Middlemarch
servants; they are often all the cleverer. I assure you I found poor
Hicks’s judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong. He was coarse and
butcher-like, but he knew my constitution. It was a loss to me his
going off so suddenly. Dear me, what a very animated conversation Miss
Brooke seems to be having with this Mr. Lydgate!”
“She is talking cottages and hospitals with him,” said Mrs.
Cadwallader, whose ears and power of interpretation were quick. “I
believe he is a sort of philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him
up.”
“James,” said Lady Chettam when her son came near, “bring Mr. Lydgate
and introduce him to me. I want to test him.”
The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of
making Mr. Lydgate’s acquaintance, having heard of his success in
treating fever on a new plan.
Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave
whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him
impressiveness as a listener. He was as little as possible like the
lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his
toilet and utterance. Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in him.
He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar, by
admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he did
not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others. He did not
approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, on
the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark. He said “I think so”
with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement,
that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.
“I am quite pleased with your protege,” she said to Mr. Brooke before
going away.
“My protege?—dear me!—who is that?” said Mr. Brooke.
“This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his
profession admirably.”
“Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of
his who sent me a letter about him. However, I think he is likely to be
first-rate—has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you
know—wants to raise the profession.”
“Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that
sort of thing,” resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady
Chettam, and had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.
“Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?—upsetting the old
treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?” said Mr. Standish.
“Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who
spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part,
hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for
confiding the new hospital to his management.”
“That is all very fine,” replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.
Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital
patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection. But I
am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on
me. I like treatment that has been tested a little.”
“Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an
experiment, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.
“Oh, if you talk in that sense!” said Mr. Standish, with as much
disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a
valuable client.
“I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing
me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger,” said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a
florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking
contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode. “It’s an
uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the
shafts of disease, as somebody said,—and I think it a very good
expression myself.”
Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party
early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty
of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke,
whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded
scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the
piquancy of an unusual combination.
“She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,” he
thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always
wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of
any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle
things after their own taste.”
Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate’s style of woman any more
than Mr. Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter,
whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to
shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young
women to purplefaced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might
possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as
to the most excellent things in woman.
Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen
under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become
Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.
CHAPTER XI.
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
—BEN JONSON.
Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman
strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose
that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of
that particular woman, “She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely
and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to
produce the effect of exquisite music.” Plain women he regarded as he
did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and
investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true
melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have
chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor
will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his. Lydgate
believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he
had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road
which was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon
almost as long as it had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and
married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had
assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation
which precedes performance,—often the larger part of a man’s fame. He
took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his
course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable
perturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his
half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to
Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to
make his fortune or even secure him a good income. To a man under such
circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of
adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to
give it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided by
a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be
found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look
at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was
about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form,
instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes,
and blue eyes for a heaven.
Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate
than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the
qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any
one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow
preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a
calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we
look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our
dramatis personae folded in her hand.
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not
only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies
who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their
establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are
constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting
new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward,
some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and
fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political
currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves
surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families
that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly
presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the
double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish
gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old
stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar
guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who
had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the
faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant
counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an
offensive advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement
and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who
also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot
for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by
attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this
respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had
excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure
blondness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and color
of drapery. But these things made only part of her charm. She was
admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in
the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the
accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a
carriage. Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as an
example: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental
acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was
quite exceptional. We cannot help the way in which people speak of us,
and probably if Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen,
these heroines would not have seemed poetical. The first vision of
Rosamond would have been enough with most judges to dispel any
prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon’s praise.
Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable
vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family;
for though Mr. Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter
on, had not been their doctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering
system adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections
and acquaintances. For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not
connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? They were old
manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in
which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more
or less decidedly genteel. Mr. Vincy’s sister had made a wealthy match
in accepting Mr. Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born in the
town, and altogether of dimly known origin, was considered to have done
well in uniting himself with a real Middlemarch family; on the other
hand, Mr. Vincy had descended a little, having taken an innkeeper’s
daughter. But on this side too there was a cheering sense of money; for