Bab Bab 16 · Chapter XVI

“All that in woman is adored

In thy fair self I find—

For the whole sex can but afford

The handsome and the kind.”

—SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain

to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and

Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power

exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a

ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters

there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a

compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general

scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you

to hold a candle to the devil.

Mr. Bulstrode’s power was not due simply to his being a country banker,

who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could

touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence

that was at once ready and severe—ready to confer obligations, and

severe in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious man

always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities,

and his private charities were both minute and abundant. He would take

a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker’s son, and

he would watch over Tegg’s church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype

the washerwoman against Stubbs’s unjust exaction on the score of her

drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs.

Strype. His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire

strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a

man gathers a domain in his neighbors’ hope and fear as well as

gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region,

propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external

means. It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as

possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a

great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust

his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required. But,

as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There

were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only

weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since

Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and

drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything,

he must have a sort of vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery.

The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy’s table when Lydgate

was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not,

he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the

host himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement

turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke’s sermons, which were all

doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were

free from that taint. Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the

chaplain’s having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who

was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher

anywhere, and companionable too.

“What line shall you take, then?” said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a

great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy’s.

“Oh, I’m precious glad I’m not one of the Directors now. I shall vote

for referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board

together. I shall roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders,

Doctor,” said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior

physician of the town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite. “You

medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will

prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?”

“I know little of either,” said Lydgate; “but in general, appointments

are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest

man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most

agreeable. Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way

would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and

put them out of the question.”

Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though

Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his

large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while

Lydgate was speaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected

about this young man—for example, a certain showiness as to foreign

ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and

forgotten by his elders—was positively unwelcome to a physician whose

standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on

Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked “own” was bound in calf.

For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s

self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very

unpleasant to find deprecated.

Lydgate’s remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company. Mr.

Vincy said, that if he could have _his_ way, he would not put

disagreeable fellows anywhere.

“Hang your reforms!” said Mr. Chichely. “There’s no greater humbug in

the world. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put

in new men. I hope you are not one of the ‘Lancet’s’ men, Mr.

Lydgate—wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal

profession: your words appear to point that way.”

“I disapprove of Wakley,” interposed Dr. Sprague, “no man more: he is

an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of

the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges,

for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself. There are men who

don’t mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.

But Wakley is right sometimes,” the Doctor added, judicially. “I could

mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right.”

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chichely, “I blame no man for standing up in favor

of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a

coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?”

“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man more

incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People

talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a

blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular

subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than

an old woman at a post-mortem examination. How is he to know the action

of a poison? You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you

to scan the potato crops.”

“You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner’s business to

conduct the _post-mortem_, but only to take the evidence of the medical

witness?” said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.

“Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself,” said Lydgate.

“Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance

of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to

be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the

stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so.”

Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his

Majesty’s coroner, and ended innocently with the question, “Don’t you

agree with me, Dr. Sprague?”

“To a certain extent—with regard to populous districts, and in the

metropolis,” said the Doctor. “But I hope it will be long before this

part of the country loses the services of my friend Chichely, even

though it might get the best man in our profession to succeed him. I am

sure Vincy will agree with me.”

“Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man,” said Mr.

Vincy, jovially. “And in my opinion, you’re safest with a lawyer.

Nobody can know everything. Most things are ‘visitation of God.’ And as

to poisoning, why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we

join the ladies?”

Lydgate’s private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very

coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not

meant to be personal. This was one of the difficulties of moving in

good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a

qualification for any salaried office. Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a

prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared;

especially when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be making himself

eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easily monopolized in a

_tête-à-tête_, since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at the tea-table. She

resigned no domestic function to her daughter; and the matron’s

blooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating

from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children,

was certainly among the great attractions of the Vincy

house—attractions which made it all the easier to fall in love with the

daughter. The tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity in Mrs.

Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond’s refinement, which was beyond what

Lydgate had expected.

Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression

of refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly

right when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid.

And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that

sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most

decisive mark of her cleverness.

She and Lydgate readily got into conversation. He regretted that he had

not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court. The only pleasure he

allowed himself during the latter part of his stay in Paris was to go

and hear music.

“You have studied music, probably?” said Rosamond.

“No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;

but the music that I don’t know at all, and have no notion about,

delights me—affects me. How stupid the world is that it does not make

more use of such a pleasure within its reach!”

“Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless. There are hardly any

good musicians. I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well.”

“I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,

leaving you to fancy the tune—very much as if it were tapped on a

drum?”

“Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer,” said Rosamond, with one of her rare

smiles. “But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors.”

Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation,

in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be

made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if

the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her;

and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready,

self-possessed grace. Since he had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate had

lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divine cow no longer

attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite. But he recalled

himself.

“You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope.”

“I will let you hear my attempts, if you like,” said Rosamond. “Papa is

sure to insist on my singing. But I shall tremble before you, who have

heard the best singers in Paris. I have heard very little: I have only

once been to London. But our organist at St. Peter’s is a good

musician, and I go on studying with him.”

“Tell me what you saw in London.”

“Very little.” (A more naive girl would have said, “Oh, everything!”

But Rosamond knew better.) “A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw

country girls are always taken to.”

“Do you call yourself a raw country girl?” said Lydgate, looking at her

with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush

with pleasure. But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a

little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits—an

habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten’s paw.

Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph

caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon’s.

“I assure you my mind is raw,” she said immediately; “I pass at

Middlemarch. I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors. But I am

really afraid of you.”

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her

knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a

thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were

any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language

between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

“Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder him from

jarring all your nerves,” said Rosamond, moving to the other side of

the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father’s desire,

that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically

performing “Cherry Ripe!” with one hand. Able men who have passed their

examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the plucked

Fred.

“Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.

Lydgate ill,” said Rosamond. “He has an ear.”

Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.

Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, “You perceive,

the bears will not always be taught.”

“Now then, Rosy!” said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it

upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment. “Some good

rousing tunes first.”

Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon’s school (close to

a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church

and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be

found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted

Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of

musical celebrity. Rosamond, with the executant’s instinct, had seized

his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble

music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for

the first time. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from

Rosamond’s fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in

perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an

originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter. Lydgate was

taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something

exceptional. After all, he thought, one need not be surprised to find

the rare conjunctions of nature under circumstances apparently

unfavorable: come where they may, they always depend on conditions that

are not obvious. He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her any

compliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration was

deepened.

Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to

hear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang “Meet me by

moonlight,” and “I’ve been roaming”; for mortals must share the

fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always

classical. But Rosamond could also sing “Black-eyed Susan” with effect,

or Haydn’s canzonets, or “Voi, che sapete,” or “Batti, batti”—she only

wanted to know what her audience liked.

Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.

Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest

little girl on her lap, softly beating the child’s hand up and down in

time to the music. And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism

about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he

could do the same thing on his flute. It was the pleasantest family

party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch. The Vincys

had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the

belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most

county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain

suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived

in the provinces. At the Vincys’ there was always whist, and the

card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly

impatient of the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in—a

handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose

black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray

eyes. He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little

Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room by

Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to

condense more talk into ten minutes than had been held all through the

evening. He claimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come

and see him. “I can’t let you off, you know, because I have some

beetles to show you. We collectors feel an interest in every new man

till he has seen all we have to show him.”

But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,

“Come now, let us be serious! Mr. Lydgate? not play? Ah! you are too

young and light for this kind of thing.”

Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so

painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in

this certainly not erudite household. He could half understand it: the

good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for

passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the

house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd

hours.

Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, who was

brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said,

just the sort of person for a governess. Lydgate did not mean to pay

many such visits himself. They were a wretched waste of the evenings;

and now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant to

excuse himself and go.

“You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure,” she said, when the

whist-players were settled. “We are very stupid, and you have been used

to something quite different.”

“I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,” said Lydgate. “But

I have noticed that one always believes one’s own town to be more

stupid than any other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it

comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same

way. I have certainly found some charms in it which are much greater

than I had expected.”

“You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased

with those,” said Rosamond, with simplicity.

“No, I mean something much nearer to me.”

Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, “Do you care

about dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever men ever

dance.”

“I would dance with you if you would allow me.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh. “I was only going

to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know whether you

would feel insulted if you were asked to come.”

“Not on the condition I mentioned.”

After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving

towards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr.

Farebrother’s play, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a

striking mixture of the shrewd and the mild. At ten o’clock supper was

brought in (such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was

punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water. He was

winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers

should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.

But as it was not eleven o’clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air

towards the tower of St. Botolph’s, Mr. Farebrother’s church, which

stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight. It was the

oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage

worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he

wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at

cards; thinking, “He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may

have his good reasons.” Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it

should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable. “What is

his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along

with it? One must use such brains as are to be found.”

These were actually Lydgate’s first meditations as he walked away from

Mr. Vincy’s, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider

him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her

music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he

dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no

agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.

He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and

therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love

with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond

exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was

not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.

Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would

have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just

the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman—polished, refined,

docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of life, and

enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of demonstration

that excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate felt sure that if

ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, that

distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music,

that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being

moulded only for pure and delicate joys.

But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years—his more

pressing business was to look into Louis’ new book on Fever, which he

was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and

had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the

specific differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read far

into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details

and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it

necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these

being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,

and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial

conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him

that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere

arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power—combining and

constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest

obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with

impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its

own work.

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of

their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reports of

very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming

down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts

of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect

life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate

regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that

reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in

that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the

inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing

even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his

part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself

able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is

the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and

correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to

pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human

misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first

lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and

transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy

consciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the

grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable

afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a

specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the

rest of our existence—seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back

after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted

strength—Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and

something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his

profession.

“If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,” he thought, “I might

have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always

in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did

not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good

warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical

profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that

touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It

is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly.”

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the

evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up

his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is

apt to accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but

at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the

ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life

of mankind—like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure

country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of

which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he

had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any

reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any

pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,

that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a

large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her

or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and

compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed

to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for

he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise

at her possession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered

every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a

preconceived romance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen

development and climax. In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to

imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious

business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,

as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate

was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch

admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and

getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which

she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last

associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked

down on the Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond’s cleverness to

discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had

seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,

and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding

their plain dress.

If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family

could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the

sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power

of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth

and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do

not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe

of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,

feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius

Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was

excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men

might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe

at once that Lydgate could be no exception. His looks and words meant

more to her than other men’s, because she cared more for them: she

thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection

of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which

would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been

conscious of.

For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable

to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in

sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in

practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own

standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own

consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more

variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house. She

found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and

she knew much poetry by heart. Her favorite poem was “Lalla Rookh.”

“The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!”

was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and

the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in

country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals. But

Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous

pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid

aside as soon as she was married? While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a

sisterly faithfulness towards her brother’s family, had two sincere

wishes for Rosamond—that she might show a more serious turn of mind,

and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth corresponded to her

habits.