Middlemarch

‘I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger,’ said Mr Vincy, the mayor, a florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr Bulstrode. ‘It’s an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the shafts of disease, as somebody said,—and I think it a very good expression myself.’

Mr Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke, whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the piquancy of an unusual combination.

‘She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,’ he thought. ‘It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste.’

Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr Lydgate’s style of woman any more than Mr Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter, whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young women to purple-faced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might possibly have experiences before him which would modify his opinion as to the most excellent things in woman.

Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become Mrs Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.

CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_3da75618-1654-51c8-9ea4-69d7d50d8136)

‘But deeds and language such as men do use,

And persons such as comedy would choose,

When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.’

—Ben Jonson.

Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particular woman, ‘She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music.’ Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his. Lydgate believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road which was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon almost as long as it had taken Mr Casaubon to become engaged and married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation which precedes performance,—often the larger part of a man’s fame. He took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even secure him a good income. To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.

Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant countries, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blondness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and colour of drapery. But these things made only part of her charm. She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage. Mrs Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as an example; no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional. We cannot help the way in which people speak of us, and probably if Mrs Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen, these heroines would not have seemed poetical. The first vision of Rosamond would have been enough with most judges to dispel any prejudice excited by Mrs Lemon’s praise.

Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family; for although Mr Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter on, had not been their doctor (Mrs Vincy not liking the lowering system adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections and acquaintances. For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? They were old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbours more or less decidedly genteel. Mr Vincy’s sister had made a wealthy match in accepting Mr Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimly-known origin, was considered to have done well in uniting himself with a real Middlemarch family; on the other hand, Mr Vincy had descended a little, having taken an innkeeper’s daughter. But on this side too there was a cheering sense of money; for Mrs Vincy’s sister had been second wife to rich old Mr Featherstone, and had died childless years ago, so that her nephews and nieces might be supposed to touch the affections of the widower. And it happened that Mr Bulstrode and Mr Featherstone, two of Peacock’s most important patients, had, from different causes, given an especially good reception to his successor, who had raised some partisanship as well as discussion. Mr Wrench, medical attendant to the Vincy family, very early had grounds for thinking lightly of Lydgate’s professional discretion, and there was no report about him which was not retailed at the Vincys’, where visitors were frequent. Mr Vincy was more inclined to general good-fellowship than to taking sides, but there was no need for him to be hasty in making any new man’s acquaintance. Rosamond silently wished that her father would invite Mr Lydgate. She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used to—the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as boys. She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more interested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions. But she would not have chosen to mention her wish to her father; and he, for his part, was in no hurry on the subject. An alderman about to be mayor must by-and-by enlarge his dinner-parties, but at present there were plenty of guests at his well-spread table.

That table often remained covered with the relics of the family breakfast long after Mr Vincy had gone with his second son to the warehouse, and when Miss Morgan was already far on in morning lessons with the younger girls in the schoolroom. It awaited the family laggard, who found any sort of inconvenience (to others) less disagreeable than getting up when he was called. This was the case one morning of the October in which we have lately seen Mr Casaubon visiting the Grange; and though the room was a little overheated with the fire, which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner, Rosamond, for some reason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weariness. Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen, sat on the other side of the small work-table with an air of more entire placidity, until, the clock again giving notice that it was going to strike, she looked up from the lace-mending which was occupying her plump fingers and rang the bell.

‘Knock at Mr Fred’s door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has struck half-past ten.’

This was said without any change in the radiant good-humour of Mrs Vincy’s face, in which forty-five years had delved neither angles nor parallels; and pushing back her pink cap-strings, she let her work rest on her lap, while she looked admiringly at her daughter.

‘Mamma,’ said Rosamond, ‘when Fred comes down I wish you would not let him have red herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them all over the house at this hour of the morning.’

‘Oh, my dear, you are so hard on your brothers! It is the only fault I have to find with you. You are the sweetest temper in the world, but you are so tetchy with your brothers.’

‘Not tetchy, mamma: you never hear me speak in an unladylike way.’

‘Well, but you want to deny them things.’

‘Brothers are so unpleasant.’

‘Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men. Be thankful if they have good hearts. A woman must learn to put up with little things. You will be married some day.’

‘Not to any one who is like Fred.’

‘Don’t decry your own brother, my dear. Few young men have less against them, although he couldn’t take his degree—I’m sure I can’t understand why, for he seems to me most clever. And you know yourself he was thought equal to the best society at college. So particular as you are, my dear, I wonder you are not glad to have such a gentlemanly young man for a brother. You are always finding fault with Bob because he is not Fred.’

‘Oh, no, mamma, only because he is Bob.’

‘Well, my dear, you will not find any Middlemarch young man who has not something against him.’

‘But’—here Rosamond’s face broke into a smile which suddenly revealed two dimples. She herself thought unfavourably of these dimples and smiled little in general society. ‘But I shall not marry any Middlemarch young man.’

‘So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick of them; and if there’s better to be had, I’m sure there’s no girl better deserves it.’

‘Excuse me, mamma—I wish you would not say, “the pick of them”.’

‘Why, what else are they?’

‘I mean, mamma, it is rather a vulgar expression.’

‘Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker. What should I say?’

‘The best of them.’

‘Why, that seems just as plain and common. If I had had time to think, I should have said, “the most superior young men”. But with your education you must know.’

‘What must Rosy know, mother?’ said Mr Fred, who had slid in unobserved through the half-open door while the ladies were bending over their work, and now going up to the fire stood with his back towards it, warming the soles of his slippers.

‘Whether it’s right to say “superior young men”,’ said Mrs Vincy, ringing the bell.

‘Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to be shopkeepers’ slang.’

‘Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?’ said Rosamond, with mild gravity.

‘Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.’

‘There is correct English: that is not slang.’

‘I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.’

‘You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.’

‘Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.’

‘Of course you can call it poetry if you like.’

‘Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate.’

‘Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!’ said Mrs Vincy, with cheerful admiration.

‘Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?’ said Fred, to the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast; while he walked round the table surveying the ham, potted beef, and other cold remnants, with an air of silent rejection, and polite forbearance from signs of disgust.

‘Should you like eggs, sir?’