Middlemarch
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.