"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate, looking ather with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamondblush with pleasure. But she remained simply serious, turned her longneck a little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits—anhabitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten's paw.Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph caughtyoung and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.
"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; "I pass atMiddlemarch. I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors. But I amreally afraid of you."
"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men,though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teachme a thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if therewere any common language between them. Happily, there is a commonlanguage between women and men, and so the bears can get taught."
"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder him fromjarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the other side of theroom, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father's desire, thatRosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically performing"Cherry Ripe!" with one hand. Able men who have passed theirexaminations will do these things sometimes, not less than the pluckedFred.
"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.Lydgate ill," said Rosamond. "He has an ear."
Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.
Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "Youperceive, the bears will not always be taught."
"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting itupward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment. "Some goodrousing tunes first."
Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school(close to a county town with a memorable history that had its relics inchurch and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there tobe found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a notedKapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions ofmusical celebrity. Rosamond, with the executant's instinct, had seized hismanner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble musicwith the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the firsttime. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond's fingers;and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to allfine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be onlythat of an interpreter. Lydgate was taken possession of, and began tobelieve in her as something exceptional. After all, he thought, one neednot be surprised to find the rare conjunctions of nature undercircumstances apparently unfavorable: come where they may, theyalways depend on conditions that are not obvious. He sat looking at her,and did not rise to pay her any compliments, leaving that to others, nowthat his admiration was deepened.
Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet tohear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang "Meet me bymoonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the fashionsof their time, and none but the ancients can be always classical. ButRosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with effect, or Haydn'scanzonets, or "Voi, che sapete," or "Batti, batti"—she only wanted toknow what her audience liked.
Her father looked round at the company, delighting in theiradmiration. Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with heryoungest little girl on her lap, softly beating the child's hand up anddown in time to the music. And Fred, notwithstanding his generalscepticism about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance,wishing he could do the same thing on his flute. It was the pleasantestfamily party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch. TheVincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and thebelief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in mostcounty towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certainsuspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survivedin the provinces. At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly impatientof the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in—a handsome,broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose black wasvery threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray eyes. He camelike a pleasant change in the light, arresting little Louisa with fatherlynonsense as she was being led out of the room by Miss Morgan, greetingeverybody with some special word, and seeming to condense more talkinto ten minutes than had been held all through the evening. He claimedfrom Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come and see him. "I can't letyou off, you know, because I have some beetles to show you. Wecollectors feel an interest in every new man till he has seen all we haveto show him."
But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands andsaying, "Come now, let us be serious! Mr. Lydgate? not play? Ah! you aretoo young and light for this kind of thing."
Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were sopainful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort inthis certainly not erudite household. He could half understand it: thegood-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision forpassing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the housebeguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.
Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, whowas brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said,just the sort of person for a governess. Lydgate did not mean to paymany such visits himself. They were a wretched waste of the evenings;and now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant toexcuse himself and go.
"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she said, when thewhist-players were settled. "We are very stupid, and you have been usedto something quite different."
"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike," said Lydgate."But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be morestupid than any other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch asit comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the sameway. I have certainly found some charms in it which are much greaterthan I had expected."
"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one ispleased with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.
"No, I mean something much nearer to me."
Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "Do you careabout dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever men everdance."
"I would dance with you if you would allow me."
"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh. "I was onlygoing to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to knowwhether you would feel insulted if you were asked to come."
"Not on the condition I mentioned."
After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on movingtowards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr. Farebrother'splay, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a strikingmixture of the shrewd and the mild. At ten o'clock supper was brought in(such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was punch-drinking;but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water. He was winning, butthere seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers should end,and Lydgate at last took his leave.
But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in the brisk airtowards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr. Farebrother's church, whichstood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight. It was theoldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarageworth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and hewondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he wonat cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode mayhave his good reasons." Many things would be easier to Lydgate if itshould turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable. "What is hisreligious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along with it?One must use such brains as are to be found."
These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked awayfrom Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies willconsider him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamondand her music only in the second place; and though, when her turncame, he dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt noagitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life. Hecould not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; andtherefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love with agirl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond exceedingly;but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was not, hethought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman. Certainly, iffalling in love had been at all in question, it would have been quite safewith a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligenceone would desire in a woman—polished, refined, docile, lending itself tofinish in all the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body whichexpressed this with a force of demonstration that excluded the need forother evidence. Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife wouldhave that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must beclassed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its verynature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years—his morepressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which hewas specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, andhad followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain thespecific differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read farinto the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details andrelations into this pathological study than he had ever thought itnecessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these beingsubjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature, and thattraditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation ofmen. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him that delightfullabor of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the exerciseof disciplined power—combining and constructing with the clearest eyefor probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yetmore energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to inventtests by which to try its own work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strengthof their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reportsof very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer comingdown on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurtsof phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflectlife in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regardedas rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that revealssubtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outerdarkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inwardlight which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even theethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossedaway all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease:he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye ofresearch, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more andmore exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of thoseminute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisiblethoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, andcrime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth ofhappy or unhappy consciousness.
As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers inthe grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in thatagreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examinationof a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all therest of our existence—seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back aftervigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength—Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pityfor those less lucky men who were not of his profession.
"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I mighthave got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived alwaysin blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that didnot call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in goodwarm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medicalprofession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touchesthe distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It is ratherharder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of theevening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took uphis bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is aptto accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but atpresent his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the ambitionof making his life recognized as a factor in the better life of mankind—like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure countrypractice to begin with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world ofwhich the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that hehad been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neitherany reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor anypathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, thatinward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a large partin the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her or speak to herwith more than the inevitable amount of admiration and complimentwhich a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed to him thathis enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for he fearedfalling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at her possessionof such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered every look andword, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceivedromance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen developmentand climax. In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to imaginemuch about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in theworld: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well assufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his goodbirth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, andpresented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and getting a littlenearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would havenothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate withrelatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on theMiddlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to discern verysubtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the MissBrookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and seatedamong the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding their plaindress.
