Middlemarch
must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will’s
sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of
Mr. Casaubon’s charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian
carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed like
a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.
At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer—searched all her husband’s
places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed
especially to her, except that “Synoptical Tabulation,” which was
probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her
guidance. In carrying out this bequest of labor to Dorothea, as in all
else, Mr. Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan
of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense
of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Dorothea’s
competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust
of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a trust for
himself out of Dorothea’s nature: she could do what she resolved to do:
and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to
erect a tomb with his name upon it. (Not that Mr. Casaubon called the
future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But
the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had
time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp
on Dorothea’s life.
The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of
her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her
judgment whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of
faithfulness which is a supreme use. But now her judgment, instead of
being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the
imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the
hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion. The living, suffering man
was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the
retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been
lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had
even blinded his scrupulous care for his own character, and made him
defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honor. As for the
property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been
glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune
which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to
ownership, which she ought not to flinch from. About this property many
troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in
thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?—but was it
not impossible now for her to do that act of justice? Mr. Casaubon had
taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation
against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of
his purpose revolted her.
After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she
locked up again the desks and drawers—all empty of personal words for
her—empty of any sign that in her husband’s lonely brooding his heart
had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to
Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last
injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken.
Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and
one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her
of. Lydgate’s ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as
soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of
making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an
ill-satisfied conscience. “Instead of telling you anything about Mr.
Tyke,” he said, “I should like to speak of another man—Mr. Farebrother,
the Vicar of St. Botolph’s. His living is a poor one, and gives him a
stinted provision for himself and his family. His mother, aunt, and
sister all live with him, and depend upon him. I believe he has never
married because of them. I never heard such good preaching as his—such
plain, easy eloquence. He would have done to preach at St. Paul’s Cross
after old Latimer. His talk is just as good about all subjects:
original, simple, clear. I think him a remarkable fellow: he ought to
have done more than he has done.”
“Why has he not done more?” said Dorothea, interested now in all who
had slipped below their own intention.
“That’s a hard question,” said Lydgate. “I find myself that it’s
uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many
strings pulling at once. Farebrother often hints that he has got into
the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor
clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on. He is very
fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is
hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position. He has no money
to spare—hardly enough to use; and that has led him into
card-playing—Middlemarch is a great place for whist. He does play for
money, and he wins a good deal. Of course that takes him into company a
little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet,
with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most
blameless men I ever knew. He has neither venom nor doubleness in him,
and those often go with a more correct outside.”
“I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,”
said Dorothea; “I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off.”
“I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into
plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things.”
“My uncle says that Mr. Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man,” said
Dorothea, meditatively. She was wishing it were possible to restore the
times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother with a
strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.
“I don’t pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic,” said Lydgate.
“His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a
parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.
Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an
impatience of everything in which the parson doesn’t cut the principal
figure. I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at the Hospital: a good
deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people
uncomfortably aware of him. Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!—he
ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the
birds.”
“True,” said Dorothea. “It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our
farmers and laborers get from their teaching. I have been looking into
a volume of sermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at
Lowick—I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the
Apocalypse. I have always been thinking of the different ways in which
Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a
wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean
that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most
people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than
to condemn too much. But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear
him preach.”
“Do,” said Lydgate; “I trust to the effect of that. He is very much
beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can’t
forgive an able man for differing from them. And that money-winning
business is really a blot. You don’t, of course, see many Middlemarch
people: but Mr. Ladislaw, who is constantly seeing Mr. Brooke, is a
great friend of Mr. Farebrother’s old ladies, and would be glad to sing
the Vicar’s praises. One of the old ladies—Miss Noble, the aunt—is a
wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Ladislaw
gallants her about sometimes. I met them one day in a back street: you
know Ladislaw’s look—a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this
little old maid reaching up to his arm—they looked like a couple
dropped out of a romantic comedy. But the best evidence about
Farebrother is to see him and hear him.”
Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this conversation
occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate’s innocent
introduction of Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual with him in
matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond’s
remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Casaubon. At that moment he
was only caring for what would recommend the Farebrother family; and he
had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the
Vicar, in order to forestall objections. In the weeks since Mr.
Casaubon’s death he had hardly seen Ladislaw, and he had heard no rumor
to warn him that Mr. Brooke’s confidential secretary was a dangerous
subject with Mrs. Casaubon. When he was gone, his picture of Ladislaw
lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the
Lowick living. What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her? Would he hear
of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And
how would he feel when he heard it?—But she could see as well as
possible how he smiled down at the little old maid. An Italian with
white mice!—on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every
one’s feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of
urging his own with iron resistance.
CHAPTER LI.
Party is Nature too, and you shall see
By force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
Genus holds species, both are great or small;
One genus highest, one not high at all;
Each species has its differentia too,
This is not That, and He was never You,
Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
Are like as one to one, or three to three.
No gossip about Mr. Casaubon’s will had yet reached Ladislaw: the air
seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming
election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter
of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice
of. The famous “dry election” was at hand, in which the depths of
public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink. Will
Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time; and though Dorothea’s
widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to
be spoken to on the subject, that when Lydgate sought him out to tell
him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather
waspishly—
“Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs. Casaubon,
and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt. I never go
there. It is Tory ground, where I and the ‘Pioneer’ are no more welcome
than a poacher and his gun.”
The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing
that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the
Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to
contrive that he should go there as little as possible. This was a
shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke’s to Sir James Chettam’s indignant
remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hint in this direction,
concluded that he was to be kept away from the Grange on Dorothea’s
account. Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion? Their
fears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they
imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying
to win the favor of a rich woman.
Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and
Dorothea—until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on
the other side. He began, not without some inward rage, to think of