Middlemarch
“Oh, don’t sew, Mary!” said Ben, pulling her arm down. “Make me a
peacock with this bread-crumb.” He had been kneading a small mass for
the purpose.
“No, no, Mischief!” said Mary, good-humoredly, while she pricked his
hand lightly with her needle. “Try and mould it yourself: you have seen
me do it often enough. I must get this sewing done. It is for Rosamond
Vincy: she is to be married next week, and she can’t be married without
this handkerchief.” Mary ended merrily, amused with the last notion.
“Why can’t she, Mary?” said Letty, seriously interested in this
mystery, and pushing her head so close to her sister that Mary now
turned the threatening needle towards Letty’s nose.
“Because this is one of a dozen, and without it there would only be
eleven,” said Mary, with a grave air of explanation, so that Letty sank
back with a sense of knowledge.
“Have you made up your mind, my dear?” said Mrs. Garth, laying the
letters down.
“I shall go to the school at York,” said Mary. “I am less unfit to
teach in a school than in a family. I like to teach classes best. And,
you see, I must teach: there is nothing else to be done.”
“Teaching seems to me the most delightful work in the world,” said Mrs.
Garth, with a touch of rebuke in her tone. “I could understand your
objection to it if you had not knowledge enough, Mary, or if you
disliked children.”
“I suppose we never quite understand why another dislikes what we like,
mother,” said Mary, rather curtly. “I am not fond of a schoolroom: I
like the outside world better. It is a very inconvenient fault of
mine.”
“It must be very stupid to be always in a girls’ school,” said Alfred.
“Such a set of nincompoops, like Mrs. Ballard’s pupils walking two and
two.”
“And they have no games worth playing at,” said Jim. “They can neither
throw nor leap. I don’t wonder at Mary’s not liking it.”
“What is that Mary doesn’t like, eh?” said the father, looking over his
spectacles and pausing before he opened his next letter.
“Being among a lot of nincompoop girls,” said Alfred.
“Is it the situation you had heard of, Mary?” said Caleb, gently,
looking at his daughter.
“Yes, father: the school at York. I have determined to take it. It is
quite the best. Thirty-five pounds a-year, and extra pay for teaching
the smallest strummers at the piano.”
“Poor child! I wish she could stay at home with us, Susan,” said Caleb,
looking plaintively at his wife.
“Mary would not be happy without doing her duty,” said Mrs. Garth,
magisterially, conscious of having done her own.
“It wouldn’t make me happy to do such a nasty duty as that,” said
Alfred—at which Mary and her father laughed silently, but Mrs. Garth
said, gravely—
“Do find a fitter word than nasty, my dear Alfred, for everything that
you think disagreeable. And suppose that Mary could help you to go to
Mr. Hanmer’s with the money she gets?”
“That seems to me a great shame. But she’s an old brick,” said Alfred,
rising from his chair, and pulling Mary’s head backward to kiss her.
Mary colored and laughed, but could not conceal that the tears were
coming. Caleb, looking on over his spectacles, with the angles of his
eyebrows falling, had an expression of mingled delight and sorrow as he
returned to the opening of his letter; and even Mrs. Garth, her lips
curling with a calm contentment, allowed that inappropriate language to
pass without correction, although Ben immediately took it up, and sang,
“She’s an old brick, old brick, old brick!” to a cantering measure,
which he beat out with his fist on Mary’s arm.
But Mrs. Garth’s eyes were now drawn towards her husband, who was
already deep in the letter he was reading. His face had an expression
of grave surprise, which alarmed her a little, but he did not like to
be questioned while he was reading, and she remained anxiously watching
till she saw him suddenly shaken by a little joyous laugh as he turned
back to the beginning of the letter, and looking at her above his
spectacles, said, in a low tone, “What do you think, Susan?”
She went and stood behind him, putting her hand on his shoulder, while
they read the letter together. It was from Sir James Chettam, offering
to Mr. Garth the management of the family estates at Freshitt and
elsewhere, and adding that Sir James had been requested by Mr. Brooke
of Tipton to ascertain whether Mr. Garth would be disposed at the same
time to resume the agency of the Tipton property. The Baronet added in
very obliging words that he himself was particularly desirous of seeing
the Freshitt and Tipton estates under the same management, and he hoped
to be able to show that the double agency might be held on terms
agreeable to Mr. Garth, whom he would be glad to see at the Hall at
twelve o’clock on the following day.
“He writes handsomely, doesn’t he, Susan?” said Caleb, turning his eyes
upward to his wife, who raised her hand from his shoulder to his ear,
while she rested her chin on his head. “Brooke didn’t like to ask me
himself, I can see,” he continued, laughing silently.
“Here is an honor to your father, children,” said Mrs. Garth, looking
round at the five pair of eyes, all fixed on the parents. “He is asked
to take a post again by those who dismissed him long ago. That shows
that he did his work well, so that they feel the want of him.”
“Like Cincinnatus—hooray!” said Ben, riding on his chair, with a
pleasant confidence that discipline was relaxed.
“Will they come to fetch him, mother?” said Letty, thinking of the
Mayor and Corporation in their robes.
Mrs. Garth patted Letty’s head and smiled, but seeing that her husband
was gathering up his letters and likely soon to be out of reach in that
sanctuary “business,” she pressed his shoulder and said emphatically—
“Now, mind you ask fair pay, Caleb.”
“Oh yes,” said Caleb, in a deep voice of assent, as if it would be
unreasonable to suppose anything else of him. “It’ll come to between
four and five hundred, the two together.” Then with a little start of
remembrance he said, “Mary, write and give up that school. Stay and
help your mother. I’m as pleased as Punch, now I’ve thought of that.”
No manner could have been less like that of Punch triumphant than
Caleb’s, but his talents did not lie in finding phrases, though he was
very particular about his letter-writing, and regarded his wife as a
treasury of correct language.
There was almost an uproar among the children now, and Mary held up the
cambric embroidery towards her mother entreatingly, that it might be
put out of reach while the boys dragged her into a dance. Mrs. Garth,
in placid joy, began to put the cups and plates together, while Caleb
pushing his chair from the table, as if he were going to move to the
desk, still sat holding his letters in his hand and looking on the
ground meditatively, stretching out the fingers of his left hand,
according to a mute language of his own. At last he said—
“It’s a thousand pities Christy didn’t take to business, Susan. I shall
want help by-and-by. And Alfred must go off to the engineering—I’ve
made up my mind to that.” He fell into meditation and finger-rhetoric
again for a little while, and then continued: “I shall make Brooke have
new agreements with the tenants, and I shall draw up a rotation of
crops. And I’ll lay a wager we can get fine bricks out of the clay at
Bott’s corner. I must look into that: it would cheapen the repairs.
It’s a fine bit of work, Susan! A man without a family would be glad to
do it for nothing.”
“Mind you don’t, though,” said his wife, lifting up her finger.
“No, no; but it’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the
nature of business: to have the chance of getting a bit of the country
into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with
their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building
done—that those who are living and those who come after will be the
better for. I’d sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most
honorable work that is.” Here Caleb laid down his letters, thrust his
fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat, and sat upright, but
presently proceeded with some awe in his voice and moving his head
slowly aside—“It’s a great gift of God, Susan.”
“That it is, Caleb,” said his wife, with answering fervor. “And it will
be a blessing to your children to have had a father who did such work:
a father whose good work remains though his name may be forgotten.” She
could not say any more to him then about the pay.
In the evening, when Caleb, rather tired with his day’s work, was
seated in silence with his pocket-book open on his knee, while Mrs.
Garth and Mary were at their sewing, and Letty in a corner was
whispering a dialogue with her doll, Mr. Farebrother came up the
orchard walk, dividing the bright August lights and shadows with the
tufted grass and the apple-tree boughs. We know that he was fond of his
parishioners the Garths, and had thought Mary worth mentioning to
Lydgate. He used to the full the clergyman’s privilege of disregarding
the Middlemarch discrimination of ranks, and always told his mother
that Mrs. Garth was more of a lady than any matron in the town. Still,
you see, he spent his evenings at the Vincys’, where the matron, though
less of a lady, presided over a well-lit drawing-room and whist. In
those days human intercourse was not determined solely by respect. But
the Vicar did heartily respect the Garths, and a visit from him was no
surprise to that family. Nevertheless he accounted for it even while he
was shaking hands, by saying, “I come as an envoy, Mrs. Garth: I have
something to say to you and Garth on behalf of Fred Vincy. The fact is,
poor fellow,” he continued, as he seated himself and looked round with
his bright glance at the three who were listening to him, “he has taken
me into his confidence.”
Mary’s heart beat rather quickly: she wondered how far Fred’s
confidence had gone.
“We haven’t seen the lad for months,” said Caleb. “I couldn’t think
what was become of him.”
“He has been away on a visit,” said the Vicar, “because home was a
little too hot for him, and Lydgate told his mother that the poor
fellow must not begin to study yet. But yesterday he came and poured
himself out to me. I am very glad he did, because I have seen him grow
up from a youngster of fourteen, and I am so much at home in the house
that the children are like nephews and nieces to me. But it is a
difficult case to advise upon. However, he has asked me to come and
tell you that he is going away, and that he is so miserable about his
debt to you, and his inability to pay, that he can’t bear to come
himself even to bid you good by.”
“Tell him it doesn’t signify a farthing,” said Caleb, waving his hand.
“We’ve had the pinch and have got over it. And now I’m going to be as
rich as a Jew.”
“Which means,” said Mrs. Garth, smiling at the Vicar, “that we are
going to have enough to bring up the boys well and to keep Mary at
home.”
“What is the treasure-trove?” said Mr. Farebrother.
“I’m going to be agent for two estates, Freshitt and Tipton; and
perhaps for a pretty little bit of land in Lowick besides: it’s all the
same family connection, and employment spreads like water if it’s once
set going. It makes me very happy, Mr. Farebrother”—here Caleb threw
back his head a little, and spread his arms on the elbows of his
chair—“that I’ve got an opportunity again with the letting of the land,
and carrying out a notion or two with improvements. It’s a most
uncommonly cramping thing, as I’ve often told Susan, to sit on
horseback and look over the hedges at the wrong thing, and not be able
to put your hand to it to make it right. What people do who go into
politics I can’t think: it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement