Adam Bede
look at the little Methodist who is staying there. Joshua tells me she
was preaching on the Green last night.”
“Oh, by Jove!” said Captain Donnithorne, laughing. “Why, she looks as
quiet as a mouse. There’s something rather striking about her, though.
I positively felt quite bashful the first time I saw her—she was
sitting stooping over her sewing in the sunshine outside the house,
when I rode up and called out, without noticing that she was a
stranger, ‘Is Martin Poyser at home?’ I declare, when she got up and
looked at me and just said, ‘He’s in the house, I believe: I’ll go and
call him,’ I felt quite ashamed of having spoken so abruptly to her.
She looked like St. Catherine in a Quaker dress. It’s a type of face
one rarely sees among our common people.”
“I should like to see the young woman, Dauphin,” said Mrs. Irwine.
“Make her come here on some pretext or other.”
“I don’t know how I can manage that, Mother; it will hardly do for me
to patronize a Methodist preacher, even if she would consent to be
patronized by an idle shepherd, as Will Maskery calls me. You should
have come in a little sooner, Arthur, to hear Joshua’s denunciation of
his neighbour Will Maskery. The old fellow wants me to excommunicate
the wheelwright, and then deliver him over to the civil arm—that is to
say, to your grandfather—to be turned out of house and yard. If I chose
to interfere in this business, now, I might get up as pretty a story of
hatred and persecution as the Methodists need desire to publish in the
next number of their magazine. It wouldn’t take me much trouble to
persuade Chad Cranage and half a dozen other bull-headed fellows that
they would be doing an acceptable service to the Church by hunting Will
Maskery out of the village with rope-ends and pitchforks; and then,
when I had furnished them with half a sovereign to get gloriously drunk
after their exertions, I should have put the climax to as pretty a
farce as any of my brother clergy have set going in their parishes for
the last thirty years.”
“It is really insolent of the man, though, to call you an ‘idle
shepherd’ and a ‘dumb dog,’” said Mrs. Irwine. “I should be inclined to
check him a little there. You are too easy-tempered, Dauphin.”
“Why, Mother, you don’t think it would be a good way of sustaining my
dignity to set about vindicating myself from the aspersions of Will
Maskery? Besides, I’m not so sure that they _are_ aspersions. I _am_ a
lazy fellow, and get terribly heavy in my saddle; not to mention that
I’m always spending more than I can afford in bricks and mortar, so
that I get savage at a lame beggar when he asks me for sixpence. Those
poor lean cobblers, who think they can help to regenerate mankind by
setting out to preach in the morning twilight before they begin their
day’s work, may well have a poor opinion of me. But come, let us have
our luncheon. Isn’t Kate coming to lunch?”
“Miss Irwine told Bridget to take her lunch upstairs,” said Carroll;
“she can’t leave Miss Anne.”
“Oh, very well. Tell Bridget to say I’ll go up and see Miss Anne
presently. You can use your right arm quite well now, Arthur,” Mr.
Irwine continued, observing that Captain Donnithorne had taken his arm
out of the sling.
“Yes, pretty well; but Godwin insists on my keeping it up constantly
for some time to come. I hope I shall be able to get away to the
regiment, though, in the beginning of August. It’s a desperately dull
business being shut up at the Chase in the summer months, when one can
neither hunt nor shoot, so as to make one’s self pleasantly sleepy in
the evening. However, we are to astonish the echoes on the 30th of
July. My grandfather has given me _carte blanche_ for once, and I
promise you the entertainment shall be worthy of the occasion. The
world will not see the grand epoch of my majority twice. I think I
shall have a lofty throne for you, Godmamma, or rather two, one on the
lawn and another in the ballroom, that you may sit and look down upon
us like an Olympian goddess.”
“I mean to bring out my best brocade, that I wore at your christening
twenty years ago,” said Mrs. Irwine. “Ah, I think I shall see your poor
mother flitting about in her white dress, which looked to me almost
like a shroud that very day; and it _was_ her shroud only three months
after; and your little cap and christening dress were buried with her
too. She had set her heart on that, sweet soul! Thank God you take
after your mother’s family, Arthur. If you had been a puny, wiry,
yellow baby, I wouldn’t have stood godmother to you. I should have been
sure you would turn out a Donnithorne. But you were such a broad-faced,
broad-chested, loud-screaming rascal, I knew you were every inch of you
a Tradgett.”
“But you might have been a little too hasty there, Mother,” said Mr.
Irwine, smiling. “Don’t you remember how it was with Juno’s last pups?
One of them was the very image of its mother, but it had two or three
of its father’s tricks notwithstanding. Nature is clever enough to
cheat even you, Mother.”
“Nonsense, child! Nature never makes a ferret in the shape of a
mastiff. You’ll never persuade me that I can’t tell what men are by
their outsides. If I don’t like a man’s looks, depend upon it I shall
never like _him_. I don’t want to know people that look ugly and
disagreeable, any more than I want to taste dishes that look
disagreeable. If they make me shudder at the first glance, I say, take
them away. An ugly, piggish, or fishy eye, now, makes me feel quite
ill; it’s like a bad smell.”
“Talking of eyes,” said Captain Donnithorne, “that reminds me that I’ve
got a book I meant to bring you, Godmamma. It came down in a parcel
from London the other day. I know you are fond of queer, wizardlike
stories. It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ Most of them seem
to be twaddling stuff, but the first is in a different style—‘The
Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as
a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing. I’ll send it over to you;
and there are some other books that _you_ may like to see,
Irwine—pamphlets about Antinomianism and Evangelicalism, whatever they
may be. I can’t think what the fellow means by sending such things to
me. I’ve written to him to desire that from henceforth he will send me
no book or pamphlet on anything that ends in _ism_.”
“Well, I don’t know that I’m very fond of _isms_ myself; but I may as
well look at the pamphlets; they let one see what is going on. I’ve a
little matter to attend to, Arthur,” continued Mr. Irwine, rising to
leave the room, “and then I shall be ready to set out with you.”
The little matter that Mr. Irwine had to attend to took him up the old
stone staircase (part of the house was very old) and made him pause
before a door at which he knocked gently. “Come in,” said a woman’s
voice, and he entered a room so darkened by blinds and curtains that
Miss Kate, the thin middle-aged lady standing by the bedside, would not
have had light enough for any other sort of work than the knitting
which lay on the little table near her. But at present she was doing
what required only the dimmest light—sponging the aching head that lay
on the pillow with fresh vinegar. It was a small face, that of the poor
sufferer; perhaps it had once been pretty, but now it was worn and
sallow. Miss Kate came towards her brother and whispered, “Don’t speak
to her; she can’t bear to be spoken to to-day.” Anne’s eyes were
closed, and her brow contracted as if from intense pain. Mr. Irwine
went to the bedside and took up one of the delicate hands and kissed
it, a slight pressure from the small fingers told him that it was
worth-while to have come upstairs for the sake of doing that. He
lingered a moment, looking at her, and then turned away and left the
room, treading very gently—he had taken off his boots and put on
slippers before he came upstairs. Whoever remembers how many things he
has declined to do even for himself, rather than have the trouble of
putting on or taking off his boots, will not think this last detail
insignificant.
And Mr. Irwine’s sisters, as any person of family within ten miles of
Broxton could have testified, were such stupid, uninteresting women! It
was quite a pity handsome, clever Mrs. Irwine should have had such
commonplace daughters. That fine old lady herself was worth driving ten
miles to see, any day; her beauty, her well-preserved faculties, and
her old-fashioned dignity made her a graceful subject for conversation
in turn with the King’s health, the sweet new patterns in cotton
dresses, the news from Egypt, and Lord Dacey’s lawsuit, which was
fretting poor Lady Dacey to death. But no one ever thought of
mentioning the Miss Irwines, except the poor people in Broxton village,
who regarded them as deep in the science of medicine, and spoke of them
vaguely as “the gentlefolks.” If any one had asked old Job Dummilow who
gave him his flannel jacket, he would have answered, “the gentlefolks,
last winter”; and widow Steene dwelt much on the virtues of the “stuff”
the gentlefolks gave her for her cough. Under this name too, they were
used with great effect as a means of taming refractory children, so
that at the sight of poor Miss Anne’s sallow face, several small
urchins had a terrified sense that she was cognizant of all their worst
misdemeanours, and knew the precise number of stones with which they
had intended to hit Farmer Britton’s ducks. But for all who saw them
through a less mythical medium, the Miss Irwines were quite superfluous
existences—inartistic figures crowding the canvas of life without
adequate effect. Miss Anne, indeed, if her chronic headaches could have
been accounted for by a pathetic story of disappointed love, might have
had some romantic interest attached to her: but no such story had
either been known or invented concerning her, and the general
impression was quite in accordance with the fact, that both the sisters
were old maids for the prosaic reason that they had never received an
eligible offer.
Nevertheless, to speak paradoxically, the existence of insignificant
people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to
affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many
evil tempers from the selfish and many heroisms from the sympathetic,
and, in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life. And
if that handsome, generous-blooded clergyman, the Rev. Adolphus Irwine,
had not had these two hopelessly maiden sisters, his lot would have
been shaped quite differently: he would very likely have taken a comely
wife in his youth, and now, when his hair was getting grey under the
powder, would have had tall sons and blooming daughters—such
possessions, in short, as men commonly think will repay them for all
the labour they take under the sun. As it was—having with all his three
livings no more than seven hundred a-year, and seeing no way of keeping
his splendid mother and his sickly sister, not to reckon a second
sister, who was usually spoken of without any adjective, in such
ladylike ease as became their birth and habits, and at the same time
providing for a family of his own—he remained, you see, at the age of
eight-and-forty, a bachelor, not making any merit of that renunciation,
but saying laughingly, if any one alluded to it, that he made it an
excuse for many indulgences which a wife would never have allowed him.
And perhaps he was the only person in the world who did not think his
sisters uninteresting and superfluous; for his was one of those
large-hearted, sweet-blooded natures that never know a narrow or a
grudging thought; Epicurean, if you will, with no enthusiasm, no
self-scourging sense of duty; but yet, as you have seen, of a
sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearying tenderness for