Middlemarch
“I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?” said Lydgate, really
believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case
of this kind.
“Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, coming to her
mother’s aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.
When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not
care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go on now,
whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have fever in the
house. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on
Thursday. And Pritchard needn’t get up any wine: brandy was the best
thing against infection. “I shall drink brandy,” added Mr. Vincy,
emphatically—as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing
with blank-cartridges. “He’s an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred.
He’d need have some luck by and by to make up for all this—else I don’t
know who’d have an eldest son.”
“Don’t say so, Vincy,” said the mother, with a quivering lip, “if you
don’t want him to be taken from me.”
“It will worret you to death, Lucy; _that_ I can see,” said Mr. Vincy,
more mildly. “However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter.”
(What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow
have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about
his—the Mayor’s—family.) “I’m the last man to give in to the cry about
new doctors, or new parsons either—whether they’re Bulstrode’s men or
not. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will.”
Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he could
be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a
disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he
happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand. Country
practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point
of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He
did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was
somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say—
“Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?— To
go away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been stretched
a corpse!”
Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection,
and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard
Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.
“I’ll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke,” said the Mayor,
who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now
broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes. “To let fever
get unawares into a house like this. There are some things that ought
to be actionable, and are not so— that’s my opinion.”
But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being
instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,
inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for “in point of fact,”
Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions,
which would not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he
afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case. The house
might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody
on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his
side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his
ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his
professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out
biting remarks on Lydgate’s tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get
himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about
cures was never got up by sound practitioners.
This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could
desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but
perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the
weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst
which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself
as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.
However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and
the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some
said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy had
threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him of poisoning her
son. Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate’s passing by was
providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that
Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many people believed
that Lydgate’s coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode;
and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her
information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her
knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son
of Bulstrode’s, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of
evangelical laymen.
She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother,
who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing—
“I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be
sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate.”
“Why, mother,” said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, “you
know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never
heard of Bulstrode before he came here.”
“That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,” said
the old lady, with an air of precision.—“But as to Bulstrode—the report
may be true of some other son.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man.
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly
furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me
this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of
polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and
multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a
lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will
seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round
that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going
everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the
flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with
an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The
scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now
absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own
who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed
to have arranged Fred’s illness and Mr. Wrench’s mistake in order to
bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to
contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to
Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially
since Mr. Lydgate thought the precaution needless. Therefore, while
Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning
after Fred’s illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave
papa and mamma.
Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman;
and Mr. Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account
than on Fred’s. But for his insistence she would have taken no rest:
her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had
always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye
and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights and sounds that
used most to interest her. Fred’s delirium, in which he seemed to be
wandering out of her reach, tore her heart. After her first outburst
against Mr. Wrench she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to
Lydgate. She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his
arm moaning out, “Save my boy.” Once she pleaded, “He has always been
good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother,”—as
if poor Fred’s suffering were an accusation against him. All the
deepest fibres of the mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man
whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the
babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born.
“I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy,” Lydgate would say. “Come down with me
and let us talk about the food.” In that way he led her to the parlor
where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising her into
taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her. There was a
constant understanding between him and Rosamond on these matters. He
almost always saw her before going to the sickroom, and she appealed to
him as to what she could do for mamma. Her presence of mind and
adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it is not
wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itself with
his interest in the case. Especially when the critical stage was
passed, and he began to feel confident of Fred’s recovery. In the more
doubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could,
would rather have remained neutral on Wrench’s account); but after two
consultations, the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there
was every reason to make him assiduous. Morning and evening he was at
Mr. Vincy’s, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became
simply feeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but
conscious of it, so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all, the illness
had made a festival for her tenderness.
Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits, when
old Mr. Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred must
make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not do
without him, and missed his visits sadly. The old man himself was
getting bedridden. Mrs. Vincy told these messages to Fred when he could
listen, and he turned towards her his delicate, pinched face, from
which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the eyes
seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about Mary—wondering
what she felt about his illness. No word passed his lips; but “to hear
with eyes belongs to love’s rare wit,” and the mother in the fulness of
her heart not only divined Fred’s longing, but felt ready for any
sacrifice in order to satisfy him.
“If I can only see my boy strong again,” she said, in her loving folly;
“and who knows?—perhaps master of Stone Court! and he can marry anybody
he likes then.”
“Not if they won’t have me, mother,” said Fred. The illness had made
him childish, and tears came as he spoke.
“Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, secretly
incredulous of any such refusal.
She never left Fred’s side when her husband was not in the house, and
thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone. Lydgate,
naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it seemed that
the brief impersonal conversations they had together were creating that
peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness. They were obliged to look
at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried
through as the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate began to
feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant and one day looked down, or
anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the
next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was that when their
eyes met again, both were more conscious than before. There was no help
for this in science, and as Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed
to be no help for it in folly. It was therefore a relief when neighbors
no longer considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of
seeing Rosamond alone were very much reduced.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the