Middlemarch
by George Eliot · English · Gutenberg #145 · 1,799,406 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot
Release date: July 1, 1994 [eBook #145]
Most recently updated: April 12, 2026
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/145
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIDDLEMARCH ***
Middlemarch
George Eliot
New York and Boston
H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
Contents
PRELUDE.
BOOK I. MISS BROOKE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
BOOK III. WAITING FOR DEATH.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
BOOK IV. THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
BOOK V. THE DEAD HAND.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
BOOK VI. THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
BOOK VII. TWO TEMPTATIONS.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.
BOOK VIII. SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
CHAPTER LXXII.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXV.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
CHAPTER LXXX.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXXV.
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
FINALE.
PRELUDE.
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious
mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,
at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with
some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one
morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek
martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged
Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human
hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met
them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great
resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s
passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed
romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to
her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within,
soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would
never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the
rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the
reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not
the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for
themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of
far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of
a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of
opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and
sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance
they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but
after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and
formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent
social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge
for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague
ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was
disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures
of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as
the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might
be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness
remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one
would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite
love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared
uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the
living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and
there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are
dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some
long-recognizable deed.
BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.
CHAPTER I.
Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
—_The Maid’s Tragedy:_ BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she
could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the
Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as
her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain
garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the
impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our
elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually
spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her
sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely
more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress
differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its
arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed
conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being
ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not
exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably “good:” if you inquired
backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring
or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a
clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan
gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and
managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a
respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet
country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a
parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s
daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made
show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was
required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have
been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious
feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have
determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s
sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to
accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea
knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;
and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,
made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for
Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life
involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and
artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned
by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might
frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there;
she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing
whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom,
to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a
quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the
character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and
hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks,
vanity, and merely canine affection. With all this, she, the elder of
the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since
they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on plans
at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and
afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and
guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their
orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with
their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous
opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger years,
and was held in this part of the county to have contracted a too
rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to
predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with
benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as
possible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite
minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax
about all his own interests except the retention of his snuff-box,
concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in
abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and
virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk or his
way of “letting things be” on his estate, and making her long all the
more for the time when she would be of age and have some command of
money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress; for not
only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but
if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s
estate, presumably worth about three thousand a-year—a rental which
seemed wealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel’s late
conduct on the Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and
of that gorgeous plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities
of genteel life.
And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such
prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her
insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a
wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead
her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and
fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick
laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the
time of the Apostles—who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist,
and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife
might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the
application of her income which would interfere with political economy
and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice
before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to
have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic
life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their
neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know
and avoid them.
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,
was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and
innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her
religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her,
the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much
subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of
blazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by
this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably
reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on
horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the
country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she
looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she
allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she
enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to
renouncing it.
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it
was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with
attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman
appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of
seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia:
Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from
Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for
Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself
would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all
her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas
about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the
judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that
wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his
blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits
it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome
baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when she expressed
uncertainty,—how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful
marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and
could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
These peculiarities of Dorothea’s character caused Mr. Brooke to be all
the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing some
middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces. But he himself
dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available for
such a position, that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea’s
objections, and was in this case brave enough to defy the world—that is
to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector’s wife, and the small group of
gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire. So
Miss Brooke presided in her uncle’s household, and did not at all
dislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another
gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt
some venerating expectation. This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon,
noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many
years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also
as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views
of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication
of his book. His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be
measured without a precise chronology of scholarship.
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she
had set going in the village, and was taking her usual place in the
pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on
finishing a plan for some buildings (a kind of work which she delighted
in), when Celia, who had been watching her with a hesitating desire to
propose something, said—
“Dorothea, dear, if you don’t mind—if you are not very busy—suppose we
looked at mamma’s jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six
months to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at
them yet.”
Celia’s face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full
presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and
principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious
electricity if you touched them incautiously. To her relief, Dorothea’s
eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.
“What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar or
six lunar months?”
“It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April
when uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he had forgotten
them till then. I believe you have never thought of them since you
locked them up in the cabinet here.”
“Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know.” Dorothea spoke in a
full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencil
in her hand, and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.
Celia colored, and looked very grave. “I think, dear, we are wanting in
respect to mamma’s memory, to put them by and take no notice of them.
And,” she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of
mortification, “necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who
was stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments.
And Christians generally—surely there are women in heaven now who wore
jewels.” Celia was conscious of some mental strength when she really
applied herself to argument.
“You would like to wear them?” exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished
discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she
had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments. “Of
course, then, let us have them out. Why did you not tell me before? But
the keys, the keys!” She pressed her hands against the sides of her
head and seemed to despair of her memory.
“They are here,” said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long
meditated and prearranged.
“Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box.”
The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread
out, making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection,
but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest
that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set in
exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it.
Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it round her
sister’s neck, where it fitted almost as closely as a bracelet; but the
circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style of Celia’s head and neck, and
she could see that it did, in the pier-glass opposite.
“There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin. But this
cross you must wear with your dark dresses.”
Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. “O Dodo, you must keep the
cross yourself.”
“No, no, dear, no,” said Dorothea, putting up her hand with careless
deprecation.
“Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you—in your black dress, now,”
said Celia, insistingly. “You _might_ wear that.”
“Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I
would wear as a trinket.” Dorothea shuddered slightly.
“Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,” said Celia, uneasily.
“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “Souls have
complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”
“But you might like to keep it for mamma’s sake.”
“No, I have other things of mamma’s—her sandal-wood box which I am so
fond of—plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need
discuss them no longer. There—take away your property.”
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority
in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of
an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
“But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will
never wear them?”
“Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to
keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I
should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with
me, and I should not know how to walk.”
Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. “It would be a
little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit
you better,” she said, with some satisfaction. The complete unfitness
of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea, made Celia
happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes, which disclosed
a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun passing beyond a
cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.
“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current
of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colors
seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why
gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They
look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful
than any of them.”
“And there is a bracelet to match it,” said Celia. “We did not notice
this at first.”
“They are lovely,” said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her
finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on
a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify
her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
“You _would_ like those, Dorothea,” said Celia, rather falteringly,
beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness,
and also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better than
purple amethysts. “You must keep that ring and bracelet—if nothing
else. But see, these agates are very pretty and quiet.”
“Yes! I will keep these—this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then,
letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone—“Yet what
miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!” She
paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce
the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
“Yes, dear, I will keep these,” said Dorothea, decidedly. “But take all
the rest away, and the casket.”
She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking
at them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at
these little fountains of pure color.
“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her with
real curiosity as to what she would do.
Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative
adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen
discernment, which was not without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke
ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be for lack of inward
fire.
“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I
may sink.”
Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her
sister, and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the
ornaments which she put back into the box and carried away. Dorothea
too was unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing, questioning the
purity of her own feeling and speech in the scene which had ended with
that little explosion.
Celia’s consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the
wrong: it was quite natural and justifiable that she should have asked
that question, and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was
inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the
jewels, or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them
altogether.
“I am sure—at least, I trust,” thought Celia, “that the wearing of a
necklace will not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see that I
should be bound by Dorothea’s opinions now we are going into society,
though of course she herself ought to be bound by them. But Dorothea is
not always consistent.”
Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard her
sister calling her.
“Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great
architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces.”
As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her
sister’s arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw
that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they
could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the
attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had
always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private
opinions?
CHAPTER II.
“‘Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un
caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?’ ‘Lo
que veo y columbro,’ respondio Sancho, ‘no es sino un hombre sobre un
as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que
relumbra.’ ‘Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,’ dijo Don
Quijote.”—CERVANTES.
“‘Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray
steed, and weareth a golden helmet?’ ‘What I see,’ answered Sancho, ‘is
nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own, who carries something
shiny on his head.’ ‘Just so,’ answered Don Quixote: ‘and that
resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.’”
“Sir Humphry Davy?” said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling
way, taking up Sir James Chettam’s remark that he was studying Davy’s
Agricultural Chemistry. “Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him
years ago at Cartwright’s, and Wordsworth was there too—the poet
Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular. I was at
Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him—and I dined
with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s. There’s an oddity in
things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say,
Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every
sense, you know.”
Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of
dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the
mass of a magistrate’s mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man
like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she
thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his
deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the
spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different
as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type
represented by Sir James Chettam.
“I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry,” said this excellent baronet,
“because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see
if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among
my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?”
“A great mistake, Chettam,” interposed Mr. Brooke, “going into
electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of
your cow-house. It won’t do. I went into science a great deal myself at
one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can
let nothing alone. No, no—see that your tenants don’t sell their straw,
and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles, you know. But
your fancy farming will not do—the most expensive sort of whistle you
can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds.”
“Surely,” said Dorothea, “it is better to spend money in finding out
how men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in
keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it. It is not a sin to make
yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all.”
She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir
James had appealed to her. He was accustomed to do so, and she had
often thought that she could urge him to many good actions when he was
her brother-in-law.
Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was
speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr.
Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. “I remember when we were all
reading Adam Smith. _There_ is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas
at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in
circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The
fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in
fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do.
I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been
in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be
landed back in the dark ages. But talking of books, there is Southey’s
‘Peninsular War.’ I am reading that of a morning. You know Southey?”
“No,” said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke’s impetuous
reason, and thinking of the book only. “I have little leisure for such
literature just now. I have been using up my eyesight on old characters
lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am
fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect
reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the
inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something
like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying
mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and
confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution
about my eyesight.”
This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length. He
delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make
a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech,
occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more
conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke’s scrappy
slovenliness. Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most
interesting man she had ever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret,
the Vaudois clergyman who had given conferences on the history of the
Waldenses. To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the
highest purposes of truth—what a work to be in any way present at, to
assist in, though only as a lamp-holder! This elevating thought lifted
her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of
political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an
extinguisher over all her lights.
“But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke,” Sir James presently took an
opportunity of saying. “I should have thought you would enter a little
into the pleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me send over a
chestnut horse for you to try. It has been trained for a lady. I saw
you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you. My
groom shall bring Corydon for you every day, if you will only mention
the time.”
“Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding. I shall not
ride any more,” said Dorothea, urged to this brusque resolution by a
little annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting her attention when
she wanted to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.
“No, that is too hard,” said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that
showed strong interest. “Your sister is given to self-mortification, is
she not?” he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
“I think she is,” said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say
something that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily as
possible above her necklace. “She likes giving up.”
“If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not
self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to
do what is very agreeable,” said Dorothea.
Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr.
Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
“Exactly,” said Sir James. “You give up from some high, generous
motive.”
“No, indeed, not exactly. I did not say that of myself,” answered
Dorothea, reddening. Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from
high delight or anger. At this moment she felt angry with the perverse
Sir James. Why did he not pay attention to Celia, and leave her to
listen to Mr. Casaubon?—if that learned man would only talk, instead of
allowing himself to be talked to by Mr. Brooke, who was just then
informing him that the Reformation either meant something or it did
not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism
was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist
chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly
speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.
“I made a great study of theology at one time,” said Mr. Brooke, as if
to explain the insight just manifested. “I know something of all
schools. I knew Wilberforce in his best days. Do you know Wilberforce?”
Mr. Casaubon said, “No.”
“Well, Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I went
into Parliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on the
independent bench, as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy.”
Mr. Casaubon bowed, and observed that it was a wide field.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, “but I have documents. I
began a long while ago to collect documents. They want arranging, but
when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got an
answer. I have documents at my back. But now, how do you arrange your
documents?”
“In pigeon-holes partly,” said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air
of effort.
“Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but
everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is
in A or Z.”
“I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle,” said
Dorothea. “I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects
under each letter.”
Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, “You have
an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; “I cannot let young ladies
meddle with my documents. Young ladies are too flighty.”
Dorothea felt hurt. Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had some
special reason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark lay in
his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other
fragments there, and a chance current had sent it alighting on _her_.
When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said—
“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”
“Celia! He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw. He
is remarkably like the portrait of Locke. He has the same deep
eye-sockets.”
“Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?”
“Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him,” said
Dorothea, walking away a little.
“Mr. Casaubon is so sallow.”
“All the better. I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a
_cochon de lait_.”
“Dodo!” exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise. “I never heard
you make such a comparison before.”
“Why should I make it before the occasion came? It is a good
comparison: the match is perfect.”
Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.
“I wonder you show temper, Dorothea.”
“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as
if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul
in a man’s face.”
“Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?” Celia was not without a touch of naive
malice.
“Yes, I believe he has,” said Dorothea, with the full voice of
decision. “Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on
Biblical Cosmology.”
“He talks very little,” said Celia
“There is no one for him to talk to.”
Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam; I
believe she would not accept him.” Celia felt that this was a pity. She
had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet’s interest.
Sometimes, indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a
husband happy who had not her way of looking at things; and stifled in
the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too
religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt
needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even
eating.
When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by
her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive. Why
should he? He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and
manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted
by preconceptions either confident or distrustful. She was thoroughly
charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his
attachment. He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare
merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the
smallest stream in the county on fire: hence he liked the prospect of a
wife to whom he could say, “What shall we do?” about this or that; who
could help her husband out with reasons, and would also have the
property qualification for doing so. As to the excessive religiousness
alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it
consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage. In
short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready
to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could
always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should
ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose
cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind—what there is of it—has
always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is
of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is
of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this
estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with
a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.
“Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse,
Miss Brooke,” said the persevering admirer. “I assure you, riding is
the most healthy of exercises.”
“I am aware of it,” said Dorothea, coldly. “I think it would do Celia
good—if she would take to it.”
“But you are such a perfect horsewoman.”
“Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily
thrown.”
“Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a
perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”
“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I
ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond
to your pattern of a lady.” Dorothea looked straight before her, and
spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy,
in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her admirer.
“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is
not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong.”
“It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”
“Oh, why?” said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was
listening.
“We must not inquire too curiously into motives,” he interposed, in his
measured way. “Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in
the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep
the germinating grain away from the light.”
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the
speaker. Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,
and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning
almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,
which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.
Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
“Certainly,” said good Sir James. “Miss Brooke shall not be urged to
tell reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her reasons
would do her honor.”
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had
looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom
he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm
towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a
clergyman of some distinction.
However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with
Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to
Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town,
and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London. Away from her sister,
Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the
second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty,
though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the
elder sister. He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all
respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to
having the best. He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who
pretended not to expect it.
CHAPTER III.
“Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . .
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange.”
—_Paradise Lost_, B. vii.
If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him
were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day
the reasons had budded and bloomed. For they had had a long
conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company
of Mr. Casaubon’s moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to
play with the curate’s ill-shod but merry children.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of
Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own
experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great
work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as
instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel;” and with something of the
archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what
indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness,
justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr.
Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally
revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm
footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became
intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of
correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no
light or speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of
volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous
still-accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of
Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf. In explaining this to
Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly as he would have done
to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles of talking at command:
it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the
English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have done this in
any case. A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of his
acquaintances as of “lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men,
that conne Latyn but lytille.”
Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this
conception. Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile
complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who
united the glories of doctor and saint.
The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when
Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she
could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially
on the secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms and articles of
belief compared with that spiritual religion, that submergence of self
in communion with Divine perfection which seemed to her to be expressed
in the best Christian books of widely distant ages, she found in Mr.
Casaubon a listener who understood her at once, who could assure her of
his own agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise
conformity, and could mention historical examples before unknown to
her.
“He thinks with me,” said Dorothea to herself, “or rather, he thinks a
whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror. And his
feelings too, his whole experience—what a lake compared with my little
pool!”
Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things,
but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent
nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a
sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of
knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself
may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning
sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way
off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and
then arrive just where we ought to be. Because Miss Brooke was hasty in
her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of
it.
He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of
invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own
documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called
into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up
first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and
uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a
“Yes, now, but here!” and finally pushing them all aside to open the
journal of his youthful Continental travels.
“Look here—here is all about Greece. Rhamnus, the ruins of Rhamnus—you
are a great Grecian, now. I don’t know whether you have given much
study to the topography. I spent no end of time in making out these
things—Helicon, now. Here, now!—‘We started the next morning for
Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.’ All this volume is about
Greece, you know,” Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb transversely
along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward.
Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in
the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as
possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this
desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and
that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an
amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance
aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?
Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on
drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her
his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine. Before
he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke
along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the
disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship
with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils
of maturity. And he delivered this statement with as much careful
precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be
attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect that
he should have to repeat or revise his communications of a practical or
personal kind. The inclinations which he had deliberately stated on the
2d of October he would think it enough to refer to by the mention of
that date; judging by the standard of his own memory, which was a
volume where a vide supra could serve instead of repetitions, and not
the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of forgotten
writing. But in this case Mr. Casaubon’s confidence was not likely to
be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the
eager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in
experience is an epoch.
It was three o’clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.
Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from
Tipton; and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along
the shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the
bordering wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk,
the Great St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in
their walks. There had risen before her the girl’s vision of a possible
future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling hope, and
she wanted to wander on in that visionary future without interruption.
She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in her cheeks, and
her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look at with
conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a little
backward. She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if it were
omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled behind
so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a time
when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to be
dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never
surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean. This was a trait of
Miss Brooke’s asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic’s
expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not
consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the
solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between
the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.
All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform
times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had
referred the glow in her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary
images of young love: the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been
sufficiently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all
spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin, and
dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying companionship, was a little
drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and had been put into
all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a figure which would sustain the
disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-tail, and everybody felt it
not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a
sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional
ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no persons
then living—certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton—would have had
a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions
about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm
about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own
fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern
of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make
her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort
of reverential gratitude. How good of him—nay, it would be almost as if
a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his
hand towards her! For a long while she had been oppressed by the
indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over
all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do,
what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet
with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied
by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a
discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she
might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find
her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler
clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,” unfolding the
private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under
the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own
boudoir—with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less
strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously
inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such
contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious
disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one
aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually
consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow
teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a
labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no
whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration
and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to
justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended
admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as
yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her
was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own
ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide
who would take her along the grandest path.
“I should learn everything then,” she said to herself, still walking
quickly along the bridle road through the wood. “It would be my duty to
study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would
be nothing trivial about our lives. Every-day things with us would mean
the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn
to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by. And
then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it
was possible to lead a grand life here—now—in England. I don’t feel
sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a
mission to a people whose language I don’t know;—unless it were
building good cottages—there can be no doubt about that. Oh, I hope I
should be able to get the people well housed in Lowick! I will draw
plenty of plans while I have time.”
Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the presumptuous
way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she was spared
any inward effort to change the direction of her thoughts by the
appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning of the road. The
well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful setters could leave no
doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam. He discerned Dorothea,
jumped off his horse at once, and, having delivered it to his groom,
advanced towards her with something white on his arm, at which the two
setters were barking in an excited manner.
“How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke,” he said, raising his hat and
showing his sleekly waving blond hair. “It has hastened the pleasure I
was looking forward to.”
Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption. This amiable baronet,
really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of
making himself agreeable to the elder sister. Even a prospective
brother-in-law may be an oppression if he will always be presupposing
too good an understanding with you, and agreeing with you even when you
contradict him. The thought that he had made the mistake of paying his
addresses to herself could not take shape: all her mental activity was
used up in persuasions of another kind. But he was positively obtrusive
at this moment, and his dimpled hands were quite disagreeable. Her
roused temper made her color deeply, as she returned his greeting with
some haughtiness.
Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying
to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
“I have brought a little petitioner,” he said, “or rather, I have
brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is
offered.” He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny
Maltese puppy, one of nature’s most naive toys.
“It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as
pets,” said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment
(as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
“Oh, why?” said Sir James, as they walked forward.
“I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.
They are too helpless: their lives are too frail. A weasel or a mouse
that gets its own living is more interesting. I like to think that the
animals about us have souls something like our own, and either carry on
their own little affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here.
Those creatures are parasitic.”
“I am so glad I know that you do not like them,” said good Sir James.
“I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of
these Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?”
The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and
expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had
better not have been born. But she felt it necessary to explain.
“You must not judge of Celia’s feeling from mine. I think she likes
these small pets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond
of. It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am
rather short-sighted.”
“You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is
always a good opinion.”
What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?
“Do you know, I envy you that,” Sir James said, as they continued
walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.
“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”
“Your power of forming an opinion. I can form an opinion of persons. I
know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have
often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on
opposite sides.”
“Or that seem sensible. Perhaps we don’t always discriminate between
sense and nonsense.”
Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.
“Exactly,” said Sir James. “But you seem to have the power of
discrimination.”
“On the contrary, I am often unable to decide. But that is from
ignorance. The right conclusion is there all the same, though I am
unable to see it.”
“I think there are few who would see it more readily. Do you know,
Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the
world of a plan for cottages—quite wonderful for a young lady, he
thought. You had a real _genus_, to use his expression. He said you
wanted Mr. Brooke to build a new set of cottages, but he seemed to
think it hardly probable that your uncle would consent. Do you know,
that is one of the things I wish to do—I mean, on my own estate. I
should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours, if you would let me
see it. Of course, it is sinking money; that is why people object to
it. Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer. But, after all, it
is worth doing.”
“Worth doing! yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting
her previous small vexations. “I think we deserve to be beaten out of
our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords—all of us who let
tenants live in such sties as we see round us. Life in cottages might
be happier than ours, if they were real houses fit for human beings
from whom we expect duties and affections.”
“Will you show me your plan?”
“Yes, certainly. I dare say it is very faulty. But I have been
examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon’s book, and picked out
what seem the best things. Oh what a happiness it would be to set the
pattern about here! I think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should
put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate.”
Dorothea was in the best temper now. Sir James, as brother in-law,
building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being
built at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation—it would be
as if the spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes to make the
life of poverty beautiful!
Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with
Lovegood. He also took away a complacent sense that he was making great
progress in Miss Brooke’s good opinion. The Maltese puppy was not
offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea afterwards thought of with
surprise; but she blamed herself for it. She had been engrossing Sir
James. After all, it was a relief that there was no puppy to tread
upon.
Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir
James’s illusion. “He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only
cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him
if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her
notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot bear
notions.”
It was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike. She dared not
confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be
laying herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at
war with all goodness. But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect
mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her
down from her rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring,
not listening. Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait,
and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness. When
people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces and
features merely. She never could understand how well-bred persons
consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous manner
requisite for that vocal exercise.
It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on which
he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay the night.
Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him, and was convinced
that her first impressions had been just. He was all she had at first
imagined him to be: almost everything he had said seemed like a
specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which
might open on the treasures of past ages; and this trust in his mental
wealth was all the deeper and more effective on her inclination because
it was now obvious that his visits were made for her sake. This
accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the
pains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to
her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction. What
delightful companionship! Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that
trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy
men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an
odor of cupboard. He talked of what he was interested in, or else he
was silent and bowed with sad civility. To Dorothea this was adorable
genuineness, and religious abstinence from that artificiality which
uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence. For she looked as
reverently at Mr. Casaubon’s religious elevation above herself as she
did at his intellect and learning. He assented to her expressions of
devout feeling, and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed
himself to say that he had gone through some spiritual conflicts in his
youth; in short, Dorothea saw that here she might reckon on
understanding, sympathy, and guidance. On one—only one—of her favorite
themes she was disappointed. Mr. Casaubon apparently did not care about
building cottages, and diverted the talk to the extremely narrow
accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of the ancient
Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard. After he was gone,
Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his; and her
mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying
conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the admitted
wickedness of pagan despots. Should she not urge these arguments on Mr.
Casaubon when he came again? But further reflection told her that she
was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such a subject; he would
not disapprove of her occupying herself with it in leisure moments, as
other women expected to occupy themselves with their dress and
embroidery—would not forbid it when—Dorothea felt rather ashamed as she
detected herself in these speculations. But her uncle had been invited
to go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to suppose
that Mr. Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke’s society for its own sake,
either with or without documents?
Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir
James Chettam’s readiness to set on foot the desired improvements. He
came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him
disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had
already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood’s estimates,
and was charmingly docile. She proposed to build a couple of cottages,
and transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then be
pulled down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites. Sir
James said “Exactly,” and she bore the word remarkably well.
Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very
useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were
fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law! It is difficult to say
whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing
blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in
relation to her. But her life was just now full of hope and action: she
was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned books from
the library and reading many things hastily (that she might be a little
less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the while being visited
with conscientious questionings whether she were not exalting these
poor doings above measure and contemplating them with that
self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.
CHAPTER IV.
1_st Gent_. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2_d Gent._ Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
“Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish,” said Celia, as
they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.
“He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,”
said Dorothea, inconsiderately.
“You mean that he appears silly.”
“No, no,” said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on
her sister’s a moment, “but he does not talk equally well on all
subjects.”
“I should think none but disagreeable people do,” said Celia, in her
usual purring way. “They must be very dreadful to live with. Only
think! at breakfast, and always.”
Dorothea laughed. “O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!” She pinched
Celia’s chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and
lovely—fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not
doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a
squirrel. “Of course people need not be always talking well. Only one
tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well.”
“You mean that Sir James tries and fails.”
“I was speaking generally. Why do you catechise me about Sir James? It
is not the object of his life to please me.”
“Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?”
“Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister—that is all.” Dorothea
had never hinted this before, waiting, from a certain shyness on such
subjects which was mutual between the sisters, until it should be
introduced by some decisive event. Celia blushed, but said at once—
“Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo. When Tantripp was
brushing my hair the other day, she said that Sir James’s man knew from
Mrs. Cadwallader’s maid that Sir James was to marry the eldest Miss
Brooke.”
“How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?” said
Dorothea, indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep in her
memory were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation. “You must
have asked her questions. It is degrading.”
“I see no harm at all in Tantripp’s talking to me. It is better to hear
what people say. You see what mistakes you make by taking up notions. I
am quite sure that Sir James means to make you an offer; and he
believes that you will accept him, especially since you have been so
pleased with him about the plans. And uncle too—I know he expects it.
Every one can see that Sir James is very much in love with you.”
The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea’s mind that the
tears welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were
embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James’s conceiving that
she recognized him as her lover. There was vexation too on account of
Celia.
“How could he expect it?” she burst forth in her most impetuous manner.
“I have never agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I was
barely polite to him before.”
“But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel
quite sure that you are fond of him.”
“Fond of him, Celia! How can you choose such odious expressions?” said
Dorothea, passionately.
“Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a
man whom you accepted for a husband.”
“It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of
him. Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have
towards the man I would accept as a husband.”
“Well, I am sorry for Sir James. I thought it right to tell you,
because you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are,
and treading in the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees;
it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.
That’s your way, Dodo.” Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage;
and she was not sparing the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe.
Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us
beings of wider speculation?
“It is very painful,” said Dorothea, feeling scourged. “I can have no
more to do with the cottages. I must be uncivil to him. I must tell him
I will have nothing to do with them. It is very painful.” Her eyes
filled again with tears.
“Wait a little. Think about it. You know he is going away for a day or
two to see his sister. There will be nobody besides Lovegood.” Celia
could not help relenting. “Poor Dodo,” she went on, in an amiable
staccato. “It is very hard: it is your favorite _fad_ to draw plans.”
“_Fad_ to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my
fellow-creatures’ houses in that childish way? I may well make
mistakes. How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among
people with such petty thoughts?”
No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She
was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the
purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer
the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white
nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the “Pilgrim’s
Progress.” The _fad_ of drawing plans! What was life worth—what great
faith was possible when the whole effect of one’s actions could be
withered up into such parched rubbish as that? When she got out of the
carriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids red. She was an image of
sorrow, and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been alarmed,
if Celia had not been close to her looking so pretty and composed, that
he at once concluded Dorothea’s tears to have their origin in her
excessive religiousness. He had returned, during their absence, from a
journey to the county town, about a petition for the pardon of some
criminal.
“Well, my dears,” he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him, “I hope
nothing disagreeable has happened while I have been away.”
“No, uncle,” said Celia, “we have been to Freshitt to look at the
cottages. We thought you would have been at home to lunch.”
“I came by Lowick to lunch—you didn’t know I came by Lowick. And I have
brought a couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea—in the library, you
know; they lie on the table in the library.”
It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her
from despair into expectation. They were pamphlets about the early
Church. The oppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir James was shaken
off, and she walked straight to the library. Celia went up-stairs. Mr.
Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the library,
he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets which
had some marginal manuscript of Mr. Casaubon’s,—taking it in as eagerly
as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry,
hot, dreary walk.
She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad
liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.
Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards the
wood-fire, which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice
between the dogs, and rubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly
towards Dorothea, but with a neutral leisurely air, as if he had
nothing particular to say. Dorothea closed her pamphlet, as soon as she
was aware of her uncle’s presence, and rose as if to go. Usually she
would have been interested about her uncle’s merciful errand on behalf
of the criminal, but her late agitation had made her absent-minded.
“I came back by Lowick, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not as if with any
intention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his usual
tendency to say what he had said before. This fundamental principle of
human speech was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke. “I lunched there and
saw Casaubon’s library, and that kind of thing. There’s a sharp air,
driving. Won’t you sit down, my dear? You look cold.”
Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation. Some times, when
her uncle’s easy way of taking things did not happen to be
exasperating, it was rather soothing. She threw off her mantle and
bonnet, and sat down opposite to him, enjoying the glow, but lifting up
her beautiful hands for a screen. They were not thin hands, or small
hands; but powerful, feminine, maternal hands. She seemed to be holding
them up in propitiation for her passionate desire to know and to think,
which in the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Freshitt had issued in
crying and red eyelids.
She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal. “What news have
you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”
“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be
hanged.”
Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.
“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly!
he would have helped us. I knew Romilly. Casaubon didn’t know Romilly.
He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”
“When a man has great studies and is writing a great work, he must of
course give up seeing much of the world. How can he go about making
acquaintances?”
“That’s true. But a man mopes, you know. I have always been a bachelor
too, but I have that sort of disposition that I never moped; it was my
way to go about everywhere and take in everything. I never moped: but I
can see that Casaubon does, you know. He wants a companion—a companion,
you know.”
“It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion,” said
Dorothea, energetically.
“You like him, eh?” said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or
other emotion. “Well, now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he
came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you
know. However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of
thing, you know, if Peel stays in. And he has a very high opinion of
you, my dear.”
Dorothea could not speak.
“The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you. And he speaks
uncommonly well—does Casaubon. He has deferred to me, you not being of
age. In short, I have promised to speak to you, though I told him I
thought there was not much chance. I was bound to tell him that. I
said, my niece is very young, and that kind of thing. But I didn’t
think it necessary to go into everything. However, the long and the
short of it is, that he has asked my permission to make you an offer of
marriage—of marriage, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with his explanatory
nod. “I thought it better to tell you, my dear.”
No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke’s manner, but he
did really wish to know something of his niece’s mind, that, if there
were any need for advice, he might give it in time. What feeling he, as
a magistrate who had taken in so many ideas, could make room for, was
unmixedly kind. Since Dorothea did not speak immediately, he repeated,
“I thought it better to tell you, my dear.”
“Thank you, uncle,” said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone. “I am
very grateful to Mr. Casaubon. If he makes me an offer, I shall accept
him. I admire and honor him more than any man I ever saw.”
Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone, “Ah?
… Well! He is a good match in some respects. But now, Chettam is a good
match. And our land lies together. I shall never interfere against your
wishes, my dear. People should have their own way in marriage, and that
sort of thing—up to a certain point, you know. I have always said that,
up to a certain point. I wish you to marry well; and I have good reason
to believe that Chettam wishes to marry you. I mention it, you know.”
“It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam,” said
Dorothea. “If he thinks of marrying me, he has made a great mistake.”
“That is it, you see. One never knows. I should have thought Chettam
was just the sort of man a woman would like, now.”
“Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle,” said Dorothea,
feeling some of her late irritation revive.
Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject
of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of
scientific prediction about them. Here was a fellow like Chettam with
no chance at all.
“Well, but Casaubon, now. There is no hurry—I mean for you. It’s true,
every year will tell upon him. He is over five-and-forty, you know. I
should say a good seven-and-twenty years older than you. To be sure,—if
you like learning and standing, and that sort of thing, we can’t have
everything. And his income is good—he has a handsome property
independent of the Church—his income is good. Still he is not young,
and I must not conceal from you, my dear, that I think his health is
not over-strong. I know nothing else against him.”
“I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,” said
Dorothea, with grave decision. “I should wish to have a husband who was
above me in judgment and in all knowledge.”
Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, “Ah?—I thought you had more of your
own opinion than most girls. I thought you liked your own opinion—liked
it, you know.”
“I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should
wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see
which opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to live
according to them.”
“Very true. You couldn’t put the thing better—couldn’t put it better,
beforehand, you know. But there are oddities in things,” continued Mr.
Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for
his niece on this occasion. “Life isn’t cast in a mould—not cut out by
rule and line, and that sort of thing. I never married myself, and it
will be the better for you and yours. The fact is, I never loved any
one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It _is_ a noose,
you know. Temper, now. There is temper. And a husband likes to be
master.”
“I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher
duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease,” said poor
Dorothea.
“Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners,
that kind of thing. I can see that Casaubon’s ways might suit you
better than Chettam’s. And you shall do as you like, my dear. I would
not hinder Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no knowing how
anything may turn out. You have not the same tastes as every young
lady; and a clergyman and scholar—who may be a bishop—that kind of
thing—may suit you better than Chettam. Chettam is a good fellow, a
good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn’t go much into ideas.
I did, when I was his age. But Casaubon’s eyes, now. I think he has
hurt them a little with too much reading.”
“I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me to
help him,” said Dorothea, ardently.
“You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is, I
have a letter for you in my pocket.” Mr. Brooke handed the letter to
Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, “There is not too much
hurry, my dear. Think about it, you know.”
When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly spoken
strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a striking
manner. It was his duty to do so. But as to pretending to be wise for
young people,—no uncle, however much he had travelled in his youth,
absorbed the new ideas, and dined with celebrities now deceased, could
pretend to judge what sort of marriage would turn out well for a young
girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam. In short, woman was a problem
which, since Mr. Brooke’s mind felt blank before it, could be hardly
less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.
CHAPTER V.
“Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums,
cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities,
oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as
come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dry, ill-colored …
and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will
not believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and Thomas
Aquinas’ works; and tell me whether those men took pains.”—BURTON’S
_Anatomy of Melancholy_, P. I, s. 2.
This was Mr. Casaubon’s letter.
MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian’s permission to address you
on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust,
mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of
date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen
contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with
you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your
eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I
may say, with such activity of the affections as even the
preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not
uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for
observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me
more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus
evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now
referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to
you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to
the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation
of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not
conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with
those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer
distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental
qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet
with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive,
adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant
hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me
again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with
foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages
towards the completion of a life’s plan), I should presumably have gone
on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a
matrimonial union.
Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my
feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to
ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy
presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly
guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of
providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection
hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which,
however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you
choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly
cause you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of
your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of
wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than
usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in
looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel
that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the
temporary illumination of hope.
In any case, I shall remain,
Yours with sincere devotion,
EDWARD CASAUBON.
Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her
knees, buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray: under the rush
of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated
uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of
reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her
own. She remained in that attitude till it was time to dress for
dinner.
How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it
critically as a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the
fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte
about to enter on a higher grade of initiation. She was going to have
room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and
pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the
world’s habits.
Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties;
now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind
that she could reverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow of
proud delight—the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the man
whom her admiration had chosen. All Dorothea’s passion was transfused
through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her
transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its
level. The impetus with which inclination became resolution was
heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her
discontent with the actual conditions of her life.
After dinner, when Celia was playing an “air, with variations,” a small
kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young
ladies’ education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr.
Casaubon’s letter. Why should she defer the answer? She wrote it over
three times, not because she wished to change the wording, but because
her hand was unusually uncertain, and she could not bear that Mr.
Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible. She piqued
herself on writing a hand in which each letter was distinguishable
without any large range of conjecture, and she meant to make much use
of this accomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon’s eyes. Three times she
wrote.
MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I am very grateful to you for loving me, and
thinking me worthy to be your wife. I can look forward to no better
happiness than that which would be one with yours. If I said more, it
would only be the same thing written out at greater length, for I
cannot now dwell on any other thought than that I may be through life
Yours devotedly,
DOROTHEA BROOKE.
Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to give
him the letter, that he might send it in the morning. He was surprised,
but his surprise only issued in a few moments’ silence, during which he
pushed about various objects on his writing-table, and finally stood
with his back to the fire, his glasses on his nose, looking at the
address of Dorothea’s letter.
“Have you thought enough about this, my dear?” he said at last.
“There was no need to think long, uncle. I know of nothing to make me
vacillate. If I changed my mind, it must be because of something
important and entirely new to me.”
“Ah!—then you have accepted him? Then Chettam has no chance? Has
Chettam offended you—offended you, you know? What is it you don’t like
in Chettam?”
“There is nothing that I like in him,” said Dorothea, rather
impetuously.
Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one had
thrown a light missile at him. Dorothea immediately felt some
self-rebuke, and said—
“I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think—really very
good about the cottages. A well-meaning man.”
“But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies a
little in our family. I had it myself—that love of knowledge, and going
into everything—a little too much—it took me too far; though that sort
of thing doesn’t often run in the female-line; or it runs underground
like the rivers in Greece, you know—it comes out in the sons. Clever
sons, clever mothers. I went a good deal into that, at one time.
However, my dear, I have always said that people should do as they like
in these things, up to a certain point. I couldn’t, as your guardian,
have consented to a bad match. But Casaubon stands well: his position
is good. I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though, and Mrs. Cadwallader
will blame me.”
That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened. She
attributed Dorothea’s abstracted manner, and the evidence of further
crying since they had got home, to the temper she had been in about Sir
James Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not to give further
offence: having once said what she wanted to say, Celia had no
disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects. It had been her nature
when a child never to quarrel with any one—only to observe with wonder
that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon
she was ready to play at cat’s cradle with them whenever they recovered
themselves. And as to Dorothea, it had always been her way to find
something wrong in her sister’s words, though Celia inwardly protested
that she always said just how things were, and nothing else: she never
did and never could put words together out of her own head. But the
best of Dodo was, that she did not keep angry for long together. Now,
though they had hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet when
Celia put by her work, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which
she was always much the earlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low
stool, unable to occupy herself except in meditation, said, with the
musical intonation which in moments of deep but quiet feeling made her
speech like a fine bit of recitative—
“Celia, dear, come and kiss me,” holding her arms open as she spoke.
Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterfly
kiss, while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her
lips gravely on each cheek in turn.
“Don’t sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon,” said
Celia, in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.
“No, dear, I am very, very happy,” said Dorothea, fervently.
“So much the better,” thought Celia. “But how strangely Dodo goes from
one extreme to the other.”
The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr. Brooke,
said, “Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter.”
Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea, said,
“Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn’t wait to write
more—didn’t wait, you know.”
It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should be
announced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the same
direction as her uncle’s, she was struck with the peculiar effect of
the announcement on Dorothea. It seemed as if something like the
reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across her features,
ending in one of her rare blushes. For the first time it entered into
Celia’s mind that there might be something more between Mr. Casaubon
and her sister than his delight in bookish talk and her delight in
listening. Hitherto she had classed the admiration for this “ugly” and
learned acquaintance with the admiration for Monsieur Liret at
Lausanne, also ugly and learned. Dorothea had never been tired of
listening to old Monsieur Liret when Celia’s feet were as cold as
possible, and when it had really become dreadful to see the skin of his
bald head moving about. Why then should her enthusiasm not extend to
Mr. Casaubon simply in the same way as to Monsieur Liret? And it seemed
probable that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster’s view of
young people.
But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted
into her mind. She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, her
marvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally
preparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in.
Not that she now imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an accepted lover:
she had only begun to feel disgust at the possibility that anything in
Dorothea’s mind could tend towards such an issue. Here was something
really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very well not to accept Sir
James Chettam, but the idea of marrying Mr. Casaubon! Celia felt a sort
of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous. But perhaps Dodo, if
she were really bordering on such an extravagance, might be turned away
from it: experience had often shown that her impressibility might be
calculated on. The day was damp, and they were not going to walk out,
so they both went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia observed
that Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual diligent
interest to some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an open book
and looked out of the window at the great cedar silvered with the damp.
She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate’s children,
and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately.
Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know
of the momentous change in Mr. Casaubon’s position since he had last
been in the house: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance of
what would necessarily affect her attitude towards him; but it was
impossible not to shrink from telling her. Dorothea accused herself of
some meanness in this timidity: it was always odious to her to have any
small fears or contrivances about her actions, but at this moment she
was seeking the highest aid possible that she might not dread the
corrosiveness of Celia’s pretty carnally minded prose. Her reverie was
broken, and the difficulty of decision banished, by Celia’s small and
rather guttural voice speaking in its usual tone, of a remark aside or
a “by the bye.”
“Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat his soup
so.”
“What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?”
“Really, Dodo, can’t you hear how he scrapes his spoon? And he always
blinks before he speaks. I don’t know whether Locke blinked, but I’m
sure I am sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did.”
“Celia,” said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, “pray don’t make any
more observations of that kind.”
“Why not? They are quite true,” returned Celia, who had her reasons for
persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.
“Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe.”
“Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful. I think it is
a pity Mr. Casaubon’s mother had not a commoner mind: she might have
taught him better.” Celia was inwardly frightened, and ready to run
away, now she had hurled this light javelin.
Dorothea’s feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could be no
further preparation.
“It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry Mr.
Casaubon.”
Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before. The paper man she was
making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of
whatever she held in her hands. She laid the fragile figure down at
once, and sat perfectly still for a few moments. When she spoke there
was a tear gathering.
“Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy.” Her sisterly tenderness could not
but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the
fears of affection.
Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.
“It is quite decided, then?” said Celia, in an awed under tone. “And
uncle knows?”
“I have accepted Mr. Casaubon’s offer. My uncle brought me the letter
that contained it; he knew about it beforehand.”
“I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo,” said
Celia, with a slight sob. She never could have thought that she should
feel as she did. There was something funereal in the whole affair, and
Mr. Casaubon seemed to be the officiating clergyman, about whom it
would be indecent to make remarks.
“Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve. We should never admire the same
people. I often offend in something of the same way; I am apt to speak
too strongly of those who don’t please me.”
In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
much from Celia’s subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms. Of
course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy with this
marriage. Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life and
its best objects.
Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy. In an
hour’s _tête-à-tête_ with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him with more
freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the
thought of devoting herself to him, and of learning how she might best
share and further all his great ends. Mr. Casaubon was touched with an
unknown delight (what man would not have been?) at this childlike
unrestrained ardor: he was not surprised (what lover would have been?)
that he should be the object of it.
“My dear young lady—Miss Brooke—Dorothea!” he said, pressing her hand
between his hands, “this is a happiness greater than I had ever
imagined to be in reserve for me. That I should ever meet with a mind
and person so rich in the mingled graces which could render marriage
desirable, was far indeed from my conception. You have all—nay, more
than all—those qualities which I have ever regarded as the
characteristic excellences of womanhood. The great charm of your sex is
its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection, and herein we
see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own.
Hitherto I have known few pleasures save of the severer kind: my
satisfactions have been those of the solitary student. I have been
little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now
I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom.”
No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the
frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the
cawing of an amorous rook. Would it not be rash to conclude that there
was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the
thin music of a mandolin?
Dorothea’s faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon’s words seemed to leave
unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The
text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put
into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
“I am very ignorant—you will quite wonder at my ignorance,” said
Dorothea. “I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken; and now
I shall be able to tell them all to you, and ask you about them. But,”
she added, with rapid imagination of Mr. Casaubon’s probable feeling,
“I will not trouble you too much; only when you are inclined to listen
to me. You must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects in your own
track. I shall gain enough if you will take me with you there.”
“How should I be able now to persevere in any path without your
companionship?” said Mr. Casaubon, kissing her candid brow, and feeling
that heaven had vouchsafed him a blessing in every way suited to his
peculiar wants. He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms
of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for
immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea
so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her
reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing
herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon’s feet, and kissing
his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope. She was
not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough
for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good
enough for Mr. Casaubon. Before he left the next day it had been
decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not?
Mr. Casaubon’s house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a
considerable mansion, with much land attached to it. The parsonage was
inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the
morning sermon.
CHAPTER VI.
My lady’s tongue is like the meadow blades,
That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
Nice cutting is her function: she divides
With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
And makes intangible savings.
As Mr. Casaubon’s carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested
the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated
behind. It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for
Mr. Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was
quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a “How do you do?” in the nick of time.
In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain
that the lodge-keeper regarded her as an important personage, from the
low curtsy which was dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton.
“Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?” said the
high-colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.
“Pretty well for laying, madam, but they’ve ta’en to eating their eggs:
I’ve no peace o’ mind with ’em at all.”
“Oh, the cannibals! Better sell them cheap at once. What will you sell
them a couple? One can’t eat fowls of a bad character at a high price.”
“Well, madam, half-a-crown: I couldn’t let ’em go, not under.”
“Half-a-crown, these times! Come now—for the Rector’s chicken-broth on
a Sunday. He has consumed all ours that I can spare. You are half paid
with the sermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that. Take a pair of
tumbler-pigeons for them—little beauties. You must come and see them.
You have no tumblers among your pigeons.”
“Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see ’em after work. He’s
very hot on new sorts; to oblige you.”
“Oblige me! It will be the best bargain he ever made. A pair of church
pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own eggs!
Don’t you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!”
The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs.
Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional
“Sure_ly_, sure_ly_!”—from which it might be inferred that she would
have found the country-side somewhat duller if the Rector’s lady had
been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint. Indeed, both the farmers
and laborers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton would have felt a
sad lack of conversation but for the stories about what Mrs.
Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended,
as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the crowd of heroic shades—who
pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut jokes in the most
companionable manner, though with a turn of tongue that let you know
who she was. Such a lady gave a neighborliness to both rank and
religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe. A much more
exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity would not have
furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and would
have been less socially uniting.
Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader’s merits from a different point of
view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where
he was sitting alone.
“I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here,” she said, seating herself
comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built
figure. “I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you
would not be seeing so much of the lively man. I shall inform against
you: remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel’s
side about the Catholic Bill. I shall tell everybody that you are going
to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns,
and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner: going to
bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to
distribute them. Come, confess!”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Brooke, smiling and rubbing his
eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment. “Casaubon
and I don’t talk politics much. He doesn’t care much about the
philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing. He
only cares about Church questions. That is not my line of action, you
know.”
“Ra-a-ther too much, my friend. I have heard of your doings. Who was it
that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch? I believe you
bought it on purpose. You are a perfect Guy Faux. See if you are not
burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming. Humphrey would not come to
quarrel with you about it, so I am come.”
“Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting—not
persecuting, you know.”
“There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the
hustings. Now, _do not_ let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr.
Brooke. A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there’s no
excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on
your humming and hawing. You will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You
will make a Saturday pie of all parties’ opinions, and be pelted by
everybody.”
“That is what I expect, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to
betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch—“what I expect as an
independent man. As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is
not likely to be hooked on by any party. He may go with them up to a
certain point—up to a certain point, you know. But that is what you
ladies never understand.”
“Where your certain point is? No. I should like to be told how a man
can have any certain point when he belongs to no party—leading a roving
life, and never letting his friends know his address. ‘Nobody knows
where Brooke will be—there’s no counting on Brooke’—that is what people
say of you, to be quite frank. Now, do turn respectable. How will you
like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you, and you with
a bad conscience and an empty pocket?”
“I don’t pretend to argue with a lady on politics,” said Mr. Brooke,
with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly
conscious that this attack of Mrs. Cadwallader’s had opened the
defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him. “Your
sex are not thinkers, you know—_varium et mutabile semper_—that kind of
thing. You don’t know Virgil. I knew”—Mr. Brooke reflected in time that
he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet—“I was
going to say, poor Stoddart, you know. That was what _he_ said. You
ladies are always against an independent attitude—a man’s caring for
nothing but truth, and that sort of thing. And there is no part of the
county where opinion is narrower than it is here—I don’t mean to throw
stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent line;
and if I don’t take it, who will?”
“Who? Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position. People
of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk
it about. And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your
daughter, to one of our best men. Sir James would be cruelly annoyed:
it will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a
Whig sign-board.”
Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea’s engagement had no
sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader’s
prospective taunts. It might have been easy for ignorant observers to
say, “Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;” but where is a country gentleman
to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors? Who could taste the fine
flavor in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like wine
without a seal? Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a
certain point.
“I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to
say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece,” said Mr. Brooke,
much relieved to see through the window that Celia was coming in.
“Why not?” said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise. “It is
hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it.”
“My niece has chosen another suitor—has chosen him, you know. I have
had nothing to do with it. I should have preferred Chettam; and I
should have said Chettam was the man any girl would have chosen. But
there is no accounting for these things. Your sex is capricious, you
know.”
“Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?”
Mrs. Cadwallader’s mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of
choice for Dorothea.
But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the
greeting with her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity of answering
immediately. He got up hastily, and saying, “By the way, I must speak
to Wright about the horses,” shuffled quickly out of the room.
“My dear child, what is this?—this about your sister’s engagement?”
said Mrs. Cadwallader.
“She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon,” said Celia, resorting, as
usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity
of speaking to the Rector’s wife alone.
“This is frightful. How long has it been going on?”
“I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.”
“Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.”
“I am so sorry for Dorothea.”
“Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.”
“Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul.”
“With all my heart.”
“Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with
a great soul.”
“Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now; when the
next comes and wants to marry you, don’t you accept him.”
“I’m sure I never should.”
“No; one such in a family is enough. So your sister never cared about
Sir James Chettam? What would you have said to _him_ for a
brother-in-law?”
“I should have liked that very much. I am sure he would have been a
good husband. Only,” Celia added, with a slight blush (she sometimes
seemed to blush as she breathed), “I don’t think he would have suited
Dorothea.”
“Not high-flown enough?”
“Dodo is very strict. She thinks so much about everything, and is so
particular about what one says. Sir James never seemed to please her.”
“She must have encouraged him, I am sure. That is not very creditable.”
“Please don’t be angry with Dodo; she does not see things. She thought
so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir James sometimes;
but he is so kind, he never noticed it.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, putting on her shawl, and rising, as if
in haste, “I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him. He
will have brought his mother back by this time, and I must call. Your
uncle will never tell him. We are all disappointed, my dear. Young
people should think of their families in marrying. I set a bad
example—married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object
among the De Bracys—obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to
heaven for my salad oil. However, Casaubon has money enough; I must do
him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings are
three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant. By the bye, before
I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry. I want to
send my young cook to learn of her. Poor people with four children,
like us, you know, can’t afford to keep a good cook. I have no doubt
Mrs. Carter will oblige me. Sir James’s cook is a perfect dragon.”
In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter and
driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her
husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.
Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had kept
him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending
to ride over to Tipton Grange. His horse was standing at the door when
Mrs. Cadwallader drove up, and he immediately appeared there himself,
whip in hand. Lady Chettam had not yet returned, but Mrs. Cadwallader’s
errand could not be despatched in the presence of grooms, so she asked
to be taken into the conservatory close by, to look at the new plants;
and on coming to a contemplative stand, she said—
“I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love
as you pretended to be.”
It was of no use protesting against Mrs. Cadwallader’s way of putting
things. But Sir James’s countenance changed a little. He felt a vague
alarm.
“I do believe Brooke is going to expose himself after all. I accused
him of meaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he
looked silly and never denied it—talked about the independent line, and
the usual nonsense.”
“Is that all?” said Sir James, much relieved.
“Why,” rejoined Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharper note, “you don’t mean
to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a
sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?”
“He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense.”
“That is what I told him. He is vulnerable to reason there—always a few
grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a
capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to
dip on. And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we
should not see what we are to see.”
“What? Brooke standing for Middlemarch?”
“Worse than that. I really feel a little responsible. I always told you
Miss Brooke would be such a fine match. I knew there was a great deal
of nonsense in her—a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff. But these
things wear out of girls. However, I am taken by surprise for once.”
“What do you mean, Mrs. Cadwallader?” said Sir James. His fear lest
Miss Brooke should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some
preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little allayed by the
knowledge that Mrs. Cadwallader always made the worst of things. “What
has happened to Miss Brooke? Pray speak out.”
“Very well. She is engaged to be married.” Mrs. Cadwallader paused a
few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend’s face,
which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his
boot; but she soon added, “Engaged to Casaubon.”
Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up. Perhaps his face
had never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he
turned to Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, “Casaubon?”
“Even so. You know my errand now.”
“Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!” (The point of
view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed
rival.)
“She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle
in!” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?” said Sir James.
“He has one foot in the grave.”
“He means to draw it out again, I suppose.”
“Brooke ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put off
till she is of age. She would think better of it then. What is a
guardian for?”
“As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Brooke!”
“Cadwallader might talk to him.”
“Not he! Humphrey finds everybody charming. I never can get him to
abuse Casaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell
him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a
husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I
can by abusing everybody myself. Come, come, cheer up! you are well rid
of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the
stars by daylight. Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of her,
and likely after all to be the better match. For this marriage to
Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery.”
“Oh, on my own account—it is for Miss Brooke’s sake I think her friends
should try to use their influence.”
“Well, Humphrey doesn’t know yet. But when I tell him, you may depend
on it he will say, ‘Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow—and young—young
enough.’ These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they
have swallowed it and got the colic. However, if I were a man I should
prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone. The truth is, you have
been courting one and have won the other. I can see that she admires
you almost as much as a man expects to be admired. If it were any one
but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration. Good-by!”
Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on
his horse. He was not going to renounce his ride because of his
friend’s unpleasant news—only to ride the faster in some other
direction than that of Tipton Grange.
Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about
Miss Brooke’s marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think
she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived
the preliminaries of another? Was there any ingenious plot, any
hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful
telescopic watch? Not at all: a telescope might have swept the parishes
of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs. Cadwallader in
her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could excite
suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the same
unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In fact,
if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages,
one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know little of
women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even with a
microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a
weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity
into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so
many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain
tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the
swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way,
metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s
match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be
called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she
needed. Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either
foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected
by the great affairs of the world. All the more did the affairs of the
great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born
relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the
dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young
Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the
exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new
branch and widened the relations of scandal,—these were topics of which
she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced them in
an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more
because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as she did
in game and vermin. She would never have disowned any one on the ground
of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have
seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I fear his
aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling
towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had
probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs.
Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in
kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God’s design in making
the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where
such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which
could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.
Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire
into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite
sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the
honor to coexist with hers.
With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came
near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that
the Miss Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her?
especially as it had been the habit of years for her to scold Mr.
Brooke with the friendliest frankness, and let him know in confidence
that she thought him a poor creature. From the first arrival of the
young ladies in Tipton she had prearranged Dorothea’s marriage with Sir
James, and if it had taken place would have been quite sure that it was
her doing: that it should not take place after she had preconceived it,
caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with. She
was the diplomatist of Tipton and Freshitt, and for anything to happen
in spite of her was an offensive irregularity. As to freaks like this
of Miss Brooke’s, Mrs. Cadwallader had no patience with them, and now
saw that her opinion of this girl had been infected with some of her
husband’s weak charitableness: those Methodistical whims, that air of
being more religious than the rector and curate together, came from a
deeper and more constitutional disease than she had been willing to
believe.
“However,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards to
her husband, “I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married
Sir James, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman. He would never have
contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no
motive for obstinacy in her absurdities. But now I wish her joy of her
hair shirt.”
It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir
James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss
Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the
success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an
impression on Celia’s heart. For he was not one of those gentlemen who
languish after the unattainable Sappho’s apple that laughs from the
topmost bough—the charms which
“Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.”
He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that
he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred.
Already the knowledge that Dorothea had chosen Mr. Casaubon had bruised
his attachment and relaxed its hold. Although Sir James was a
sportsman, he had some other feelings towards women than towards grouse
and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey,
valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase. Neither was he so
well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an
ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to
the historical continuity of the marriage-tie. On the contrary, having
the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and
disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful
nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun
little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.
Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for half
an hour in a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened his pace,
and at last turned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter
cut. Various feelings wrought in him the determination after all to go
to the Grange to-day as if nothing new had happened. He could not help
rejoicing that he had never made the offer and been rejected; mere
friendly politeness required that he should call to see Dorothea about
the cottages, and now happily Mrs. Cadwallader had prepared him to
offer his congratulations, if necessary, without showing too much
awkwardness. He really did not like it: giving up Dorothea was very
painful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this
visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of
file-biting and counter-irritant. And without his distinctly
recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the sense
that Celia would be there, and that he should pay her more attention
than he had done before.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between
breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale
about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride
helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide
our own hurts—not to hurt others.
CHAPTER VII.
“Piacer e popone
Vuol la sua stagione.”
—_Italian Proverb_.
Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time at
the Grange in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship occasioned
to the progress of his great work—the Key to all Mythologies—naturally
made him look forward the more eagerly to the happy termination of
courtship. But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made
up his mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the
graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue
was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labor with the play of
female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of
female tendance for his declining years. Hence he determined to abandon
himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find
what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism
by immersion could only be performed symbolically, Mr. Casaubon found
that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream
would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated
the force of masculine passion. Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure
that Miss Brooke showed an ardent submissive affection which promised
to fulfil his most agreeable previsions of marriage. It had once or
twice crossed his mind that possibly there was some deficiency in
Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment; but he was
unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to himself a woman who
would have pleased him better; so that there was clearly no reason to
fall back upon but the exaggerations of human tradition.
“Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?” said Dorothea
to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; “could I not learn
to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton’s daughters did to
their father, without understanding what they read?”
“I fear that would be wearisome to you,” said Mr. Casaubon, smiling;
“and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned
regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion
against the poet.”
“Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they
would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second
place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to
understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting. I
hope you don’t expect me to be naughty and stupid?”
“I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every
possible relation of life. Certainly it might be a great advantage if
you were able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it were well
to begin with a little reading.”
Dorothea seized this as a precious permission. She would not have asked
Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things
to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of
devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek.
Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground
from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she
constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own
ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not
for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to
conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?
Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few
roots—in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on
the social duties of the Christian. And she had not reached that point
of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a
wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke
was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose
mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other
people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little
feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any
particular occasion.
However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour
together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover,
to whom a mistress’s elementary ignorance and difficulties have a
touching fitness. Few scholars would have disliked teaching the
alphabet under such circumstances. But Dorothea herself was a little
shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, and the answers she got
to some timid questions about the value of the Greek accents gave her a
painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secrets not capable
of explanation to a woman’s reason.
Mr. Brooke had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with his
usual strength upon it one day that he came into the library while the
reading was going forward.
“Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics,
that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman—too taxing, you know.”
“Dorothea is learning to read the characters simply,” said Mr.
Casaubon, evading the question. “She had the very considerate thought
of saving my eyes.”
“Ah, well, without understanding, you know—that may not be so bad. But
there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the
fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain
point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be
able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune. That
is what I like; though I have heard most things—been at the opera in
Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. But I’m a conservative
in music—it’s not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes.”
“Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,”
said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine
art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing
in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period. She smiled and
looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes. If he had always been
asking her to play the “Last Rose of Summer,” she would have required
much resignation. “He says there is only an old harpsichord at Lowick,
and it is covered with books.”
“Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear. Celia, now, plays very
prettily, and is always ready to play. However, since Casaubon does not
like it, you are all right. But it’s a pity you should not have little
recreations of that sort, Casaubon: the bow always strung—that kind of
thing, you know—will not do.”
“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears
teased with measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon. “A tune much iterated
has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort
of minuet to keep time—an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after
boyhood. As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn
celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to
the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not
immediately concerned.”
“No; but music of that sort I should enjoy,” said Dorothea. “When we
were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ
at Freiberg, and it made me sob.”
“That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke.
“Casaubon, she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece to
take things more quietly, eh, Dorothea?”
He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really
thinking that it was perhaps better for her to be early married to so
sober a fellow as Casaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.
“It is wonderful, though,” he said to himself as he shuffled out of the
room—“it is wonderful that she should have liked him. However, the
match is good. I should have been travelling out of my brief to have
hindered it, let Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will. He is pretty
certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon. That was a very seasonable
pamphlet of his on the Catholic Question:—a deanery at least. They owe
him a deanery.”
And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by
remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the
Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the
incomes of the bishops. What elegant historian would neglect a striking
opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the
history of the world, or even their own actions?—For example, that
Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a
Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his
laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen
measuring their idle days with watches. Here is a mine of truth, which,
however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal.
But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by
precedent—namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not
have made any great difference. To think with pleasure of his niece’s
husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing—to make a
Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot
look at a subject from various points of view.
CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now,
And you her father. Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian in each gentleman.”
It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he continued to like
going to the Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty of
seeing Dorothea for the first time in the light of a woman who was
engaged to another man. Of course the forked lightning seemed to pass
through him when he first approached her, and he remained conscious
throughout the interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he was, it
must be owned that his uneasiness was less than it would have been if
he had thought his rival a brilliant and desirable match. He had no
sense of being eclipsed by Mr. Casaubon; he was only shocked that
Dorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification lost
some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.
Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had completely
resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not
affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to
nature; he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her
engagement to Mr. Casaubon. On the day when he first saw them together
in the light of his present knowledge, it seemed to him that he had not
taken the affair seriously enough. Brooke was really culpable; he ought
to have hindered it. Who could speak to him? Something might be done
perhaps even now, at least to defer the marriage. On his way home he
turned into the Rectory and asked for Mr. Cadwallader. Happily, the
Rector was at home, and his visitor was shown into the study, where all
the fishing tackle hung. But he himself was in a little room adjoining,
at work with his turning apparatus, and he called to the baronet to
join him there. The two were better friends than any other landholder
and clergyman in the county—a significant fact which was in agreement
with the amiable expression of their faces.
Mr. Cadwallader was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very
plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease
and good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the
sunshine, quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed
of itself. “Well, how are you?” he said, showing a hand not quite fit
to be grasped. “Sorry I missed you before. Is there anything
particular? You look vexed.”
Sir James’s brow had a little crease in it, a little depression of the
eyebrow, which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.
“It is only this conduct of Brooke’s. I really think somebody should
speak to him.”
“What? meaning to stand?” said Mr. Cadwallader, going on with the
arrangement of the reels which he had just been turning. “I hardly
think he means it. But where’s the harm, if he likes it? Any one who
objects to Whiggery should be glad when the Whigs don’t put up the
strongest fellow. They won’t overturn the Constitution with our friend
Brooke’s head for a battering ram.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Sir James, who, after putting down his
hat and throwing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse his leg and
examine the sole of his boot with much bitterness. “I mean this
marriage. I mean his letting that blooming young girl marry Casaubon.”
“What is the matter with Casaubon? I see no harm in him—if the girl
likes him.”
“She is too young to know what she likes. Her guardian ought to
interfere. He ought not to allow the thing to be done in this headlong
manner. I wonder a man like you, Cadwallader—a man with daughters, can
look at the affair with indifference: and with such a heart as yours!
Do think seriously about it.”
“I am not joking; I am as serious as possible,” said the Rector, with a
provoking little inward laugh. “You are as bad as Elinor. She has been
wanting me to go and lecture Brooke; and I have reminded her that her
friends had a very poor opinion of the match she made when she married
me.”
“But look at Casaubon,” said Sir James, indignantly. “He must be fifty,
and I don’t believe he could ever have been much more than the shadow
of a man. Look at his legs!”
“Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your
own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you
half so much as you admire yourselves. Elinor used to tell her sisters
that she married me for my ugliness—it was so various and amusing that
it had quite conquered her prudence.”
“You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you. But this is no
question of beauty. I don’t _like_ Casaubon.” This was Sir James’s
strongest way of implying that he thought ill of a man’s character.
“Why? what do you know against him?” said the Rector laying down his
reels, and putting his thumbs into his armholes with an air of
attention.
Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons:
it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being
told, since he only felt what was reasonable. At last he said—
“Now, Cadwallader, has he got any heart?”
“Well, yes. I don’t mean of the melting sort, but a sound kernel,
_that_ you may be sure of. He is very good to his poor relations:
pensions several of the women, and is educating a young fellow at a
good deal of expense. Casaubon acts up to his sense of justice. His
mother’s sister made a bad match—a Pole, I think—lost herself—at any
rate was disowned by her family. If it had not been for that, Casaubon
would not have had so much money by half. I believe he went himself to
find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them. Every man
would not ring so well as that, if you tried his metal. _You_ would,
Chettam; but not every man.”
“I don’t know,” said Sir James, coloring. “I am not so sure of myself.”
He paused a moment, and then added, “That was a right thing for
Casaubon to do. But a man may wish to do what is right, and yet be a
sort of parchment code. A woman may not be happy with him. And I think
when a girl is so young as Miss Brooke is, her friends ought to
interfere a little to hinder her from doing anything foolish. You
laugh, because you fancy I have some feeling on my own account. But
upon my honor, it is not that. I should feel just the same if I were
Miss Brooke’s brother or uncle.”
“Well, but what should you do?”
“I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was of
age. And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off. I wish
you saw it as I do—I wish you would talk to Brooke about it.”
Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs.
Cadwallader entering from the study. She held by the hand her youngest
girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa, and was made
comfortable on his knee.
“I hear what you are talking about,” said the wife. “But you will make
no impression on Humphrey. As long as the fish rise to his bait,
everybody is what he ought to be. Bless you, Casaubon has got a
trout-stream, and does not care about fishing in it himself: could
there be a better fellow?”
“Well, there is something in that,” said the Rector, with his quiet,
inward laugh. “It is a very good quality in a man to have a
trout-stream.”
“But seriously,” said Sir James, whose vexation had not yet spent
itself, “don’t you think the Rector might do some good by speaking?”
“Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say,” answered Mrs.
Cadwallader, lifting up her eyebrows. “I have done what I could: I wash
my hands of the marriage.”
“In the first place,” said the Rector, looking rather grave, “it would
be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him act
accordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into
any mould, but he won’t keep shape.”
“He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage,” said Sir
James.
“But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon’s
disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be
acting for the advantage of Miss Brooke? I know no harm of Casaubon. I
don’t care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he
doesn’t care about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the
Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to
me, and I don’t see why I should spoil his sport. For anything I can
tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any
other man.”
“Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather dine
under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing to say to
each other.”
“What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do
it for my amusement.”
“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.
“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all
semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
“Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,” said Sir
James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of
an English layman.
“Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They
say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of ‘Hop o’ my
Thumb,’ and he has been making abstracts ever since. Ugh! And that is
the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with.”
“Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes,” said the Rector. “I don’t profess
to understand every young lady’s taste.”
“But if she were your own daughter?” said Sir James.
“That would be a different affair. She is _not_ my daughter, and I
don’t feel called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good as most of us.
He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some Radical
fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned
straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent,
and I was the angling incumbent. And upon my word, I don’t see that one
is worse or better than the other.” The Rector ended with his silent
laugh. He always saw the joke of any satire against himself. His
conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what
it could do without any trouble.
Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke’s marriage
through Mr. Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some sadness that she
was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment. It was a sign of his good
disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying
out Dorothea’s design of the cottages. Doubtless this persistence was
the best course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be
generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
She was now enough aware of Sir James’s position with regard to her, to
appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord’s duty, to
which he had at first been urged by a lover’s complaisance, and her
pleasure in it was great enough to count for something even in her
present happiness. Perhaps she gave to Sir James Chettam’s cottages all
the interest she could spare from Mr. Casaubon, or rather from the
symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust, and passionate self
devotion which that learned gentleman had set playing in her soul.
Hence it happened that in the good baronet’s succeeding visits, while
he was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself
talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. She was perfectly
unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was
gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and
companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or
confess.
CHAPTER IX.
1_st Gent_. An ancient land in ancient oracles
Is called “law-thirsty”: all the struggle there
Was after order and a perfect rule.
Pray, where lie such lands now? . . .
2_d Gent_. Why, where they lay of old—in human souls.
Mr. Casaubon’s behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to
Mr. Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along,
shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her
future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made
there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an
appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we
male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly
raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company
with her uncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon’s home was the manor-house.
Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church,
with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr.
Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put
him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine
old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest
front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from
the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope
of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures,
which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was
the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather
melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more
confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large
clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards
from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old
English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the
sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and
little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this
latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling
slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the
house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he
presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by
that background.
“Oh dear!” Celia said to herself, “I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
been pleasanter than this.” She thought of the white freestone, the
pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling
above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush,
with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately
odorous petals—Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things
which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those
light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen
sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon’s bias had been
different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.
Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she
could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and
curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and
bird’s-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an
old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful
than the casts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago
brought home from his travels—they being probably among the ideas he
had taken in at one time. To poor Dorothea these severe classical
nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully
inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she
had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of
relevance with her life. But the owners of Lowick apparently had not
been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon’s studies of the past were not
carried on by means of such aids.
Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything
seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and
she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew
her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she
would like an alteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully,
but saw nothing to alter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal
tenderness had no defect for her. She filled up all blanks with
unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works
of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness
to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of
courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.
“Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which
room you would like to have as your boudoir,” said Mr. Casaubon,
showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to
include that requirement.
“It is very kind of you to think of that,” said Dorothea, “but I assure
you I would rather have all those matters decided for me. I shall be
much happier to take everything as it is—just as you have been used to
have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be. I have no motive for
wishing anything else.”
“Oh, Dodo,” said Celia, “will you not have the bow-windowed room
up-stairs?”
Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the avenue
of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were
miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a
group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world
with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy
to upset. It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a
tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery. A light
bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf,
completing the furniture.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, “this would be a pretty room with some new
hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now.”
“No, uncle,” said Dorothea, eagerly. “Pray do not speak of altering
anything. There are so many other things in the world that want
altering—I like to take these things as they are. And you like them as
they are, don’t you?” she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon. “Perhaps this
was your mother’s room when she was young.”
“It was,” he said, with his slow bend of the head.
“This is your mother,” said Dorothea, who had turned to examine the
group of miniatures. “It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I
should think, a better portrait. And this one opposite, who is this?”
“Her elder sister. They were, like you and your sister, the only two
children of their parents, who hang above them, you see.”
“The sister is pretty,” said Celia, implying that she thought less
favorably of Mr. Casaubon’s mother. It was a new opening to Celia’s
imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their
time—the ladies wearing necklaces.
“It is a peculiar face,” said Dorothea, looking closely. “Those deep
gray eyes rather near together—and the delicate irregular nose with a
sort of ripple in it—and all the powdered curls hanging backward.
Altogether it seems to me peculiar rather than pretty. There is not
even a family likeness between her and your mother.”
“No. And they were not alike in their lot.”
“You did not mention her to me,” said Dorothea.
“My aunt made an unfortunate marriage. I never saw her.”
Dorothea wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just
then to ask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer, and
she turned to the window to admire the view. The sun had lately pierced
the gray, and the avenue of limes cast shadows.
“Shall we not walk in the garden now?” said Dorothea.
“And you would like to see the church, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “It
is a droll little church. And the village. It all lies in a nut-shell.
By the way, it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages are like a row
of alms-houses—little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, please,” said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I should like
to see all that.” She had got nothing from him more graphic about the
Lowick cottages than that they were “not bad.”
They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy
borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church,
Mr. Casaubon said. At the little gate leading into the churchyard there
was a pause while Mr. Casaubon went to the parsonage close by to fetch
a key. Celia, who had been hanging a little in the rear, came up
presently, when she saw that Mr. Casaubon was gone away, and said in
her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradict the suspicion of
any malicious intent—
“Do you know, Dorothea, I saw some one quite young coming up one of the
walks.”
“Is that astonishing, Celia?”
“There may be a young gardener, you know—why not?” said Mr. Brooke. “I
told Casaubon he should change his gardener.”
“No, not a gardener,” said Celia; “a gentleman with a sketch-book. He
had light-brown curls. I only saw his back. But he was quite young.”
“The curate’s son, perhaps,” said Mr. Brooke. “Ah, there is Casaubon
again, and Tucker with him. He is going to introduce Tucker. You don’t
know Tucker yet.”
Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the “inferior clergy,”
who are usually not wanting in sons. But after the introduction, the
conversation did not lead to any question about his family, and the
startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every one but
Celia. She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown curls and
slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as
old and musty-looking as she would have expected Mr. Casaubon’s curate
to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven (for Celia
wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were so
unpleasant. Celia thought with some dismalness of the time she should
have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the curate had probably no
pretty little children whom she could like, irrespective of principle.
Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon had
not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to
answer all Dorothea’s questions about the villagers and the other
parishioners. Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a
cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the
strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore
excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a
little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though
the public disposition was rather towards laying by money than towards
spirituality, there was not much vice. The speckled fowls were so
numerous that Mr. Brooke observed, “Your farmers leave some barley for
the women to glean, I see. The poor folks here might have a fowl in
their pot, as the good French king used to wish for all his people. The
French eat a good many fowls—skinny fowls, you know.”
“I think it was a very cheap wish of his,” said Dorothea, indignantly.
“Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned a royal
virtue?”
“And if he wished them a skinny fowl,” said Celia, “that would not be
nice. But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls.”
“Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was
subauditum; that is, present in the king’s mind, but not uttered,” said
Mr. Casaubon, smiling and bending his head towards Celia, who
immediately dropped backward a little, because she could not bear Mr.
Casaubon to blink at her.
Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house. She felt some
disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing
for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had
glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred, of
finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of
the world’s misery, so that she might have had more active duties in
it. Then, recurring to the future actually before her, she made a
picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon’s aims in which she
would await new duties. Many such might reveal themselves to the higher
knowledge gained by her in that companionship.
Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not
allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden
through the little gate, Mr. Casaubon said—
“You seem a little sad, Dorothea. I trust you are pleased with what you
have seen.”
“I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong,” answered
Dorothea, with her usual openness—“almost wishing that the people
wanted more to be done for them here. I have known so few ways of
making my life good for anything. Of course, my notions of usefulness
must be narrow. I must learn new ways of helping people.”
“Doubtless,” said Mr. Casaubon. “Each position has its corresponding
duties. Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any
yearning unfulfilled.”
“Indeed, I believe that,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “Do not suppose
that I am sad.”
“That is well. But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to
the house than that by which we came.”
Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a
fine yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds on this side
of the house. As they approached it, a figure, conspicuous on a dark
background of evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old
tree. Mr. Brooke, who was walking in front with Celia, turned his head,
and said—
“Who is that youngster, Casaubon?”
They had come very near when Mr. Casaubon answered—
“That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson, in
fact,” he added, looking at Dorothea, “of the lady whose portrait you
have been noticing, my aunt Julia.”
The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy
light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once
with Celia’s apparition.
“Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw. Will, this
is Miss Brooke.”
The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea
could see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate
irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward;
but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect
than belonged to the type of the grandmother’s miniature. Young
Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile, as if he were charmed with
this introduction to his future second cousin and her relatives; but
wore rather a pouting air of discontent.
“You are an artist, I see,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book
and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.
“No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,”
said young Ladislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.
“Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself
at one time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice
thing, done with what we used to call _brio_.” Mr. Brooke held out
towards the two girls a large colored sketch of stony ground and trees,
with a pool.
“I am no judge of these things,” said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an
eager deprecation of the appeal to her. “You know, uncle, I never see
the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They
are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation
between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you
see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me.”
Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her,
while Mr. Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly—
“Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style of
teaching, you know—else this is just the thing for girls—sketching,
fine art and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don’t understand
_morbidezza_, and that kind of thing. You will come to my house, I
hope, and I will show you what I did in this way,” he continued,
turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his
preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up his mind that
she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon,
and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have confirmed
that opinion even if he had believed her. As it was, he took her words
for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch
detestable. There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was
laughing both at her uncle and himself. But what a voice! It was like
the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp. This must
be one of Nature’s inconsistencies. There could be no sort of passion
in a girl who would marry Casaubon. But he turned from her, and bowed
his thanks for Mr. Brooke’s invitation.
“We will turn over my Italian engravings together,” continued that
good-natured man. “I have no end of those things, that I have laid by
for years. One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know. Not
you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get
undermost—out of use, you know. You clever young men must guard against
indolence. I was too indolent, you know: else I might have been
anywhere at one time.”
“That is a seasonable admonition,” said Mr. Casaubon; “but now we will
pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of
standing.”
When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with his
sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of
amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw
back his head and laughed aloud. Partly it was the reception of his own
artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave
cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Brooke’s definition of
the place he might have held but for the impediment of indolence. Mr.
Will Ladislaw’s sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very
agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture
of sneering and self-exaltation.
“What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?” said Mr.
Brooke, as they went on.
“My cousin, you mean—not my nephew.”
“Yes, yes, cousin. But in the way of a career, you know.”
“The answer to that question is painfully doubtful. On leaving Rugby he
declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have
placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of
studying at Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again, without
any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture,
preparation for he knows not what. He declines to choose a profession.”
“He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose.”
“I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I
would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a
scholarly education, and launching him respectably. I am therefore
bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting
his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which
Dorothea noticed with admiration.
“He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a
Mungo Park,” said Mr. Brooke. “I had a notion of that myself at one
time.”
“No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our
geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with
some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so
often ends in premature and violent death. But so far is he from having
any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that
he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that
there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for
the poetic imagination.”
“Well, there is something in that, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, who had
certainly an impartial mind.
“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and
indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury
for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far
submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.”
“Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,”
said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable
explanation. “Because the law and medicine should be very serious
professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes
depend on them.”
“Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly
determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady
application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful
instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to
self-indulgent taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has
stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work
regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or
acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience. I have
pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years
preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain. To careful
reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every
form of prescribed work ‘harness.’”
Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say
something quite amusing.
“Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a
Churchill—that sort of thing—there’s no telling,” said Mr. Brooke.
“Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?”
“Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or
so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
with delight. “It is noble. After all, people may really have in them
some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?
They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very
patient with each other, I think.”
“I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think
patience good,” said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone
together, taking off their wrappings.
“You mean that I am very impatient, Celia.”
“Yes; when people don’t do and say just what you like.” Celia had
become less afraid of “saying things” to Dorothea since this
engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.
CHAPTER X.
“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than
the skin of a bear not yet killed.”—FULLER.
Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited
him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young
relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness
to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise
destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is
necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the
utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await
those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work,
only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime
chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had
sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but
he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that
form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on
lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly
original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium
had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his
constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would
evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.
Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know
what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be
disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful
analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw
clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no
chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose
plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned
theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a
moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the
intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that
reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the
contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility,
but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in
particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our
pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the
most gratuitous.
But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me
more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to
Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight
the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow
that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned
personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him?
I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from
Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighboring clergyman’s alleged
greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor opinion of his rival’s
legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, or from
Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance. I am
not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary
superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of
himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his
portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling
rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or
fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of
hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system
been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we
turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest,
what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or
capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what
fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are
marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against
universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring
his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own
eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in
our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him
to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held
sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he
may have got from us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own
world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made
for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness
for the author of a “Key to all Mythologies,” this trait is not quite
alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims
some of our pity.
Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more
nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their
disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more
tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the
disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day fixed
for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits
rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene,
where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with
flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed
vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to himself,
still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though
he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won
delight,—which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.
It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying the
contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion,
which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal
application.
Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had
stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large
drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of
us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act
fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being
saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually
happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a
certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his
expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged
the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the
Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly
condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened
him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to
the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from
sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not less
happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and in
relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and veneration,
he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of
encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his
performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the
pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience
which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure
of Tartarean shades.
For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to
young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr.
Casaubon’s talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this
sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics
and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own,
kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory
which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with
that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some
bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching would come—Mr.
Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher
initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and
blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to
suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr.
Casaubon’s learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the
neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that
epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise
vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing,
apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that
full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were
habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with
knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her
action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint
Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her
conscience. But something she yearned for by which her life might be
filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was
gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer
heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but
knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned
than Mr. Casaubon?
Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation was
unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of
flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate
interest.
The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the
wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this
because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.
“I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us,” he said one
morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia objected to
go, and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship. “You will
have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make
the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel
more at liberty if you had a companion.”
The words “I should feel more at liberty” grated on Dorothea. For the
first time in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored from annoyance.
“You must have misunderstood me very much,” she said, “if you think I
should not enter into the value of your time—if you think that I should
not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to the
best purpose.”
“That is very amiable in you, my dear Dorothea,” said Mr. Casaubon, not
in the least noticing that she was hurt; “but if you had a lady as your
companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we
could thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time.”
“I beg you will not refer to this again,” said Dorothea, rather
haughtily. But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning
towards him she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, “Pray
do not be anxious about me. I shall have so much to think of when I am
alone. And Tantripp will be a sufficient companion, just to take care
of me. I could not bear to have Celia: she would be miserable.”
It was time to dress. There was to be a dinner-party that day, the last
of the parties which were held at the Grange as proper preliminaries to
the wedding, and Dorothea was glad of a reason for moving away at once
on the sound of the bell, as if she needed more than her usual amount
of preparation. She was ashamed of being irritated from some cause she
could not define even to herself; for though she had no intention to be
untruthful, her reply had not touched the real hurt within her. Mr.
Casaubon’s words had been quite reasonable, yet they had brought a
vague instantaneous sense of aloofness on his part.
“Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind,” she said to
herself. “How can I have a husband who is so much above me without
knowing that he needs me less than I need him?”
Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right, she
recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity
when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray dress—the simple
lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow and coiled massively
behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and
expression of all search after mere effect. Sometimes when Dorothea was
in company, there seemed to be as complete an air of repose about her
as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her
tower into the clear air; but these intervals of quietude made the
energy of her speech and emotion the more remarked when some outward
appeal had touched her.
She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for
the dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male
portion than any which had been held at the Grange since Mr. Brooke’s
nieces had resided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and
trios more or less inharmonious. There was the newly elected mayor of
Middlemarch, who happened to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic
banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that
some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the
resources of their vocabulary; and there were various professional men.
In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Brooke was beginning to treat the
Middlemarchers, and that she preferred the farmers at the tithe-dinner,
who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their
grandfathers’ furniture. For in that part of the country, before reform
had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness,
there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of
parties; so that Mr. Brooke’s miscellaneous invitations seemed to
belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate travel and
habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.
Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was
found for some interjectional “asides.”
“A fine woman, Miss Brooke! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!” said Mr.
Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the
landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used that oath in
a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the
speech of a man who held a good position.
Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman
disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed. The remark was
taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing
celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few
hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of
a distinguished appearance.
“Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a
little more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a
woman—something of the coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The
more of a dead set she makes at you the better.”
“There’s some truth in that,” said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.
“And, by God, it’s usually the way with them. I suppose it answers some
wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?”
“I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source,” said Mr.
Bulstrode. “I should rather refer it to the devil.”
“Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,” said Mr.
Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental
to his theology. “And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a
swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste
than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either. If I were a marrying man I
should choose Miss Vincy before either of them.”
“Well, make up, make up,” said Mr. Standish, jocosely; “you see the
middle-aged fellows carry the day.”
Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to
incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.
The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely’s ideal was of
course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far,
would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a
Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion. The
feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs.
Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was
not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on
the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed
clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need
the supplement of quackery. Lady Chettam, who attributed her own
remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical
attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs.
Renfrew’s account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her
case of all strengthening medicines.
“Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?” said the
mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively,
when Mrs. Renfrew’s attention was called away.
“It strengthens the disease,” said the Rector’s wife, much too
well-born not to be an amateur in medicine. “Everything depends on the
constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile—that’s my
view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the
mill.”
“Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce—reduce the disease,
you know, if you are right, my dear. And I think what you say is
reasonable.”
“Certainly it is reasonable. You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on the
same soil. One of them grows more and more watery—”
“Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew—that is what I think. Dropsy! There is
no swelling yet—it is inward. I should say she ought to take drying
medicines, shouldn’t you?—or a dry hot-air bath. Many things might be
tried, of a drying nature.”
“Let her try a certain person’s pamphlets,” said Mrs. Cadwallader in an
undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter. “He does not want drying.”
“Who, my dear?” said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick as to
nullify the pleasure of explanation.
“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since
the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose.”
“I should think he is far from having a good constitution,” said Lady
Chettam, with a still deeper undertone. “And then his studies—so very
dry, as you say.”
“Really, by the side of Sir James, he looks like a death’s head skinned
over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that
girl will hate him. She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by
she will be at the other extreme. All flightiness!”
“How very shocking! I fear she is headstrong. But tell me—you know all
about him—is there anything very bad? What is the truth?”
“The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and sure to
disagree.”
“There could not be anything worse than that,” said Lady Chettam, with
so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned
something exact about Mr. Casaubon’s disadvantages. “However, James
will hear nothing against Miss Brooke. He says she is the mirror of
women still.”
“That is a generous make-believe of his. Depend upon it, he likes
little Celia better, and she appreciates him. I hope you like my little
Celia?”
“Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though
not so fine a figure. But we were talking of physic. Tell me about this
new young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate. I am told he is wonderfully clever: he
certainly looks it—a fine brow indeed.”
“He is a gentleman. I heard him talking to Humphrey. He talks well.”
“Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland,
really well connected. One does not expect it in a practitioner of that
kind. For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing with the
servants; they are often all the cleverer. I assure you I found poor
Hicks’s judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong. He was coarse and
butcher-like, but he knew my constitution. It was a loss to me his
going off so suddenly. Dear me, what a very animated conversation Miss
Brooke seems to be having with this Mr. Lydgate!”
“She is talking cottages and hospitals with him,” said Mrs.
Cadwallader, whose ears and power of interpretation were quick. “I
believe he is a sort of philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him
up.”
“James,” said Lady Chettam when her son came near, “bring Mr. Lydgate
and introduce him to me. I want to test him.”
The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of
making Mr. Lydgate’s acquaintance, having heard of his success in
treating fever on a new plan.
Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave
whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him
impressiveness as a listener. He was as little as possible like the
lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his
toilet and utterance. Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in him.
He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar, by
admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he did
not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others. He did not
approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, on
the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark. He said “I think so”
with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement,
that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.
“I am quite pleased with your protege,” she said to Mr. Brooke before
going away.
“My protege?—dear me!—who is that?” said Mr. Brooke.
“This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his
profession admirably.”
“Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of
his who sent me a letter about him. However, I think he is likely to be
first-rate—has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you
know—wants to raise the profession.”
“Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that
sort of thing,” resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady
Chettam, and had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.
“Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?—upsetting the old
treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?” said Mr. Standish.
“Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who
spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part,
hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for
confiding the new hospital to his management.”
“That is all very fine,” replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.
Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital
patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection. But I
am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on
me. I like treatment that has been tested a little.”
“Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an
experiment, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.
“Oh, if you talk in that sense!” said Mr. Standish, with as much
disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a
valuable client.
“I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing
me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger,” said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a
florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking
contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode. “It’s an
uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the
shafts of disease, as somebody said,—and I think it a very good
expression myself.”
Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party
early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty
of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke,
whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded
scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the
piquancy of an unusual combination.
“She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,” he
thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always
wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of
any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle
things after their own taste.”
Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate’s style of woman any more
than Mr. Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter,
whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to
shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young
women to purplefaced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might
possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as
to the most excellent things in woman.
Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen
under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become
Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.
CHAPTER XI.
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
—BEN JONSON.
Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman
strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose
that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of
that particular woman, “She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely
and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to
produce the effect of exquisite music.” Plain women he regarded as he
did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and
investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true
melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have
chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor
will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his. Lydgate
believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he
had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road
which was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon
almost as long as it had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and
married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had
assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation
which precedes performance,—often the larger part of a man’s fame. He
took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his
course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable
perturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his
half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to
Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to
make his fortune or even secure him a good income. To a man under such
circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of
adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to
give it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided by
a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be
found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look
at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was
about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form,
instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes,
and blue eyes for a heaven.
Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate
than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the
qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any
one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow
preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a
calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we
look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our
dramatis personae folded in her hand.
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not
only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies
who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their
establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are
constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting
new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward,
some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and
fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political
currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves
surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families
that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly
presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the
double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish
gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old
stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar
guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who
had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the
faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant
counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an
offensive advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement
and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who
also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot
for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by
attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this
respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had
excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure
blondness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and color
of drapery. But these things made only part of her charm. She was
admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in
the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the
accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a
carriage. Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as an
example: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental
acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was
quite exceptional. We cannot help the way in which people speak of us,
and probably if Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen,
these heroines would not have seemed poetical. The first vision of
Rosamond would have been enough with most judges to dispel any
prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon’s praise.
Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable
vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family;
for though Mr. Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter
on, had not been their doctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering
system adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections
and acquaintances. For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not
connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? They were old
manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in
which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more
or less decidedly genteel. Mr. Vincy’s sister had made a wealthy match
in accepting Mr. Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born in the
town, and altogether of dimly known ori
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