Middlemarch
a subject which Mrs. Farebrother could not let pass.
“You don’t mean, my dear Miss Garth, that you are glad to hear of a
young man giving up the Church for which he was educated: you only mean
that things being so, you are glad that he should be under an excellent
man like your father.”
“No, really, Mrs. Farebrother, I am glad of both, I fear,” said Mary,
cleverly getting rid of one rebellious tear. “I have a dreadfully
secular mind. I never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield
and Mr. Farebrother.”
“Now why, my dear?” said Mrs. Farebrother, pausing on her large wooden
knitting-needles and looking at Mary. “You have always a good reason
for your opinions, but this astonishes me. Of course I put out of the
question those who preach new doctrine. But why should you dislike
clergymen?”
“Oh dear,” said Mary, her face breaking into merriment as she seemed to
consider a moment, “I don’t like their neckcloths.”
“Why, you don’t like Camden’s, then,” said Miss Winifred, in some
anxiety.
“Yes, I do,” said Mary. “I don’t like the other clergymen’s neckcloths,
because it is they who wear them.”
“How very puzzling!” said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect
was probably deficient.
“My dear, you are joking. You would have better reasons than these for
slighting so respectable a class of men,” said Mrs. Farebrother,
majestically.
“Miss Garth has such severe notions of what people should be that it is
difficult to satisfy her,” said Fred.
“Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favor of my
son,” said the old lady.
Mary was wondering at Fred’s piqued tone, when Mr. Farebrother came in
and had to hear the news about the engagement under Mr. Garth. At the
end he said with quiet satisfaction, “_That_ is right;” and then bent
to look at Mary’s labels and praise her handwriting. Fred felt horribly
jealous—was glad, of course, that Mr. Farebrother was so estimable, but
wished that he had been ugly and fat as men at forty sometimes are. It
was clear what the end would be, since Mary openly placed Farebrother
above everybody, and these women were all evidently encouraging the
affair. He was feeling sure that he should have no chance of speaking
to Mary, when Mr. Farebrother said—
“Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study—you have never
seen my fine new study. Pray come too, Miss Garth. I want you to see a
stupendous spider I found this morning.”
Mary at once saw the Vicar’s intention. He had never since the
memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her,
and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep. Mary was
accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable, and if a
belief flattered her vanity she felt warned to dismiss it as
ridiculous, having early had much exercise in such dismissals. It was
as she had foreseen: when Fred had been asked to admire the fittings of
the study, and she had been asked to admire the spider, Mr. Farebrother
said—
“Wait here a minute or two. I am going to look out an engraving which
Fred is tall enough to hang for me. I shall be back in a few minutes.”
And then he went out. Nevertheless, the first word Fred said to Mary
was—
“It is of no use, whatever I do, Mary. You are sure to marry
Farebrother at last.” There was some rage in his tone.
“What do you mean, Fred?” Mary exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply,
and surprised out of all her readiness in reply.
“It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough—you who
see everything.”
“I only see that you are behaving very ill, Fred, in speaking so of Mr.
Farebrother after he has pleaded your cause in every way. How can you
have taken up such an idea?”
Fred was rather deep, in spite of his irritation. If Mary had really
been unsuspicious, there was no good in telling her what Mrs. Garth had
said.
“It follows as a matter of course,” he replied. “When you are
continually seeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom you set
up above everybody, I can have no fair chance.”
“You are very ungrateful, Fred,” said Mary. “I wish I had never told
Mr. Farebrother that I cared for you in the least.”
“No, I am not ungrateful; I should be the happiest fellow in the world
if it were not for this. I told your father everything, and he was very
kind; he treated me as if I were his son. I could go at the work with a
will, writing and everything, if it were not for this.”
“For this? for what?” said Mary, imagining now that something specific
must have been said or done.
“This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Farebrother.”
Mary was appeased by her inclination to laugh.
“Fred,” she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were sulkily
turned away from her, “you are too delightfully ridiculous. If you were
not such a charming simpleton, what a temptation this would be to play
the wicked coquette, and let you suppose that somebody besides you has
made love to me.”
“Do you really like me best, Mary?” said Fred, turning eyes full of
affection on her, and trying to take her hand.
“I don’t like you at all at this moment,” said Mary, retreating, and
putting her hands behind her. “I only said that no mortal ever made
love to me besides you. And that is no argument that a very wise man
ever will,” she ended, merrily.
“I wish you would tell me that you could not possibly ever think of
him,” said Fred.
“Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fred,” said Mary, getting
serious again. “I don’t know whether it is more stupid or ungenerous in
you not to see that Mr. Farebrother has left us together on purpose
that we might speak freely. I am disappointed that you should be so
blind to his delicate feeling.”
There was no time to say any more before Mr. Farebrother came back with
the engraving; and Fred had to return to the drawing-room still with a
jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from
Mary’s words and manner. The result of the conversation was on the
whole more painful to Mary: inevitably her attention had taken a new
attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations. She was
in a position in which she seemed to herself to be slighting Mr.
Farebrother, and this, in relation to a man who is much honored, is
always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman. To have a reason
for going home the next day was a relief, for Mary earnestly desired to
be always clear that she loved Fred best. When a tender affection has
been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we
could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.
And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can
over other treasures.
“Fred has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this,” Mary
said to herself, with a smile curling her lips. It was impossible to
help fleeting visions of another kind—new dignities and an acknowledged
value of which she had often felt the absence. But these things with
Fred outside them, Fred forsaken and looking sad for the want of her,
could never tempt her deliberate thought.
CHAPTER LVIII.
“For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change:
In many’s looks the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
But Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell:
Whate’er thy thoughts or thy heart’s workings be
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.”
—SHAKESPEARE: _Sonnets_.
At the time when Mr. Vincy uttered that presentiment about Rosamond,
she herself had never had the idea that she should be driven to make
the sort of appeal which he foresaw. She had not yet had any anxiety
about ways and means, although her domestic life had been expensive as
well as eventful. Her baby had been born prematurely, and all the
embroidered robes and caps had to be laid by in darkness. This
misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted in going out
on horseback one day when her husband had desired her not to do so; but
it must not be supposed that she had shown temper on the occasion, or
rudely told him that she would do as she liked.
What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from
Captain Lydgate, the baronet’s third son, who, I am sorry to say, was
detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop “parting his hair
from brow to nape in a despicable fashion” (not followed by Tertius
himself), and showing an ignorant security that he knew the proper
thing to say on every topic. Lydgate inwardly cursed his own folly that
he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go to his uncle’s on the
wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable to Rosamond by
saying so in private. For to Rosamond this visit was a source of
unprecedented but gracefully concealed exultation. She was so intensely
conscious of having a cousin who was a baronet’s son staying in the
house, that she imagined the knowledge of what was implied by his
presence to be diffused through all other minds; and when she
introduced Captain Lydgate to her guests, she had a placid sense that
his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odor. The satisfaction
was enough for the time to melt away some disappointment in the
conditions of marriage with a medical man even of good birth: it seemed
now that her marriage was visibly as well as ideally floating her above
the Middlemarch level, and the future looked bright with letters and
visits to and from Quallingham, and vague advancement in consequence
for Tertius. Especially as, probably at the Captain’s suggestion, his
married sister, Mrs. Mengan, had come with her maid, and stayed two
nights on her way from town. Hence it was clearly worth while for
Rosamond to take pains with her music and the careful selection of her
lace.
As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose bent on
one side, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been
disadvantageous in any young gentleman who had not a military bearing
and mustache to give him what is doted on by some flower-like blond
heads as “style.” He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding which
consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of middle-class
gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms. Rosamond
delighted in his admiration now even more than she had done at
Quallingham, and he found it easy to spend several hours of the day in
flirting with her. The visit altogether was one of the pleasantest
larks he had ever had, not the less so perhaps because he suspected
that his queer cousin Tertius wished him away: though Lydgate, who
would rather (hyperbolically speaking) have died than have failed in
polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike, and only pretended
generally not to hear what the gallant officer said, consigning the
task of answering him to Rosamond. For he was not at all a jealous
husband, and preferred leaving a feather-headed young gentleman alone
with his wife to bearing him company.
“I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius,” said
Rosamond, one evening when the important guest was gone to Loamford to
see some brother officers stationed there. “You really look so absent
sometimes—you seem to be seeing through his head into something behind
it, instead of looking at him.”
“My dear Rosy, you don’t expect me to talk much to such a conceited ass
as that, I hope,” said Lydgate, brusquely. “If he got his head broken,
I might look at it with interest, not before.”
“I cannot conceive why you should speak of your cousin so
contemptuously,” said Rosamond, her fingers moving at her work while
she spoke with a mild gravity which had a touch of disdain in it.