Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (525 page)

‘It is half-past six now,’ said Miss Linnet, looking at her watch as the servant appeared with the tea-tray. ‘I suppose the delegates are come back by this time. If Mr. Tryan had not so kindly promised to call and let us know, I should hardly rest without walking to Milby myself to know what answer they have brought back. It is a great privilege for us, Mr. Tryan living at Mrs. Wagstaff’s, for he is often able to take us on his way backwards and forwards into the town.’

‘I wonder if there’s another man in the world who has been brought up as Mr. Tryan has, that would choose to live in those small close rooms on the common, among heaps of dirty cottages, for the sake of being near the poor people,’ said Mrs. Pettifer. ‘I’m afraid he hurts his health by it; he looks to me far from strong.’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Pratt, ‘I understand he is of a highly respectable family indeed, in Huntingdonshire. I heard him myself speak of his father’s carriage — quite incidentally, you know — and Eliza tells me what very fine cambric handkerchiefs he uses. My eyes are not good enough to see such things, but I know what breeding is as well as most people, and it is easy to see that Mr. Tryan is quite
comme il faw
, to use a French expression.’

‘I should like to tell him better nor use fine cambric i’ this place, where there’s such washing, it’s a shame to be seen,’ said Mrs. Linnet; ‘he’ll get ‘em tore to pieces. Good lawn ‘ud be far better. I saw what a colour his linen looked at the sacrament last Sunday. Mary’s making him a black silk case to hold his bands, but I told her she’d more need wash ‘em for him.’

‘O mother!’ said Rebecca, with solemn severity, ‘pray don’t think of pocket-handkerchiefs and linen, when we are talking of such a man. And at this moment, too, when he is perhaps having to bear a heavy blow. We have more need to help him by prayer, as Aaron and Hur held up the hands of Moses. We don’t know but wickedness may have triumphed, and Mr. Prendergast may have consented to forbid the lecture. There have been dispensations quite as mysterious, and Satan is evidently putting forth all his strength to resist the entrance of the Gospel into Milby Church.’

‘You niver spoke a truer word than that, my dear,’ said Mrs. Linnet, who accepted all religious phrases, but was extremely rationalistic in her interpretation; ‘for if iver Old Harry appeared in a human form, it’s that Dempster. It was all through him as we got cheated out o’ Pye’s Croft, making out as the title wasn’t good. Such lawyer’s villany! As if paying good money wasn’t title enough to anything. If your father as is dead and gone had been worthy to know it! But he’ll have a fall some day, Dempster will. Mark my words.’

‘Ah, out of his carriage, you mean,’ said Miss Pratt, who, in the movement occasioned by the clearing of the table, had lost the first part of Mrs. Linnet’s speech. ‘It certainly is alarming to see him driving home from Rotherby, flogging his galloping horse like a madman. My brother has often said he expected every Thursday evening to be called in to set some of Dempster’s bones; but I suppose he may drop that expectation now, for we are given to understand from good authority that he has forbidden his wife to call my brother in again either to herself or her mother. He swears no Tryanite doctor shall attend his family. I have reason to believe that Pilgrim was called in to Mrs. Dempster’s mother the other day.’

‘Poor Mrs. Raynor! she’s glad to do anything for the sake of peace and quietness,’ said Mrs. Pettifer; ‘but it’s no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.’

‘What trouble that poor woman has to bear in her old age!’ said Mary Linnet, ‘to see her daughter leading such a life! — an only daughter, too, that she doats on.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘We, of course, know more about it than most people, my brother having attended the family so many years. For my part, I never thought well of the marriage; and I endeavoured to dissuade my brother when Mrs. Raynor asked him to give Janet away at the wedding. ‘If you will take my advice, Richard,’ I said, ‘you will have nothing to do with that marriage.’ And he has seen the justice of my opinion since. Mrs. Raynor herself was against the connection at first; but she always spoiled Janet, and I fear, too, she was won over by a foolish pride in having her daughter marry a professional man. I fear it was so. No one but myself, I think, foresaw the extent of the evil.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘Janet had nothing to look forward to but being a governess; and it was hard for Mrs. Raynor to have to work at millinering — a woman well brought up, and her husband a man who held his head as high as any man in Thurston. And it isn’t everybody that sees everything fifteen years beforehand. Robert Dempster was the cleverest man in Milby; and there weren’t many young men fit to talk to Janet.’

‘It is a thousand pities,’ said Miss Pratt, choosing to ignore Mrs. Pettifer’s slight sarcasm, ‘for I certainly did consider Janet Raynor the most promising young woman of my acquaintance; — a little too much lifted up, perhaps, by her superior education, and too much given to satire, but able to express herself very well indeed about any book I recommended to her perusal. There is no young woman in Milby now who can be compared with what Janet was when she was married, either in mind or person. I consider Miss Landor far, far below her. Indeed, I cannot say much for the mental superiority of the young ladies in our first families. They are superficial — very superficial.’

‘She made the handsomest bride that ever came out of Milby church, too,’ said Mrs. Pettifer. ‘Such a very fine figure! And it showed off her white poplin so well. And what a pretty smile Janet always had! Poor thing, she keeps that now for all her old friends. I never see her but she has something pretty to say to me — living in the same street, you know, I can’t help seeing her often, though I’ve never been to the house since Dempster broke out on me in one of his drunken fits. She comes to me sometimes, poor thing, looking so strange, anybody passing her in the street may see plain enough what’s the matter; but she’s always got some little good-natured plan in her head for all that. Only last night I met her, I saw five yards off she wasn’t fit to be out; but she had a basin in her hand, full of something she was carrying to Sally Martin, the deformed girl that’s in a consumption.’

‘But she is just as bitter against Mr. Tryan as her husband is, I understand,’ said Rebecca. ‘Her heart is very much set against the truth, for I understand she bought Mr. Tryan’s sermons on purpose to ridicule them to Mrs. Crewe.

‘Well, poor thing,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘you know she stands up for everything her husband says and does. She never will admit to anybody that he is not a good husband.’

‘That is her pride,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘She married him in opposition to the advice of her best friends, and now she is not willing to admit that she was wrong. Why, even to my brother — and a medical attendant, you know, can hardly fail to be acquainted with family secrets — she has always pretended to have the highest respect for her husband’s qualities. Poor Mrs. Raynor, however, is very well aware that every one knows the real state of things. Latterly, she has not even avoided the subject with me. The very last time I called on her she said, “Have you been to see my poor daughter?” and burst into tears.’

‘Pride or no pride,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ‘I shall always stand up for Janet Dempster. She sat up with me night after night when I had that attack of rheumatic fever six years ago. There’s great excuses for her. When a woman can’t think of her husband coming home without trembling, it’s enough to make her drink something to blunt her feelings — and no children either, to keep her from it. You and me might do the same, if we were in her place.’

‘Speak for yourself, Mrs. Pettifer,’ said Miss Pratt. ‘Under no circumstances can I imagine myself resorting to a practice so degrading. A woman should find support in her own strength of mind.’

‘I think,’ said Rebecca, who considered Miss Pratt still very blind in spiritual things, notwithstanding her assumption of enlightenment, ‘she will find poor support if she trusts only to her own strength. She must seek aid elsewhere than in herself.’

Happily the removal of the tea-things just then created a little confusion, which aided Miss Pratt to repress her resentment at Rebecca’s presumption in correcting her — a person like Rebecca Linnet! who six months ago was as flighty and vain a woman as Miss Pratt had ever known — so very unconscious of her unfortunate person!

The ladies had scarcely been seated at their work another hour, when the sun was sinking, and the clouds that flecked the sky to the very zenith were every moment taking on a brighter gold. The gate of the little garden opened, and Miss Linnet, seated at her small table near the window, saw Mr. Tryan enter.

‘There is Mr. Tryan,’ she said, and her pale cheek was lighted up with a little blush that would have made her look more attractive to almost any one except Miss Eliza Pratt, whose fine grey eyes allowed few things to escape her silent observation. ‘Mary Linnet gets more and more in love with Mr. Tryan,’ thought Miss Eliza; ‘it is really pitiable to see such feelings in a woman of her age, with those old-maidish little ringlets. I daresay she flatters herself Mr. Tryan may fall in love with her, because he makes her useful among the poor.’ At the same time, Miss Eliza, as she bent her handsome head and large cannon curls with apparent calmness over her work, felt a considerable internal flutter when she heard the knock at the door. Rebecca had less self-command. She felt too much agitated to go on with her pasting, and clutched the leg of the table to counteract the trembling in her hands.

Poor women’s hearts! Heaven forbid that I should laugh at you, and make cheap jests on your susceptibility towards the clerical sex, as if it had nothing deeper or more lovely in it than the mere vulgar angling for a husband. Even in these enlightened days, many a curate who, considered abstractedly, is nothing more than a sleek bimanous animal in a white neck-cloth, with views more or less Anglican, and furtively addicted to the flute, is adored by a girl who has coarse brothers, or by a solitary woman who would like to be a helpmate in good works beyond her own means, simply because he seems to them the model of refinement and of public usefulness. What wonder, then, that in Milby society, such as I have told you it was a very long while ago, a zealous evangelical clergyman, aged thirty-three, called forth all the little agitations that belong to the divine necessity of loving, implanted in the Miss Linnets, with their seven or eight lustrums and their unfashionable ringlets, no less than in Miss Eliza Pratt, with her youthful bloom and her ample cannon curls.

But Mr. Tryan has entered the room, and the strange light from the golden sky falling on his light-brown hair, which is brushed high up round his head, makes it look almost like an aureole. His grey eyes, too, shine with unwonted brilliancy this evening. They were not remarkable eyes, but they accorded completely in their changing light with the changing expression of his person, which indicated the paradoxical character often observable in a large-limbed sanguine blond; at once mild and irritable, gentle and overbearing, indolent and resolute, self-conscious and dreamy. Except that the well-filled lips had something of the artificially compressed look which is often the sign of a struggle to keep the dragon undermost, and that the complexion was rather pallid, giving the idea of imperfect health, Mr. Tryan’s face in repose was that of an ordinary whiskerless blond, and it seemed difficult to refer a certain air of distinction about him to anything in particular, unless it were his delicate hands and well-shapen feet.

It was a great anomaly to the Milby mind that a canting evangelical parson, who would take tea with tradespeople, and make friends of vulgar women like the Linnets, should have so much the air of a gentleman, and be so little like the splay-footed Mr. Stickney of Salem, to whom he approximated so closely in doctrine. And this want of correspondence between the physique and the creed had excited no less surprise in the larger town of Laxeter, where Mr. Tryan had formerly held a curacy; for of the two other Low Church clergymen in the neighbourhood, one was a Welshman of globose figure and unctuous complexion, and the other a man of atrabiliar aspect, with lank black hair, and a redundance of limp cravat — in fact, the sort of thing you might expect in men who distributed the publications of the Religious Tract Society, and introduced Dissenting hymns into the Church.

Mr. Tryan shook hands with Mrs. Linnet, bowed with rather a preoccupied air to the other ladies, and seated himself in the large horse-hair easy-chair which had been drawn forward for him, while the ladies ceased from their work, and fixed their eyes on him, awaiting the news he had to tell them.

‘It seems,’ he began, in a low and silvery tone, ‘I need a lesson of patience; there has been something wrong in my thought or action about this evening lecture. I have been too much bent on doing good to Milby after my own plan — too reliant on my own wisdom.’

Mr. Tryan paused. He was struggling against inward irritation.

‘The delegates are come back, then?’ ‘Has Mr. Prendergast given way?’ ‘Has Dempster succeeded?’ — were the eager questions of three ladies at once.