Middlemarch
punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water. He was
winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers
should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.
But as it was not eleven o’clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air
towards the tower of St. Botolph’s, Mr. Farebrother’s church, which
stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight. It was the
oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage
worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he
wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at
cards; thinking, “He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may
have his good reasons.” Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it
should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable. “What is
his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along
with it? One must use such brains as are to be found.”
These were actually Lydgate’s first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy’s, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her
music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he
dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and
therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love
with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond
exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was
not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.
Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just
the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman—polished, refined,
docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of life, and
enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of demonstration
that excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate felt sure that if
ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, that
distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music,
that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being
moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years—his more
pressing business was to look into Louis’ new book on Fever, which he
was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and
had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the
specific differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read far
into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details
and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it
necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these
being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,
and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him
that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere
arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power—combining and
constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its
own work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reports of
very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming
down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts
of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect
life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate
regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that
reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in
that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the
inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing
even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his
part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself
able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is
the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and
correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to
pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human
misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first
lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and
transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy
consciousness.
As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
rest of our existence—seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
strength—Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
profession.
“If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,” he thought, “I might
have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did
not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical
profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It
is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly.”
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
apt to accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but
at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the
ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
of mankind—like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
country practice to begin with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her
or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and
compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed
to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise
at her possession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered
every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a
preconceived romance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen
development and climax. In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to
imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious
business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,
as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate
was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch
admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which
she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked
down on the Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond’s cleverness to
discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had
seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,
and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding
their plain dress.
If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the
sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power
of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth
and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do
not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe
of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,
feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was
excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men
might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe
at once that Lydgate could be no exception. His looks and words meant
more to her than other men’s, because she cared more for them: she
thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection
of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which
would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been
conscious of.
For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable
to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in
sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in
practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own
standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own
consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more
variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house. She
found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and
she knew much poetry by heart. Her favorite poem was “Lalla Rookh.”
“The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!”
was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and
the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in
country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals. But
Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous
pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid
aside as soon as she was married? While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a
sisterly faithfulness towards her brother’s family, had two sincere
wishes for Rosamond—that she might show a more serious turn of mind,
and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth corresponded to her
habits.
CHAPTER XVII.
“The clerkly person smiled and said
Promise was a pretty maid,
But being poor she died unwed.”
The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the next evening,
lived in an old parsonage, built of stone, venerable enough to match
the church which it looked out upon. All the furniture too in the house
was old, but with another grade of age—that of Mr. Farebrother’s father
and grandfather. There were painted white chairs, with gilding and
wreaths on them, and some lingering red silk damask with slits in it.
There were engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other celebrated
lawyers of the last century; and there were old pier-glasses to reflect
them, as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas resembling
a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief against the
dark wainscot. This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room into which
Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive him, who were