew nothing about thecirc*mstances of her yesterday’s visit; nay, he appeared to imagine that shehad carried it out according to her intention. She had prepared a little noteasking Rosamond to see her, which she would have given to the servant if he hadnot been in the way, but now she was in much anxiety as to the result of hisannouncement.

After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to take a letter from hispocket and put it into her hands, saying, “I wrote this last night, and wasgoing to carry it to Lowick in my ride. When one is grateful for something toogood for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech—one does notat least hear how inadequate the words are.”

Dorothea’s face brightened. “It is I who have most to thank for, since you havelet me take that place. You have consented?” she said, suddenlydoubting.

“Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day.”

He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had but lately finisheddressing herself, and sat languidly wondering what she should do next, herhabitual industry in small things, even in the days of her sadness, promptingher to begin some kind of occupation, which she dragged through slowly orpaused in from lack of interest. She looked ill, but had recovered her usualquietude of manner, and Lydgate had feared to disturb her by any questions. Hehad told her of Dorothea’s letter containing the check, and afterwards he hadsaid, “Ladislaw is come, Rosy; he sat with me last night; I dare say he will behere again to-day. I thought he looked rather battered and depressed.” AndRosamond had made no reply.

Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, “Rosy, dear, Mrs. Casaubon iscome to see you again; you would like to see her, would you not?” That shecolored and gave rather a startled movement did not surprise him after theagitation produced by the interview yesterday—a beneficent agitation, hethought, since it seemed to have made her turn to him again.

Rosamond dared not say no. She dared not with a tone of her voice touch thefacts of yesterday. Why had Mrs. Casaubon come again? The answer was a blankwhich Rosamond could only fill up with dread, for Will Ladislaw’s laceratingwords had made every thought of Dorothea a fresh smart to her. Nevertheless, inher new humiliating uncertainty she dared do nothing but comply. She did notsay yes, but she rose and let Lydgate put a light shawl over her shoulders,while he said, “I am going out immediately.” Then something crossed her mindwhich prompted her to say, “Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into thedrawing-room.” And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully understood thiswish. He led her down to the drawing-room door, and then turned away, observingto himself that he was rather a blundering husband to be dependent for hiswife’s trust in him on the influence of another woman.

Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards Dorothea,was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve. Had Mrs. Casaubon come to sayanything to her about Will? If so, it was a liberty that Rosamond resented; andshe prepared herself to meet every word with polite impassibility. Will hadbruised her pride too sorely for her to feel any compunction towards him andDorothea: her own injury seemed much the greater. Dorothea was not only the“preferred” woman, but had also a formidable advantage in being Lydgate’sbenefactor; and to poor Rosamond’s pained confused vision it seemed that thisMrs. Casaubon—this woman who predominated in all things concerning her—musthave come now with the sense of having the advantage, and with animosityprompting her to use it. Indeed, not Rosamond only, but any one else, knowingthe outer facts of the case, and not the simple inspiration on which Dorotheaacted, might well have wondered why she came.

Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful slimness wrapped in hersoft white shawl, the rounded infantine mouth and cheek inevitably suggestingmildness and innocence, Rosamond paused at three yards’ distance from hervisitor and bowed. But Dorothea, who had taken off her gloves, from an impulsewhich she could never resist when she wanted a sense of freedom, came forward,and with her face full of a sad yet sweet openness, put out her hand. Rosamondcould not avoid meeting her glance, could not avoid putting her small hand intoDorothea’s, which clasped it with gentle motherliness; and immediately a doubtof her own prepossessions began to stir within her. Rosamond’s eye was quickfor faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon’s face looked pale and changed sinceyesterday, yet gentle, and like the firm softness of her hand. But Dorothea hadcounted a little too much on her own strength: the clearness and intensity ofher mental action this morning were the continuance of a nervous exaltationwhich made her frame as dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetiancrystal; and in looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling, andwas unable to speak—all her effort was required to keep back tears. Shesucceeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face like the spirit ofa sob; but it added to Rosamond’s impression that Mrs. Casaubon’s state of mindmust be something quite different from what she had imagined.

So they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that happened tobe nearest, and happened also to be close together; though Rosamond’s notionwhen she first bowed was that she should stay a long way off from Mrs.Casaubon. But she ceased thinking how anything would turn out—merely wonderingwhat would come. And Dorothea began to speak quite simply, gathering firmnessas she went on.

“I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that is why I am here againso soon. You will not think me too troublesome when I tell you that I came totalk to you about the injustice that has been shown towards Mr. Lydgate. Itwill cheer you—will it not?—to know a great deal about him, that he may notlike to speak about himself just because it is in his own vindication and tohis own honor. You will like to know that your husband has warm friends, whohave not left off believing in his high character? You will let me speak ofthis without thinking that I take a liberty?”

The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with generous heedlessnessabove all the facts which had filled Rosamond’s mind as grounds of obstructionand hatred between her and this woman, came as soothingly as a warm stream overher shrinking fears. Of course Mrs. Casaubon had the facts in her mind, but shewas not going to speak of anything connected with them. That relief was toogreat for Rosamond to feel much else at the moment. She answered prettily, inthe new ease of her soul—

“I know you have been very good. I shall like to hear anything you will say tome about Tertius.”

“The day before yesterday,” said Dorothea, “when I had asked him to come toLowick to give me his opinion on the affairs of the Hospital, he told meeverything about his conduct and feelings in this sad event which has madeignorant people cast suspicions on him. The reason he told me was because I wasvery bold and asked him. I believed that he had never acted dishonorably, and Ibegged him to tell me the history. He confessed to me that he had never told itbefore, not even to you, because he had a great dislike to say, ‘I was notwrong,’ as if that were proof, when there are guilty people who will say so.The truth is, he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there were any badsecrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode offered him the moneybecause he repented, out of kindness, of having refused it before. All hisanxiety about his patient was to treat him rightly, and he was a littleuncomfortable that the case did not end as he had expected; but he thought thenand still thinks that there may have been no wrong in it on any one’s part. AndI have told Mr. Farebrother, and Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam: they allbelieve in your husband. That will cheer you, will it not? That will give youcourage?”

Dorothea’s face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very close toher, she felt something like bashful timidity before a superior, in thepresence of this self-forgetful ardor. She said, with blushing embarrassment,“Thank you: you are very kind.”

“And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything about this toyou. But you will forgive him. It was because he feels so much more about yourhappiness than anything else—he feels his life bound into one with yours, andit hurts him more than anything, that his misfortunes must hurt you. He couldspeak to me because I am an indifferent person. And then I asked him if I mightcome to see you; because I felt so much for his trouble and yours. That is whyI came yesterday, and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is itnot?— How can we live and think that any one has trouble—piercing trouble—andwe could help them, and never try?”

Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering, forgoteverything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her own trial toRosamond’s. The emotion had wrought itself more and more into her utterance,till the tones might have gone to one’s very marrow, like a low cry from somesuffering creature in the darkness. And she had unconsciously laid her handagain on the little hand that she had pressed before.

Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been probed,burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before when she clung toher husband. Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave of her own sorrow returningover her—her thought being drawn to the possible share that Will Ladislaw mighthave in Rosamond’s mental tumult. She was beginning to fear that she should notbe able to suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while herhand was still resting on Rosamond’s lap, though the hand underneath it waswithdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs. She tried to masterherself with the thought that this might be a turning-point in three lives—notin her own; no, there the irrevocable had happened, but—in those three liveswhich were touching hers with the solemn neighborhood of danger and distress.The fragile creature who was crying close to her—there might still be time torescue her from the misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment wasunlike any other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with the samethrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both. She felt the relationbetween them to be peculiar enough to give her a peculiar influence, though shehad no conception that the way in which her own feelings were involved wasfully known to Mrs. Lydgate.

It was a newer crisis in Rosamond’s experience than even Dorothea couldimagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her dream-worldin which she had been easily confident of herself and critical of others; andthis strange unexpected manifestation of feeling in a woman whom she hadapproached with a shrinking aversion and dread, as one who must necessarilyhave a jealous hatred towards her, made her soul totter all the more with asense that she had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken inupon her.

When Rosamond’s convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she withdrew thehandkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her eyes met Dorothea’sas helplessly as if they had been blue flowers. What was the use of thinkingabout behavior after this crying? And Dorothea looked almost as childish, withthe neglected trace of a silent tear. Pride was broken down between these two.

“We were talking about your husband,” Dorothea said, with some timidity. “Ithought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the other day. I had notseen him for many weeks before. He said he had been feeling very lonely in histrial; but I think he would have borne it all better if he had been able to bequite open with you.”

“Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything,” said Rosamond, imaginingthat he had been complaining of her to Dorothea. “He ought not to wonder that Iobject to speak to him on painful subjects.”

“It was himself he blamed for not speaking,” said Dorothea. “What he said ofyou was, that he could not be happy in doing anything which made youunhappy—that his marriage was of course a bond which must affect his choiceabout everything; and for that reason he refused my proposal that he shouldkeep his position at the Hospital, because that would bind him to stay inMiddlemarch, and he would not undertake to do anything which would be painfulto you. He could say that to me, because he knows that I had much trial in mymarriage, from my husband’s illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him;and he knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurtinganother who is tied to us.”

Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing overRosamond’s face. But there was no answer, and she went on, with a gatheringtremor, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awfulin the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than—thanthose we were married to, it would be no use”—poor Dorothea, in her palpitatinganxiety, could only seize her language brokenly—“I mean, marriage drinks up allour power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know itmay be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays withus like a murder—and everything else is gone. And then our husband—if he lovedand trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life—”

Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming too far,and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing error. She was toomuch preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware that Rosamond was tremblingtoo; and filled with the need to express pitying fellowship rather than rebuke,she put her hands on Rosamond’s, and said with more agitated rapidity,—“I know,I know that the feeling may be very dear—it has taken hold of us unawares—it isso hard, it may seem like death to part with it—and we are weak—I am weak—”

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to saveanother, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force. She stopped in speechlessagitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being inwardly grappled. Herface had become of a deathlier paleness, her lips trembled, and she pressed herhands helplessly on the hands that lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own—hurried along in anew movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect—could findno words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea’s forehead which wasvery near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as ifthey had been in a shipwreck.

“You are thinking what is not true,” said Rosamond, in an eager half-whisper,while she was still feeling Dorothea’s arms round her—urged by a mysteriousnecessity to free herself from something that oppressed her as if it were bloodguiltiness.

They moved apart, looking at each other.

“When you came in yesterday—it was not as you thought,” said Rosamond in thesame tone.

There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea. She expected avindication of Rosamond herself.

“He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he could neverlove me,” said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as she went on. “And nowI think he hates me because—because you mistook him yesterday. He says it isthrough me that you will think ill of him—think that he is a false person. Butit shall not be through me. He has never had any love for me—I know he hasnot—he has always thought slightly of me. He said yesterday that no other womanexisted for him beside you. The blame of what happened is entirely mine. Hesaid he could never explain to you—because of me. He said you could never thinkwell of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot reproach me anymore.”

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known before.She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of Dorothea’semotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that she was repellingWill’s reproaches, which were still like a knife-wound within her.

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy. It was atumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning made a resistantpain:—she could only perceive that this would be joy when she had recovered herpower of feeling it. Her immediate consciousness was one of immense sympathywithout check; she cared for Rosamond without struggle now, and respondedearnestly to her last words—

“No, he cannot reproach you any more.”

With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a greatoutgoing of her heart towards Rosamond, for the generous effort which hadredeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was a reflex of herown energy. After they had been silent a little, she said—

“You are not sorry that I came this morning?”

“No, you have been very good to me,” said Rosamond. “I did not think that youwould be so good. I was very unhappy. I am not happy now. Everything is sosad.”

“But better days will come. Your husband will be rightly valued. And he dependson you for comfort. He loves you best. The worst loss would be to lose that—andyou have not lost it,” said Dorothea.

She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her own relief, lestshe should fail to win some sign that Rosamond’s affection was yearning backtowards her husband.

“Tertius did not find fault with me, then?” said Rosamond, understanding nowthat Lydgate might have said anything to Mrs. Casaubon, and that she certainlywas different from other women. Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy inthe question. A smile began to play over Dorothea’s face as she said—

“No, indeed! How could you imagine it?” But here the door opened, and Lydgateentered.

“I am come back in my quality of doctor,” he said. “After I went away, I washaunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need of care as you,Rosy. And I thought that I had not done my duty in leaving you together; sowhen I had been to Coleman’s I came home again. I noticed that you werewalking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has changed—I think we may have rain. May Isend some one to order your carriage to come for you?”

“Oh, no! I am strong: I need the walk,” said Dorothea, rising with animation inher face. “Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal, and it is time for meto go. I have always been accused of being immoderate and saying too much.”

She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet good-bywithout kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between them too muchserious emotion for them to use the signs of it superficially.

As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond, but told him ofMr. Farebrother and the other friends who had listened with belief to hisstory.

When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself on the sofa, inresigned fatigue.

“Well, Rosy,” he said, standing over her, and touching her hair, “what do youthink of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much of her?”

“I think she must be better than any one,” said Rosamond, “and she is verybeautiful. If you go to talk to her so often, you will be more discontentedwith me than ever!”

Lydgate laughed at the “so often.” “But has she made you any less discontentedwith me?”

“I think she has,” said Rosamond, looking up in his face. “How heavy your eyesare, Tertius—and do push your hair back.” He lifted up his large white hand toobey her, and felt thankful for this little mark of interest in him. PoorRosamond’s vagrant fancy had come back terribly scourged—meek enough to nestleunder the old despised shelter. And the shelter was still there: Lydgate hadaccepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragilecreature, and had taken the burthen of her life upon his arms. He must walk ashe could, carrying that burthen pitifully.

CHAPTER LXXXII.

“My grief lies onward and my joy behind.”
—SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.

Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay in banishmentunless they are obliged. When Will Ladislaw exiled himself from Middlemarch hehad placed no stronger obstacle to his return than his own resolve, which wasby no means an iron barrier, but simply a state of mind liable to melt into aminuet with other states of mind, and to find itself bowing, smiling, andgiving place with polite facility. As the months went on, it had seemed moreand more difficult to him to say why he should not run down toMiddlemarch—merely for the sake of hearing something about Dorothea; and if onsuch a flying visit he should chance by some strange coincidence to meet withher, there was no reason for him to be ashamed of having taken an innocentjourney which he had beforehand supposed that he should not take. Since he washopelessly divided from her, he might surely venture into her neighborhood; andas to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch over her—their opinionsseemed less and less important with time and change of air.

And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which seemed tomake a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty. Will had given adisinterested attention to an intended settlement on a new plan in the FarWest, and the need for funds in order to carry out a good design had set him ondebating with himself whether it would not be a laudable use to make of hisclaim on Bulstrode, to urge the application of that money which had beenoffered to himself as a means of carrying out a scheme likely to be largelybeneficial. The question seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnanceto again entering into any relation with the banker might have made him dismissit quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination the probability that hisjudgment might be more safely determined by a visit to Middlemarch.

That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason for coming down.He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss the money question with him,and he had meant to amuse himself for the few evenings of his stay by having agreat deal of music and badinage with fair Rosamond, without neglecting hisfriends at Lowick Parsonage:—if the Parsonage was close to the Manor, that wasno fault of his. He had neglected the Farebrothers before his departure, from aproud resistance to the possible accusation of indirectly seeking interviewswith Dorothea; but hunger tames us, and Will had become very hungry for thevision of a certain form and the sound of a certain voice. Nothing had doneinstead—not the opera, or the converse of zealous politicians, or theflattering reception (in dim corners) of his new hand in leading articles.

Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything wouldbe in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be nosurprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terriblydynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; andthe first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. Thenext morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he dreadedso much the immediate issues before him—that seeing while he breakfasted thearrival of the Riverston coach, he went out hurriedly and took his place on it,that he might be relieved, at least for a day, from the necessity of doing orsaying anything in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw was in one of those tangledcrises which are commoner in experience than one might imagine, from theshallow absoluteness of men’s judgments. He had found Lydgate, for whom he hadthe sincerest respect, under circ*mstances which claimed his thorough andfrankly declared sympathy; and the reason why, in spite of that claim, it wouldhave been better for Will to have avoided all further intimacy, or evencontact, with Lydgate, was precisely of the kind to make such a course appearimpossible. To a creature of Will’s susceptible temperament—without any neutralregion of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that befell himinto the collisions of a passionate drama—the revelation that Rosamond had madeher happiness in any way dependent on him was a difficulty which his outburstof rage towards her had immeasurably increased for him. He hated his owncruelty, and yet he dreaded to show the fulness of his relenting: he must go toher again; the friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappinesswas a power which he dreaded. And all the while there was no more foretaste ofenjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped off and hewas making his fresh start on crutches. In the night he had debated whether heshould not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but for London, leaving a noteto Lydgate which would give a makeshift reason for his retreat. But there werestrong cords pulling him back from that abrupt departure: the blight on hishappiness in thinking of Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which hadremained in spite of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresha misery for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distancewhich was also despair.

Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach. He came backagain by it while it was still daylight, having made up his mind that he mustgo to Lydgate’s that evening. The Rubicon, we know, was a very insignificantstream to look at; its significance lay entirely in certain invisibleconditions. Will felt as if he were forced to cross his small boundary ditch,and what he saw beyond it was not empire, but discontented subjection.

But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness thesaving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue that may liein a self-subduing act of fellowship. If Dorothea, after her night’s anguish,had not taken that walk to Rosamond—why, she perhaps would have been a womanwho gained a higher character for discretion, but it would certainly not havebeen as well for those three who were on one hearth in Lydgate’s house athalf-past seven that evening.

Rosamond had been prepared for Will’s visit, and she received him with alanguid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous exhaustion, ofwhich he could not suppose that it had any relation to Will. And when she satin silence bending over a bit of work, he innocently apologized for her in anindirect way by begging her to lean backward and rest. Will was miserable inthe necessity for playing the part of a friend who was making his firstappearance and greeting to Rosamond, while his thoughts were busy about herfeeling since that scene of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclosethem both, like the painful vision of a double madness. It happened thatnothing called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded paper in hissaucer. He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he went back to his inn he hadno eagerness to unfold the paper. What Rosamond had written to him wouldprobably deepen the painful impressions of the evening. Still, he opened andread it by his bed-candle. There were only these few words in her neatlyflowing hand:—

“I have told Mrs. Casaubon. She is not under any mistake about you. I told herbecause she came to see me and was very kind. You will have nothing to reproachme with now. I shall not have made any difference to you.”

The effect of these words was not quite all gladness. As Will dwelt on themwith excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning at the thought ofwhat had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond—at the uncertainty how farDorothea might still feel her dignity wounded in having an explanation of hisconduct offered to her. There might still remain in her mind a changedassociation with him which made an irremediable difference—a lasting flaw. Withactive fancy he wrought himself into a state of doubt little more easy thanthat of the man who has escaped from wreck by night and stands on unknownground in the darkness. Until that wretched yesterday—except the moment ofvexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same presence—all theirvision, all their thought of each other, had been as in a world apart, wherethe sunshine fell on tall white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soulentered. But now—would Dorothea meet him in that world again?

CHAPTER LXXXIII.

“And now good-morrow to our waking souls
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.”
—DR. DONNE.

On the second morning after Dorothea’s visit to Rosamond, she had had twonights of sound sleep, and had not only lost all traces of fatigue, but felt asif she had a great deal of superfluous strength—that is to say, more strengththan she could manage to concentrate on any occupation. The day before, she hadtaken long walks outside the grounds, and had paid two visits to the Parsonage;but she never in her life told any one the reason why she spent her time inthat fruitless manner, and this morning she was rather angry with herself forher childish restlessness. To-day was to be spent quite differently. What wasthere to be done in the village? Oh dear! nothing. Everybody was well and hadflannel; nobody’s pig had died; and it was Saturday morning, when there was ageneral scrubbing of doors and door-stones, and when it was useless to go intothe school. But there were various subjects that Dorothea was trying to getclear upon, and she resolved to throw herself energetically into the gravest ofall. She sat down in the library before her particular little heap of books onpolitical economy and kindred matters, out of which she was trying to get lightas to the best way of spending money so as not to injure one’s neighbors,or—what comes to the same thing—so as to do them the most good. Here was aweighty subject which, if she could but lay hold of it, would certainly keepher mind steady. Unhappily her mind slipped off it for a whole hour; and at theend she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intenseconsciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text.This was hopeless. Should she order the carriage and drive to Tipton? No; forsome reason or other she preferred staying at Lowick. But her vagrant mind mustbe reduced to order: there was an art in self-discipline; and she walked roundand round the brown library considering by what sort of manoeuvre she couldarrest her wandering thoughts. Perhaps a mere task was the best means—somethingto which she must go doggedly. Was there not the geography of Asia Minor, inwhich her slackness had often been rebuked by Mr. Casaubon? She went to thecabinet of maps and unrolled one: this morning she might make herself finallysure that Paphlagonia was not on the Levantine coast, and fix her totaldarkness about the Chalybes firmly on the shores of the Euxine. A map was afine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, beingmade up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.Dorothea set earnestly to work, bending close to her map, and uttering thenames in an audible, subdued tone, which often got into a chime. She lookedamusingly girlish after all her deep experience—nodding her head and markingthe names off on her fingers, with a little pursing of her lip, and now andthen breaking off to put her hands on each side of her face and say, “Oh dear!oh dear!”

There was no reason why this should end any more than a merry-go-round; but itwas at last interrupted by the opening of the door and the announcement of MissNoble.

The little old lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea’s shoulder, waswarmly welcomed, but while her hand was being pressed she made many of herbeaver-like noises, as if she had something difficult to say.

“Do sit down,” said Dorothea, rolling a chair forward. “Am I wanted foranything? I shall be so glad if I can do anything.”

“I will not stay,” said Miss Noble, putting her hand into her small basket, andholding some article inside it nervously; “I have left a friend in thechurchyard.” She lapsed into her inarticulate sounds, and unconsciously drewforth the article which she was fingering. It was the tortoise-shelllozenge-box, and Dorothea felt the color mounting to her cheeks.

“Mr. Ladislaw,” continued the timid little woman. “He fears he has offendedyou, and has begged me to ask if you will see him for a few minutes.”

Dorothea did not answer on the instant: it was crossing her mind that she couldnot receive him in this library, where her husband’s prohibition seemed todwell. She looked towards the window. Could she go out and meet him in thegrounds? The sky was heavy, and the trees had begun to shiver as at a comingstorm. Besides, she shrank from going out to him.

“Do see him, Mrs. Casaubon,” said Miss Noble, pathetically; “else I must goback and say No, and that will hurt him.”

“Yes, I will see him,” said Dorothea. “Pray tell him to come.”

What else was there to be done? There was nothing that she longed for at thatmoment except to see Will: the possibility of seeing him had thrust itselfinsistently between her and every other object; and yet she had a throbbingexcitement like an alarm upon her—a sense that she was doing something daringlydefiant for his sake.

When the little lady had trotted away on her mission, Dorothea stood in themiddle of the library with her hands falling clasped before her, making noattempt to compose herself in an attitude of dignified unconsciousness. Whatshe was least conscious of just then was her own body: she was thinking of whatwas likely to be in Will’s mind, and of the hard feelings that others had hadabout him. How could any duty bind her to hardness? Resistance to unjustdispraise had mingled with her feeling for him from the very first, and now inthe rebound of her heart after her anguish the resistance was stronger thanever. “If I love him too much it is because he has been used so ill:”—there wasa voice within her saying this to some imagined audience in the library, whenthe door was opened, and she saw Will before her.

She did not move, and he came towards her with more doubt and timidity in hisface than she had ever seen before. He was in a state of uncertainty which madehim afraid lest some look or word of his should condemn him to a new distancefrom her; and Dorothea was afraid of her own emotion. She looked as ifthere were a spell upon her, keeping her motionless and hindering her fromunclasping her hands, while some intense, grave yearning was imprisoned withinher eyes. Seeing that she did not put out her hand as usual, Will paused a yardfrom her and said with embarrassment, “I am so grateful to you for seeing me.”

“I wanted to see you,” said Dorothea, having no other words at command. It didnot occur to her to sit down, and Will did not give a cheerful interpretationto this queenly way of receiving him; but he went on to say what he had made uphis mind to say.

“I fear you think me foolish and perhaps wrong for coming back so soon. I havebeen punished for my impatience. You know—every one knows now—a painful storyabout my parentage. I knew of it before I went away, and I always meant to tellyou of it if—if we ever met again.”

There was a slight movement in Dorothea, and she unclasped her hands, butimmediately folded them over each other.

“But the affair is matter of gossip now,” Will continued. “I wished you to knowthat something connected with it—something which happened before I went away,helped to bring me down here again. At least I thought it excused my coming. Itwas the idea of getting Bulstrode to apply some money to a public purpose—somemoney which he had thought of giving me. Perhaps it is rather to Bulstrode’scredit that he privately offered me compensation for an old injury: he offeredto give me a good income to make amends; but I suppose you know thedisagreeable story?”

Will looked doubtfully at Dorothea, but his manner was gathering some of thedefiant courage with which he always thought of this fact in his destiny. Headded, “You know that it must be altogether painful to me.”

“Yes—yes—I know,” said Dorothea, hastily.

“I did not choose to accept an income from such a source. I was sure that youwould not think well of me if I did so,” said Will. Why should he mind sayinganything of that sort to her now? She knew that he had avowed his love for her.“I felt that”—he broke off, nevertheless.

“You acted as I should have expected you to act,” said Dorothea, her facebrightening and her head becoming a little more erect on its beautiful stem.

“I did not believe that you would let any circ*mstance of my birth create aprejudice in you against me, though it was sure to do so in others,” said Will,shaking his head backward in his old way, and looking with a grave appeal intoher eyes.

“If it were a new hardship it would be a new reason for me to cling to you,”said Dorothea, fervidly. “Nothing could have changed me but—” her heart wasswelling, and it was difficult to go on; she made a great effort over herselfto say in a low tremulous voice, “but thinking that you were different—not sogood as I had believed you to be.”

“You are sure to believe me better than I am in everything but one,” said Will,giving way to his own feeling in the evidence of hers. “I mean, in my truth toyou. When I thought you doubted of that, I didn’t care about anything that wasleft. I thought it was all over with me, and there was nothing to try for—onlythings to endure.”

“I don’t doubt you any longer,” said Dorothea, putting out her hand; a vaguefear for him impelling her unutterable affection.

He took her hand and raised it to his lips with something like a sob. But hestood with his hat and gloves in the other hand, and might have done for theportrait of a Royalist. Still it was difficult to loose the hand, and Dorothea,withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed her, looked and moved away.

“See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed,” she said,walking towards the window, yet speaking and moving with only a dim sense ofwhat she was doing.

Will followed her at a little distance, and leaned against the tall back of aleather chair, on which he ventured now to lay his hat and gloves, and freehimself from the intolerable durance of formality to which he had been for thefirst time condemned in Dorothea’s presence. It must be confessed that he feltvery happy at that moment leaning on the chair. He was not much afraid ofanything that she might feel now.

They stood silent, not looking at each other, but looking at the evergreenswhich were being tossed, and were showing the pale underside of their leavesagainst the blackening sky. Will never enjoyed the prospect of a storm so much:it delivered him from the necessity of going away. Leaves and little brancheswere hurled about, and the thunder was getting nearer. The light was more andmore sombre, but there came a flash of lightning which made them start and lookat each other, and then smile. Dorothea began to say what she had been thinkingof.

“That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to tryfor. If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, andthat is worth trying for. Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearlythan ever, when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could haveborne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength.”

“You have never felt the sort of misery I felt,” said Will; “the misery ofknowing that you must despise me.”

“But I have felt worse—it was worse to think ill—” Dorothea had begunimpetuously, but broke off.

Will colored. He had the sense that whatever she said was uttered in the visionof a fatality that kept them apart. He was silent a moment, and then saidpassionately—

“We may at least have the comfort of speaking to each other without disguise.Since I must go away—since we must always be divided—you may think of me as oneon the brink of the grave.”

While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit each ofthem up for the other—and the light seemed to be the terror of a hopeless love.Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window; Will followed her, seizing herhand with a spasmodic movement; and so they stood, with their hands clasped,like two children, looking out on the storm, while the thunder gave atremendous crack and roll above them, and the rain began to pour down. Thenthey turned their faces towards each other, with the memory of his last wordsin them, and they did not loose each other’s hands.

“There is no hope for me,” said Will. “Even if you loved me as well as I loveyou—even if I were everything to you—I shall most likely always be very poor:on a sober calculation, one can count on nothing but a creeping lot. It isimpossible for us ever to belong to each other. It is perhaps base of me tohave asked for a word from you. I meant to go away into silence, but I have notbeen able to do what I meant.”

“Don’t be sorry,” said Dorothea, in her clear tender tones. “I would rathershare all the trouble of our parting.”

Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the firstto move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly, and then theymoved apart.

The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were withinit, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those momentsin which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.

Dorothea sat down on the seat nearest to her, a long low ottoman in the middleof the room, and with her hands folded over each other on her lap, looked atthe drear outer world. Will stood still an instant looking at her, then seatedhimself beside her, and laid his hand on hers, which turned itself upward to beclasped. They sat in that way without looking at each other, until the rainabated and began to fall in stillness. Each had been full of thoughts whichneither of them could begin to utter.

But when the rain was quiet, Dorothea turned to look at Will. With passionateexclamation, as if some torture screw were threatening him, he started up andsaid, “It is impossible!”

He went and leaned on the back of the chair again, and seemed to be battlingwith his own anger, while she looked towards him sadly.

“It is as fatal as a murder or any other horror that divides people,” he burstout again; “it is more intolerable—to have our life maimed by petty accidents.”

“No—don’t say that—your life need not be maimed,” said Dorothea, gently.

“Yes, it must,” said Will, angrily. “It is cruel of you to speak in that way—asif there were any comfort. You may see beyond the misery of it, but I don’t. Itis unkind—it is throwing back my love for you as if it were a trifle, to speakin that way in the face of the fact. We can never be married.”

“Some time—we might,” said Dorothea, in a trembling voice.

“When?” said Will, bitterly. “What is the use of counting on any success ofmine? It is a mere toss up whether I shall ever do more than keep myselfdecently, unless I choose to sell myself as a mere pen and a mouthpiece. I cansee that clearly enough. I could not offer myself to any woman, even if she hadno luxuries to renounce.”

There was silence. Dorothea’s heart was full of something that she wanted tosay, and yet the words were too difficult. She was wholly possessed by them: atthat moment debate was mute within her. And it was very hard that she could notsay what she wanted to say. Will was looking out of the window angrily. If hewould have looked at her and not gone away from her side, she thoughteverything would have been easier. At last he turned, still resting against thechair, and stretching his hand automatically towards his hat, said with a sortof exasperation, “Good-by.”

“Oh, I cannot bear it—my heart will break,” said Dorothea, starting from herseat, the flood of her young passion bearing down all the obstructions whichhad kept her silent—the great tears rising and falling in an instant: “I don’tmind about poverty—I hate my wealth.”

In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she drewher head back and held his away gently that she might go on speaking, her largetear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while she said in a sobbingchildlike way, “We could live quite well on my own fortune—it is too much—sevenhundred a-year—I want so little—no new clothes—and I will learn what everythingcosts.”

CHAPTER LXXXIV.

“Though it be songe of old and yonge,
That I sholde be to blame,
Theyrs be the charge, that spoke so large
In hurtynge of my name.”
—The Not-Browne Mayde.

It was just after the Lords had thrown out the Reform Bill: that explains howMr. Cadwallader came to be walking on the slope of the lawn near the greatconservatory at Fresh*tt Hall, holding the “Times” in his hands behind him,while he talked with a trout-fisher’s dispassionateness about the prospects ofthe country to Sir James Chettam. Mrs. Cadwallader, the Dowager Lady Chettam,and Celia were sometimes seated on garden-chairs, sometimes walking to meetlittle Arthur, who was being drawn in his chariot, and, as became the infantineBouddha, was sheltered by his sacred umbrella with handsome silken fringe.

The ladies also talked politics, though more fitfully. Mrs. Cadwallader wasstrong on the intended creation of peers: she had it for certain from hercousin that Truberry had gone over to the other side entirely at theinstigation of his wife, who had scented peerages in the air from the veryfirst introduction of the Reform question, and would sign her soul away to takeprecedence of her younger sister, who had married a baronet. Lady Chettamthought that such conduct was very reprehensible, and remembered that Mrs.Truberry’s mother was a Miss Walsingham of Melspring. Celia confessed it wasnicer to be “Lady” than “Mrs.,” and that Dodo never minded about precedence ifshe could have her own way. Mrs. Cadwallader held that it was a poorsatisfaction to take precedence when everybody about you knew that you had nota drop of good blood in your veins; and Celia again, stopping to look atArthur, said, “It would be very nice, though, if he were a Viscount—and hislordship’s little tooth coming through! He might have been, if James had beenan Earl.”

“My dear Celia,” said the Dowager, “James’s title is worth far more than anynew earldom. I never wished his father to be anything else than Sir James.”

“Oh, I only meant about Arthur’s little tooth,” said Celia, comfortably. “Butsee, here is my uncle coming.”

She tripped off to meet her uncle, while Sir James and Mr. Cadwallader cameforward to make one group with the ladies. Celia had slipped her arm throughher uncle’s, and he patted her hand with a rather melancholy “Well, my dear!”As they approached, it was evident that Mr. Brooke was looking dejected, butthis was fully accounted for by the state of politics; and as he was shakinghands all round without more greeting than a “Well, you’re all here, you know,”the Rector said, laughingly—

“Don’t take the throwing out of the Bill so much to heart, Brooke; you’ve gotall the riff-raff of the country on your side.”

“The Bill, eh? ah!” said Mr. Brooke, with a mild distractedness of manner.“Thrown out, you know, eh? The Lords are going too far, though. They’ll have topull up. Sad news, you know. I mean, here at home—sad news. But you must notblame me, Chettam.”

“What is the matter?” said Sir James. “Not another gamekeeper shot, I hope?It’s what I should expect, when a fellow like Trapping Bass is let off soeasily.”

“Gamekeeper? No. Let us go in; I can tell you all in the house, you know,” saidMr. Brooke, nodding at the Cadwalladers, to show that he included them in hisconfidence. “As to poachers like Trapping Bass, you know, Chettam,” hecontinued, as they were entering, “when you are a magistrate, you’ll not findit so easy to commit. Severity is all very well, but it’s a great deal easierwhen you’ve got somebody to do it for you. You have a soft place in your heartyourself, you know—you’re not a Draco, a Jeffreys, that sort of thing.”

Mr. Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation. When he hadsomething painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among anumber of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get amilder flavor by mixing. He continued his chat with Sir James about thepoachers until they were all seated, and Mrs. Cadwallader, impatient of thisdrivelling, said—

“I’m dying to know the sad news. The gamekeeper is not shot: that is settled.What is it, then?”

“Well, it’s a very trying thing, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “I’m glad you andthe Rector are here; it’s a family matter—but you will help us all to bear it,Cadwallader. I’ve got to break it to you, my dear.” Here Mr. Brooke looked atCelia—“You’ve no notion what it is, you know. And, Chettam, it will annoy youuncommonly—but, you see, you have not been able to hinder it, any more than Ihave. There’s something singular in things: they come round, you know.”

“It must be about Dodo,” said Celia, who had been used to think of her sisteras the dangerous part of the family machinery. She had seated herself on a lowstool against her husband’s knee.

“For God’s sake let us hear what it is!” said Sir James.

“Well, you know, Chettam, I couldn’t help Casaubon’s will: it was a sort ofwill to make things worse.”

“Exactly,” said Sir James, hastily. “But what is worse?”

“Dorothea is going to be married again, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, noddingtowards Celia, who immediately looked up at her husband with a frightenedglance, and put her hand on his knee. Sir James was almost white with anger,but he did not speak.

“Merciful heaven!” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Not to young Ladislaw?”

Mr. Brooke nodded, saying, “Yes; to Ladislaw,” and then fell into a prudentialsilence.

“You see, Humphrey!” said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her arm towards her husband.“Another time you will admit that I have some foresight; or rather you willcontradict me and be just as blind as ever. You supposed that the younggentleman was gone out of the country.”

“So he might be, and yet come back,” said the Rector, quietly.

“When did you learn this?” said Sir James, not liking to hear any one elsespeak, though finding it difficult to speak himself.

“Yesterday,” said Mr. Brooke, meekly. “I went to Lowick. Dorothea sent for me,you know. It had come about quite suddenly—neither of them had any idea twodays ago—not any idea, you know. There’s something singular in things. ButDorothea is quite determined—it is no use opposing. I put it strongly to her. Idid my duty, Chettam. But she can act as she likes, you know.”

“It would have been better if I had called him out and shot him a year ago,”said Sir James, not from bloody-mindedness, but because he needed somethingstrong to say.

“Really, James, that would have been very disagreeable,” said Celia.

“Be reasonable, Chettam. Look at the affair more quietly,” said Mr.Cadwallader, sorry to see his good-natured friend so overmastered by anger.

“That is not so very easy for a man of any dignity—with any sense of right—whenthe affair happens to be in his own family,” said Sir James, still in his whiteindignation. “It is perfectly scandalous. If Ladislaw had had a spark of honorhe would have gone out of the country at once, and never shown his face in itagain. However, I am not surprised. The day after Casaubon’s funeral I saidwhat ought to be done. But I was not listened to.”

“You wanted what was impossible, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke. “Youwanted him shipped off. I told you Ladislaw was not to be done as we likedwith: he had his ideas. He was a remarkable fellow—I always said he was aremarkable fellow.”

“Yes,” said Sir James, unable to repress a retort, “it is rather a pity youformed that high opinion of him. We are indebted to that for his being lodgedin this neighborhood. We are indebted to that for seeing a woman like Dorotheadegrading herself by marrying him.” Sir James made little stoppages between hisclauses, the words not coming easily. “A man so marked out by her husband’swill, that delicacy ought to have forbidden her from seeing him again—who takesher out of her proper rank—into poverty—has the meanness to accept such asacrifice—has always had an objectionable position—a bad origin—and, Ibelieve, is a man of little principle and light character. That is myopinion.” Sir James ended emphatically, turning aside and crossing his leg.

“I pointed everything out to her,” said Mr. Brooke, apologetically—“I mean thepoverty, and abandoning her position. I said, ‘My dear, you don’t know what itis to live on seven hundred a-year, and have no carriage, and that kind ofthing, and go amongst people who don’t know who you are.’ I put it strongly toher. But I advise you to talk to Dorothea herself. The fact is, she has adislike to Casaubon’s property. You will hear what she says, you know.”

“No—excuse me—I shall not,” said Sir James, with more coolness. “I cannot bearto see her again; it is too painful. It hurts me too much that a woman likeDorothea should have done what is wrong.”

“Be just, Chettam,” said the easy, large-lipped Rector, who objected to allthis unnecessary discomfort. “Mrs. Casaubon may be acting imprudently: she isgiving up a fortune for the sake of a man, and we men have so poor an opinionof each other that we can hardly call a woman wise who does that. But I thinkyou should not condemn it as a wrong action, in the strict sense of the word.”

“Yes, I do,” answered Sir James. “I think that Dorothea commits a wrong actionin marrying Ladislaw.”

“My dear fellow, we are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it isunpleasant to us,” said the Rector, quietly. Like many men who take lifeeasily, he had the knack of saying a home truth occasionally to those who feltthemselves virtuously out of temper. Sir James took out his handkerchief andbegan to bite the corner.

“It is very dreadful of Dodo, though,” said Celia, wishing to justify herhusband. “She said she never would marry again—not anybody at all.”

“I heard her say the same thing myself,” said Lady Chettam, majestically, as ifthis were royal evidence.

“Oh, there is usually a silent exception in such cases,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.“The only wonder to me is, that any of you are surprised. You did nothing tohinder it. If you would have had Lord Triton down here to woo her with hisphilanthropy, he might have carried her off before the year was over. There wasno safety in anything else. Mr. Casaubon had prepared all this as beautifullyas possible. He made himself disagreeable—or it pleased God to make him so—andthen he dared her to contradict him. It’s the way to make any trumperytempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way.”

“I don’t know what you mean by wrong, Cadwallader,” said Sir James, stillfeeling a little stung, and turning round in his chair towards the Rector.“He’s not a man we can take into the family. At least, I must speak formyself,” he continued, carefully keeping his eyes off Mr. Brooke. “I supposeothers will find his society too pleasant to care about the propriety of thething.”

“Well, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke, good-humoredly, nursing his leg, “Ican’t turn my back on Dorothea. I must be a father to her up to a certainpoint. I said, ‘My dear, I won’t refuse to give you away.’ I had spokenstrongly before. But I can cut off the entail, you know. It will cost money andbe troublesome; but I can do it, you know.”

Mr. Brooke nodded at Sir James, and felt that he was both showing his own forceof resolution and propitiating what was just in the Baronet’s vexation. He hadhit on a more ingenious mode of parrying than he was aware of. He had touched amotive of which Sir James was ashamed. The mass of his feeling about Dorothea’smarriage to Ladislaw was due partly to excusable prejudice, or even justifiableopinion, partly to a jealous repugnance hardly less in Ladislaw’s case than inCasaubon’s. He was convinced that the marriage was a fatal one for Dorothea.But amid that mass ran a vein of which he was too good and honorable a man tolike the avowal even to himself: it was undeniable that the union of the twoestates—Tipton and Fresh*tt—lying charmingly within a ring-fence, was aprospect that flattered him for his son and heir. Hence when Mr. Brookenoddingly appealed to that motive, Sir James felt a sudden embarrassment; therewas a stoppage in his throat; he even blushed. He had found more words thanusual in the first jet of his anger, but Mr. Brooke’s propitiation was moreclogging to his tongue than Mr. Cadwallader’s caustic hint.

But Celia was glad to have room for speech after her uncle’s suggestion of themarriage ceremony, and she said, though with as little eagerness of manner asif the question had turned on an invitation to dinner, “Do you mean that Dodois going to be married directly, uncle?”

“In three weeks, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, helplessly. “I can do nothing tohinder it, Cadwallader,” he added, turning for a little countenance toward theRector, who said—

“I should not make any fuss about it. If she likes to be poor, that isher affair. Nobody would have said anything if she had married the young fellowbecause he was rich. Plenty of beneficed clergy are poorer than they will be.Here is Elinor,” continued the provoking husband; “she vexed her friends by me:I had hardly a thousand a-year—I was a lout—nobody could see anything in me—myshoes were not the right cut—all the men wondered how a woman could like me.Upon my word, I must take Ladislaw’s part until I hear more harm of him.”

“Humphrey, that is all sophistry, and you know it,” said his wife. “Everythingis all one—that is the beginning and end with you. As if you had not been aCadwallader! Does any one suppose that I would have taken such a monster as youby any other name?”

“And a clergyman too,” observed Lady Chettam with approbation. “Elinor cannotbe said to have descended below her rank. It is difficult to say what Mr.Ladislaw is, eh, James?”

Sir James gave a small grunt, which was less respectful than his usual mode ofanswering his mother. Celia looked up at him like a thoughtful kitten.

“It must be admitted that his blood is a frightful mixture!” said Mrs.Cadwallader. “The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to begin with, and then arebellious Polish fiddler or dancing-master, was it?—and then an old clo—”

“Nonsense, Elinor,” said the Rector, rising. “It is time for us to go.”

“After all, he is a pretty sprig,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, rising too, andwishing to make amends. “He is like the fine old Crichley portraits before theidiots came in.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Mr. Brooke, starting up with alacrity. “You must allcome and dine with me to-morrow, you know—eh, Celia, my dear?”

“You will, James—won’t you?” said Celia, taking her husband’s hand.

“Oh, of course, if you like,” said Sir James, pulling down his waistcoat, butunable yet to adjust his face good-humoredly. “That is to say, if it is not tomeet anybody else.”

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Brooke, understanding the condition. “Dorothea would notcome, you know, unless you had been to see her.”

When Sir James and Celia were alone, she said, “Do you mind about my having thecarriage to go to Lowick, James?”

“What, now, directly?” he answered, with some surprise.

“Yes, it is very important,” said Celia.

“Remember, Celia, I cannot see her,” said Sir James.

“Not if she gave up marrying?”

“What is the use of saying that?—however, I’m going to the stables. I’ll tellBriggs to bring the carriage round.”

Celia thought it was of great use, if not to say that, at least to take ajourney to Lowick in order to influence Dorothea’s mind. All through theirgirlhood she had felt that she could act on her sister by a word judiciouslyplaced—by opening a little window for the daylight of her own understanding toenter among the strange colored lamps by which Dodo habitually saw. And Celiathe matron naturally felt more able to advise her childless sister. How couldany one understand Dodo so well as Celia did or love her so tenderly?

Dorothea, busy in her boudoir, felt a glow of pleasure at the sight of hersister so soon after the revelation of her intended marriage. She hadprefigured to herself, even with exaggeration, the disgust of her friends, andshe had even feared that Celia might be kept aloof from her.

“O Kitty, I am delighted to see you!” said Dorothea, putting her hands onCelia’s shoulders, and beaming on her. “I almost thought you would not come tome.”

“I have not brought Arthur, because I was in a hurry,” said Celia, and they satdown on two small chairs opposite each other, with their knees touching.

“You know, Dodo, it is very bad,” said Celia, in her placid guttural, lookingas prettily free from humors as possible. “You have disappointed us all so. AndI can’t think that it ever will be—you never can go and live in thatway. And then there are all your plans! You never can have thought of that.James would have taken any trouble for you, and you might have gone on all yourlife doing what you liked.”

“On the contrary, dear,” said Dorothea, “I never could do anything that Iliked. I have never carried out any plan yet.”

“Because you always wanted things that wouldn’t do. But other plans would havecome. And how can you marry Mr. Ladislaw, that we none of us everthought you could marry? It shocks James so dreadfully. And then it isall so different from what you have always been. You would have Mr. Casaubonbecause he had such a great soul, and was so old and dismal and learned; andnow, to think of marrying Mr. Ladislaw, who has got no estate or anything. Isuppose it is because you must be making yourself uncomfortable in some way orother.”

Dorothea laughed.

“Well, it is very serious, Dodo,” said Celia, becoming more impressive. “Howwill you live? and you will go away among queer people. And I shall never seeyou—and you won’t mind about little Arthur—and I thought you always would—”

Celia’s rare tears had got into her eyes, and the corners of her mouth wereagitated.

“Dear Celia,” said Dorothea, with tender gravity, “if you don’t ever see me, itwill not be my fault.”

“Yes, it will,” said Celia, with the same touching distortion of her smallfeatures. “How can I come to you or have you with me when James can’t bearit?—that is because he thinks it is not right—he thinks you are so wrong, Dodo.But you always were wrong: only I can’t help loving you. And nobody can thinkwhere you will live: where can you go?”

“I am going to London,” said Dorothea.

“How can you always live in a street? And you will be so poor. I could give youhalf my things, only how can I, when I never see you?”

“Bless you, Kitty,” said Dorothea, with gentle warmth. “Take comfort: perhapsJames will forgive me some time.”

“But it would be much better if you would not be married,” said Celia, dryingher eyes, and returning to her argument; “then there would be nothinguncomfortable. And you would not do what nobody thought you could do. Jamesalways said you ought to be a queen; but this is not at all being like a queen.You know what mistakes you have always been making, Dodo, and this is another.Nobody thinks Mr. Ladislaw a proper husband for you. And you said youwould never be married again.”

“It is quite true that I might be a wiser person, Celia,” said Dorothea, “andthat I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is whatI am going to do. I have promised to marry Mr. Ladislaw; and I am going tomarry him.”

The tone in which Dorothea said this was a note that Celia had long learned torecognize. She was silent a few moments, and then said, as if she had dismissedall contest, “Is he very fond of you, Dodo?”

“I hope so. I am very fond of him.”

“That is nice,” said Celia, comfortably. “Only I would rather you had such asort of husband as James is, with a place very near, that I could drive to.”

Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, “Icannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hearthe story.

“I dare say not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew howit came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”

“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.

“No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”

CHAPTER LXXXV.

“Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice,Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar,Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his privateverdict against him among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded tobring him in guilty before the judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman,the foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic. Then said Mr.No-good, Away with such a fellow from the earth! Ay, said Mr. Malice, for Ihate the very look of him. Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him.Nor I, said Mr. Live-loose; for he would be always condemning my way. Hang him,hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said Mr. High-mind. My heart risethagainst him, said Mr. Enmity. He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too goodfor him, said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way said Mr.Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all the world given me, Icould not be reconciled to him; therefore let us forthwith bring him in guiltyof death.”—Pilgrim’s Progress.

When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions bringing intheir verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful? That is a rare and blessed lotwhich some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before acondemning crowd—to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the goodin us. The pitiable lot is that of the man who could not call himself a martyreven though he were to persuade himself that the men who stoned him were butugly passions incarnate—who knows that he is stoned, not for professing theRight, but for not being the man he professed to be.

This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he made hispreparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end his stricken lifein that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces. The duteous mercifulconstancy of his wife had delivered him from one dread, but it could not hinderher presence from being still a tribunal before which he shrank from confessionand desired advocacy. His equivocations with himself about the death of Raffleshad sustained the conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to, yet he had aterror upon him which would not let him expose them to judgment by a fullconfession to his wife: the acts which he had washed and diluted with inwardargument and motive, and for which it seemed comparatively easy to wininvisible pardon—what name would she call them by? That she should eversilently call his acts Murder was what he could not bear. He felt shrouded byher doubt: he got strength to face her from the sense that she could not yetfeel warranted in pronouncing that worst condemnation on him. Some time,perhaps—when he was dying—he would tell her all: in the deep shadow of thattime, when she held his hand in the gathering darkness, she might listenwithout recoiling from his touch. Perhaps: but concealment had been the habitof his life, and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of adeeper humiliation.

He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he deprecated anyharshness of judgment from her, but because he felt a deep distress at thesight of her suffering. She had sent her daughters away to board at a school onthe coast, that this crisis might be hidden from them as far as possible. Setfree by their absence from the intolerable necessity of accounting for hergrief or of beholding their frightened wonder, she could live unconstrainedlywith the sorrow that was every day streaking her hair with whiteness and makingher eyelids languid.

“Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,” Bulstrode hadsaid to her; “I mean with regard to arrangements of property. It is myintention not to sell the land I possess in this neighborhood, but to leave itto you as a safe provision. If you have any wish on such subjects, do notconceal it from me.”

A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to her brother’s, shebegan to speak to her husband on a subject which had for some time been in hermind.

“I should like to do something for my brother’s family, Nicholas; and Ithink we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond and her husband. Walter saysMr. Lydgate must leave the town, and his practice is almost good for nothing,and they have very little left to settle anywhere with. I would rather dowithout something for ourselves, to make some amends to my poor brother’sfamily.”

Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the phrase “makesome amends;” knowing that her husband must understand her. He had a particularreason, which she was not aware of, for wincing under her suggestion. Hehesitated before he said—

“It is not possible to carry out your wish in the way you propose, my dear. Mr.Lydgate has virtually rejected any further service from me. He has returned thethousand pounds which I lent him. Mrs. Casaubon advanced him the sum for thatpurpose. Here is his letter.”

The letter seemed to cut Mrs. Bulstrode severely. The mention of Mrs.Casaubon’s loan seemed a reflection of that public feeling which held it amatter of course that every one would avoid a connection with her husband. Shewas silent for some time; and the tears fell one after the other, her chintrembling as she wiped them away. Bulstrode, sitting opposite to her, ached atthe sight of that grief-worn face, which two months before had been bright andblooming. It had aged to keep sad company with his own withered features. Urgedinto some effort at comforting her, he said—

“There is another means, Harriet, by which I might do a service to yourbrother’s family, if you like to act in it. And it would, I think, bebeneficial to you: it would be an advantageous way of managing the land which Imean to be yours.”

She looked attentive.

“Garth once thought of undertaking the management of Stone Court in order toplace your nephew Fred there. The stock was to remain as it is, and they wereto pay a certain share of the profits instead of an ordinary rent. That wouldbe a desirable beginning for the young man, in conjunction with his employmentunder Garth. Would it be a satisfaction to you?”

“Yes, it would,” said Mrs. Bulstrode, with some return of energy. “Poor Walteris so cast down; I would try anything in my power to do him some good before Igo away. We have always been brother and sister.”

“You must make the proposal to Garth yourself, Harriet,” said Mr. Bulstrode,not liking what he had to say, but desiring the end he had in view, for otherreasons besides the consolation of his wife. “You must state to him that theland is virtually yours, and that he need have no transactions with me.Communications can be made through Standish. I mention this, because Garth gaveup being my agent. I can put into your hands a paper which he himself drew up,stating conditions; and you can propose his renewed acceptance of them. I thinkit is not unlikely that he will accept when you propose the thing for the sakeof your nephew.”

CHAPTER LXXXVI.

“Le cœur se sature d’amour comme d’un sel divin qui le conserve; de làl’incorruptible adhérence de ceux qui se sont aimés dès l’aube de la vie, et lafraîcheur des vielles amours prolongées. Il existe un embaumement d’amour.C’est de Daphnis et Chloé que sont faits Philémon et Baucis. Cettevieillesse-là, ressemblance du soir avec l’aurore.”—VICTOR HUGO: L’homme quirit.

Mrs. Garth, hearing Caleb enter the passage about tea-time, opened theparlor-door and said, “There you are, Caleb. Have you had your dinner?” (Mr.Garth’s meals were much subordinated to “business.”)

“Oh yes, a good dinner—cold mutton and I don’t know what. Where is Mary?”

“In the garden with Letty, I think.”

“Fred is not come yet?”

“No. Are you going out again without taking tea, Caleb?” said Mrs. Garth,seeing that her absent-minded husband was putting on again the hat which he hadjust taken off.

“No, no; I’m only going to Mary a minute.”

Mary was in a grassy corner of the garden, where there was a swing loftily hungbetween two pear-trees. She had a pink kerchief tied over her head, making alittle poke to shade her eyes from the level sunbeams, while she was giving aglorious swing to Letty, who laughed and screamed wildly.

Seeing her father, Mary left the swing and went to meet him, pushing back thepink kerchief and smiling afar off at him with the involuntary smile of lovingpleasure.

“I came to look for you, Mary,” said Mr. Garth. “Let us walk about a bit.”

Mary knew quite well that her father had something particular to say: hiseyebrows made their pathetic angle, and there was a tender gravity in hisvoice: these things had been signs to her when she was Letty’s age. She put herarm within his, and they turned by the row of nut-trees.

“It will be a sad while before you can be married, Mary,” said her father, notlooking at her, but at the end of the stick which he held in his other hand.

“Not a sad while, father—I mean to be merry,” said Mary, laughingly. “I havebeen single and merry for four-and-twenty years and more: I suppose it will notbe quite as long again as that.” Then, after a little pause, she said, moregravely, bending her face before her father’s, “If you are contented withFred?”

Caleb screwed up his mouth and turned his head aside wisely.

“Now, father, you did praise him last Wednesday. You said he had an uncommonnotion of stock, and a good eye for things.”

“Did I?” said Caleb, rather slyly.

“Yes, I put it all down, and the date, anno Domini, and everything,”said Mary. “You like things to be neatly booked. And then his behavior to you,father, is really good; he has a deep respect for you; and it is impossible tohave a better temper than Fred has.”

“Ay, ay; you want to coax me into thinking him a fine match.”

“No, indeed, father. I don’t love him because he is a fine match.”

“What for, then?”

“Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

“Your mind is quite settled, then, Mary?” said Caleb, returning to his firsttone. “There’s no other wish come into it since things have been going on asthey have been of late?” (Caleb meant a great deal in that vague phrase;)“because, better late than never. A woman must not force her heart—she’ll do aman no good by that.”

“My feelings have not changed, father,” said Mary, calmly. “I shall be constantto Fred as long as he is constant to me. I don’t think either of us could sparethe other, or like any one else better, however much we might admire them. Itwould make too great a difference to us—like seeing all the old places altered,and changing the name for everything. We must wait for each other a long while;but Fred knows that.”

Instead of speaking immediately, Caleb stood still and screwed his stick on thegrassy walk. Then he said, with emotion in his voice, “Well, I’ve got a bit ofnews. What do you think of Fred going to live at Stone Court, and managing theland there?”

“How can that ever be, father?” said Mary, wonderingly.

“He would manage it for his aunt Bulstrode. The poor woman has been to mebegging and praying. She wants to do the lad good, and it might be a fine thingfor him. With saving, he might gradually buy the stock, and he has a turn forfarming.”

“Oh, Fred would be so happy! It is too good to believe.”

“Ah, but mind you,” said Caleb, turning his head warningly, “I must take it onmy shoulders, and be responsible, and see after everything; and thatwill grieve your mother a bit, though she mayn’t say so. Fred had need becareful.”

“Perhaps it is too much, father,” said Mary, checked in her joy. “There wouldbe no happiness in bringing you any fresh trouble.”

“Nay, nay; work is my delight, child, when it doesn’t vex your mother. Andthen, if you and Fred get married,” here Caleb’s voice shook just perceptibly,“he’ll be steady and saving; and you’ve got your mother’s cleverness, and minetoo, in a woman’s sort of way; and you’ll keep him in order. He’ll be comingby-and-by, so I wanted to tell you first, because I think you’d like to tellhim by yourselves. After that, I could talk it well over with him, andwe could go into business and the nature of things.”

“Oh, you dear good father!” cried Mary, putting her hands round her father’sneck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. “I wonder if anyother girl thinks her father the best man in the world!”

“Nonsense, child; you’ll think your husband better.”

“Impossible,” said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; “husbands are aninferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

When they were entering the house with Letty, who had run to join them, Marysaw Fred at the orchard-gate, and went to meet him.

“What fine clothes you wear, you extravagant youth!” said Mary, as Fred stoodstill and raised his hat to her with playful formality. “You are not learningeconomy.”

“Now that is too bad, Mary,” said Fred. “Just look at the edges of thesecoat-cuffs! It is only by dint of good brushing that I look respectable. I amsaving up three suits—one for a wedding-suit.”

“How very droll you will look!—like a gentleman in an old fashion-book.”

“Oh no, they will keep two years.”

“Two years! be reasonable, Fred,” said Mary, turning to walk. “Don’t encourageflattering expectations.”

“Why not? One lives on them better than on unflattering ones. If we can’t bemarried in two years, the truth will be quite bad enough when it comes.”

“I have heard a story of a young gentleman who once encouraged flatteringexpectations, and they did him harm.”

“Mary, if you’ve got something discouraging to tell me, I shall bolt; I shallgo into the house to Mr. Garth. I am out of spirits. My father is so cutup—home is not like itself. I can’t bear any more bad news.”

“Should you call it bad news to be told that you were to live at Stone Court,and manage the farm, and be remarkably prudent, and save money every year tillall the stock and furniture were your own, and you were a distinguishedagricultural character, as Mr. Borthrop Trumbull says—rather stout, I fear, andwith the Greek and Latin sadly weather-worn?”

“You don’t mean anything except nonsense, Mary?” said Fred, coloring slightlynevertheless.

“That is what my father has just told me of as what may happen, and he nevertalks nonsense,” said Mary, looking up at Fred now, while he grasped her handas they walked, till it rather hurt her; but she would not complain.

“Oh, I could be a tremendously good fellow then, Mary, and we could be marrieddirectly.”

“Not so fast, sir; how do you know that I would not rather defer our marriagefor some years? That would leave you time to misbehave, and then if I likedsome one else better, I should have an excuse for jilting you.”

“Pray don’t joke, Mary,” said Fred, with strong feeling. “Tell me seriouslythat all this is true, and that you are happy because of it—because you love mebest.”

“It is all true, Fred, and I am happy because of it—because I love you best,”said Mary, in a tone of obedient recitation.

They lingered on the door-step under the steep-roofed porch, and Fred almost ina whisper said—

“When we were first engaged, with the umbrella-ring, Mary, you used to—”

The spirit of joy began to laugh more decidedly in Mary’s eyes, but the fatalBen came running to the door with Brownie yapping behind him, and, bouncingagainst them, said—

“Fred and Mary! are you ever coming in?—or may I eat your cake?”

FINALE.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives afterbeing long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them intheir after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not thesample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may befollowed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; apast error may urge a grand retrieval.

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a greatbeginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but hadtheir first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It isstill the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable lossof that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age theharvest of sweet memories in common.

Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope andenthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and theworld.

All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that thesetwo made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness. Fred surprisedhis neighbors in various ways. He became rather distinguished in his side ofthe county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced a work on the“Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding” which won himhigh congratulations at agricultural meetings. In Middlemarch admiration wasmore reserved: most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit ofFred’s authorship was due to his wife, since they had never expected Fred Vincyto write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.

But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called “Stories of Great Men,taken from Plutarch,” and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co.,Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the credit of this workto Fred, observing that he had been to the University, “where the ancients werestudied,” and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, andthat there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it wasalways done by somebody else.

Moreover, Fred remained unswervingly steady. Some years after his marriage hetold Mary that his happiness was half owing to Farebrother, who gave him astrong pull-up at the right moment. I cannot say that he was never again misledby his hopefulness: the yield of crops or the profits of a cattle sale usuallyfell below his estimate; and he was always prone to believe that he could makemoney by the purchase of a horse which turned out badly—though this, Maryobserved, was of course the fault of the horse, not of Fred’s judgment. He kepthis love of horsemanship, but he rarely allowed himself a day’s hunting; andwhen he did so, it was remarkable that he submitted to be laughed at forcowardliness at the fences, seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on thefive-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch.

There were three boys: Mary was not discontented that she brought forthmen-children only; and when Fred wished to have a girl like her, she said,laughingly, “that would be too great a trial to your mother.” Mrs. Vincy in herdeclining years, and in the diminished lustre of her housekeeping, was muchcomforted by her perception that two at least of Fred’s boys were real Vincys,and did not “feature the Garths.” But Mary secretly rejoiced that the youngestof the three was very much what her father must have been when he wore a roundjacket, and showed a marvellous nicety of aim in playing at marbles, or inthrowing stones to bring down the mellow pears.

Ben and Letty Garth, who were uncle and aunt before they were well in theirteens, disputed much as to whether nephews or nieces were more desirable; Bencontending that it was clear girls were good for less than boys, else theywould not be always in petticoats, which showed how little they were meant for;whereupon Letty, who argued much from books, got angry in replying that Godmade coats of skins for both Adam and Eve alike—also it occurred to her that inthe East the men too wore petticoats. But this latter argument, obscuring themajesty of the former, was one too many, for Ben answered contemptuously, “Themore spooneys they!” and immediately appealed to his mother whether boys werenot better than girls. Mrs. Garth pronounced that both were alike naughty, butthat boys were undoubtedly stronger, could run faster, and throw with moreprecision to a greater distance. With this oracular sentence Ben was wellsatisfied, not minding the naughtiness; but Letty took it ill, her feeling ofsuperiority being stronger than her muscles.

Fred never became rich—his hopefulness had not led him to expect that; but hegradually saved enough to become owner of the stock and furniture at StoneCourt, and the work which Mr. Garth put into his hands carried him in plentythrough those “bad times” which are always present with farmers. Mary, in hermatronly days, became as solid in figure as her mother; but, unlike her, gavethe boys little formal teaching, so that Mrs. Garth was alarmed lest theyshould never be well grounded in grammar and geography. Nevertheless, they werefound quite forward enough when they went to school; perhaps, because they hadliked nothing so well as being with their mother. When Fred was riding home onwinter evenings he had a pleasant vision beforehand of the bright hearth in thewainscoted parlor, and was sorry for other men who could not have Mary fortheir wife; especially for Mr. Farebrother. “He was ten times worthier of youthan I was,” Fred could now say to her, magnanimously. “To be sure he was,”Mary answered; “and for that reason he could do better without me. But you—Ishudder to think what you would have been—a curate in debt for horse-hire andcambric pocket-handkerchiefs!”

On inquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit StoneCourt—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over thefine stone-wall into the field where the walnut-trees stand in stately row—andthat on sunny days the two lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ringmay be seen in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth,in the days of old Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered to look out forMr. Lydgate.

Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving hiswife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gainedan excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London anda Continental bathing-place; having written a treatise on Gout, a disease whichhas a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many payingpatients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what heonce meant to do. His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so charming awife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion. Rosamond never committed asecond compromising indiscretion. She simply continued to be mild in hertemper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and ableto frustrate him by stratagem. As the years went on he opposed her less andless, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learned the value of her opinion;on the other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents now thathe gained a good income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride Streetprovided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of paradise that sheresembled. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he diedprematurely of diphtheria, and Rosamond afterwards married an elderly andwealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children. She made a very prettyshow with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of herhappiness as “a reward”—she did not say for what, but probably she meant thatit was a reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never becamefaultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was morememorable than the signs he made of his repentance. He once called her hisbasil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plantwhich had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains. Rosamond had aplacid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then had he chosen her? It was apity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and placingabove her. And thus the conversation ended with the advantage on Rosamond’sside. But it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word indepreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance the generosity whichhad come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.

Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling thatthere was always something better which she might have done, if she had onlybeen better and known better. Still, she never repented that she had given upposition and fortune to marry Will Ladislaw, and he would have held it thegreatest shame as well as sorrow to him if she had repented. They were bound toeach other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it. Nolife would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion,and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent activity which she had notthe doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself. Will became anardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with ayoung hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days,and getting at last returned to Parliament by a constituency who paid hisexpenses. Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, thanthat her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and thatshe should give him wifely help. Many who knew her, thought it a pity that sosubstantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life ofanother, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no onestated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to havedone—not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the negativeprescription that she ought not to have married Will Ladislaw.

But this opinion of his did not cause a lasting alienation; and the way inwhich the family was made whole again was characteristic of all concerned. Mr.Brooke could not resist the pleasure of corresponding with Will and Dorothea;and one morning when his pen had been remarkably fluent on the prospects ofMunicipal Reform, it ran off into an invitation to the Grange, which, oncewritten, could not be done away with at less cost than the sacrifice (hardly tobe conceived) of the whole valuable letter. During the months of thiscorrespondence Mr. Brooke had continually, in his talk with Sir James Chettam,been presupposing or hinting that the intention of cutting off the entail wasstill maintained; and the day on which his pen gave the daring invitation, hewent to Fresh*tt expressly to intimate that he had a stronger sense than everof the reasons for taking that energetic step as a precaution against anymixture of low blood in the heir of the Brookes.

But that morning something exciting had happened at the Hall. A letter had cometo Celia which made her cry silently as she read it; and when Sir James, unusedto see her in tears, asked anxiously what was the matter, she burst out in awail such as he had never heard from her before.

“Dorothea has a little boy. And you will not let me go and see her. And I amsure she wants to see me. And she will not know what to do with the baby—shewill do wrong things with it. And they thought she would die. It is verydreadful! Suppose it had been me and little Arthur, and Dodo had been hinderedfrom coming to see me! I wish you would be less unkind, James!”

“Good heavens, Celia!” said Sir James, much wrought upon, “what do you wish? Iwill do anything you like. I will take you to town to-morrow if you wish it.”And Celia did wish it.

It was after this that Mr. Brooke came, and meeting the Baronet in the grounds,began to chat with him in ignorance of the news, which Sir James for somereason did not care to tell him immediately. But when the entail was touched onin the usual way, he said, “My dear sir, it is not for me to dictate to you,but for my part I would let that alone. I would let things remain as they are.”

Mr. Brooke felt so much surprised that he did not at once find out how much hewas relieved by the sense that he was not expected to do anything inparticular.

Such being the bent of Celia’s heart, it was inevitable that Sir James shouldconsent to a reconciliation with Dorothea and her husband. Where women loveeach other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike. Sir James never likedLadislaw, and Will always preferred to have Sir James’s company mixed withanother kind: they were on a footing of reciprocal tolerance which was madequite easy only when Dorothea and Celia were present.

It became an understood thing that Mr. and Mrs. Ladislaw should pay at leasttwo visits during the year to the Grange, and there came gradually a small rowof cousins at Fresh*tt who enjoyed playing with the two cousins visiting Tiptonas much as if the blood of these cousins had been less dubiously mixed.

Mr. Brooke lived to a good old age, and his estate was inherited by Dorothea’sson, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined, thinking that hisopinions had less chance of being stifled if he remained out of doors.

Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a mistake; andindeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she wasspoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sicklyclergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year afterhis death gave up her estate to marry his cousin—young enough to have been hisson, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything ofDorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a nice woman,” else shewould not have married either the one or the other.

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. Theywere the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst theconditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will oftentake the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there isno creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determinedby what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity ofreforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroicpiety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in whichtheir ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people withour daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some ofwhich may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose storywe know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were notwidely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke thestrength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. Butthe effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for thegrowing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and thatthings are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing tothe number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

THE END

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