that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode’s purpose.
To non-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other
young practitioner, who had come into the town on Mr. Peacock’s
retirement without further recommendation than his own merits and such
argument for solid professional acquirement as might be gathered from
his having apparently wasted no time on other branches of knowledge. It
was clear that Lydgate, by not dispensing drugs, intended to cast
imputations on his equals, and also to obscure the limit between his
own rank as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in
the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various
grades,—especially against a man who had not been to either of the
English universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside
study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in
Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed, but
hardly sound.

Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified with
Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety of
interchangeable names for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds were
enabled to form the same judgment concerning it.

Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly to the group assembled when he
entered, “I go for Farebrother. A salary, with all my heart. But why
take it from the Vicar? He has none too much—has to insure his life,
besides keeping house, and doing a vicar’s charities. Put forty pounds
in his pocket and you’ll do no harm. He’s a good fellow, is
Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as will serve to
carry orders.”

“Ho, ho! Doctor,” said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger of some
standing—his interjection being something between a laugh and a
Parliamentary disapproval; “we must let you have your say. But what we
have to consider is not anybody’s income—it’s the souls of the poor
sick people”—here Mr. Powderell’s voice and face had a sincere pathos
in them. “He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke. I should vote
against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke—I should indeed.”

“Mr. Tyke’s opponents have not asked any one to vote against his
conscience, I believe,” said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent
speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair were turned with
some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell. “But in my judgment it
behoves us, as Directors, to consider whether we will regard it as our
whole business to carry out propositions emanating from a single
quarter. Will any member of the committee aver that he would have
entertained the idea of displacing the gentleman who has always
discharged the function of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested
to him by parties whose disposition it is to regard every institution
of this town as a machinery for carrying out their own views? I tax no
man’s motives: let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I
do say, that there are influences at work here which are incompatible
with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is usually
dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting themselves
could not afford either morally or financially to avow. I myself am a
layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the divisions
in the Church and—”

“Oh, damn the divisions!” burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and
town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the board, but now looked
in hurriedly, whip in hand. “We have nothing to do with them here.
Farebrother has been doing the work—what there was—without pay, and if
pay is to be given, it should be given to him. I call it a confounded
job to take the thing away from Farebrother.”

“I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give their remarks a
personal bearing,” said Mr. Plymdale. “I shall vote for the appointment
of Mr. Tyke, but I should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt hadn’t hinted
it, that I was a Servile Crawler.”

“I disclaim any personalities. I expressly said, if I may be allowed to
repeat, or even to conclude what I was about to say—”

“Ah, here’s Minchin!” said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody turned
away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior
gifts in Middlemarch. “Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right side,
eh?”

“I hope so,” said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and
there; “at whatever cost to my feelings.”

“If there’s any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man who is
turned out, I think,” said Mr. Frank Hawley.

“I confess I have feelings on the other side also. I have a divided
esteem,” said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands. “I consider Mr. Tyke an
exemplary man—none more so—and I believe him to be proposed from
unimpeachable motives. I, for my part, wish that I could give him my
vote. But I am constrained to take a view of the case which gives the
preponderance to Mr. Farebrother’s claims. He is an amiable man, an
able preacher, and has been longer among us.”

Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent. Mr. Plymdale settled his
cravat, uneasily.

“You don’t set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman ought to
be, I hope,” said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier, who had just come
in. “I have no ill-will towards him, but I think we owe something to
the public, not to speak of anything higher, in these appointments. In
my opinion Farebrother is too lax for a clergyman. I don’t wish to
bring up particulars against him; but he will make a little attendance
here go as far as he can.”

“And a devilish deal better than too much,” said Mr. Hawley, whose bad
language was notorious in that part of the county. “Sick people can’t
bear so much praying and preaching. And that methodistical sort of
religion is bad for the spirits—bad for the inside, eh?” he added,
turning quickly round to the four medical men who were assembled.

But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen,
with whom there were greetings more or less cordial. These were the
Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of St. Peter’s, Mr. Bulstrode, and our
friend Mr. Brooke of Tipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put
on the board of directors in his turn, but had never before attended,
his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode’s exertions. Lydgate was
the only person still expected.

Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale and
self-restrained as usual. Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical, wished
for the appointment of his friend Mr. Tyke, a zealous able man, who,
officiating at a chapel of ease, had not a cure of souls too extensive
to leave him ample time for the new duty. It was desirable that
chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with a fervent
intention: they were peculiar opportunities for spiritual influence;
and while it was good that a salary should be allotted, there was the
more need for scrupulous watching lest the office should be perverted
into a mere question of salary. Mr. Thesiger’s manner had so much quiet
propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.

Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter. He had not
himself attended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he had a
strong interest in whatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was
most happy to meet the gentlemen present on any public question—“any
public question, you know,” Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod of
perfect understanding. “I am a good deal occupied as a magistrate, and
in the collection of documentary evidence, but I regard my time as
being at the disposal of the public—and, in short, my friends have
convinced me that a chaplain with a salary—a salary, you know—is a very
good thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and vote for the
appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an unexceptionable man,
apostolic and eloquent and everything of that kind—and I am the last
man to withhold my vote—under the circumstances, you know.”

“It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side of the
question, Mr. Brooke,” said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was afraid of nobody,
and was a Tory suspicious of electioneering intentions. “You don’t seem
to know that one of the worthiest men we have has been doing duty as
chaplain here for years without pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed to
supersede him.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hawley,” said Mr. Bulstrode. “Mr. Brooke has been fully
informed of Mr. Farebrother’s character and position.”

“By his enemies,” flashed out Mr. Hawley.

“I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here,” said Mr.
Thesiger.

“I’ll swear there is, though,” retorted Mr. Hawley.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, “the merits of the
question may be very briefly stated, and if any one present doubts that
every gentleman who is about to give his vote has not been fully
informed, I can now recapitulate the considerations that should weigh
on either side.”

“I don’t see the good of that,” said Mr. Hawley. “I suppose we all know
whom we mean to vote for. Any man who wants to do justice does not wait
till the last minute to hear both sides of the question. I have no time
to lose, and I propose that the matter be put to the vote at once.”

A brief but still hot discussion followed before each person wrote
“Tyke” or “Farebrother” on a piece of paper and slipped it into a glass
tumbler; and in the mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.

“I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present,” said Mr.
Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice. Then, looking up at Lydgate—

“There is a casting-vote still to be given. It is yours, Mr. Lydgate:
will you be good enough to write?”

“The thing is settled now,” said Mr. Wrench, rising. “We all know how
Mr. Lydgate will vote.”

“You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir,” said Lydgate,
rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.

“I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode. Do you
regard that meaning as offensive?”

“It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist from voting with
him on that account.” Lydgate immediately wrote down “Tyke.”

So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate
continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode. He was really uncertain whether
Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness
told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should
have voted for Mr. Farebrother. The affair of the chaplaincy remained a
sore point in his memory as a case in which this petty medium of
Middlemarch had been too strong for him. How could a man be satisfied
with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances?
No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at
best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before. The
character of the publican and sinner is not always practically
incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us
scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the
faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes. But
the Vicar of St. Botolph’s had certainly escaped the slightest tincture
of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too
much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in
this—that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and
could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.

“The world has been too strong for _me_, I know,” he said one day to
Lydgate. “But then I am not a mighty man—I shall never be a man of
renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it
easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another
story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last wore the
Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve might keep a man right if
everybody else’s resolve helped him.”

The Vicar’s talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a
Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities
which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr.
Farebrother.

CHAPTER XIX.

“L’ altra vedete ch’ha fatto alla guancia
Della sua palma, sospirando, letto.”
—_Purgatorio_, vii.

When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of
Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born
Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. In those days
the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years
than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry full information
on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the
most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed
tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter’s
fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks with love
and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven and
entered into everybody’s food; it was fermenting still as a
distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German
artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who worked or idled
near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.

One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but
abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had
just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was
looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining
round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the
approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing
a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, “Come here, quick!
else she will have changed her pose.”

Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly
along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne,
then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her
beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and
tenderness. They were just in time to see another figure standing
against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming
girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray
drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from
her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing
somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to
her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking
at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were
fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But
she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused as if to
contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them, immediately
turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who were loitering along
the hall at a little distance off.

“What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?” said the
German, searching in his friend’s face for responding admiration, but
going on volubly without waiting for any other answer. “There lies
antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the
complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty
in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in
its bosom. But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost
what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture.
However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that wonderful left
hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallow _Geistlicher_ was her
father. I saw him parting from her a good while ago, and just now I
found her in that magnificent pose. Only think! he is perhaps rich, and
would like to have her portrait taken. Ah! it is no use looking after
her—there she goes! Let us follow her home!”

“No, no,” said his companion, with a little frown.

“You are singular, Ladislaw. You look struck together. Do you know
her?”

“I know that she is married to my cousin,” said Will Ladislaw,
sauntering down the hall with a preoccupied air, while his German
friend kept at his side and watched him eagerly.

“What! the _Geistlicher_? He looks more like an uncle—a more useful
sort of relation.”

“He is not my uncle. I tell you he is my second cousin,” said Ladislaw,
with some irritation.

“Schön, schön. Don’t be snappish. You are not angry with me for
thinking Mrs. Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw?”

“Angry? nonsense. I have only seen her once before, for a couple of
minutes, when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I left
England. They were not married then. I didn’t know they were coming to
Rome.”

“But you will go to see them now—you will find out what they have for
an address—since you know the name. Shall we go to the post? And you
could speak about the portrait.”

“Confound you, Naumann! I don’t know what I shall do. I am not so
brazen as you.”

“Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you were
an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form
animated by Christian sentiment—a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous
force controlled by spiritual passion.”

“Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her
existence—the divinity passing into higher completeness and all but
exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas. I am amateurish if
you like: I do _not_ think that all the universe is straining towards
the obscure significance of your pictures.”

“But it is, my dear!—so far as it is straining through me, Adolf
Naumann: that stands firm,” said the good-natured painter, putting a
hand on Ladislaw’s shoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the
unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone. “See now! My existence
presupposes the existence of the whole universe—does it _not?_ and my
function is to paint—and as a painter I have a conception which is
altogether _genialisch_, of your great-aunt or second grandmother as a
subject for a picture; therefore, the universe is straining towards
that picture through that particular hook or claw which it puts forth
in the shape of me—not true?”

“But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart
it?—the case is a little less simple then.”

“Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing—picture or no
picture—logically.”

Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his
face broke into sunshiny laughter.

“Come now, my friend—you will help?” said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.

“No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody’s service
as models. And you want to express too much with your painting. You
would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which
every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against. And
what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff
after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them.
Language is a finer medium.”

“Yes, for those who can’t paint,” said Naumann. “There you have perfect
right. I did not recommend you to paint, my friend.”

The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose to
appear stung. He went on as if he had not heard.

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being
vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you
with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about
representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored
superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference
in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman
whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice,
pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of
her.”

“I see, I see. You are jealous. No man must presume to think that he
can paint your ideal. This is serious, my friend! Your great-aunt! ‘Der
Neffe als Onkel’ in a tragic sense—_ungeheuer!_”

“You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt
again.”

“How is she to be called then?”

“Mrs. Casaubon.”

“Good. Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find that
she very much wishes to be painted?”

“Yes, suppose!” said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone,
intended to dismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated by
ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was
he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something
had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are
continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas
which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will
clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

CHAPTER XX.

“A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
    The meeting eyes of love.”

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a
handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment
to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled
by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will
sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon
was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.

Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state
even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion,
the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a
self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her
own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with
the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage
chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had
thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he
must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share;
moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was
beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole
hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral
images and trophies gathered from afar.

But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike
strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in
Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go
hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently
survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr.
Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced
courier. She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to
the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the
most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive
out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,
away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too
seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a
knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and
traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome
may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let
them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken
revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the
notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of
the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small
allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their
mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the
quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,
and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself
plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight
of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it
formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;
but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and
basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,
where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep
degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but
yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the
long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the
monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious
ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of
breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and
fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,
preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other
like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of
dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of
St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the
attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics
above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading
itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very
exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their
elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs.
Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding,
the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some
faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary,
is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what
is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of
frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of
mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had
a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like
hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die
of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the
quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the
cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have
already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been
like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new
real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from
the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely
relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with
the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden
dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least
admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that
devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she
was almost sure sooner or later to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the
disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not
possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of
her nature heightened its confusion. In this way, the early months of
marriage often are times of critical tumult—whether that of a
shrimp-pool or of deeper waters—which afterwards subsides into cheerful
peace.

But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of
expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable? Oh
waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability
to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his
provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand? And was not
Rome the place in all the world to give free play to such
accomplishments? Besides, had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm especially
dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness
with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?— And that
such weight pressed on Mr. Casaubon was only plainer than before.

All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same,
the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday.
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are
acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few
imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of
married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than
what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether
the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is
felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings
with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician
in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases
too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end
by inverting the quantities.

Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of
flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as
any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any
illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her
marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling
depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had
dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and
winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that
in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and
the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee
delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But
the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on
the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is
impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not
within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on
some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see
the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness
of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she
had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments
to be brought against Mr. Casaubon’s entirely new view of the
Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking that hereafter
she should see this subject which touched him so nearly from the same
high ground whence doubtless it had become so important to him. Again,
the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissal with which he
treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts, was easily
accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and preoccupation in
which she herself shared during their engagement. But now, since they
had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion roused to
tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements,
she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that
her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and
repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judicious Hooker
or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr.
Casaubon’s time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could
not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband’s way of
commenting on the strangely impressive objects around them had begun to
affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best
intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting
himself. What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such
capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by
the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried
preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

When he said, “Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little
longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”—it seemed to her as if
going or staying were alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the
Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted
by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.”

“But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question.

“They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable
of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a
literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical
product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive
thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of
Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome. He is
the painter who has been held to combine the most complete grace of
form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be
the opinion of cognoscenti.”

This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a
clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the
glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew
more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There
is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than
that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in
a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

On other subjects indeed Mr. Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation
and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of
enthusiasm, and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous
direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she
dragged him away from it. But she was gradually ceasing to expect with
her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening
where she followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small
closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the
Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered
parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to
these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of
windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about
the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon,
might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been
encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling—if he would
have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of
tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up
her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in
return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual
knowledge and affection—or if she could have fed her affection with
those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who
has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll,
creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own
love. That was Dorothea’s bent. With all her yearning to know what was
afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for what
was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have
caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of
acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of
a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same
time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these
manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made his clerical
toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those
amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat
of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.

And by a sad contradiction Dorothea’s ideas and resolves seemed like
melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been
but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of
feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all
her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of
despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation,
transforming all hard conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea! she was
certainly troublesome—to herself chiefly; but this morning for the
first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon.

She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to
shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face
all cheerful attention to her husband when he said, “My dear Dorothea,
we must now think of all that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to
our departure. I would fain have returned home earlier that we might
have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my inquiries here have been
protracted beyond their anticipated period. I trust, however, that the
time here has not been passed unpleasantly to you. Among the sights of
Europe, that of Rome has ever been held one of the most striking and in
some respects edifying. I well remember that I considered it an epoch
in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of
Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I
think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has
been applied—‘See Rome and die:’ but in your case I would propose an
emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy
wife.”

Mr. Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious
intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and
concluding with a smile. He had not found marriage a rapturous state,
but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable
husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved
to be.

“I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay—I mean, with the
result so far as your studies are concerned,” said Dorothea, trying to
keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband.

“Yes,” said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes
the word half a negative. “I have been led farther than I had foreseen,
and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which,
though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit. The task,
notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat
laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from that too
continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study which has
been the snare of my solitary life.”

“I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you,” said
Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed
that Mr. Casaubon’s mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to
get to the surface again. I fear there was a little temper in her
reply. “I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you,
and be able to enter a little more into what interests you.”

“Doubtless, my dear,” said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow. “The notes
I have here made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract
them under my direction.”

“And all your notes,” said Dorothea, whose heart had already burned
within her on this subject, so that now she could not help speaking
with her tongue. “All those rows of volumes—will you not now do what
you used to speak of?—will you not make up your mind what part of them
you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast
knowledge useful to the world? I will write to your dictation, or I
will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use.”
Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, ended with a
slight sob and eyes full of tears.

The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly
disturbing to Mr. Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea’s
words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could
have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles as
he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her
husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his
heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. In Mr.
Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those
muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain
as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when
such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are
resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full
acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in
hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those
confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if
they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel outward accuser was
there in the shape of a wife—nay, of a young bride, who, instead of
observing his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the
uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present
herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.
Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a
sensitiveness to match Dorothea’s, and an equal quickness to imagine
more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approbation her
capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden
terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this
worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,—that which sees
vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it
costs to reach them.

For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon’s face
had a quick angry flush upon it.

“My love,” he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, “you may
rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the
different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile
conjectures of ignorant onlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a
temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the
trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn
of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed
equipped for no other. And it were well if all such could be admonished
to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter lies
entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may be
compassed by a narrow and superficial survey.”

This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual
with Mr. Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had
taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains
from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not only his
wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds
the appreciated or desponding author.

Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing
everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship
with her husband’s chief interests?

“My judgment _was_ a very superficial one—such as I am capable of
forming,” she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no
rehearsal. “You showed me the rows of notebooks—you have often spoken
of them—you have often said that they wanted digesting. But I never
heard you speak of the writing that is to be published. Those were very
simple facts, and my judgment went no farther. I only begged you to let
me be of some good to you.”

Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply, taking
up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it. Both were
shocked at their mutual situation—that each should have betrayed anger
towards the other. If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in
ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less
embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is
to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each
other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and
stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively and placed
yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to
find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without
looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the
toughest minds. To Dorothea’s inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed
like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was
a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found
himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had
been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged
him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously
given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just
where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence against
the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given
it a more substantial presence?

Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. To have
reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been
a show of persistent anger which Dorothea’s conscience shrank from,
seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty. However just her
indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give
tenderness. So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr.
Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of
inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the
Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what
was around her. She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would
drive anywhere. It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann
had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at
the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw with
whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical
mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure, and
had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw
lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where
he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which
made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight
on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the
light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and
elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which
they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as
it had been. But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into which all
thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—the reaching
forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least
partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and
despondency.

CHAPTER XXI.

“Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
No contrefeted termes had she
To semen wise.”
—CHAUCER.

It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was
securely alone. But she was presently roused by a knock at the door,
which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, “Come in.” Tantripp
had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the
lobby. The courier had told him that only Mrs. Casaubon was at home,
but he said he was a relation of Mr. Casaubon’s: would she see him?

“Yes,” said Dorothea, without pause; “show him into the salon.” Her
chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him
at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon’s generosity towards
him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about
his career. She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for
active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come
to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent—to remind her of her
husband’s goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be
his helpmate in all kind deeds. She waited a minute or two, but when
she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had
been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than
usual. She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of good-will which is
unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him. He was the elder by
several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for his
transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a shyness
extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his male
companion, while Dorothea became all the calmer with a wondering desire
to put him at ease.

“I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome, until this
morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum,” he said. “I knew you at
once—but—I mean, that I concluded Mr. Casaubon’s address would be found
at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious to pay my respects to him and
you as early as possible.”

“Pray sit down. He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of you,
I am sure,” said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between the
fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair
opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron. The signs of girlish
sorrow in her face were only the more striking. “Mr. Casaubon is much
engaged; but you will leave your address—will you not?—and he will
write to you.”

“You are very good,” said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in
the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had
altered her face. “My address is on my card. But if you will allow me I
will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr. Casaubon is likely to be
at home.”

“He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can
hardly see him except by an appointment. Especially now. We are about
to leave Rome, and he is very busy. He is usually away almost from
breakfast till dinner. But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us.”

Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments. He had never been fond
of Mr. Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation,
would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition. But the idea of this
dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as
important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s
back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry
him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his
mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture
stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the
impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst
into scornful invective.

For an instant he felt that the struggle was causing a queer contortion
of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved it into
nothing more offensive than a merry smile.

Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from
her face too. Will Ladislaw’s smile was delightful, unless you were
angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating
the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve
and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm, and
banishing forever the traces of moodiness. The reflection of that smile
could not but have a little merriment in it too, even under dark
eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, “Something amuses
you?”

“Yes,” said Will, quick in finding resources. “I am thinking of the
sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my
poor sketch with your criticism.”

“My criticism?” said Dorothea, wondering still more. “Surely not. I
always feel particularly ignorant about painting.”

“I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what
was most cutting. You said—I dare say you don’t remember it as I
do—that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you.
At least, you implied that.” Will could laugh now as well as smile.

“That was really my ignorance,” said Dorothea, admiring Will’s
good-humor. “I must have said so only because I never could see any
beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought very
fine. And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome. There
are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy. At first when
I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescos, or with rare
pictures, I feel a kind of awe—like a child present at great ceremonies
where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself in the
presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine
the pictures one by one the life goes out of them, or else is something
violent and strange to me. It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so
much all at once, and not understanding half of it. That always makes
one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine
and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind,
while people talk of the sky.”

“Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be
acquired,” said Will. (It was impossible now to doubt the directness of
Dorothea’s confession.) “Art is an old language with a great many
artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets
out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing. I enjoy the art of
all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to
pieces I should find it made up of many different threads. There is
something in daubing a little one’s self, and having an idea of the
process.”

“You mean perhaps to be a painter?” said Dorothea, with a new direction
of interest. “You mean to make painting your profession? Mr. Casaubon
will like to hear that you have chosen a profession.”

“No, oh no,” said Will, with some coldness. “I have quite made up my
mind against it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been seeing a great
deal of the German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with one of
them. Some are fine, even brilliant fellows—but I should not like to
get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the studio
point of view.”

“That I can understand,” said Dorothea, cordially. “And in Rome it
seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the
world than pictures. But if you have a genius for painting, would it
not be right to take that as a guide? Perhaps you might do better
things than these—or different, so that there might not be so many
pictures almost all alike in the same place.”

There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it into
frankness. “A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that
sort. I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing
well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it
worth while. And I should never succeed in anything by dint of
drudgery. If things don’t come easily to me I never get them.”

“I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,”
said Dorothea, gently. She was rather shocked at this mode of taking
all life as a holiday.

“Yes, I know Mr. Casaubon’s opinion. He and I differ.”

The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Dorothea.
She was all the more susceptible about Mr. Casaubon because of her
morning’s trouble.

“Certainly you differ,” she said, rather proudly. “I did not think of
comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr.
Casaubon’s is not common.”

Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional
impulse to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr.
Casaubon. It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshipping
this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the
husband in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out
of their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no
murder.

“No, indeed,” he answered, promptly. “And therefore it is a pity that
it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want
of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world. If Mr. Casaubon
read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble.”

“I do not understand you,” said Dorothea, startled and anxious.

“I merely mean,” said Will, in an offhand way, “that the Germans have
taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which
are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have
made good roads. When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened
himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read
a Latin treatise written by a German. I was very sorry.”

Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that
vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which
Dorothea would be wounded. Young Mr. Ladislaw was not at all deep
himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in
order to pity another man’s shortcomings.

Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her
husband’s life might be void, which left her no energy to spare for the
question whether this young relative who was so much obliged to him
ought not to have repressed his observation. She did not even speak,
but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in the piteousness of that
thought.

Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather
ashamed, imagining from Dorothea’s silence that he had offended her
still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the
tail-feathers from a benefactor.

“I regretted it especially,” he resumed, taking the usual course from
detraction to insincere eulogy, “because of my gratitude and respect
towards my cousin. It would not signify so much in a man whose talents
and character were less distinguished.”

Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and
said in her saddest recitative, “How I wish I had learned German when I
was at Lausanne! There were plenty of German teachers. But now I can be
of no use.”

There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in
Dorothea’s last words. The question how she had come to accept Mr.
Casaubon—which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that
she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances—was not now to be
answered on any such short and easy method. Whatever else she might be,
she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly
satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel
beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the
melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly
and ingenuously. The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.

She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.
And if Mr. Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his
lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been
an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet. But
he was something more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a benefactor
with collective society at his back, and he was at that moment entering
the room in all the unimpeachable correctness of his demeanor, while
Dorothea was looking animated with a newly roused alarm and regret, and
Will was looking animated with his admiring speculation about her
feelings.

Mr. Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but
he did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose
and explained his presence. Mr. Casaubon was less happy than usual, and
this perhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the
effect might easily have been produced by the contrast of his young
cousin’s appearance. The first impression on seeing Will was one of
sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing
expression. Surely, his very features changed their form, his jaw
looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in
his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis. When he turned his head
quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought
they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the
contrary, stood rayless.

As Dorothea’s eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was perhaps
not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other
causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf
which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the
realities of his lot and not by her own dreams. Yet it was a source of
greater freedom to her that Will was there; his young equality was
agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction. She felt an
immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen any
one who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand
everything.

Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as
well as pleasantly in Rome—had thought his intention was to remain in
South Germany—but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he could
converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary. Ladislaw
understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave.

Dorothea’s eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down
wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head
and looked on the floor. A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she
seated herself beside him, and said—

“Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning. I was wrong. I
fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome.”

“I am glad that you feel that, my dear,” said Mr. Casaubon. He spoke
quietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy
feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.

“But you do forgive me?” said Dorothea, with a quick sob. In her need
for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own
fault. Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its
neck and kiss it?

“My dear Dorothea—‘who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of
heaven nor earth:’—you do not think me worthy to be banished by that
severe sentence,” said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strong
statement, and also to smile faintly.

Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would
insist on falling.

“You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant
consequences of too much mental disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon. In
fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have
received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he abstained, partly from
the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the
moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to
avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was
too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so
exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in
other directions. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little
fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp
despondency of uneasy egoism.

“I think it is time for us to dress,” he added, looking at his watch.
They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we
all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies,
or some new motive is born. Today she had begun to see that she had
been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from
Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there
might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on
his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder
to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from
that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his
strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is
no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness
of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre
of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain
difference.

CHAPTER XXII.

“Nous câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumône,
Et tout en écoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n’en sut jamais rien.”
—ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and
gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation. On the
contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing
her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him
than she had ever observed in any one before. To be sure, the listeners
about Tipton were not highly gifted! Will talked a good deal himself,
but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with such an
unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed a gay
little chime after the great bell. If Will was not always perfect, this
was certainly one of his good days. He described touches of incident
among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could move
about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the
unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and
Catholicism; and passed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful
picture of the enjoyment he got out of the very miscellaneousness of
Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant comparison, and saved
you from seeing the world’s ages as a set of box-like partitions
without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon’s studies, Will observed, had
always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt
any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had
given him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments
stimulated his imagination and made him constructive. Then
occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to Dorothea, and discussed
what she said, as if her sentiment were an item to be considered in the
final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno or the Laocoon. A sense
of contributing to form the world’s opinion makes conversation
particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not without his pride
in his young wife, who spoke better than most women, as indeed he had
perceived in choosing her.

Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon’s statement that
his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and
that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying
in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away
without seeing a studio or two. Would not Mr. Casaubon take her? That
sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a
form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its
population of insects on huge fossils. Will would be happy to conduct
them—not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.

Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him, could not but
ask her if she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her
service during the whole day; and it was agreed that Will should come
on the morrow and drive with them.

Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr.
Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way
to the studio of his friend Adolf Naumann, whom he mentioned as one of
the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only
revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as
mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation
to which the great souls of all periods became as it were
contemporaries. Will added that he had made himself Naumann’s pupil for
the nonce.

“I have been making some oil-sketches under him,” said Will. “I hate
copying. I must put something of my own in. Naumann has been painting
the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a
sketch of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his
Chariot. I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit
him with his excess of meaning. But this time I mean to outdo him in
breadth of intention. I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the
tremendous course of the world’s physical history lashing on the
harnessed dynasties. In my opinion, that is a good mythical
interpretation.” Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon, who received this
offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral
air.

“The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much,” said Dorothea.
“I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give. Do you
intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?”

“Oh yes,” said Will, laughing, “and migrations of races and clearings
of forests—and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can
imagine!”

“What a difficult kind of shorthand!” said Dorothea, smiling towards
her husband. “It would require all your knowledge to be able to read
it.”

Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will. He had a suspicion that he was
being laughed at. But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the
suspicion.

They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present;
his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious
person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so
that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the beautiful
young English lady exactly at that time.

The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his
finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon as
much as he did Dorothea. Will burst in here and there with ardent words
of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend’s work; and
Dorothea felt that she was getting quite new notions as to the
significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones
with the simple country as a background, and of saints with
architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in
their skulls. Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were
gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was
apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not
interested himself.

“I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to
read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures
sooner than yours with the very wide meaning,” said Dorothea, speaking
to Will.

“Don’t speak of my painting before Naumann,” said Will. “He will tell
you, it is all _pfuscherei_, which is his most opprobrious word!”

“Is that true?” said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann, who
made a slight grimace and said—

“Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting. His walk must be
_belles-lettres_. That is wi-ide.”

Naumann’s pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word
satirically. Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr.
Casaubon, while he felt some disgust at the artist’s German accent,
began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.

The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will aside
for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr.
Casaubon, came forward again and said—

“My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a
sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas
Aquinas in my picture there. It is too much to ask; but I so seldom see
just what I want—the idealistic in the real.”

“You astonish me greatly, sir,” said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved
with a glow of delight; “but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been
accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to
you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel
honored. That is to say, if the operation will not be a lengthy one;
and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object to the delay.”

As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had
been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and
worthiest among the sons of men. In that case her tottering faith would
have become firm again.

Naumann’s apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the
sketch went on at once as well as the conversation. Dorothea sat down
and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a
long while before. Every one about her seemed good, and she said to
herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been
full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope. No nature
could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed
in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows,
and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made
manifest.

The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about English
polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched
himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.

Presently Naumann said—“Now if I could lay this by for half an hour and
take it up again—come and look, Ladislaw—I think it is perfect so far.”

Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is
too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret—

“Ah—now—if I could but have had more—but you have other engagements—I
could not ask it—or even to come again to-morrow.”

“Oh, let us stay!” said Dorothea. “We have nothing to do to-day except
go about, have we?” she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon.
“It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible.”

“I am at your service, sir, in the matter,” said Mr. Casaubon, with
polite condescension. “Having given up the interior of my head to
idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work in this way.”

“You are unspeakably good—now I am happy!” said Naumann, and then went
on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he
were considering that. Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round
vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors, and afterwards
turning to Mr. Casaubon, said—

“Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling
to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of
her—not, of course, as you see, for that picture—only as a single
study.”

Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him,
and Dorothea said, at once, “Where shall I put myself?”

Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to
adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected
airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions, when
the painter said, “It is as Santa Clara that I want you to
stand—leaning so, with your cheek against your hand—so—looking at that
stool, please, so!”

Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint’s feet
and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he
was adjusting her arm. All this was impudence and desecration, and he
repented that he had brought her.

The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and
occupied Mr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the
end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear
from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Casaubon would be tired. Naumann
took the hint and said—

“Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife.”

So Mr. Casaubon’s patience held out further, and when after all it
turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect
if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow. On the
morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once. The result of all
was so far from displeasing to Mr. Casaubon, that he arranged for the
purchase of the picture in which Saint Thomas Aquinas sat among the
doctors of the Church in a disputation too abstract to be represented,
but listened to with more or less attention by an audience above. The
Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann declared
himself to be dissatisfied with—he could not, in conscience, engage to
make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangement
was conditional.

I will not dwell on Naumann’s jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon that
evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea’s charm, in all which Will
joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail
of Dorothea’s beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption:
there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what
business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken
of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he
became irritable. And yet, when after some resistance he had consented
to take the Casaubons to his friend’s studio, he had been allured by
the gratification of his pride in being the person who could grant
Naumann such an opportunity of studying her loveliness—or rather her
divineness, for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodily
prettiness were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Tipton and its
neighborhood, as well as Dorothea herself, would have been surprised at
her beauty being made so much of. In that part of the world Miss Brooke
had been only a “fine young woman.”)

“Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann. Mrs. Casaubon is not
to be talked of as if she were a model,” said Will. Naumann stared at
him.

“Schön! I will talk of my Aquinas. The head is not a bad type, after
all. I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered
to have his portrait asked for. Nothing like these starchy doctors for
vanity! It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than
his own.”

“He’s a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb,” said Will, with
gnashing impetuosity. His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were not known to
his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them, and wishing that he
could discharge them all by a check.

Naumann gave a shrug and said, “It is good they go away soon, my dear.
They are spoiling your fine temper.”

All Will’s hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing
Dorothea when she was alone. He only wanted her to take more emphatic
notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her
remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be. He was
rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, which he saw was her
usual state of feeling. The remote worship of a woman throned out of
their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in most cases the
worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by
which his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her
high place. That was precisely what Will wanted. But there were plenty
of contradictions in his imaginative demands. It was beautiful to see
how Dorothea’s eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr.
Casaubon: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been without
that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the husband’s
sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and Will’s longing
to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the less tormenting
because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining it.

Will had not been invited to dine the next day. Hence he persuaded
himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was
the middle of the day, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.

Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will
had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him,
especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit. When he entered
she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for Celia. She
greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course, and said at
once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand—

“I am so glad you are come. Perhaps you understand all about cameos,
and can tell me if these are really good. I wished to have you with us
in choosing them, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought there was not
time. He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three
days. I have been uneasy about these cameos. Pray sit down and look at
them.”

“I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about
these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat. And the color is
fine: it will just suit you.”

“Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion. You
saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty—at least
I think so. We were never so long away from each other in our lives
before. She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life. I found
out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos, and I
should be sorry for them not to be good—after their kind.” Dorothea
added the last words with a smile.

“You seem not to care about cameos,” said Will, seating himself at some
distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.

“No, frankly, I don’t think them a great object in life,” said
Dorothea.

“I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should
have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.”

“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I
should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then
all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life
and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment
of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from
it.”

“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You
might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you
carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn
evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to
enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s
character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no
use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of
when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all
the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing
over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues
of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.” Will had gone
further than he intended, and checked himself. But Dorothea’s thought
was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she answered
without any special emotion—

“Indeed you mistake me. I am not a sad, melancholy creature. I am never
unhappy long together. I am angry and naughty—not like Celia: I have a
great outburst, and then all seems glorious again. I cannot help
believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way. I should be quite
willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don’t know
the reason of—so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness
rather than beauty. The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but
the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous.
Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble—something that I
might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian
Hill; but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the
best kind among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so.”

“Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things
want that soil to grow in.”

“Oh dear,” said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
of her anxiety; “I see it must be very difficult to do anything good. I
have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would
look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be
put on the wall.”

Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but
changed her mind and paused.

“You are too young—it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts,”
said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head habitual to
him. “You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous—as
if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like the boy in the
legend. You have been brought up in some of those horrible notions that
choose the sweetest women to devour—like Minotaurs. And now you will go
and be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick: you will be buried
alive. It makes me savage to think of it! I would rather never have
seen you than think of you with such a prospect.”

Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
much kindness in it for Dorothea’s heart, which had always been giving
out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
gentle smile—

“It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you did
not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
life. But Lowick is my chosen home.”

The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent
for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an air of saying at
last what had been in her mind beforehand.

“I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that
you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak
hastily.”

“What was it?” said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity
quite new in her. “I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it
goes. I dare say I shall have to retract.”

“I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German—I mean, for
the subjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in. I have been thinking
about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Casaubon’s learning he must
have before him the same materials as German scholars—has he not?”
Dorothea’s timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was
in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the
adequacy of Mr. Casaubon’s learning.

“Not exactly the same materials,” said Will, thinking that he would be
duly reserved. “He is not an Orientalist, you know. He does not profess
to have more than second-hand knowledge there.”

“But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written
a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern
things; and they are still used. Why should Mr. Casaubon’s not be
valuable, like theirs?” said Dorothea, with more remonstrant energy.
She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been having
in her own mind.

“That depends on the line of study taken,” said Will, also getting a
tone of rejoinder. “The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as changing
as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view.
Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements, or a book to
refute Paracelsus? Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling
a little way after men of the last century—men like Bryant—and
correcting their mistakes?—living in a lumber-room and furbishing up
broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”

“How can you bear to speak so lightly?” said Dorothea, with a look
between sorrow and anger. “If it were as you say, what could be sadder
than so much ardent labor all in vain? I wonder it does not affect you
more painfully, if you really think that a man like Mr. Casaubon, of so
much goodness, power, and learning, should in any way fail in what has
been the labor of his best years.” She was beginning to be shocked that
she had got to such a point of supposition, and indignant with Will for
having led her to it.

“You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling,” said
Will. “But if you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit. I am not in
a position to express my feeling toward Mr. Casaubon: it would be at
best a pensioner’s eulogy.”

“Pray excuse me,” said Dorothea, coloring deeply. “I am aware, as you
say, that I am in fault in having introduced the subject. Indeed, I am
wrong altogether. Failure after long perseverance is much grander than
never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Will, determined to change the
situation—“so much so that I have made up my mind not to run that risk
of never attaining a failure. Mr. Casaubon’s generosity has perhaps
been dangerous to me, and I mean to renounce the liberty it has given
me. I mean to go back to England shortly and work my own way—depend on
nobody else than myself.”

“That is fine—I respect that feeling,” said Dorothea, with returning
kindness. “But Mr. Casaubon, I am sure, has never thought of anything
in the matter except what was most for your welfare.”

“She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she
has married him,” said Will to himself. Aloud he said, rising—

“I shall not see you again.”

“Oh, stay till Mr. Casaubon comes,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “I am so
glad we met in Rome. I wanted to know you.”

“And I have made you angry,” said Will. “I have made you think ill of
me.”

“Oh no. My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do not say
just what I like. But I hope I am not given to think ill of them. In
the end I am usually obliged to think ill of myself for being so
impatient.”

“Still, you don’t like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to
you.”

“Not at all,” said Dorothea, with the most open kindness. “I like you
very much.”

Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have
been of more importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing, but
looked dull, not to say sulky.

“And I am quite interested to see what you will do,” Dorothea went on
cheerfully. “I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation. If
it were not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow—there
are so many things, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant of. You
would hardly believe how little I have taken in of music and
literature, which you know so much of. I wonder what your vocation will
turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?”

“That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that
no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment
is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of
emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling,
and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that
condition by fits only.”

“But you leave out the poems,” said Dorothea. “I think they are wanted
to complete the poet. I understand what you mean about knowledge
passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience. But
I am sure I could never produce a poem.”

“You _are_ a poem—and that is to be the best part of a poet—what makes
up the poet’s consciousness in his best moods,” said Will, showing such
originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and
other endless renewals.

“I am very glad to hear it,” said Dorothea, laughing out her words in a
bird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her
eyes. “What very kind things you say to me!”

“I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind—that
I could ever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never
have the opportunity.” Will spoke with fervor.

“Oh yes,” said Dorothea, cordially. “It will come; and I shall remember
how well you wish me. I quite hoped that we should be friends when I
first saw you—because of your relationship to Mr. Casaubon.” There was
a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, and Will was conscious that
his own were obeying a law of nature and filling too. The allusion to
Mr. Casaubon would have spoiled all if anything at that moment could
have spoiled the subduing power, the sweet dignity, of her noble
unsuspicious inexperience.

“And there is one thing even now that you can do,” said Dorothea,
rising and walking a little way under the strength of a recurring
impulse. “Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of that
subject—I mean about Mr. Casaubon’s writings—I mean in that kind of
way. It was I who led to it. It was my fault. But promise me.”

She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will, looking
gravely at him.

“Certainly, I will promise you,” said Will, reddening however. If he
never said a cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left off
receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible to hate him
the more. The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe; and Will was at
least ready with that accomplishment. He said that he must go now
without waiting for Mr. Casaubon, whom he would come to take leave of
at the last moment. Dorothea gave him her hand, and they exchanged a
simple “Good-by.”

But going out of the _porte cochere_ he met Mr. Casaubon, and that
gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived
the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be
sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure.

“I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr. Ladislaw, which I
think will heighten your opinion of him,” said Dorothea to her husband
in the course of the evening. She had mentioned immediately on his
entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr.
Casaubon had said, “I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I
believe,” saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any
subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish
for a further remark upon it. So Dorothea had waited.

“What is that, my love?” said Mr Casaubon (he always said “my love”
when his manner was the coldest).

“He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up
his dependence on your generosity. He means soon to go back to England,
and work his own way. I thought you would consider that a good sign,”
said Dorothea, with an appealing look into her husband’s neutral face.

“Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would
addict himself?”

“No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him in your
generosity. Of course he will write to you about it. Do you not think
better of him for his resolve?”

“I shall await his communication on the subject,” said Mr. Casaubon.

“I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did for
him was his own welfare. I remembered your goodness in what you said
about him when I first saw him at Lowick,” said Dorothea, putting her
hand on her husband’s.

“I had a duty towards him,” said Mr. Casaubon, laying his other hand on
Dorothea’s in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance
which he could not hinder from being uneasy. “The young man, I confess,
is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I think,
discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine beyond the
limits which I have sufficiently indicated.” Dorothea did not mention
Will again.

BOOK III.
WAITING FOR DEATH.

CHAPTER XXIII.

“Your horses of the Sun,” he said,
    “And first-rate whip Apollo!
Whate’er they be, I’ll eat my head,
    But I will beat them hollow.”

Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such
immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman
for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this
debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate. The creditor
was Mr. Bambridge, a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company
was much sought in Middlemarch by young men understood to be “addicted
to pleasure.” During the vacations Fred had naturally required more
amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Bambridge had been
accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and
the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a
small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at
billiards. The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds. Bambridge was
in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Vincy had backers;
but he had required something to show for it, and Fred had at first
given a bill with his own signature. Three months later he had renewed
this bill with the signature of Caleb Garth. On both occasions Fred had
felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds
at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his
confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we
know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable
disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the
folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater
mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about
agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in
costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing. Fred
felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should
have a run of luck, that by dint of “swapping” he should gradually
metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a
hundred at any moment—“judgment” being always equivalent to an
unspecified sum in hard cash. And in any case, even supposing negations
which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fred had always (at that
time) his father’s pocket as a last resource, so that his assets of
hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. Of what
might be the capacity of his father’s pocket, Fred had only a vague
notion: was not trade elastic? And would not the deficiencies of one
year be made up for by the surplus of another? The Vincys lived in an
easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the
family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of
economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion
that their father might pay for anything if he would. Mr. Vincy himself
had expensive Middlemarch habits—spent money on coursing, on his
cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts
with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything
one wants without any question of payment. But it was in the nature of
fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a
little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and
Fred disliked bad weather within doors. He was too filial to be
disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty
that it was transient; but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see
his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having
fun; for Fred was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under
scolding, it was chiefly for propriety’s sake. The easier course
plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend’s signature. Why not? With
the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason
why he should not have increased other people’s liabilities to any
extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything
were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order
of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young
gentleman.

With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their
more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning
each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to
oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as
other warmth. Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed
as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened
that Fred checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that
applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that
he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had
a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall
into a thoroughly unpleasant position—wear trousers shrunk with
washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to “duck
under” in any sort of way—was an absurdity irreconcilable with those
cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature. And Fred winced under
the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts.
Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at
once the poorest and the kindest—namely, Caleb Garth.

The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and
Rosamond were little ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight
connection between the two families through Mr. Featherstone’s double
marriage (the first to Mr. Garth’s sister, and the second to Mrs.
Vincy’s) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the
children rather than the parents: the children drank tea together out
of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together in play. Mary was a
little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in
the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from
an umbrella. Through all the stages of his education he had kept his
affection for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as a
second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his
family had long ceased. Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the
Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there
were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old
manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but
equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was
defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible
theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the building
business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of
surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time
entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living
narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay
twenty shillings in the pound. He had now achieved this, and from all
who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won
him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded
on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete
dinner-service. Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth,
and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her
bread—meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage;
in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall’s Questions
was something like a draper’s discrimination of calico trademarks, or a
courier’s acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better
off needed that sort of thing. And since Mary had been keeping Mr.
Featherstone’s house, Mrs. Vincy’s want of liking for the Garths had
been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should
engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents “lived in such a small
way.” Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to
Mrs. Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing
ardor of his affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those
who belonged to her.

Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went with
his request. He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount
of painful experience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth cautious
about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had
not proved themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of
Fred, was “sure the lad would turn out well—an open affectionate
fellow, with a good bottom to his character—you might trust him for
anything.” Such was Caleb’s psychological argument. He was one of those
rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others. He had a
certain shame about his neighbors’ errors, and never spoke of them
willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind from the best
mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order to
preconceive those errors. If he had to blame any one, it was necessary
for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various
diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his
pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other men’s work
than find fault with their doing. I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it
without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be
forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his
spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite’s clear young
eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future
from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a
friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he
must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly, he took the paper
and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached
his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again,
then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles
again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy
eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details
for once—you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb
Garth), and said in a comfortable tone,—

“It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse’s knees? And then,
these exchanges, they don’t answer when you have ’cute jockeys to deal
with. You’ll be wiser another time, my boy.”

Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his
signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for
whatever he did in the way of business he did well. He contemplated the
large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a
trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fred, said
“Good-by,” and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir
James Chettam’s new farm-buildings.

Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the
signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb was more
conscious, Mrs. Garth remained ignorant of the affair.

Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred’s sky, which altered his
view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone’s
present of money was of importance enough to make his color come and
go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a
proportionate disappointment. His failure in passing his examination,
had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his
father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home. Mr. Vincy
had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with,
Fred should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never
yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had
especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did
not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not “go on with that.”
Fred was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with
if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr.
Featherstone’s heir; that old gentleman’s pride in him, and apparent
fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct—just
as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act
kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of
his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy
who had stolen turnips. In fact, tacit expectations of what would be
done for him by uncle Featherstone determined the angle at which most
people viewed Fred Vincy in Middlemarch; and in his own consciousness,
what uncle Featherstone would do for him in an emergency, or what he
would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable
depth of aerial perspective. But that present of bank-notes, once made,
was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt, showed a
deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fred’s “judgment” or
by luck in some other shape. For that little episode of the alleged
borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting the
Bulstrode certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for
money towards meeting his actual debt. Fred was keen enough to foresee
that anger would confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having
borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle’s will would be taken
as a falsehood. He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious
affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete
revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity. Now
Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs; he often
shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at what he called
Rosamond’s fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with
a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he
would even incur some trouble and self-restraint. It was under strong
inward pressure of this kind that Fred had taken the wise step of
depositing the eighty pounds with his mother. It was a pity that he had
not at once given them to Mr. Garth; but he meant to make the sum
complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had kept
twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which, planted
by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than threefold—a
very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young gentleman’s
infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.

Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the
suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as
necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that
diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is
carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous
imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and
having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there
must be to others in going aboard with it. Hopefulness has a pleasure
in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is
certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as
possible a share in the stake. Fred liked play, especially billiards,
as he liked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the
better because he wanted money and hoped to win. But the twenty pounds’
worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green
plot—all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the
roadside—and Fred found himself close upon the term of payment with no
money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with
his mother. The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present
which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Featherstone:
his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Vincy’s own habits
making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who was
rather exasperating. This horse, then, was Fred’s property, and in his
anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a
possession without which life would certainly be worth little. He made
the resolution with a sense of heroism—heroism forced on him by the
dread of breaking his word to Mr. Garth, by his love for Mary and awe
of her opinion. He would start for Houndsley horse-fair which was to be
held the next morning, and—simply sell his horse, bringing back the
money by coach?—Well, the horse would hardly fetch more than thirty
pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it would be folly
to balk himself of luck beforehand. It was a hundred to one that some
good chance would fall in his way; the longer he thought of it, the
less possible it seemed that he should not have a good chance, and the
less reasonable that he should not equip himself with the powder and
shot for bringing it down. He would ride to Houndsley with Bambridge
and with Horrock “the vet,” and without asking them anything expressly,
he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion. Before he set
out, Fred got the eighty pounds from his mother.

Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with
Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair,
thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an
unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have
had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a
gay young fellow. Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he
rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not
been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and
unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and
Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh
would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of
Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other
name than “pleasure” the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock
must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with
them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a
dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse
in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and
various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for
the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit
of these things was “gay.”

In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which
offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a
thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which
took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending
downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian
eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a
moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable
sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a
susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to
create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund
of humor—too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable
crust,—and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate
enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other. It is a
physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more
powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.

Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse’s fetlock, turned
sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse’s action for the space of
three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and
remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it
had been.

The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective.
A mixture of passions was excited in Fred—a mad desire to thrash
Horrock’s opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the
advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that Horrock
might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.

Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his
ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of
as being “given to indulgence”—chiefly in swearing, drinking, and
beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious
man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might
have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was
undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore
their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green
bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine
old tune, “Drops of brandy,” gave you after a while a sense of
returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a
slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to
several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in
the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes
about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses
and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its
pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his
memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and
sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without
turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of
passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of
his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it.
In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.

Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to
Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at
their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine
opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent
critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge’s weakness to be a gratuitous
flatterer. He had never before been so much struck with the fact that
this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the
roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.

“You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me,
Vincy! Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that
chestnut, and you gave him for this brute. If you set him cantering, he
goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but one worse roarer in my
life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he
used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take
him, but I said, ‘Thank you, Peg, I don’t deal in wind-instruments.’
That was what I said. It went the round of the country, that joke did.
But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of
yours.”

“Why, you said just now his was worse than mine,” said Fred, more
irritable than usual.

“I said a lie, then,” said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically. “There wasn’t a
penny to choose between ’em.”

Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way. When they
slackened again, Mr. Bambridge said—

“Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours.”

“I’m quite satisfied with his paces, I know,” said Fred, who required
all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; “I say
his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?”

Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he
had been a portrait by a great master.

Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on
reflection he saw that Bambridge’s depreciation and Horrock’s silence
were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better
of the horse than they chose to say.

That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought he
saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but
an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in
bringing with him his eighty pounds. A young farmer, acquainted with
Mr. Bambridge, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation
about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond,
implying that it was a public character. For himself he only wanted a
useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and
to give up hunting. The hunter was in a friend’s stable at some little
distance; there was still time for gentlemen to see it before dark. The
friend’s stable had to be reached through a back street where you might
as easily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any grim
street of that unsanitary period. Fred was not fortified against
disgust by brandy, as his companions were, but the hope of having at
last seen the horse that would enable him to make money was
exhilarating enough to lead him over the same ground again the first
thing in the morning. He felt sure that if he did not come to a bargain
with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress of circumstances, Fred
felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the
constructive power of suspicion. Bambridge had run down Diamond in a
way that he never would have done (the horse being a friend’s) if he
had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at the animal—even
Horrock—was evidently impressed with its merit. To get all the
advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how to draw
your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally. The
color of the horse was a dappled gray, and Fred happened to know that
Lord Medlicote’s man was on the look-out for just such a horse. After
all his running down, Bambridge let it out in the course of the
evening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go
for eighty pounds. Of course he contradicted himself twenty times over,
but when you know what is likely to be true you can test a man’s
admissions. And Fred could not but reckon his own judgment of a horse
as worth something. The farmer had paused over Fred’s respectable
though broken-winded steed long enough to show that he thought it worth
consideration, and it seemed probable that he would take it, with
five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond. In
that case Fred, when he had parted with his new horse for at least
eighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction,
and would have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the
bill; so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Garth would at the
utmost be twenty-five pounds. By the time he was hurrying on his
clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance of not losing
this rare chance, that if Bambridge and Horrock had both dissuaded him,
he would not have been deluded into a direct interpretation of their
purpose: he would have been aware that those deep hands held something
else than a young fellow’s interest. With regard to horses, distrust
was your only clew. But scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly
applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must
believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is
virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish
reliance on another. Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain,
and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the
dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in
addition—only five pounds more than he had expected to give.

But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate,
and without waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he set
out alone on his fourteen miles’ journey, meaning to take it very
quietly and keep his horse fresh.

CHAPTER XXIV.

“The offender’s sorrow brings but small relief
To him who wears the strong offence’s cross.”
—SHAKESPEARE: _Sonnets_.

I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events
at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known
in his life before. Not that he had been disappointed as to the
possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be
concluded with Lord Medlicote’s man, this Diamond, in which hope to the
amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest
warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had
just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely
by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was
no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after
marriage—which of course old companions were aware of before the
ceremony. For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual
elasticity under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that
he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any
more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be
presented in five days. Even if he had applied to his father on the
plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss, Fred felt smartingly
that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Garth from the
consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit.
He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to
go straight to Mr. Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him
the fifty pounds, and getting that sum at least safely out of his own
hands. His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the
accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being
brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred
wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater. He took
his father’s nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr.
Garth, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary. In fact,
it is probable that but for Mary’s existence and Fred’s love for her,
his conscience would have been much less active both in previously
urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself
after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as
directly and simply as he could. Even much stronger mortals than Fred
Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love
best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique
personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who
get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would
have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth
had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.

Mr. Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house, which
was a little way outside the town—a homely place with an orchard in
front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which
before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now
surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen. We get the fonder
of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends
have. The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had four
brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from which
all the best furniture had long been sold. Fred liked it too, knowing
it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples and
quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant
expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he
should probably have to make his confession before Mrs. Garth, of whom
he was rather more in awe than of her husband. Not that she was
inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Mary was. In her
present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth never committed herself by
over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth,
and learned self-control. She had that rare sense which discerns what
is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her
husband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his
incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences
cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in
teapots or children’s frilling, and had never poured any pathetic
confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr.