Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (335 page)

“Well, that is really a hit about the gates,” said Sir James, anxious to tread carefully. “Dagley complained to me the other day that he hadn’t got a decent gate on his farm. Garth has invented a new pattern of gate — I wish you would try it. One ought to use some of one’s timber in that way.”

“You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke, appearing to glance over the columns of the “Trumpet.” “That’s your hobby, and you don’t mind the expense.”

“I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing for Parliament,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “They said the last unsuccessful candidate at Middlemarch — Giles, wasn’t his name? — spent ten thousand pounds and failed because he did not bribe enough. What a bitter reflection for a man!”

“Somebody was saying,” said the Rector, laughingly, “that East Retford was nothing to Middlemarch, for bribery.”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Brooke. “The Tories bribe, you know: Hawley and his set bribe with treating, hot codlings, and that sort of thing; and they bring the voters drunk to the poll. But they are not going to have it their own way in future — not in future, you know. Middlemarch is a little backward, I admit — the freemen are a little backward. But we shall educate them — we shall bring them on, you know. The best people there are on our side.”

“Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm,” remarked Sir James. “He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm.”

“And that if you got pelted,” interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, “half the rotten eggs would mean hatred of your committee-man. Good heavens! Think what it must be to be pelted for wrong opinions. And I seem to remember a story of a man they pretended to chair and let him fall into a dust-heap on purpose!”

“Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one’s coat,” said the Rector. “I confess that’s what I should be afraid of, if we parsons had to stand at the hustings for preferment. I should be afraid of their reckoning up all my fishing days. Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

“The fact is,” said Sir James, “if a man goes into public life he must be prepared for the consequences. He must make himself proof against calumny.”

“My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But how will you make yourself proof against calumny? You should read history — look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. But what is that in Horace? — ‘fiat justitia, ruat … something or other.”

“Exactly,” said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual. “What I mean by being proof against calumny is being able to point to the fact as a contradiction.”

“And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one’s self,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

But it was Sir James’s evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke. “Well, you know, Chettam,” he said, rising, taking up his hat and leaning on his stick, “you and I have a different system. You are all for outlay with your farms. I don’t want to make out that my system is good under all circumstances — under all circumstances, you know.”

“There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,” said Sir James. “Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair valuation. What do you say, Cadwallader?”

“I agree with you. If I were Brooke, I would choke the ‘Trumpet’ at once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving him carte blanche about gates and repairs: that’s my view of the political situation,” said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking his thumbs in his armholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.

“That’s a showy sort of thing to do, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But I should like you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his tenants for arrears as little as I have. I let the old tenants stay on. I’m uncommonly easy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy. I have my own ideas, and I take my stand on them, you know. A man who does that is always charged with eccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of thing. When I change my line of action, I shall follow my own ideas.”

After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly good-by.

“I didn’t want to take a liberty with Brooke,” said Sir James; “I see he is nettled. But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of fact no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms.”

“I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,” said the Rector. “But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling another. You wanted to frighten him away from expense, and we want to frighten him into it. Better let him try to be popular and see that his character as a landlord stands in his way. I don’t think it signifies two straws about the ‘Pioneer,’ or Ladislaw, or Brooke’s speechifying to the Middlemarchers. But it does signify about the parishioners in Tipton being comfortable.”

“Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad management, and then we should all have pulled together. If you put him a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences. It was all very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas.”

CHAPTER XXXIX
.

 
“If, as I have, you also doe,

 
Vertue attired in woman see,

And dare love that, and say so too,

 
And forget the He and She;

And if this love, though placed so,

 
From prophane men you hide,

Which will no faith on this bestow,

 
Or, if they doe, deride:

Then you have done a braver thing

 
Than all the Worthies did,

And a braver thence will spring,

 
Which is, to keep that hid.”

— DR. DONNE.

Sir James Chettam’s mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxiety to “act on Brooke,” once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea’s capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia’s indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of the estate.

In this way it happened that one day near four o’clock, when Mr. Brooke and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs. Casaubon was announced.

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and, obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted — as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

“Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now,” said Mr. Brooke, meeting and kissing her. “You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose. That’s right. We must not have you getting too learned for a woman, you know.”

“There is no fear of that, uncle,” said Dorothea, turning to Will and shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of greeting, but went on answering her uncle. “I am very slow. When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts. I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages.”

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming had anything to do with him.

“Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt to ran away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. I have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up. That is what I tell Ladislaw. He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go into everything. We are working at capital punishment. We shall do a great deal together, Ladislaw and I.”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, “Sir James has been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon in your management of the estate — that you are thinking of having the farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!” — she went on, clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. “If I were at home still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised my cottages, Sir James says.”

“Chettam is a little hasty, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, coloring slightly; “a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything of the kind. I never said I should
not
do it, you know.”

“He only feels confident that you will do it,” said Dorothea, in a voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a credo, “because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table! — and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle — which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.”

Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked: an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear. For the moment, Will’s admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case of good Mr. Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece. He could not immediately find any other mode of expressing himself than that of rising, fixing his eye-glass, and fingering the papers before him. At last he said —

“There is something in what you say, my dear, something in what you say — but not everything — eh, Ladislaw? You and I don’t like our pictures and statues being found fault with. Young ladies are a little ardent, you know — a little one-sided, my dear. Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation — emollit mores — you understand a little Latin now. But — eh? what?”

These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had come in to say that the keeper had found one of Dagley’s boys with a leveret in his hand just killed.

“I’ll come, I’ll come. I shall let him off easily, you know,” said Mr. Brooke aside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.

“I hope you feel how right this change is that I — that Sir James wishes for,” said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.

“I do, now I have heard you speak about it. I shall not forget what you have said. But can you think of something else at this moment? I may not have another opportunity of speaking to you about what has occurred,” said Will, rising with a movement of impatience, and holding the back of his chair with both hands.

“Pray tell me what it is,” said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and going to the open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and wagging his tail. She leaned her back against the window-frame, and laid her hand on the dog’s head; for though, as we know, she was not fond of pets that must be held in the hands or trodden on, she was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to decline their advances.

Will followed her only with his eyes and said, “I presume you know that Mr. Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house.”

“No, I did not,” said Dorothea, after a moment’s pause. She was evidently much moved. “I am very, very sorry,” she added, mournfully. She was thinking of what Will had no knowledge of — the conversation between her and her husband in the darkness; and she was anew smitten with hopelessness that she could influence Mr. Casaubon’s action. But the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Will that it was not all given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not been visited by the idea that Mr. Casaubon’s dislike and jealousy of him turned upon herself. He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation: of delight that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home, without suspicion and without stint — of vexation because he was of too little account with her, was not formidable enough, was treated with an unhesitating benevolence which did not flatter him. But his dread of any change in Dorothea was stronger than his discontent, and he began to speak again in a tone of mere explanation.

“Mr. Casaubon’s reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position here which he considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin. I have told him that I cannot give way on this point. It is a little too hard on me to expect that my course in life is to be hampered by prejudices which I think ridiculous. Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning. I would not have accepted the position if I had not meant to make it useful and honorable. I am not bound to regard family dignity in any other light.”

Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether in the wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.

“It is better for us not to speak on the subject,” she said, with a tremulousness not common in her voice, “since you and Mr. Casaubon disagree. You intend to remain?” She was looking out on the lawn, with melancholy meditation.

“Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now,” said Will, in a tone of almost boyish complaint.

“No,” said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, “hardly ever. But I shall hear of you. I shall know what you are doing for my uncle.”

“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell me anything.”

“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at Lowick.”

“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.

“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”

“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

“That is a beautiful mysticism — it is a — “

“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much — now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”

“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.