I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in his life before. Not that he had been disappointed as to the possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be concluded with Lord Medlicote’s man, this Diamond, in which hope to the amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after marriage—which of course old companions were aware of before the ceremony. For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual elasticity under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be presented in five days. Even if he had applied to his father on the plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss, Fred felt smartingly that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Garth from the consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit. He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to go straight to Mr. Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him the fifty pounds, and getting that sum at least safely out of his own hands. His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater. He took his father’s nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr. Garth, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary. In fact, it is probable that but for Mary’s existence and Fred’s love for her, his conscience would have been much less active both in previously urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as directly and simply as he could. Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.
Mr. Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house, which was a little way outside the town—a homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen. We get the fonder of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends have. The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from which all the best furniture had long been sold. Fred liked it too, knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples and quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he should probably have to make his confession before Mrs. Garth, of whom he was rather more in awe than of her husband. Not that she was inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Mary was. In her present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth, and learned self-control. She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her husband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’s frilling, and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr. Garth’s want of prudence and the sums he might have had if he had been like other men. Hence these fair neighbors thought her either proud or eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as “your fine Mrs. Garth.” She was not without her criticism of them in return, being more accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch, and—where is the blameless woman?—apt to be a little severe towards her own sex, which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate. On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural. Also, it must be admitted that Mrs. Garth was a trifle too emphatic in her resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings. She had sometimes taken pupils in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders “without looking,”—that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that, in short, she might possess “education” and other good things ending in “tion,” and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll. When she made remarks to this edifying effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto. Certainly, the exemplary Mrs. Garth had her droll aspects, but her character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavor of skin.
Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have excused Mary for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex. But this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it the harder to Fred that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion. And the circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more unpleasant than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early to look at some repairs not far off. Mrs. Garth at certain hours was always in the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations at once there—making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally’s movements at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite to her at the table with their books and slates before them. A tub and a clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also going on.
Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry—applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with “nouns of multitude or signifying many,” was a sight agreeably amusing. She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin, a solid matronly figure, and a remarkable firmness of glance. In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm. Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—“Such as I am, she will shortly be.”
“Now let us go through that once more,” said Mrs. Garth, pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson. “‘Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea’—tell me again what that means, Ben.”
(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her “Lindley Murray” above the waves.)
“Oh—it means—you must think what you mean,” said Ben, rather peevishly. “I hate grammar. What’s the use of it?”
“To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,” said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision. “Should you like to speak as old Job does?”
“Yes,” said Ben, stoutly; “it’s funnier. He says, ‘Yo goo’—that’s just as good as ‘You go.’”
“But he says, ‘A ship’s in the garden,’ instead of ‘a sheep,’” said Letty, with an air of superiority. “You might think he meant a ship off the sea.”
“No, you mightn’t, if you weren’t silly,” said Ben. “How could a ship off the sea come there?”
“These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of grammar,” said Mrs. Garth. “That apple-peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty. Job has only to speak about very plain things. How do you think you would write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of grammar than he does? You would use wrong words, and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person. What would you do then?”
“I shouldn’t care, I should leave off,” said Ben, with a sense that this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.
“I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben,” said Mrs. Garth, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, “Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about Cincinnatus.”
“I know! he was a farmer,” said Ben.
“Now, Ben, he was a Roman—let me tell,” said Letty, using her elbow contentiously.
“You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing.”
“Yes, but before that—that didn’t come first—people wanted him,” said Letty.
“Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first,” insisted Ben. “He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his advice. And he was a brave man, and could fight. And so could my father—couldn’t he, mother?”
“Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,” said Letty, frowning. “Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak.”
“Letty, I am ashamed of you,” said her mother, wringing out the caps from the tub. “When your brother began, you ought to have waited to see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows! Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so.” (Mrs. Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) “Now, Ben.”
“Well—oh—well—why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were all blockheads, and—I can’t tell it just how you told it—but they wanted a man to be captain and king and everything—”
“Dictator, now,” said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish to make her mother repent.
“Very well, dictator!” said Ben, contemptuously. “But that isn’t a good word: he didn’t tell them to write on slates.”
“Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that,” said Mrs. Garth, carefully serious. “Hark, there is a knock at the door! Run, Letty, and open it.”
The knock was Fred’s; and when Letty said that her father was not in yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative. He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs. Garth in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there. He put his arm round Letty’s neck silently, and led her into the kitchen without his usual jokes and caresses.
Mrs. Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise was not a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly continuing her work—
“You, Fred, so early in the day? You look quite pale. Has anything happened?”
“I want to speak to Mr. Garth,” said Fred, not yet ready to say more—“and to you also,” he added, after a little pause, for he had no doubt that Mrs. Garth knew everything about the bill, and he must in the end speak of it before her, if not to her solely.
“Caleb will be in again in a few minutes,” said Mrs. Garth, who imagined some trouble between Fred and his father. “He is sure not to be long, because he has some work at his desk that must be done this morning. Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?”
“But we needn’t go on about Cincinnatus, need we?” said Ben, who had taken Fred’s whip out of his hand, and was trying its efficiency on the cat.
“No, go out now. But put that whip down. How very mean of you to whip poor old Tortoise! Pray take the whip from him, Fred.”
“Come, old boy, give it me,” said Fred, putting out his hand.
“Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?” said Ben, rendering up the whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.
“Not to-day—another time. I am not riding my own horse.”
“Shall you see Mary to-day?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Fred, with an unpleasant twinge.
“Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun.”
“Enough, enough, Ben! run away,” said Mrs. Garth, seeing that Fred was teased.
“Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs. Garth?” said Fred, when the children were gone and it was needful to say something that would pass the time. He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr. Garth, or use any good opportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs. Garth herself, give her the money and ride away.
“One—only one. Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven. I am not getting a great income now,” said Mrs. Garth, smiling. “I am at a low ebb with pupils. But I have saved my little purse for Alfred’s premium: I have ninety-two pounds. He can go to Mr. Hanmer’s now; he is just at the right age.”
This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Garth was on the brink of losing ninety-two pounds and more. Fred was silent. “Young gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that,” Mrs. Garth innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border. “And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer: he wants to give the boy a good chance. There he is! I hear him coming in. We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?”
When they entered the parlor Caleb had thrown down his hat and was seated at his desk.
“What! Fred, my boy!” he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his pen still undipped; “you are here betimes.” But missing the usual expression of cheerful greeting in Fred’s face, he immediately added, “Is there anything up at home?—anything the matter?”
“Yes, Mr. Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give you a bad opinion of me. I am come to tell you and Mrs. Garth that I can’t keep my word. I can’t find the money to meet the bill after all. I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty pounds towards the hundred and sixty.”
While Fred was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them on the desk before Mr. Garth. He had burst forth at once with the plain fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources. Mrs. Garth was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for an explanation. Caleb blushed, and after a little pause said—
“Oh, I didn’t tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred; it was for a hundred and sixty pounds. He made sure he could meet it himself.”
There was an evident change in Mrs. Garth’s face, but it was like a change below the surface of water which remains smooth. She fixed her eyes on Fred, saying—
“I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money and he has refused you.”
“No,” said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty; “but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use, I should not like to mention Mr. Garth’s name in the matter.”
“It has come at an unfortunate time,” said Caleb, in his hesitating way, looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper, “Christmas upon us—I’m rather hard up just now. You see, I have to cut out everything like a tailor with short measure. What can we do, Susan? I shall want every farthing we have in the bank. It’s a hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it!”
“I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for Alfred’s premium,” said Mrs. Garth, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear might have discerned a slight tremor in some of the words. “And I have no doubt that Mary has twenty pounds saved from her salary by this time. She will advance it.”
Mrs. Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively. Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions. But she had made Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse. Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.
“I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs. Garth—ultimately,” he stammered out.
“Yes, ultimately,” said Mrs. Garth, who having a special dislike to fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram. “But boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed at fifteen.” She had never been so little inclined to make excuses for Fred.
“I was the most in the wrong, Susan,” said Caleb. “Fred made sure of finding the money. But I’d no business to be fingering bills. I suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?” he added, fixing his merciful gray eyes on Fred. Caleb was too delicate to specify Mr. Featherstone.
“Yes, I have tried everything—I really have. I should have had a hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which I was about to sell. My uncle had given me eighty pounds, and I paid away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I was going to sell for eighty or more—I meant to go without a horse—but now it has turned out vicious and lamed itself. I wish I and the horses too had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you. There’s no one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Garth have always been so kind to me. However, it’s no use saying that. You will always think me a rascal now.”
Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry was not of much use to the Garths. They could see him mount, and quickly pass through the gate.
“I am disappointed in Fred Vincy,” said Mrs. Garth. “I would not have believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts. I knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could the least afford to lose.”
“I was a fool, Susan.”
“That you were,” said the wife, nodding and smiling. “But I should not have gone to publish it in the market-place. Why should you keep such things from me? It is just so with your buttons: you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging. If I had only known I might have been ready with some better plan.”
“You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan,” said Caleb, looking feelingly at her. “I can’t abide your losing the money you’ve scraped together for Alfred.”
“It is very well that I had scraped it together; and it is you who will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself. You must give up your bad habits. Some men take to drinking, and you have taken to working without pay. You must indulge yourself a little less in that. And you must ride over to Mary, and ask the child what money she has.”
Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his head slowly, and fitting his finger-tips together with much nicety.
“Poor Mary!” he said. “Susan,” he went on in a lowered tone, “I’m afraid she may be fond of Fred.”
“Oh no! She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her in any other than a brotherly way.”
Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up his chair to the desk, and said, “Deuce take the bill—I wish it was at Hanover! These things are a sad interruption to business!”
The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine. But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word “business,” the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.
Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “business;” and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of the special men in the county.
His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times. He divided them into “business, politics, preaching, learning, and amusement.” He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with “business” as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up all forms of his beloved “business” which required that talent. He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work well, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the Garths were poor, and “lived in a small way.” However, they did not mind it.
CHAPTER XXV.
“Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell’s despair. . . . . . . . Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.” —W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience.
Fred Vincy wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not expect him, and when his uncle was not downstairs: in that case she might be sitting alone in the wainscoted parlor. He left his horse in the yard to avoid making a noise on the gravel in front, and entered the parlor without other notice than the noise of the door-handle. Mary was in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi’s recollections of Johnson, and looked up with the fun still in her face. It gradually faded as she saw Fred approach her without speaking, and stand before her with his elbow on the mantel-piece, looking ill. She too was silent, only raising her eyes to him inquiringly.
“Mary,” he began, “I am a good-for-nothing blackguard.”
“I should think one of those epithets would do at a time,” said Mary, trying to smile, but feeling alarmed.
“I know you will never think well of me any more. You will think me a liar. You will think me dishonest. You will think I didn’t care for you, or your father and mother. You always do make the worst of me, I know.”
“I cannot deny that I shall think all that of you, Fred, if you give me good reasons. But please to tell me at once what you have done. I would rather know the painful truth than imagine it.”
“I owed money—a hundred and sixty pounds. I asked your father to put his name to a bill. I thought it would not signify to him. I made sure of paying the money myself, and I have tried as hard as I could. And now, I have been so unlucky—a horse has turned out badly—I can only pay fifty pounds. And I can’t ask my father for the money: he would not give me a farthing. And my uncle gave me a hundred a little while ago. So what can I do? And now your father has no ready money to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-two pounds that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too. You see what a—”
“Oh, poor mother, poor father!” said Mary, her eyes filling with tears, and a little sob rising which she tried to repress. She looked straight before her and took no notice of Fred, all the consequences at home becoming present to her. He too remained silent for some moments, feeling more miserable than ever. “I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world, Mary,” he said at last. “You can never forgive me.”
“What does it matter whether I forgive you?” said Mary, passionately. “Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has been earning by lessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to Mr. Hanmer’s? Should you think all that pleasant enough if I forgave you?”
“Say what you like, Mary. I deserve it all.”
“I don’t want to say anything,” said Mary, more quietly, “and my anger is of no use.” She dried her eyes, threw aside her book, rose and fetched her sewing.
Fred followed her with his eyes, hoping that they would meet hers, and in that way find access for his imploring penitence. But no! Mary could easily avoid looking upward.
“I do care about your mother’s money going,” he said, when she was seated again and sewing quickly. “I wanted to ask you, Mary—don’t you think that Mr. Featherstone—if you were to tell him—tell him, I mean, about apprenticing Alfred—would advance the money?”
“My family is not fond of begging, Fred. We would rather work for our money. Besides, you say that Mr. Featherstone has lately given you a hundred pounds. He rarely makes presents; he has never made presents to us. I am sure my father will not ask him for anything; and even if I chose to beg of him, it would be of no use.”
“I am so miserable, Mary—if you knew how miserable I am, you would be sorry for me.”
“There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world. I see enough of that every day.”
“It is hardly fair to call me selfish. If you knew what things other young men do, you would think me a good way off the worst.”
“I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish. They are always thinking of what they can get for themselves, and not of what other people may lose.”
“Any man may be unfortunate, Mary, and find himself unable to pay when he meant it. There is not a better man in the world than your father, and yet he got into trouble.”
“How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fred?” said Mary, in a deep tone of indignation. “He never got into trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people. And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make good everybody’s loss.”
“And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary. It is not generous to believe the worst of a man. When you have got any power over him, I think you might try and use it to make him better; but that is what you never do. However, I’m going,” Fred ended, languidly. “I shall never speak to you about anything again. I’m very sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused—that’s all.”
Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up. There is often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary’s hard experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very different from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness. At Fred’s last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which may lose itself and get harm. And when, looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties.
“Oh, Fred, how ill you look! Sit down a moment. Don’t go yet. Let me tell uncle that you are here. He has been wondering that he has not seen you for a whole week.” Mary spoke hurriedly, saying the words that came first without knowing very well what they were, but saying them in a half-soothing half-beseeching tone, and rising as if to go away to Mr. Featherstone. Of course Fred felt as if the clouds had parted and a gleam had come: he moved and stood in her way.
“Say one word, Mary, and I will do anything. Say you will not think the worst of me—will not give me up altogether.”
“As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you,” said Mary, in a mournful tone. “As if it were not very painful to me to see you an idle frivolous creature. How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done—how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful? And with so much good in your disposition, Fred,—you might be worth a great deal.”
“I will try to be anything you like, Mary, if you will say that you love me.”
“I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him. What will you be when you are forty? Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose—just as idle, living in Mrs. Beck’s front parlor—fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner—spending your morning in learning a comic song—oh no! learning a tune on the flute.”
Mary’s lips had begun to curl with a smile as soon as she had asked that question about Fred’s future (young souls are mobile), and before she ended, her face had its full illumination of fun. To him it was like the cessation of an ache that Mary could laugh at him, and with a passive sort of smile he tried to reach her hand; but she slipped away quickly towards the door and said, “I shall tell uncle. You must see him for a moment or two.”
Fred secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the fulfilment of Mary’s sarcastic prophecies, apart from that “anything” which he was ready to do if she would define it. He never dared in Mary’s presence to approach the subject of his expectations from Mr. Featherstone, and she always ignored them, as if everything depended on himself. But if ever he actually came into the property, she must recognize the change in his position. All this passed through his mind somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle. He stayed but a little while, excusing himself on the ground that he had a cold; and Mary did not reappear before he left the house. But as he rode home, he began to be more conscious of being ill, than of being melancholy.
When Caleb Garth arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Mary was not surprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit, and was not at all fond of having to talk with Mr. Featherstone. The old man, on the other hand, felt himself ill at ease with a brother-in-law whom he could not annoy, who did not mind about being considered poor, had nothing to ask of him, and understood all kinds of farming and mining business better than he did. But Mary had felt sure that her parents would want to see her, and if her father had not come, she would have obtained leave to go home for an hour or two the next day. After discussing prices during tea with Mr. Featherstone, Caleb rose to bid him good-by, and said, “I want to speak to you, Mary.”
She took a candle into another large parlor, where there was no fire, and setting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table, turned round to her father, and putting her arms round his neck kissed him with childish kisses which he delighted in,—the expression of his large brows softening as the expression of a great beautiful dog softens when it is caressed. Mary was his favorite child, and whatever Susan might say, and right as she was on all other subjects, Caleb thought it natural that Fred or any one else should think Mary more lovable than other girls.
“I’ve got something to tell you, my dear,” said Caleb in his hesitating way. “No very good news; but then it might be worse.”
“About money, father? I think I know what it is.”
“Ay? how can that be? You see, I’ve been a bit of a fool again, and put my name to a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother has got to part with her savings, that’s the worst of it, and even they won’t quite make things even. We wanted a hundred and ten pounds: your mother has ninety-two, and I have none to spare in the bank; and she thinks that you have some savings.”
“Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds. I thought you would come, father, so I put it in my bag. See! beautiful white notes and gold.”
Mary took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into her father’s hand.
“Well, but how—we only want eighteen—here, put the rest back, child,—but how did you know about it?” said Caleb, who, in his unconquerable indifference to money, was beginning to be chiefly concerned about the relation the affair might have to Mary’s affections.
“Fred told me this morning.”
“Ah! Did he come on purpose?”
“Yes, I think so. He was a good deal distressed.”
“I’m afraid Fred is not to be trusted, Mary,” said the father, with hesitating tenderness. “He means better than he acts, perhaps. But I should think it a pity for any body’s happiness to be wrapped up in him, and so would your mother.”
“And so should I, father,” said Mary, not looking up, but putting the back of her father’s hand against her cheek.
“I don’t want to pry, my dear. But I was afraid there might be something between you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you. You see, Mary”—here Caleb’s voice became more tender; he had been pushing his hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he turned his eyes on his daughter—“a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her. Your mother has had to put up with a good deal because of me.”
Mary turned the back of her father’s hand to her lips and smiled at him.
“Well, well, nobody’s perfect, but”—here Mr. Garth shook his head to help out the inadequacy of words—“what I am thinking of is—what it must be for a wife when she’s never sure of her husband, when he hasn’t got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched. That’s the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear. However, you have more sense than most, and you haven’t been kept in cotton-wool: there may be no occasion for me to say this, but a father trembles for his daughter, and you are all by yourself here.”
“Don’t fear for me, father,” said Mary, gravely meeting her father’s eyes; “Fred has always been very good to me; he is kind-hearted and affectionate, and not false, I think, with all his self-indulgence. But I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will provide for him. You and my mother have taught me too much pride for that.”
“That’s right—that’s right. Then I am easy,” said Mr. Garth, taking up his hat. “But it’s hard to run away with your earnings, eh child.”
“Father!” said Mary, in her deepest tone of remonstrance. “Take pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home,” was her last word before he closed the outer door on himself.
“I suppose your father wanted your earnings,” said old Mr. Featherstone, with his usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Mary returned to him. “He makes but a tight fit, I reckon. You’re of age now; you ought to be saving for yourself.”
“I consider my father and mother the best part of myself, sir,” said Mary, coldly.
Mr. Featherstone grunted: he could not deny that an ordinary sort of girl like her might be expected to be useful, so he thought of another rejoinder, disagreeable enough to be always apropos. “If Fred Vincy comes to-morrow, now, don’t you keep him chattering: let him come up to me.”
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.