Middlemarch
have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up. That is
what I tell Ladislaw. He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go into
everything. We are working at capital punishment. We shall do a great
deal together, Ladislaw and I.”
“Yes,” said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, “Sir James has
been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon
in your management of the estate—that you are thinking of having the
farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that
Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!”—she went on,
clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous
manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. “If I were at home
still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you
and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised my
cottages, Sir James says.”
“Chettam is a little hasty, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, coloring
slightly; “a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything
of the kind. I never said I should _not_ do it, you know.”
“He only feels confident that you will do it,” said Dorothea, in a
voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a
credo, “because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for
the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made
better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes,
uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one
sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those
poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the
back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason
why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me
stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and
coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in
the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in
what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the
neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward
and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils
which lie under our own hands.”
Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten
everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked:
an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her
marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear. For
the moment, Will’s admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of
remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a
woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having
intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad
oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case of good Mr.
Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a
stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece. He could not
immediately find any other mode of expressing himself than that of
rising, fixing his eye-glass, and fingering the papers before him. At
last he said—
“There is something in what you say, my dear, something in what you
say—but not everything—eh, Ladislaw? You and I don’t like our pictures
and statues being found fault with. Young ladies are a little ardent,
you know—a little one-sided, my dear. Fine art, poetry, that kind of
thing, elevates a nation—_emollit mores_—you understand a little Latin
now. But—eh? what?”
These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had come in to
say that the keeper had found one of Dagley’s boys with a leveret in
his hand just killed.
“I’ll come, I’ll come. I shall let him off easily, you know,” said Mr.
Brooke aside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.
“I hope you feel how right this change is that I—that Sir James wishes
for,” said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.
“I do, now I have heard you speak about it. I shall not forget what you
have said. But can you think of something else at this moment? I may
not have another opportunity of speaking to you about what has
occurred,” said Will, rising with a movement of impatience, and holding
the back of his chair with both hands.
“Pray tell me what it is,” said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and
going to the open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and
wagging his tail. She leaned her back against the window-frame, and
laid her hand on the dog’s head; for though, as we know, she was not
fond of pets that must be held in the hands or trodden on, she was
always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to
decline their advances.
Will followed her only with his eyes and said, “I presume you know that
Mr. Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house.”
“No, I did not,” said Dorothea, after a moment’s pause. She was
evidently much moved. “I am very, very sorry,” she added, mournfully.
She was thinking of what Will had no knowledge of—the conversation
between her and her husband in the darkness; and she was anew smitten
with hopelessness that she could influence Mr. Casaubon’s action. But
the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Will that it was not all
given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not been visited by the
idea that Mr. Casaubon’s dislike and jealousy of him turned upon
herself. He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation: of delight
that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home,
without suspicion and without stint—of vexation because he was of too
little account with her, was not formidable enough, was treated with an
unhesitating benevolence which did not flatter him. But his dread of
any change in Dorothea was stronger than his discontent, and he began
to speak again in a tone of mere explanation.
“Mr. Casaubon’s reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position here
which he considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin. I have told him
that I cannot give way on this point. It is a little too hard on me to
expect that my course in life is to be hampered by prejudices which I
think ridiculous. Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than
a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its
meaning. I would not have accepted the position if I had not meant to
make it useful and honorable. I am not bound to regard family dignity
in any other light.”
Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether in the
wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.
“It is better for us not to speak on the subject,” she said, with a
tremulousness not common in her voice, “since you and Mr. Casaubon
disagree. You intend to remain?” She was looking out on the lawn, with
melancholy meditation.
“Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now,” said Will, in a tone of
almost boyish complaint.
“No,” said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, “hardly ever. But
I shall hear of you. I shall know what you are doing for my uncle.”
“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell
me anything.”
“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an
exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at
Lowick.”
“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.
“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”
He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I
mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more
than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of
my own, and it comforts me.”
“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power
against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with
darkness narrower.”
“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”
“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her
hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else
geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with
it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little
girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have
desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and
I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite
well how my days go at Lowick.”
“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather
wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond
children who were talking confidentially of birds.
“What is _your_ religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know
about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”
“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I
am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t
like.”
“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said
Dorothea, smiling.
“Now you are subtle,” said Will.
“Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don’t feel as if I
were subtle,” said Dorothea, playfully. “But how long my uncle is! I
must go and look for him. I must really go on to the Hall. Celia is
expecting me.”
Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said that he
would step into the carriage and go with Dorothea as far as Dagley’s,
to speak about the small delinquent who had been caught with the
leveret. Dorothea renewed the subject of the estate as they drove
along, but Mr. Brooke, not being taken unawares, got the talk under his
own control.
“Chettam, now,” he replied; “he finds fault with me, my dear; but I
should not preserve my game if it were not for Chettam, and he can’t
say that that expense is for the sake of the tenants, you know. It’s a
little against my feeling:—poaching, now, if you come to look into it—I
have often thought of getting up the subject. Not long ago, Flavell,
the Methodist preacher, was brought up for knocking down a hare that
came across his path when he and his wife were walking out together. He
was pretty quick, and knocked it on the neck.”
“That was very brutal, I think,” said Dorothea.
“Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a Methodist
preacher, you know. And Johnson said, ‘You may judge what a hypo_crite_
he is.’ And upon my word, I thought Flavell looked very little like
‘the highest style of man’—as somebody calls the Christian—Young, the
poet Young, I think—you know Young? Well, now, Flavell in his shabby
black gaiters, pleading that he thought the Lord had sent him and his
wife a good dinner, and he had a right to knock it down, though not a
mighty hunter before the Lord, as Nimrod was—I assure you it was rather
comic: Fielding would have made something of it—or Scott, now—Scott
might have worked it up. But really, when I came to think of it, I
couldn’t help liking that the fellow should have a bit of hare to say
grace over. It’s all a matter of prejudice—prejudice with the law on
its side, you know—about the stick and the gaiters, and so on. However,
it doesn’t do to reason about things; and law is law. But I got Johnson
to be quiet, and I hushed the matter up. I doubt whether Chettam would
not have been more severe, and yet he comes down on me as if I were the
hardest man in the county. But here we are at Dagley’s.”
Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is
wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we
are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to
change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on
their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing
how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never