Middlemarch
“Confound John Waule! I did not mean to make you angry. I didn’t know
you had any reason for being grateful to me. I forgot what a great
service you think it if any one snuffs a candle for you.” Fred also had
his pride, and was not going to show that he knew what had called forth
this outburst of Mary’s.
“Oh, I am not angry, except with the ways of the world. I do like to be
spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I could
understand a little more than I ever hear even from young gentlemen who
have been to college.” Mary had recovered, and she spoke with a
suppressed rippling under-current of laughter pleasant to hear.
“I don’t care how merry you are at my expense this morning,” said Fred,
“I thought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It is a shame you
should stay here to be bullied in that way.”
“Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher,
and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own
way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is
paid for, and never really doing it. Everything here I can do as well
as any one else could; perhaps better than some—Rosy, for example.
Though she is just the sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned
with ogres in fairy tales.”
“_Rosy!_” cried Fred, in a tone of profound brotherly scepticism.
“Come, Fred!” said Mary, emphatically; “you have no right to be so
critical.”
“Do you mean anything particular—just now?”
“No, I mean something general—always.”
“Oh, that I am idle and extravagant. Well, I am not fit to be a poor
man. I should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich.”
“You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it has
not pleased God to call you,” said Mary, laughing.
“Well, I couldn’t do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do
yours as a governess. You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there,
Mary.”
“I never said you ought to be a clergyman. There are other sorts of
work. It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some course and
act accordingly.”
“So I could, if—” Fred broke off, and stood up, leaning against the
mantel-piece.
“If you were sure you should not have a fortune?”
“I did not say that. You want to quarrel with me. It is too bad of you
to be guided by what other people say about me.”
“How can I want to quarrel with you? I should be quarrelling with all
my new books,” said Mary, lifting the volume on the table. “However
naughty you may be to other people, you are good to me.”
“Because I like you better than any one else. But I know you despise
me.”
“Yes, I do—a little,” said Mary, nodding, with a smile.
“You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions
about everything.”
“Yes, I should.” Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly
mistress of the situation. When a conversation has taken a wrong turn
for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.
This was what Fred Vincy felt.
“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always
known—ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some
new fellow who strikes a girl.”
“Let me see,” said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly; “I
must go back on my experience. There is Juliet—she seems an example of
what you say. But then Ophelia had probably known Hamlet a long while;
and Brenda Troil—she had known Mordaunt Merton ever since they were
children; but then he seems to have been an estimable young man; and
Minna was still more deeply in love with Cleveland, who was a stranger.
Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor; but then she did not fall in love
with him. And there are Olivia and Sophia Primrose, and Corinne—they
may be said to have fallen in love with new men. Altogether, my
experience is rather mixed.”
Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers was
very dear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear windows
where observation sat laughingly. He was certainly an affectionate
fellow, and as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with
his old playmate, notwithstanding that share in the higher education of
the country which had exalted his views of rank and income.
“When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could be
a better fellow—could do anything—I mean, if he were sure of being
loved in return.”
“Not of the least use in the world for him to say he _could_ be better.
Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.”
“I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one
woman to love him dearly.”
“I think the goodness should come before he expects that.”
“You know better, Mary. Women don’t love men for their goodness.”
“Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.”
“It is hardly fair to say I am bad.”
“I said nothing at all about you.”
“I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you
love me—if you will not promise to marry me—I mean, when I am able to
marry.”
“If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not
promise ever to marry you.”
“I think that is quite wicked, Mary. If you love me, you ought to
promise to marry me.”
“On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if
I did love you.”
“You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife. Of
course: I am but three-and-twenty.”
“In that last point you will alter. But I am not so sure of any other
alteration. My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less,
be married.”
“Then I am to blow my brains out?”
“No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your
examination. I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully
easy.”
“That is all very fine. Anything is easy to him. Not that cleverness
has anything to do with it. I am ten times cleverer than many men who
pass.”
“Dear me!” said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; “that accounts for
the curates like Mr. Crowse. Divide your cleverness by ten, and the
quotient—dear me!—is able to take a degree. But that only shows you are
ten times more idle than the others.”
“Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?”
“That is not the question—what I want you to do. You have a conscience
of your own, I suppose. There! there is Mr. Lydgate. I must go and tell
my uncle.”
“Mary,” said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; “if you will not give
me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better.”
“I will not give you any encouragement,” said Mary, reddening. “Your
friends would dislike it, and so would mine. My father would think it a
disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not
work!”
Fred was stung, and released her hand. She walked to the door, but
there she turned and said: “Fred, you have always been so good, so
generous to me. I am not ungrateful. But never speak to me in that way
again.”
“Very well,” said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip. His
complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white. Like many a
plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a
plain girl, who had no money! But having Mr. Featherstone’s land in the
background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she
really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.
When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking
her to keep them for him. “I don’t want to spend that money, mother. I
want it to pay a debt with. So keep it safe away from my fingers.”
“Bless you, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy. She doted on her eldest son and
her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two
naughtiest children. The mother’s eyes are not always deceived in their
partiality: she at least can best judge who is the tender,
filial-hearted child. And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.
Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him
particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to
spend the hundred pounds. For the creditor to whom he owed a hundred
and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed by
Mary’s father.
CHAPTER XV.
“Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.
“Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:
“Lo! she turns—immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight’s aged truth—
Many-namèd Nature!”
A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is
observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty
ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer
(for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so
much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any
one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had
seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all
must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed,
counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as
a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—known merely as a
cluster of signs for his neighbors’ false suppositions. There was a
general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common
country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was
significant of great things being expected from him. For everybody’s
family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have
immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish
or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher
intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients’ immovable conviction, and
was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were
opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in
Wrench and “the strengthening treatment” regarding Toller and “the
lowering system” as medical perdition. For the heroic times of copious
bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of
thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad
name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally—as if, for example,
it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with
blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The strengtheners
and the lowerers were all “clever” men in somebody’s opinion, which is
really as much as can be said for any living talents. Nobody’s
imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could
know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians, who
alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the
smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a general