Middlemarch (version 2) — Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI.

He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction!

would it were otherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.

—_Troilus and Cressida_.

But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were quite peremptory.

From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a day or two had deemed mere depression and headache, but which got so much worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, going into the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to his mother’s anxious question, said, “I feel very ill: I think you must send for Wrench.

” Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a “slight derangement,” and did not speak of coming again on the morrow.

He had a due value for the Vincys’ house, but the wariest men are apt to be dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer.

Mr. Wrench was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and seven children; and he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Tipton, the decease of Hicks, a rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch practice in that direction.

Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men?

Mr. Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this time had black and drastic contents.

Their effect was not alleviating to poor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was “in for an illness,” rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and went down-stairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in sitting and shivering by the fire.

Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds, and Mrs. Vincy seeing her darling’s changed looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr. Sprague.

“Oh, nonsense, mother!

It’s nothing,” said Fred, putting out his hot dry hand to her, “I shall soon be all right.

I must have taken cold in that nasty damp ride.

” “Mamma!

” said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate), “there is Mr. Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one.

If I were you I would call him in.

He has cured Ellen Bulstrode.

They say he cures every one.

” Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking only of Fred and not of medical etiquette.

Lydgate was only two yards off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him.

In two minutes he was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was becoming.

Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy’s mind insisted with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially on what Mr. Wrench had said and had not said about coming again.

That there might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just the wrong medicines.

He must go to bed immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and precautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular.

Poor Mrs. Vincy’s terror at these indications of danger found vent in such words as came most easily.

She thought it “very ill usage on the part of Mr. Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr. Peacock, though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend.

Why Mr. Wrench should neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life of her understand.

He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher’s when they had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Vincy have wished that he should.

And if anything should happen—” Here poor Mrs. Vincy’s spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat and good-humored face were sadly convulsed.

This was in the hall out of Fred’s hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and now came forward anxiously.

Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go immediately to the druggist’s and have a prescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench and tell him what had been done.

“But you must come again—you must go on attending Fred.

I can’t have my boy left to anybody who may come or not.

I bear nobody ill-will, thank God, and Mr. Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he’d better have let me die—if—if—” “I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?

” said Lydgate, really believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case of this kind.

“Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, coming to her mother’s aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.

When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not care if he never came into his house again.

Lydgate should go on now, whether Wrench liked it or not.

It was no joke to have fever in the house.

Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on Thursday.

And Pritchard needn’t get up any wine: brandy was the best thing against infection.

“I shall drink brandy,” added Mr. Vincy, emphatically—as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing with blank-cartridges.

“He’s an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred.

He’d need have some luck by and by to make up for all this—else I don’t know who’d have an eldest son.

” “Don’t say so, Vincy,” said the mother, with a quivering lip, “if you don’t want him to be taken from me.

” “It will worret you to death, Lucy; _that_ I can see,” said Mr. Vincy, more mildly.

“However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter.

” (What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about his—the Mayor’s—family.

) “I’m the last man to give in to the cry about new doctors, or new parsons either—whether they’re Bulstrode’s men or not.

But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will.

” Wrench did not take it at all well.

Lydgate was as polite as he could be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand.

Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable among them.

He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was somewhat tried on the occasion.

He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say— “Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?

— To go away, and never to come again!

And my boy might have been stretched a corpse!

” Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection, and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.

“I’ll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke,” said the Mayor, who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.

“To let fever get unawares into a house like this.

There are some things that ought to be actionable, and are not so— that’s my opinion.

” But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate, inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for “in point of fact,” Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear.

He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case.

The house might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody on a professional matter.

He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself.

He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate’s tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people.

That cant about cures was never got up by sound practitioners.

This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire.

To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet.

He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.

However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch.

Some said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy had threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him of poisoning her son.

Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate’s passing by was providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward.

Many people believed that Lydgate’s coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode;

and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode’s, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen.

She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother, who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing— “I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate.

” “Why, mother,” said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, “you know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North.

He never heard of Bulstrode before he came here.

” “That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,” said the old lady, with an air of precision.

—“But as to Bulstrode—the report may be true of some other son.

” CHAPTER XXVII.

Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact.

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo!

the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.

It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.

These things are a parable.

The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example.

Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred’s illness and Mr. Wrench’s mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity.

It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Lydgate thought the precaution needless.

Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred’s illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma.

Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman;

and Mr. Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account than on Fred’s. But for his insistence she would have taken no rest: her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights and sounds that used most to interest her.

Fred’s delirium, in which he seemed to be wandering out of her reach, tore her heart.

After her first outburst against Mr. Wrench she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to Lydgate.

She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his arm moaning out, “Save my boy.

” Once she pleaded, “He has always been good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother,”—as if poor Fred’s suffering were an accusation against him.

All the deepest fibres of the mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born.

“I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy,” Lydgate would say.

“Come down with me and let us talk about the food.

” In that way he led her to the parlor where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising her into taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her.

There was a constant understanding between him and Rosamond on these matters.

He almost always saw her before going to the sickroom, and she appealed to him as to what she could do for mamma.

Her presence of mind and adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it is not wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itself with his interest in the case.

Especially when the critical stage was passed, and he began to feel confident of Fred’s recovery.

In the more doubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could, would rather have remained neutral on Wrench’s account); but after two consultations, the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there was every reason to make him assiduous.

Morning and evening he was at Mr. Vincy’s, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became simply feeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but conscious of it, so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all, the illness had made a festival for her tenderness.

Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits, when old Mr. Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred must make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not do without him, and missed his visits sadly.

The old man himself was getting bedridden.

Mrs. Vincy told these messages to Fred when he could listen, and he turned towards her his delicate, pinched face, from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about Mary—wondering what she felt about his illness.

No word passed his lips; but “to hear with eyes belongs to love’s rare wit,” and the mother in the fulness of her heart not only divined Fred’s longing, but felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him.

“If I can only see my boy strong again,” she said, in her loving folly;

“and who knows?

—perhaps master of Stone Court!

and he can marry anybody he likes then.

” “Not if they won’t have me, mother,” said Fred.

The illness had made him childish, and tears came as he spoke.

“Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, secretly incredulous of any such refusal.

She never left Fred’s side when her husband was not in the house, and thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone.

Lydgate, naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together were creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.

They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was.

Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet.

But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before.

There was no help for this in science, and as Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed to be no help for it in folly.

It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longer considered the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Rosamond alone were very much reduced.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Talk about the weather and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollow device, and behavior can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes a mutual fascination—which of course need not mean anything deep or serious.

This was the way in which Rosamond and Lydgate slid gracefully into ease, and made their intercourse lively again.

Visitors came and went as usual, there was once more music in the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr. Vincy’s mayoralty returned.

Lydgate, whenever he could, took his seat by Rosamond’s side, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself her captive—meaning, all the while, not to be her captive.

The preposterousness of the notion that he could at once set up a satisfactory establishment as a married man was a sufficient guarantee against danger.

This play at being a little in love was agreeable, and did not interfere with graver pursuits.

Flirtation, after all, was not necessarily a singeing process.

Rosamond, for her part, had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure of being admired by some one worth captivating, and she did not distinguish flirtation from love, either in herself or in another.

She seemed to be sailing with a fair wind just whither she would go, and her thoughts were much occupied with a handsome house in Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant.

She was quite determined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitors who were not agreeable to her at her father’s; and she imagined the drawing-room in her favorite house with various styles of furniture.

Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself; he seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant’s, and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him.

How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher!

Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man.

Whereas Lydgate was always listened to, bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think about them.

Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage.

If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.

But Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being steered by wary grace and propriety.

Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma?

On the contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness—indeed, would probably have disbelieved in its possibility.

For Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date.

Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide.

She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light—they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please.

Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon’s favorite pupil, who by general consent (Fred’s excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability.

Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third person need have been excluded.

In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else.

If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time?

Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr. Farebrother, were great bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation?

He was often invited to the Bulstrodes’; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs. Bulstrode’s _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband’s invariable seriousness.

The Vincys’ house, with all its faults, was the pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond—sweet to look at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man.

But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss Vincy.

One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when several other visitors were there.

The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in _tête-à-tête_ with Rosamond.

He had brought the last “Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting.

Rosamond was gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium for “paying addresses”—the very thing to please a nice girl.

He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance.

To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed.

And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.

“I think the Honorable Mrs. S.

is something like you,” said Mr. Ned.

He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it rather languishingly.

“Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that,” said Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young Plymdale’s hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come.

She went on with her tatting all the while.

“I did not say she was as beautiful as you are,” said Mr. Ned, venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.

“I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer,” said Rosamond, feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time.

But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached Rosamond’s corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the other side of her, young Plymdale’s jaw fell like a barometer towards the cheerless side of change.

Rosamond enjoyed not only Lydgate’s presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy.

“What a late comer you are!

” she said, as they shook hands.

“Mamma had given you up a little while ago.

How do you find Fred?

” “As usual; going on well, but slowly.

I want him to go away—to Stone Court, for example.

But your mamma seems to have some objection.

” “Poor fellow!

” said Rosamond, prettily.

“You will see Fred so changed,” she added, turning to the other suitor; “we have looked to Mr. Lydgate as our guardian angel during this illness.

” Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the “Keepsake” towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chin, as if in wonderment at human folly.

“What are you laughing at so profanely?

” said Rosamond, with bland neutrality.

“I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest—the engravings or the writing here,” said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought.

“Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a ‘sugared invention’—as the Elizabethans used to say?

Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking?

Yet I will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land.

” “You are so severe, I am frightened at you,” said Rosamond, keeping her amusement duly moderate.

Poor young Plymdale had lingered with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.

“There are a great many celebrated people writing in the ‘Keepsake,’ at all events,” he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid.

“This is the first time I have heard it called silly.

” “I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,” said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile.

“I suspect you know nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E.

L.

” Rosamond herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste.

“But Sir Walter Scott—I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him,” said young Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.

“Oh, I read no literature now,” said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing it away.

“I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life.

I used to know Scott’s poems by heart.

” “I should like to know when you left off,” said Rosamond, “because then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know.

” “Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing,” said Mr. Ned, purposely caustic.

“On the contrary,” said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling with exasperating confidence at Rosamond.

“It would be worth knowing by the fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me.

” Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been his ill-fortune to meet.

“How rash you are!

” said Rosamond, inwardly delighted.

“Do you see that you have given offence?

” “What!

is it Mr. Plymdale’s book?

I am sorry.

I didn’t think about it.

” “I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came here—that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds.

” “Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will.

Don’t I listen to her willingly?

” To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged.

That they were some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her mind; and ideas, we know, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the necessary materials being at hand.

It is true, Lydgate had the counter-idea of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a shadow cast by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking.

Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it.

That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual.

The reveries from which it was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of something else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown.

Moreover, he was beginning to feel some zest for the growing though half-suppressed feud between him and the other medical men, which was likely to become more manifest, now that Bulstrode’s method of managing the new hospital was about to be declared; and there were various inspiriting signs that his non-acceptance by some of Peacock’s patients might be counterbalanced by the impression he had produced in other quarters.

Only a few days later, when he had happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road and had got down from his horse to walk by her side until he had quite protected her from a passing drove, he had been stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling him in to a house of some importance where Peacock had never attended; and it was the second instance of this kind.

The servant was Sir James Chettam’s, and the house was Lowick Manor.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

1_st Gent_.

All times are good to seek your wedded home Bringing a mutual delight.

2_d Gent_.

Why, true.

The calendar hath not an evil day For souls made one by love, and even death Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves While they two clasped each other, and foresaw No life apart.

Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, returning from their wedding journey, arrived at Lowick Manor in the middle of January.

A light snow was falling as they descended at the door, and in the morning, when Dorothea passed from her dressing-room into the blue-green boudoir that we know of, she saw the long avenue of limes lifting their trunks from a white earth, and spreading white branches against the dun and motionless sky.

The distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness and low-hanging uniformity of cloud.

The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before: the stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost in his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in the bookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books.

The bright fire of dry oak-boughs burning on the logs seemed an incongruous renewal of life and glow—like the figure of Dorothea herself as she entered carrying the red-leather cases containing the cameos for Celia.

She was glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth can glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow.

As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in the bow-window, she unconsciously kept her hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking out on the still, white enclosure which made her visible world.

Mr. Casaubon, who had risen early complaining of palpitation, was in the library giving audience to his curate Mr. Tucker.

By-and-by Celia would come in her quality of bridesmaid as well as sister, and through the next weeks there would be wedding visits received and given; all in continuance of that transitional life understood to correspond with the excitement of bridal felicity, and keeping up the sense of busy ineffectiveness, as of a dream which the dreamer begins to suspect.

The duties of her married life, contemplated as so great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the white vapor-walled landscape.

The clear heights where she expected to walk in full communion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the delicious repose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effort and alarmed with dim presentiment.

When would the days begin of that active wifely devotion which was to strengthen her husband’s life and exalt her own?

Never perhaps, as she had preconceived them; but somehow—still somehow.

In this solemnly pledged union of her life, duty would present itself in some new form of inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love.

Meanwhile there was the snow and the low arch of dun vapor—there was the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid—where the sense of connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming from without in claims that would have shaped her energies.

— “What shall I do?

” “Whatever you please, my dear:” that had been her brief history since she had left off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on the hated piano.

Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness.

Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.

In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from the window she walked round the room.

The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things.

All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her.

Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon’s aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage—of Will Ladislaw’s grandmother.

Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now—the delicate woman’s face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret.

Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate?

or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night?

What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature!

She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it.

Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage.

Nay, the colors deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted.

The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea: she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her.

But the smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said aloud— “Oh, it was cruel to speak so!

How sad—how dreadful!

” She rose quickly and went out of the room, hurrying along the corridor, with the irresistible impulse to go and see her husband and inquire if she could do anything for him.

Perhaps Mr. Tucker was gone and Mr. Casaubon was alone in the library.

She felt as if all her morning’s gloom would vanish if she could see her husband glad because of her presence.

But when she reached the head of the dark oak there was Celia coming up, and below there was Mr. Brooke, exchanging welcomes and congratulations with Mr. Casaubon.

“Dodo!

” said Celia, in her quiet staccato; then kissed her sister, whose arms encircled her, and said no more.

I think they both cried a little in a furtive manner, while Dorothea ran down-stairs to greet her uncle.

“I need not ask how you are, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, after kissing her forehead.

“Rome has agreed with you, I see—happiness, frescos, the antique—that sort of thing.

Well, it’s very pleasant to have you back again, and you understand all about art now, eh?

But Casaubon is a little pale, I tell him—a little pale, you know.

Studying hard in his holidays is carrying it rather too far.

I overdid it at one time”—Mr. Brooke still held Dorothea’s hand, but had turned his face to Mr. Casaubon—“about topography, ruins, temples—I thought I had a clew, but I saw it would carry me too far, and nothing might come of it.

You may go any length in that sort of thing, and nothing may come of it, you know.

” Dorothea’s eyes also were turned up to her husband’s face with some anxiety at the idea that those who saw him afresh after absence might be aware of signs which she had not noticed.

“Nothing to alarm you, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, observing her expression.

“A little English beef and mutton will soon make a difference.

It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the portrait of Aquinas, you know—we got your letter just in time.

But Aquinas, now—he was a little too subtle, wasn’t he?

Does anybody read Aquinas?

” “He is not indeed an author adapted to superficial minds,” said Mr. Casaubon, meeting these timely questions with dignified patience.

“You would like coffee in your own room, uncle?

” said Dorothea, coming to the rescue.

“Yes; and you must go to Celia: she has great news to tell you, you know.

I leave it all to her.

” The blue-green boudoir looked much more cheerful when Celia was seated there in a pelisse exactly like her sister’s, surveying the cameos with a placid satisfaction, while the conversation passed on to other topics.

“Do you think it nice to go to Rome on a wedding journey?

” said Celia, with her ready delicate blush which Dorothea was used to on the smallest occasions.

“It would not suit all—not you, dear, for example,” said Dorothea, quietly.

No one would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey to Rome.

“Mrs. Cadwallader says it is nonsense, people going a long journey when they are married.

She says they get tired to death of each other, and can’t quarrel comfortably, as they would at home.

And Lady Chettam says she went to Bath.