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 se 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 chill, 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 east 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.