Chương Chương 50 · Chapter L

“This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.”

“Nay by my father’s soule! that schal he nat,”

Sayde the Schipman, ‘here schal he not preche,

We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche.

We leven all in the gret God,’ quod he.

He wolden sowen some diffcultee.”—_Canterbury Tales_.

Dorothea had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had

asked any dangerous questions. Every morning now she sat with Celia in

the prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small

conservatory—Celia all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed

violets, watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so

dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted

by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse.

Dorothea sat by in her widow’s dress, with an expression which rather

provoked Celia, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite

well, but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while

he lived, and besides that had—well, well! Sir James, of course, had

told Celia everything, with a strong representation how important it

was that Dorothea should not know it sooner than was inevitable.

But Mr. Brooke had been right in predicting that Dorothea would not

long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the

purport of her husband’s will made at the time of their marriage, and

her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was

silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick

Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.

One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual

alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now

pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Dorothea said—

“Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have the

living at Lowick. After Mr. Tucker had been provided for, I never heard

my husband say that he had any clergyman in his mind as a successor to

himself. I think I ought to have the keys now and go to Lowick to

examine all my husband’s papers. There may be something that would

throw light on his wishes.”

“No hurry, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, quietly. “By-and-by, you know,

you can go, if you like. But I cast my eyes over things in the desks

and drawers—there was nothing—nothing but deep subjects, you

know—besides the will. Everything can be done by-and-by. As to the

living, I have had an application for interest already—I should say

rather good. Mr. Tyke has been strongly recommended to me—I had

something to do with getting him an appointment before. An apostolic

man, I believe—the sort of thing that would suit you, my dear.”

“I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge for

myself, if Mr. Casaubon has not left any expression of his wishes. He

has perhaps made some addition to his will—there may be some

instructions for me,” said Dorothea, who had all the while had this

conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband’s work.

“Nothing about the rectory, my dear—nothing,” said Mr. Brooke, rising

to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces: “nor about his

researches, you know. Nothing in the will.”

Dorothea’s lip quivered.

“Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear. By-and-by, you

know.”

“I am quite well now, uncle; I wish to exert myself.”

“Well, well, we shall see. But I must run away now—I have no end of

work now—it’s a crisis—a political crisis, you know. And here is Celia

and her little man—you are an aunt, you know, now, and I am a sort of

grandfather,” said Mr. Brooke, with placid hurry, anxious to get away

and tell Chettam that it would not be his (Mr. Brooke’s) fault if

Dorothea insisted on looking into everything.

Dorothea sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room, and

cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.

“Look, Dodo! look at him! Did you ever see anything like that?” said

Celia, in her comfortable staccato.

“What, Kitty?” said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently.

“What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he

meant to make a face. Isn’t it wonderful! He may have his little

thoughts. I wish nurse were here. Do look at him.”

A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down

Dorothea’s cheek as she looked up and tried to smile.

“Don’t be sad, Dodo; kiss baby. What are you brooding over so? I am

sure you did everything, and a great deal too much. You should be happy

now.”

“I wonder if Sir James would drive me to Lowick. I want to look over

everything—to see if there were any words written for me.”

“You are not to go till Mr. Lydgate says you may go. And he has not

said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the

gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual,

Dodo—I can see that: it vexes me.”

“Where am I wrong, Kitty?” said Dorothea, quite meekly. She was almost

ready now to think Celia wiser than herself, and was really wondering

with some fear what her wrong notion was. Celia felt her advantage, and

was determined to use it. None of them knew Dodo as well as she did, or

knew how to manage her. Since Celia’s baby was born, she had had a new

sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom. It seemed clear that

where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in

general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.

“I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo,” said

Celia. “You are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable

for you to do now, only because Mr. Casaubon wished it. As if you had

not been uncomfortable enough before. And he doesn’t deserve it, and

you will find that out. He has behaved very badly. James is as angry

with him as can be. And I had better tell you, to prepare you.”

“Celia,” said Dorothea, entreatingly, “you distress me. Tell me at once

what you mean.” It glanced through her mind that Mr. Casaubon had left

the property away from her—which would not be so very distressing.

“Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to

go away from you if you married—I mean—”

“That is of no consequence,” said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously.

“But if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else,” Celia went on with

persevering quietude. “Of course that is of no consequence in one

way—you never _would_ marry Mr. Ladislaw; but that only makes it worse

of Mr. Casaubon.”

The blood rushed to Dorothea’s face and neck painfully. But Celia was

administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact. It was taking

up notions that had done Dodo’s health so much harm. So she went on in

her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby’s robes.

“James says so. He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And

there never was a better judge than James. It is as if Mr. Casaubon

wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr.

Ladislaw—which is ridiculous. Only James says it was to hinder Mr.

Ladislaw from wanting to marry you for your money—just as if he ever

would think of making you an offer. Mrs. Cadwallader said you might as

well marry an Italian with white mice! But I must just go and look at

baby,” Celia added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light

shawl over her, and tripping away.

Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back

helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that

moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on

a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory

would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was

changing its aspect: her husband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling

towards him, every struggle between them—and yet more, her whole

relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive

change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that

she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had

been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed

husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she

said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also

made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards

Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could,

under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the

sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light—that

perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,—and this

with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and

questions not soon to be solved.

It seemed a long while—she did not know how long—before she heard Celia

saying, “That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now. You can

go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room. What I think,

Dodo,” Celia went on, observing nothing more than that Dorothea was

leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, “is that Mr.

Casaubon was spiteful. I never did like him, and James never did. I

think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful. And now he has

behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to make

yourself uncomfortable about him. If he has been taken away, that is a

mercy, and you ought to be grateful. We should not grieve, should we,

baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise

of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to

the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to

make—you didn’t know what:—in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.

At this crisis Lydgate was announced, and one of the first things he

said was, “I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Casaubon; have

you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse.” Dorothea’s hand was of

a marble coldness.

“She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers,” said Celia. “She

ought not, ought she?”

Lydgate did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, looking at

Dorothea. “I hardly know. In my opinion Mrs. Casaubon should do what

would give her the most repose of mind. That repose will not always

come from being forbidden to act.”

“Thank you,” said Dorothea, exerting herself, “I am sure that is wise.

There are so many things which I ought to attend to. Why should I sit

here idle?” Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with

her agitation, she added, abruptly, “You know every one in Middlemarch,

I think, Mr. Lydgate. I shall ask you to tell me a great deal. I have

serious things to do now. I have a living to give away. You know Mr.

Tyke and all the—” But Dorothea’s effort was too much for her; she

broke off and burst into sobs.

Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal volatile.

“Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes,” he said to Sir James, whom he

asked to see before quitting the house. “She wants perfect freedom, I

think, more than any other prescription.”

His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him

to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He

felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of

self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in

another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.

Lydgate’s advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he

found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about

the will. There was no help for it now—no reason for any further delay

in the execution of necessary business. And the next day Sir James

complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick.

“I have no wish to stay there at present,” said Dorothea; “I could

hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia. I shall be

able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at

it from a distance. And I should like to be at the Grange a little

while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the

people in the village.”

“Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are

better out of the way of such doings,” said Sir James, who at that

moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw’s.

But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable

part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it

between them would be impossible. Sir James was shy, even with men,

about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have

chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to

her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her

husband’s injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what

had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw’s moral

claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him

as it was to her, that her husband’s strange indelicate proviso had

been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and

not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about. Also, it

must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will’s

sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of

Mr. Casaubon’s charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian

carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed like

a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.

At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer—searched all her husband’s

places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed

especially to her, except that “Synoptical Tabulation,” which was

probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her

guidance. In carrying out this bequest of labor to Dorothea, as in all

else, Mr. Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan

of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense

of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Dorothea’s

competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust

of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a trust for

himself out of Dorothea’s nature: she could do what she resolved to do:

and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to

erect a tomb with his name upon it. (Not that Mr. Casaubon called the

future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But

the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had

time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp

on Dorothea’s life.

The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of

her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her

judgment whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of

faithfulness which is a supreme use. But now her judgment, instead of

being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the

imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the

hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion. The living, suffering man

was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the

retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been

lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had

even blinded his scrupulous care for his own character, and made him

defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honor. As for the

property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been

glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune

which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to

ownership, which she ought not to flinch from. About this property many

troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in

thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?—but was it

not impossible now for her to do that act of justice? Mr. Casaubon had

taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation

against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of

his purpose revolted her.

After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she

locked up again the desks and drawers—all empty of personal words for

her—empty of any sign that in her husband’s lonely brooding his heart

had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to

Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last

injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken.

Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and

one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her

of. Lydgate’s ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as

soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of

making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an

ill-satisfied conscience. “Instead of telling you anything about Mr.

Tyke,” he said, “I should like to speak of another man—Mr. Farebrother,

the Vicar of St. Botolph’s. His living is a poor one, and gives him a

stinted provision for himself and his family. His mother, aunt, and

sister all live with him, and depend upon him. I believe he has never

married because of them. I never heard such good preaching as his—such

plain, easy eloquence. He would have done to preach at St. Paul’s Cross

after old Latimer. His talk is just as good about all subjects:

original, simple, clear. I think him a remarkable fellow: he ought to

have done more than he has done.”

“Why has he not done more?” said Dorothea, interested now in all who

had slipped below their own intention.

“That’s a hard question,” said Lydgate. “I find myself that it’s

uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many

strings pulling at once. Farebrother often hints that he has got into

the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor

clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on. He is very

fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is

hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position. He has no money

to spare—hardly enough to use; and that has led him into

card-playing—Middlemarch is a great place for whist. He does play for

money, and he wins a good deal. Of course that takes him into company a

little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet,

with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most

blameless men I ever knew. He has neither venom nor doubleness in him,

and those often go with a more correct outside.”

“I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,”

said Dorothea; “I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off.”

“I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into

plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things.”

“My uncle says that Mr. Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man,” said

Dorothea, meditatively. She was wishing it were possible to restore the

times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother with a

strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.

“I don’t pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic,” said Lydgate.

“His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a

parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.

Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an

impatience of everything in which the parson doesn’t cut the principal

figure. I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at the Hospital: a good

deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people

uncomfortably aware of him. Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!—he

ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the

birds.”

“True,” said Dorothea. “It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our

farmers and laborers get from their teaching. I have been looking into

a volume of sermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at

Lowick—I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the

Apocalypse. I have always been thinking of the different ways in which

Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a

wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean

that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most

people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than

to condemn too much. But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear

him preach.”

“Do,” said Lydgate; “I trust to the effect of that. He is very much

beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can’t

forgive an able man for differing from them. And that money-winning

business is really a blot. You don’t, of course, see many Middlemarch

people: but Mr. Ladislaw, who is constantly seeing Mr. Brooke, is a

great friend of Mr. Farebrother’s old ladies, and would be glad to sing

the Vicar’s praises. One of the old ladies—Miss Noble, the aunt—is a

wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Ladislaw

gallants her about sometimes. I met them one day in a back street: you

know Ladislaw’s look—a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this

little old maid reaching up to his arm—they looked like a couple

dropped out of a romantic comedy. But the best evidence about

Farebrother is to see him and hear him.”

Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this conversation

occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate’s innocent

introduction of Ladislaw painful to her. As was usual with him in

matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond’s

remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Casaubon. At that moment he

was only caring for what would recommend the Farebrother family; and he

had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the

Vicar, in order to forestall objections. In the weeks since Mr.

Casaubon’s death he had hardly seen Ladislaw, and he had heard no rumor

to warn him that Mr. Brooke’s confidential secretary was a dangerous

subject with Mrs. Casaubon. When he was gone, his picture of Ladislaw

lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the

Lowick living. What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her? Would he hear

of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do? And

how would he feel when he heard it?—But she could see as well as

possible how he smiled down at the little old maid. An Italian with

white mice!—on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every

one’s feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of

urging his own with iron resistance.