Middlemarch
everything as lightly as he intended it. She had an exquisite tact and
insight in relation to all points of manners; but the people she lived
among were blunderers and busybodies. However, the mistake should go no
farther. He resolved—and kept his resolution—that he would not go to
Mr. Vincy’s except on business.
Rosamond became very unhappy. The uneasiness first stirred by her
aunt’s questions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had
not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly
come—into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes
out the hopes of mortals. The world would have a new dreariness for
her, as a wilderness that a magician’s spells had turned for a little
while into a garden. She felt that she was beginning to know the pang
of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of
such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last
six months. Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as
Ariadne—as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full
of costumes and no hope of a coach.
There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike
called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage which is an
apology for everything (in literature and the drama). Happily Rosamond
did not think of committing any desperate act: she plaited her fair
hair as beautifully as usual, and kept herself proudly calm. Her most
cheerful supposition was that her aunt Bulstrode had interfered in some
way to hinder Lydgate’s visits: everything was better than a
spontaneous indifference in him. Any one who imagines ten days too
short a time—not for falling into leanness, lightness, or other
measurable effects of passion, but—for the whole spiritual circuit of
alarmed conjecture and disappointment, is ignorant of what can go on in
the elegant leisure of a young lady’s mind.
On the eleventh day, however, Lydgate when leaving Stone Court was
requested by Mrs. Vincy to let her husband know that there was a marked
change in Mr. Featherstone’s health, and that she wished him to come to
Stone Court on that day. Now Lydgate might have called at the
warehouse, or might have written a message on a leaf of his pocket-book
and left it at the door. Yet these simple devices apparently did not
occur to him, from which we may conclude that he had no strong
objection to calling at the house at an hour when Mr. Vincy was not at
home, and leaving the message with Miss Vincy. A man may, from various
motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would
be gratified that nobody missed him. It would be a graceful, easy way
of piecing on the new habits to the old, to have a few playful words
with Rosamond about his resistance to dissipation, and his firm resolve
to take long fasts even from sweet sounds. It must be confessed, also,
that momentary speculations as to all the possible grounds for Mrs.
Bulstrode’s hints had managed to get woven like slight clinging hairs
into the more substantial web of his thoughts.
Miss Vincy was alone, and blushed so deeply when Lydgate came in that
he felt a corresponding embarrassment, and instead of any playfulness,
he began at once to speak of his reason for calling, and to beg her,
almost formally, to deliver the message to her father. Rosamond, who at
the first moment felt as if her happiness were returning, was keenly
hurt by Lydgate’s manner; her blush had departed, and she assented
coldly, without adding an unnecessary word, some trivial chain-work
which she had in her hands enabling her to avoid looking at Lydgate
higher than his chin. In all failures, the beginning is certainly the
half of the whole. After sitting two long moments while he moved his
whip and could say nothing, Lydgate rose to go, and Rosamond, made
nervous by her struggle between mortification and the wish not to
betray it, dropped her chain as if startled, and rose too,
mechanically. Lydgate instantaneously stooped to pick up the chain.
When he rose he was very near to a lovely little face set on a fair
long neck which he had been used to see turning about under the most
perfect management of self-contented grace. But as he raised his eyes
now he saw a certain helpless quivering which touched him quite newly,
and made him look at Rosamond with a questioning flash. At this moment
she was as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old:
she felt that her tears had risen, and it was no use to try to do
anything else than let them stay like water on a blue flower or let
them fall over her cheeks, even as they would.
That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it
shook flirtation into love. Remember that the ambitious man who was
looking at those Forget-me-nots under the water was very warm-hearted
and rash. He did not know where the chain went; an idea had thrilled
through the recesses within him which had a miraculous effect in
raising the power of passionate love lying buried there in no sealed
sepulchre, but under the lightest, easily pierced mould. His words were
quite abrupt and awkward; but the tone made them sound like an ardent,
appealing avowal.
“What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me, pray.”
Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before. I am not sure
that she knew what the words were: but she looked at Lydgate and the
tears fell over her cheeks. There could have been no more complete
answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else,
completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief
that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually
put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly—he was used
to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and kissed each of the two
large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding,
but it was a short way. Rosamond was not angry, but she moved backward
a little in timid happiness, and Lydgate could now sit near her and
speak less incompletely. Rosamond had to make her little confession,
and he poured out words of gratitude and tenderness with impulsive
lavishment. In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose
soul was not his own, but the woman’s to whom he had bound himself.
He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just
returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long
before he heard of Mr. Featherstone’s demise. The felicitous word
“demise,” which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits
even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power,
and communicates its definiteness to our action. Considered as a
demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that
Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial, without even
an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy hated both
solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe struck about a testator, or
sang a hymn on the title to real property? Mr. Vincy was inclined to
take a jovial view of all things that evening: he even observed to
Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution after all, and would
soon be as fine a fellow as ever again; and when his approbation of
Rosamond’s engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing
facility, passing at once to general remarks on the desirableness of
matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducing from the
whole the appropriateness of a little more punch.
CHAPTER XXXII.
They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk.
—SHAKESPEARE: _Tempest_.
The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone’s
insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a
feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts of the
old man’s blood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of
the family tie and were more visibly numerous now that he had become
bedridden. Naturally: for when “poor Peter” had occupied his arm-chair
in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook
prepares boiling water could have been less welcome on a hearth which
they had reasons for preferring, than those persons whose Featherstone
blood was ill-nourished, not from penuriousness on their part, but from
poverty. Brother Solomon and Sister Jane were rich, and the family
candor and total abstinence from false politeness with which they were
always received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the
solemn act of making his will would overlook the superior claims of
wealth. Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to
banish from his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should
have kept away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no
shadow of such claims. They knew Peter’s maxim, that money was a good
egg, and should be laid in a warm nest.
But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and all the needy exiles, held a
different point of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces to
be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there,
from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination. To
the poorer and least favored it seemed likely that since Peter had done
nothing for them in his life, he would remember them at the last. Jonah
argued that men liked to make a surprise of their wills, while Martha
said that nobody need be surprised if he left the best part of his
money to those who least expected it. Also it was not to be thought but
that an own brother “lying there” with dropsy in his legs must come to
feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn’t alter his
will, he might have money by him. At any rate some blood-relations
should be on the premises and on the watch against those who were
hardly relations at all. Such things had been known as forged wills and
disputed wills, which seemed to have the golden-hazy advantage of
somehow enabling non-legatees to live out of them. Again, those who
were no blood-relations might be caught making away with things—and
poor Peter “lying there” helpless! Somebody should be on the watch. But
in this conclusion they were at one with Solomon and Jane; also, some
nephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still greater subtilty as to
what might be done by a man able to “will away” his property and give
himself large treats of oddity, felt in a handsome sort of way that
there was a family interest to be attended to, and thought of Stone
Court as a place which it would be nothing but right for them to visit.
Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs. Cranch, living with some wheeziness in
the Chalky Flats, could not undertake the journey; but her son, as
being poor Peter’s own nephew, could represent her advantageously, and
watch lest his uncle Jonah should make an unfair use of the improbable
things which seemed likely to happen. In fact there was a general sense
running in the Featherstone blood that everybody must watch everybody
else, and that it would be well for everybody else to reflect that the
Almighty was watching him.
Thus Stone Court continually saw one or other blood-relation alighting
or departing, and Mary Garth had the unpleasant task of carrying their
messages to Mr. Featherstone, who would see none of them, and sent her
down with the still more unpleasant task of telling them so. As manager
of the household she felt bound to ask them in good provincial fashion
to stay and eat; but she chose to consult Mrs. Vincy on the point of
extra down-stairs consumption now that Mr. Featherstone was laid up.
“Oh, my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness
and a property. God knows, I don’t grudge them every ham in the
house—only, save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal