Middlemarch
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