Middlemarch
in hurriedly, whip in hand. “We have nothing to do with them here.
Farebrother has been doing the work—what there was—without pay, and if
pay is to be given, it should be given to him. I call it a confounded
job to take the thing away from Farebrother.”
“I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give their remarks a
personal bearing,” said Mr. Plymdale. “I shall vote for the appointment
of Mr. Tyke, but I should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt hadn’t hinted
it, that I was a Servile Crawler.”
“I disclaim any personalities. I expressly said, if I may be allowed to
repeat, or even to conclude what I was about to say—”
“Ah, here’s Minchin!” said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody turned
away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior
gifts in Middlemarch. “Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right side,
eh?”
“I hope so,” said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and
there; “at whatever cost to my feelings.”
“If there’s any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man who is
turned out, I think,” said Mr. Frank Hawley.
“I confess I have feelings on the other side also. I have a divided
esteem,” said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands. “I consider Mr. Tyke an
exemplary man—none more so—and I believe him to be proposed from
unimpeachable motives. I, for my part, wish that I could give him my
vote. But I am constrained to take a view of the case which gives the
preponderance to Mr. Farebrother’s claims. He is an amiable man, an
able preacher, and has been longer among us.”
Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent. Mr. Plymdale settled his
cravat, uneasily.
“You don’t set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman ought to
be, I hope,” said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier, who had just come
in. “I have no ill-will towards him, but I think we owe something to
the public, not to speak of anything higher, in these appointments. In
my opinion Farebrother is too lax for a clergyman. I don’t wish to
bring up particulars against him; but he will make a little attendance
here go as far as he can.”
“And a devilish deal better than too much,” said Mr. Hawley, whose bad
language was notorious in that part of the county. “Sick people can’t
bear so much praying and preaching. And that methodistical sort of
religion is bad for the spirits—bad for the inside, eh?” he added,
turning quickly round to the four medical men who were assembled.
But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen,
with whom there were greetings more or less cordial. These were the
Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of St. Peter’s, Mr. Bulstrode, and our
friend Mr. Brooke of Tipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put
on the board of directors in his turn, but had never before attended,
his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode’s exertions. Lydgate was
the only person still expected.
Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale and
self-restrained as usual. Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical, wished
for the appointment of his friend Mr. Tyke, a zealous able man, who,
officiating at a chapel of ease, had not a cure of souls too extensive
to leave him ample time for the new duty. It was desirable that
chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with a fervent
intention: they were peculiar opportunities for spiritual influence;
and while it was good that a salary should be allotted, there was the
more need for scrupulous watching lest the office should be perverted
into a mere question of salary. Mr. Thesiger’s manner had so much quiet
propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.
Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter. He had not
himself attended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he had a
strong interest in whatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was
most happy to meet the gentlemen present on any public question—“any
public question, you know,” Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod of
perfect understanding. “I am a good deal occupied as a magistrate, and
in the collection of documentary evidence, but I regard my time as
being at the disposal of the public—and, in short, my friends have
convinced me that a chaplain with a salary—a salary, you know—is a very
good thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and vote for the
appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an unexceptionable man,
apostolic and eloquent and everything of that kind—and I am the last
man to withhold my vote—under the circumstances, you know.”
“It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side of the
question, Mr. Brooke,” said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was afraid of nobody,
and was a Tory suspicious of electioneering intentions. “You don’t seem
to know that one of the worthiest men we have has been doing duty as
chaplain here for years without pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed to
supersede him.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Hawley,” said Mr. Bulstrode. “Mr. Brooke has been fully
informed of Mr. Farebrother’s character and position.”
“By his enemies,” flashed out Mr. Hawley.
“I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here,” said Mr.
Thesiger.
“I’ll swear there is, though,” retorted Mr. Hawley.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, “the merits of the
question may be very briefly stated, and if any one present doubts that
every gentleman who is about to give his vote has not been fully
informed, I can now recapitulate the considerations that should weigh
on either side.”
“I don’t see the good of that,” said Mr. Hawley. “I suppose we all know
whom we mean to vote for. Any man who wants to do justice does not wait
till the last minute to hear both sides of the question. I have no time
to lose, and I propose that the matter be put to the vote at once.”
A brief but still hot discussion followed before each person wrote
“Tyke” or “Farebrother” on a piece of paper and slipped it into a glass
tumbler; and in the mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.
“I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present,” said Mr.
Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice. Then, looking up at Lydgate—
“There is a casting-vote still to be given. It is yours, Mr. Lydgate:
will you be good enough to write?”
“The thing is settled now,” said Mr. Wrench, rising. “We all know how
Mr. Lydgate will vote.”
“You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir,” said Lydgate,
rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.
“I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode. Do you
regard that meaning as offensive?”
“It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist from voting with
him on that account.” Lydgate immediately wrote down “Tyke.”
So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate
continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode. He was really uncertain whether
Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness
told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should
have voted for Mr. Farebrother. The affair of the chaplaincy remained a
sore point in his memory as a case in which this petty medium of
Middlemarch had been too strong for him. How could a man be satisfied
with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances?
No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at
best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.
But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before. The
character of the publican and sinner is not always practically
incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us
scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the
faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes. But
the Vicar of St. Botolph’s had certainly escaped the slightest tincture
of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too
much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in
this—that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and
could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.
“The world has been too strong for _me_, I know,” he said one day to
Lydgate. “But then I am not a mighty man—I shall never be a man of
renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it
easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another
story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last wore the
Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve might keep a man right if
everybody else’s resolve helped him.”
The Vicar’s talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a
Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities
which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr.
Farebrother.
CHAPTER XIX.
“L’ altra vedete ch’ha fatto alla guancia
Della sua palma, sospirando, letto.”
—_Purgatorio_, vii.
When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of
Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born
Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. In those days
the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years
than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry full information
on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the
most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed
tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter’s
fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks with love
and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven and
entered into everybody’s food; it was fermenting still as a
distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German
artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who worked or idled
near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.
One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but
abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had
just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was
looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining
round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the
approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing
a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, “Come here, quick!
else she will have changed her pose.”
Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly
along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne,
then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her
beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and
tenderness. They were just in time to see another figure standing
against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming
girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray
drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from
her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing
somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to
her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking
at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were
fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But
she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused as if to
contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them, immediately
turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who were loitering along
the hall at a little distance off.
“What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?” said the