Middlemarch
feeling that there was always something better which she might have
done, if she had only been better and known better. Still, she never
repented that she had given up position and fortune to marry Will
Ladislaw, and he would have held it the greatest shame as well as
sorrow to him if she had repented. They were bound to each other by a
love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it. No life
would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion,
and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent activity which she
had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself.
Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when
reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has
been much checked in our days, and getting at last returned to
Parliament by a constituency who paid his expenses. Dorothea could have
liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband
should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should
give him wifely help. Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so
substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life
of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.
But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought
rather to have done—not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further
than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will
Ladislaw.
But this opinion of his did not cause a lasting alienation; and the way
in which the family was made whole again was characteristic of all
concerned. Mr. Brooke could not resist the pleasure of corresponding
with Will and Dorothea; and one morning when his pen had been
remarkably fluent on the prospects of Municipal Reform, it ran off into
an invitation to the Grange, which, once written, could not be done
away with at less cost than the sacrifice (hardly to be conceived) of
the whole valuable letter. During the months of this correspondence Mr.
Brooke had continually, in his talk with Sir James Chettam, been
presupposing or hinting that the intention of cutting off the entail
was still maintained; and the day on which his pen gave the daring
invitation, he went to Freshitt expressly to intimate that he had a
stronger sense than ever of the reasons for taking that energetic step
as a precaution against any mixture of low blood in the heir of the
Brookes.
But that morning something exciting had happened at the Hall. A letter
had come to Celia which made her cry silently as she read it; and when
Sir James, unused to see her in tears, asked anxiously what was the
matter, she burst out in a wail such as he had never heard from her
before.
“Dorothea has a little boy. And you will not let me go and see her. And
I am sure she wants to see me. And she will not know what to do with
the baby—she will do wrong things with it. And they thought she would
die. It is very dreadful! Suppose it had been me and little Arthur, and
Dodo had been hindered from coming to see me! I wish you would be less
unkind, James!”
“Good heavens, Celia!” said Sir James, much wrought upon, “what do you
wish? I will do anything you like. I will take you to town to-morrow if
you wish it.” And Celia did wish it.
It was after this that Mr. Brooke came, and meeting the Baronet in the
grounds, began to chat with him in ignorance of the news, which Sir
James for some reason did not care to tell him immediately. But when
the entail was touched on in the usual way, he said, “My dear sir, it
is not for me to dictate to you, but for my part I would let that
alone. I would let things remain as they are.”
Mr. Brooke felt so much surprised that he did not at once find out how
much he was relieved by the sense that he was not expected to do
anything in particular.
Such being the bent of Celia’s heart, it was inevitable that Sir James
should consent to a reconciliation with Dorothea and her husband. Where
women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike. Sir
James never liked Ladislaw, and Will always preferred to have Sir
James’s company mixed with another kind: they were on a footing of
reciprocal tolerance which was made quite easy only when Dorothea and
Celia were present.
It became an understood thing that Mr. and Mrs. Ladislaw should pay at
least two visits during the year to the Grange, and there came
gradually a small row of cousins at Freshitt who enjoyed playing with
the two cousins visiting Tipton as much as if the blood of these
cousins had been less dubiously mixed.
Mr. Brooke lived to a good old age, and his estate was inherited by
Dorothea’s son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined,
thinking that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he
remained out of doors.
Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a
mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in
Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine
girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and
in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry
his cousin—young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not
well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed
that she could not have been “a nice woman,” else she would not have
married either the one or the other.
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which
great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new
Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in
daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which
their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
THE END