"I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I shouldwish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me tosee which opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to liveaccording to them."
"Very true. You couldn't put the thing better—couldn't put it better,beforehand, you know. But there are oddities in things," continued Mr.Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could forhis niece on this occasion. "Life isn't cast in a mould—not cut out by ruleand line, and that sort of thing. I never married myself, and it will be thebetter for you and yours. The fact is, I never loved any one well enoughto put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know. Temper,now. There is temper. And a husband likes to be master."
"I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higherduties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease," said poor Dorothea.
"Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls,dinners, that kind of thing. I can see that Casaubon's ways might suityou better than Chettam's. And you shall do as you like, my dear. Iwould not hinder Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no knowinghow anything may turn out. You have not the same tastes as every younglady; and a clergyman and scholar—who may be a bishop—that kind ofthing—may suit you better than Chettam. Chettam is a good fellow, agood sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn't go much into ideas.I did, when I was his age. But Casaubon's eyes, now. I think he has hurtthem a little with too much reading."
"I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for meto help him," said Dorothea, ardently.
"You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is,I have a letter for you in my pocket." Mr. Brooke handed the letter toDorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, "There is not too muchhurry, my dear. Think about it, you know."
When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainlyspoken strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a strikingmanner. It was his duty to do so. But as to pretending to be wise foryoung people,—no uncle, however much he had travelled in his youth,absorbed the new ideas, and dined with celebrities now deceased, couldpretend to judge what sort of marriage would turn out well for a younggirl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam. In short, woman was a problemwhich, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly lesscomplicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.
CHAPTER V.
"Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums,cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities,oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases ascome by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dry, ill-colored …and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If youwill not believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and ThomasAquainas' works; and tell me whether those men took pains."—BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.
This was Mr. Casaubon's letter.
MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian's permission toaddress you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I amnot, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deepercorrespondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness ofneed in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibilityof my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meetingyou, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitnessto supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of theaffections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to beabdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeedingopportunity for observation has given the impression an added depthby convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I hadpreconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections towhich I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, madesufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenorunsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I havediscerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability ofdevotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatibleeither with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex thatmay be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined,as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combinationof elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graverlabors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event ofmy introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to besuperficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentiallyrelated thereto as stages towards the completion of a life's plan), Ishould presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt tolighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union.
Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my
feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask
you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy
presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly
guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential
gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted,
and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the
sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them,
you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or
shame. I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety
which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a
more arduous labor than usual. But in this order of experience I am
still young, and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I
cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after
the temporary illumination of hope.
In any case, I shall remain,
Yours with sincere devotion,
EDWARD CASAUBON.
Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on herknees, buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray: under the rushof solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floateduncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense ofreclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.She remained in that attitude till it was time to dress for dinner.
How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it criticallyas a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that afuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte about to enter ona higher grade of initiation. She was going to have room for the energieswhich stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her ownignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the world's habits.
Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties;now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind thatshe could reverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow of prouddelight—the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the manwhom her admiration had chosen. All Dorothea's passion was transfusedthrough a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of hertransfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level.The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened bythose little events of the day which had roused her discontent with theactual conditions of her life.
After dinner, when Celia was playing an "air, with variations," asmall kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the youngladies' education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr.Casaubon's letter. Why should she defer the answer? She wrote it overthree times, not because she wished to change the wording, but becauseher hand was unusually uncertain, and she could not bear that Mr.Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible. She piquedherself on writing a hand in which each letter was distinguishablewithout any large range of conjecture, and she meant to make much useof this accomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon's eyes. Three times shewrote.
MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I am very grateful to you for loving
me, and thinking me worthy to be your wife. I can look forward to no
better happiness than that which would be one with yours. If I said
more, it would only be the same thing written out at greater length, for
I cannot now dwell on any other thought than that I may be through
life
Yours devotedly,
DOROTHEA BROOKE.
Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to givehim the letter, that he might send it in the morning. He was surprised,but his surprise only issued in a few moments' silence, during which hepushed about various objects on his writing-table, and finally stood withhis back to the fire, his glasses on his nose, looking at the address ofDorothea's letter.
"Have you thought enough about this, my dear?" he said at last.
"There was no need to think long, uncle. I know of nothing to makeme vacillate. If I changed my mind, it must be because of somethingimportant and entirely new to me."
"Ah!—then you have accepted him? Then Chettam has no chance?Has Chettam offended you—offended you, you know? What is it youdon't like in Chettam?"
"There is nothing that I like in him," said Dorothea, ratherimpetuously.
Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some onehad thrown a light missile at him. Dorothea immediately felt some self-rebuke, and said—
"I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think—reallyvery good about the cottages. A well-meaning man."
"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies alittle in our family. I had it myself—that love of knowledge, and goinginto everything—a little too much—it took me too far; though that sortof thing doesn't often run in the female-line; or it runs underground likethe rivers in Greece, you know—it comes out in the sons. Clever sons,clever mothers. I went a good deal into that, at one time. However, mydear, I have always said that people should do as they like in thesethings, up to a certain point. I couldn't, as your guardian, haveconsented to a bad match. But Casaubon stands well: his position isgood. I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though, and Mrs. Cadwalladerwill blame me."
That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened.She attributed Dorothea's abstracted manner, and the evidence of furthercrying since they had got home, to the temper she had been in about SirJames Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not to give furtheroffence: having once said what she wanted to say, Celia had nodisposition to recur to disagreeable subjects. It had been her nature whena child never to quarrel with any one—only to observe with wonder thatthey quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon shewas ready to play at cat's cradle with them whenever they recoveredthemselves. And as to Dorothea, it had always been her way to findsomething wrong in her sister's words, though Celia inwardly protestedthat she always said just how things were, and nothing else: she neverdid and never could put words together out of her own head. But thebest of Dodo was, that she did not keep angry for long together. Now,though they had hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet whenCelia put by her work, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which shewas always much the earlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low stool,unable to occupy herself except in meditation, said, with the musicalintonation which in moments of deep but quiet feeling made her speechlike a fine bit of recitative—
"Celia, dear, come and kiss me," holding her arms open as she spoke.
Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterflykiss, while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her lipsgravely on each cheek in turn.
"Don't sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon," saidCelia, in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.
"No, dear, I am very, very happy," said Dorothea, fervently.
"So much the better," thought Celia. "But how strangely Dodo goesfrom one extreme to the other."
The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr.Brooke, said, "Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter."
Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea,said, "Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn't wait towrite more—didn't wait, you know."
It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should beannounced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the samedirection as her uncle's, she was struck with the peculiar effect of theannouncement on Dorothea. It seemed as if something like the reflectionof a white sunlit wing had passed across her features, ending in one ofher rare blushes. For the first time it entered into Celia's mind that theremight be something more between Mr. Casaubon and her sister than hisdelight in bookish talk and her delight in listening. Hitherto she hadclassed the admiration for this "ugly" and learned acquaintance with theadmiration for Monsieur Liret at Lausanne, also ugly and learned.Dorothea had never been tired of listening to old Monsieur Liret whenCelia's feet were as cold as possible, and when it had really becomedreadful to see the skin of his bald head moving about. Why then shouldher enthusiasm not extend to Mr. Casaubon simply in the same way asto Monsieur Liret? And it seemed probable that all learned men had asort of schoolmaster's view of young people.
But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had dartedinto her mind. She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, hermarvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generallypreparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in.Not that she now imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an acceptedlover: she had only begun to feel disgust at the possibility that anythingin Dorothea's mind could tend towards such an issue. Here wassomething really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very well not to acceptSir James Chettam, but the idea of marrying Mr. Casaubon! Celia felt asort of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous. But perhaps Dodo,if she were really bordering on such an extravagance, might be turnedaway from it: experience had often shown that her impressibility mightbe calculated on. The day was damp, and they were not going to walkout, so they both went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia observedthat Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual diligent interest tosome occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an open book and lookedout of the window at the great cedar silvered with the damp. She herselfhad taken up the making of a toy for the curate's children, and was notgoing to enter on any subject too precipitately.
