Middlemarch
century, you know, on the other side of the water. Going on faster than
we are.”
“Why, yes,” said the Rector, taking up the newspaper. “Here is the
‘Trumpet’ accusing you of lagging behind—did you see?”
“Eh? no,” said Mr. Brooke, dropping his gloves into his hat and hastily
adjusting his eye-glass. But Mr. Cadwallader kept the paper in his
hand, saying, with a smile in his eyes—
“Look here! all this is about a landlord not a hundred miles from
Middlemarch, who receives his own rents. They say he is the most
retrogressive man in the county. I think you must have taught them that
word in the ‘Pioneer.’”
“Oh, that is Keck—an illiterate fellow, you know. Retrogressive, now!
Come, that’s capital. He thinks it means destructive: they want to make
me out a destructive, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with that
cheerfulness which is usually sustained by an adversary’s ignorance.
“I think he knows the meaning of the word. Here is a sharp stroke or
two. _If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil
sense of the word—we should say, he is one who would dub himself a
reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is
immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot
bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants
being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his
farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does
not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very
open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any
number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own
pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to
help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather
out at a tenant’s barn-door or make his house look a little less like
an Irish cottier’s. But we all know the wag’s definition of a
philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of
the distance._ And so on. All the rest is to show what sort of
legislator a philanthropist is likely to make,” ended the Rector,
throwing down the paper, and clasping his hands at the back of his
head, while he looked at Mr. Brooke with an air of amused neutrality.
“Come, that’s rather good, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the
paper and trying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did, but
coloring and smiling rather nervously; “that about roaring himself red
at rotten boroughs—I never made a speech about rotten boroughs in my
life. And as to roaring myself red and that kind of thing—these men
never understand what is good satire. Satire, you know, should be true
up to a certain point. I recollect they said that in ‘The Edinburgh’
somewhere—it must be true up to a certain point.”
“Well, that is really a hit about the gates,” said Sir James, anxious
to tread carefully. “Dagley complained to me the other day that he
hadn’t got a decent gate on his farm. Garth has invented a new pattern
of gate—I wish you would try it. One ought to use some of one’s timber
in that way.”
“You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke,
appearing to glance over the columns of the “Trumpet.” “That’s your
hobby, and you don’t mind the expense.”
“I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing for
Parliament,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “They said the last unsuccessful
candidate at Middlemarch—Giles, wasn’t his name?—spent ten thousand
pounds and failed because he did not bribe enough. What a bitter
reflection for a man!”
“Somebody was saying,” said the Rector, laughingly, “that East Retford
was nothing to Middlemarch, for bribery.”
“Nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Brooke. “The Tories bribe, you know:
Hawley and his set bribe with treating, hot codlings, and that sort of
thing; and they bring the voters drunk to the poll. But they are not
going to have it their own way in future—not in future, you know.
Middlemarch is a little backward, I admit—the freemen are a little
backward. But we shall educate them—we shall bring them on, you know.
The best people there are on our side.”
“Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm,” remarked
Sir James. “He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm.”
“And that if you got pelted,” interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, “half the
rotten eggs would mean hatred of your committee-man. Good heavens!
Think what it must be to be pelted for wrong opinions. And I seem to
remember a story of a man they pretended to chair and let him fall into
a dust-heap on purpose!”
“Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one’s coat,” said the
Rector. “I confess that’s what I should be afraid of, if we parsons had
to stand at the hustings for preferment. I should be afraid of their
reckoning up all my fishing days. Upon my word, I think the truth is
the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
“The fact is,” said Sir James, “if a man goes into public life he must
be prepared for the consequences. He must make himself proof against
calumny.”
“My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know,” said Mr. Brooke.
“But how will you make yourself proof against calumny? You should read
history—look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of
thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. But what is that
in Horace?—_fiat justitia, ruat_ … something or other.”
“Exactly,” said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual. “What I
mean by being proof against calumny is being able to point to the fact
as a contradiction.”
“And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one’s
self,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
But it was Sir James’s evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke.
“Well, you know, Chettam,” he said, rising, taking up his hat and
leaning on his stick, “you and I have a different system. You are all
for outlay with your farms. I don’t want to make out that my system is
good under all circumstances—under all circumstances, you know.”
“There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,” said Sir
James. “Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair
valuation. What do you say, Cadwallader?”
“I agree with you. If I were Brooke, I would choke the ‘Trumpet’ at
once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving
him _carte blanche_ about gates and repairs: that’s my view of the
political situation,” said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking
his thumbs in his armholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.
“That’s a showy sort of thing to do, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But I
should like you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his
tenants for arrears as little as I have. I let the old tenants stay on.
I’m uncommonly easy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy. I have my own
ideas, and I take my stand on them, you know. A man who does that is
always charged with eccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of
thing. When I change my line of action, I shall follow my own ideas.”
After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had
omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly
good-by.
“I didn’t want to take a liberty with Brooke,” said Sir James; “I see
he is nettled. But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of
fact no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms.”
“I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,” said the
Rector. “But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling
another. You wanted to frighten him away from expense, and we want to
frighten him into it. Better let him try to be popular and see that his
character as a landlord stands in his way. I don’t think it signifies
two straws about the ‘Pioneer,’ or Ladislaw, or Brooke’s speechifying
to the Middlemarchers. But it does signify about the parishioners in
Tipton being comfortable.”
“Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack,” said Mrs.
Cadwallader. “You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad
management, and then we should all have pulled together. If you put him
a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences. It was all
very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas.”
CHAPTER XXXIX.
“If, as I have, you also doe,
Vertue attired in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From prophane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they doe, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.”
—DR. DONNE.
Sir James Chettam’s mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing
anxiety to “act on Brooke,” once brought close to his constant belief
in Dorothea’s capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a
little plan; namely, to plead Celia’s indisposition as a reason for
fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the
Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of
the situation concerning the management of the estate.
In this way it happened that one day near four o’clock, when Mr. Brooke
and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs.
Casaubon was announced.
Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and,
obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging
sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding
several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a
lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant
residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier
images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric
particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from
an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one
observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the
adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which
might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed
the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is
transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those
touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a
man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy
in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top
differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too,
was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him
cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him,
and his point of view shifted as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s
entrance was the freshness of morning.
“Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now,” said Mr. Brooke, meeting and
kissing her. “You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose. That’s
right. We must not have you getting too learned for a woman, you know.”
“There is no fear of that, uncle,” said Dorothea, turning to Will and
shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of
greeting, but went on answering her uncle. “I am very slow. When I want
to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts. I
find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages.”
She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently
preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He
was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming
had anything to do with him.
“Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was
good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt to run away with us,
you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. I