Middlemarch
“You mean _my_ beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically.
Rosamond thought, “Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.” Aloud
she said, “What have you been doing lately?”
“I? Oh, minding the house—pouring out syrup—pretending to be amiable
and contented—learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.”
“It is a wretched life for you.”
“No,” said Mary, curtly, with a little toss of her head. “I think my
life is pleasanter than your Miss Morgan’s.”
“Yes; but Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young.”
“She is interesting to herself, I suppose; and I am not at all sure
that everything gets easier as one gets older.”
“No,” said Rosamond, reflectively; “one wonders what such people do,
without any prospect. To be sure, there is religion as a support. But,”
she added, dimpling, “it is very different with you, Mary. You may have
an offer.”
“Has any one told you he means to make me one?”
“Of course not. I mean, there is a gentleman who may fall in love with
you, seeing you almost every day.”
A certain change in Mary’s face was chiefly determined by the resolve
not to show any change.
“Does that always make people fall in love?” she answered, carelessly;
“it seems to me quite as often a reason for detesting each other.”
“Not when they are interesting and agreeable. I hear that Mr. Lydgate
is both.”
“Oh, Mr. Lydgate!” said Mary, with an unmistakable lapse into
indifference. “You want to know something about him,” she added, not
choosing to indulge Rosamond’s indirectness.
“Merely, how you like him.”
“There is no question of liking at present. My liking always wants some
little kindness to kindle it. I am not magnanimous enough to like
people who speak to me without seeming to see me.”
“Is he so haughty?” said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction. “You
know that he is of good family?”
“No; he did not give that as a reason.”
“Mary! you are the oddest girl. But what sort of looking man is he?
Describe him to me.”
“How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory: heavy
eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid
white hands—and—let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric
pocket-handkerchief. But you will see him. You know this is about the
time of his visits.”
Rosamond blushed a little, but said, meditatively, “I rather like a
haughty manner. I cannot endure a rattling young man.”
“I did not tell you that Mr. Lydgate was haughty; but _il y en a pour
tous les goûts_, as little Mamselle used to say, and if any girl can
choose the particular sort of conceit she would like, I should think it
is you, Rosy.”
“Haughtiness is not conceit; I call Fred conceited.”
“I wish no one said any worse of him. He should be more careful. Mrs.
Waule has been telling uncle that Fred is very unsteady.” Mary spoke
from a girlish impulse which got the better of her judgment. There was
a vague uneasiness associated with the word “unsteady” which she hoped
Rosamond might say something to dissipate. But she purposely abstained
from mentioning Mrs. Waule’s more special insinuation.
“Oh, Fred is horrid!” said Rosamond. She would not have allowed herself
so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary.
“What do you mean by horrid?”
“He is so idle, and makes papa so angry, and says he will not take
orders.”
“I think Fred is quite right.”
“How can you say he is quite right, Mary? I thought you had more sense
of religion.”
“He is not fit to be a clergyman.”
“But he ought to be fit.”—“Well, then, he is not what he ought to be. I
know some other people who are in the same case.”
“But no one approves of them. I should not like to marry a clergyman;
but there must be clergymen.”
“It does not follow that Fred must be one.”
“But when papa has been at the expense of educating him for it! And
only suppose, if he should have no fortune left him?”
“I can suppose that very well,” said Mary, dryly.
“Then I wonder you can defend Fred,” said Rosamond, inclined to push
this point.
“I don’t defend him,” said Mary, laughing; “I would defend any parish
from having him for a clergyman.”
“But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different.”
“Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet.”
“It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. You always take Fred’s
part.”
“Why should I not take his part?” said Mary, lighting up. “He would
take mine. He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige
me.”
“You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary,” said Rosamond, with her
gravest mildness; “I would not tell mamma for the world.”
“What would you not tell her?” said Mary, angrily.
“Pray do not go into a rage, Mary,” said Rosamond, mildly as ever.
“If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that
I would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so,
that I am aware. He certainly never has asked me.”
“Mary, you are always so violent.”
“And you are always so exasperating.”
“I? What can you blame me for?”
“Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the
bell—I think we must go down.”
“I did not mean to quarrel,” said Rosamond, putting on her hat.
“Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a
rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”
“Am I to repeat what you have said?”
“Just as you please. I never say what I am afraid of having repeated.
But let us go down.”
Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long
enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him,
and she herself was so kind as to propose a second favorite song of
his—“Flow on, thou shining river”—after she had sung “Home, sweet home”
(which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of the
sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also as
fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing for a song.
Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and
assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird’s, when Mr.
Lydgate’s horse passed the window.
His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged
patient—who can hardly believe that medicine would not “set him up” if
the doctor were only clever enough—added to his general disbelief in
Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision
of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to
introduce as his niece, though he had never thought it worth while to
speak of Mary Garth in that light. Nothing escaped Lydgate in
Rosamond’s graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice
which the old man’s want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet
gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing
them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with
so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining
Mary more fully than he had done before, saw an adorable kindness in
Rosamond’s eyes. But Mary from some cause looked rather out of temper.
“Miss Rosy has been singing me a song—you’ve nothing to say against
that, eh, doctor?” said Mr. Featherstone. “I like it better than your
physic.”
“That has made me forget how the time was going,” said Rosamond, rising
to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her
flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above her
riding-habit. “Fred, we must really go.”
“Very good,” said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the
best spirits, and wanted to get away.
“Miss Vincy is a musician?” said Lydgate, following her with his eyes.
(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness
that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts
that entered into her _physique:_ she even acted her own character, and
so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
“The best in Middlemarch, I’ll be bound,” said Mr. Featherstone, “let
the next be who she will. Eh, Fred? Speak up for your sister.”
“I’m afraid I’m out of court, sir. My evidence would be good for
nothing.”
“Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle,” said Rosamond, with
a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.
Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she
did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he
of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar
meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden
divine clearance of haze. I think Lydgate turned a little paler than
usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment.
After that, she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of
stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with
him.
Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called
falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.
Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a
little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary
beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly
escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a
circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native
merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was absolutely necessary
to Rosamond’s social romance, which had always turned on a lover and
bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at
all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction seemed to demand
that he should somehow be related to a baronet. Now that she and the
stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than anticipation,
and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life.
She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she held
it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love at
first sight of her. These things happened so often at balls, and why
not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for
it? Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being
fallen in love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent
and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor.
And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being
altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of
distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections
which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of
talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave: in
fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid
interest into her life which was better than any fancied “might-be”
such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.
Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied
and inclined to be silent. Rosamond, whose basis for her structure had
the usual airy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and realistic
imagination when the foundation had been once presupposed; and before
they had ridden a mile she was far on in the costume and introductions
of her wedded life, having determined on her house in Middlemarch, and
foreseen the visits she would pay to her husband’s high-bred relatives
at a distance, whose finished manners she could appropriate as
thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparing
herself thus for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come. There
was nothing financial, still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared
about what were considered refinements, and not about the money that
was to pay for them.
Fred’s mind, on the other hand, was busy with an anxiety which even his
ready hopefulness could not immediately quell. He saw no way of eluding