Middlemarch
then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from his pocket.
“Come, Josh,” he said, in a cajoling tone, “give us a spoonful of
brandy, and a sovereign to pay the way back, and I’ll go. Honor bright!
I’ll go like a bullet, _by_ Jove!”
“Mind,” said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, “if I ever see you
again, I shan’t speak to you. I don’t own you any more than if I saw a
crow; and if you want to own me you’ll get nothing by it but a
character for being what you are—a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue.”
“That’s a pity, now, Josh,” said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head
and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed. “I’m very fond
of you; _by_ Jove, I am! There’s nothing I like better than plaguing
you—you’re so like your mother, and I must do without it. But the
brandy and the sovereign’s a bargain.”
He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken bureau
with his keys. But Raffles had reminded himself by his movement with
the flask that it had become dangerously loose from its leather
covering, and catching sight of a folded paper which had fallen within
the fender, he took it up and shoved it under the leather so as to make
the glass firm.
By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled the flask,
and handed Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him nor speaking to
him. After locking up the bureau again, he walked to the window and
gazed out as impassibly as he had done at the beginning of the
interview, while Raffles took a small allowance from the flask, screwed
it up, and deposited it in his side-pocket, with provoking slowness,
making a grimace at his stepson’s back.
“Farewell, Josh—and if forever!” said Raffles, turning back his head as
he opened the door.
Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane. The gray day had
turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the
grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were
loading the last shocks of corn. Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait
of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot,
looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he
had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie. But there were none to
stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none to show dislike of
his appearance except the little water-rats which rustled away at his
approach.
He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken
by the stage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took
the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he
considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson. Mr.
Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been educated at
an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass well everywhere;
indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel
himself in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of the
entertainment which he thus gave to all the rest of the company.
He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been
entirely successful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask. The
paper with which he had wedged it was a letter signed _Nicholas
Bulstrode_, but Raffles was not likely to disturb it from its present
useful position.
CHAPTER XLII.
How much, methinks, I could despise this man
Were I not bound in charity against it!
—SHAKESPEARE: _Henry VIII_.
One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return
from his wedding-journey was to Lowick Manor, in consequence of a
letter which had requested him to fix a time for his visit.
Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his
illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as
to how far it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life. On
this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion
of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of
himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion
by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable
to him. Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and
perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough
to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of
exalting.
But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the
question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more
harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his
authorship. It is true that this last might be called his central
ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the
largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the
consciousness of the author—one knows of the river by a few streaks
amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the way
with Mr. Casaubon’s hard intellectual labors. Their most characteristic
result was not the “Key to all Mythologies,” but a morbid consciousness
that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably
merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of
him were not to his advantage—a melancholy absence of passion in his
efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession
that he had achieved nothing.
Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed
and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all
against those which came from Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame
possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him
than anything his mind had dwelt on before.
Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw’s
existence, his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his
flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic,
well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea’s nature, always taking on
some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence
covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of: against
certain notions and likings which had taken possession of her mind in
relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss with her. There
was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as
he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be
something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she
read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his
feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty
that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a
penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a
power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too
luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed
vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to
that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.
Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it
seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with
perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early
instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no
tenderness and submission afterwards could remove. To his suspicious
interpretation Dorothea’s silence now was a suppressed rebellion; a
remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an
assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an
irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a
self-approved effort of forbearance. The tenacity with which he strove
to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear
with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.
Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think
it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot
out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the
blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon
had chosen to expound his discontents—his suspicions that he was not
any longer adored without criticism—could have denied that they were
founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong reason to
be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into
account—namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this,
however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like
the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a
companion who would never find it out.
This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly
prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had
occurred since then had brought Mr. Casaubon’s power of suspicious
construction into exasperated activity. To all the facts which he knew,
he added imaginary facts both present and future which became more real
to him than those because they called up a stronger dislike, a more
predominating bitterness. Suspicion and jealousy of Will Ladislaw’s
intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea’s impressions, were
constantly at their weaving work. It would be quite unjust to him to
suppose that he could have entered into any coarse misinterpretation of
Dorothea: his own habits of mind and conduct, quite as much as the open
elevation of her nature, saved him from any such mistake. What he was
jealous of was her opinion, the sway that might be given to her ardent
mind in its judgments, and the future possibilities to which these
might lead her. As to Will, though until his last defiant letter he had
nothing definite which he would choose formally to allege against him,
he felt himself warranted in believing that he was capable of any
design which could fascinate a rebellious temper and an undisciplined
impulsiveness. He was quite sure that Dorothea was the cause of Will’s
return from Rome, and his determination to settle in the neighborhood;
and he was penetrating enough to imagine that Dorothea had innocently
encouraged this course. It was as clear as possible that she was ready
to be attached to Will and to be pliant to his suggestions: they had
never had a _tête-à-tête_ without her bringing away from it some new
troublesome impression, and the last interview that Mr. Casaubon was
aware of (Dorothea, on returning from Freshitt Hall, had for the first
time been silent about having seen Will) had led to a scene which
roused an angrier feeling against them both than he had ever known
before. Dorothea’s outpouring of her notions about money, in the
darkness of the night, had done nothing but bring a mixture of more
odious foreboding into her husband’s mind.
And there was the shock lately given to his health always sadly present
with him. He was certainly much revived; he had recovered all his usual
power of work: the illness might have been mere fatigue, and there
might still be twenty years of achievement before him, which would
justify the thirty years of preparation. That prospect was made the
sweeter by a flavor of vengeance against the hasty sneers of Carp &
Company; for even when Mr. Casaubon was carrying his taper among the
tombs of the past, those modern figures came athwart the dim light, and
interrupted his diligent exploration. To convince Carp of his mistake,
so that he would have to eat his own words with a good deal of
indigestion, would be an agreeable accident of triumphant authorship,
which the prospect of living to future ages on earth and to all
eternity in heaven could not exclude from contemplation. Since, thus,
the prevision of his own unending bliss could not nullify the bitter
savors of irritated jealousy and vindictiveness, it is the less
surprising that the probability of a transient earthly bliss for other