Middlemarch. Джордж Элиот

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      ‘I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was of age. And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off. I wish you saw it as I do—I wish you would talk to Brooke about it.’

      Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs Cadwallader entering from the study. She held by the hand her youngest girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa, and was made comfortable on his knee.

      ‘I hear what you are talking about,’ said the wife. ‘But you will make no impression on Humphrey. As long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be. Bless you, Casaubon has got a trout stream, and does not care about fishing in it himself; could there be a better fellow?’

      ‘Well, there is something in that,’ said the rector, with his quiet, inward laugh. ‘It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout stream.’

      ‘But seriously,’ said Sir James, whose vexation had not yet spent itself, ‘don’t you thing the rector might do some good by speaking?’

      ‘Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say,’ answered Mrs Cadwallader, lifting up her eyebrows. ‘I have done what I could; I wash my hands of the marriage.’

      ‘In the first place,’ said the rector, looking rather grave, ‘it would be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him act accordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.’

      ‘He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage,’ said Sir James.

      ‘But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon’s disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be acting for the advantage of Miss Brooke? I know no harm of Casaubon. I don’t care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he doesn’t care about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to me, and I don’t see why I should spoil his sport. For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any other man.’

      ‘Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing to say to each other.’

      ‘What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do it for my amusement.’

      ‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James,

      ‘No, Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.

      ‘Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying?’ said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

      ‘Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of “Hop o’ my Thumb,” and he has been making abstracts ever since. Ugh! And that is the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with.’

      ‘Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes,’ said the rector. ‘I don’t profess to understand every young lady’s taste.’

      ‘But if she were your own daughter?’ said Sir James.

      ‘That would be a different affair. She is not my daughter, and I don’t feel called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good as most of us. He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent. And upon my word, I don’t see that one is worse or better than the other.’ The rector ended with his silent laugh. He always saw the joke of any satire against himself. His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him; it did only what it could do without any trouble.

      Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke’s marriage through Mr Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment. It was a sign of his good disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying out Dorothea’s design of the cottages. Doubtless this persistence was the best course for his own dignity; but pride only helps us to be generous, it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty. She was now enough aware of Sir James’s position with regard to her, to appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord’s duty, to which he had at first been urged by a lover’s complaisance, and her pleasure in it was great enough to count for something even in her present happiness. Perhaps she gave to Sir James Chettam’s cottages all the interest she could spare from Mr Casaubon, or rather from the symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust, and passionate self-devotion which that learned gentleman had set playing in her soul. Hence it happened that in the good baronet’s succeeding visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

       CHAPTER 9

      1st Gent. ‘An ancient land in ancient oracles

      Is called ‘law-thirsty:’ all the struggle there

      Was after order and a perfect rule.

      Pray, where lie such lands now? …’

      2nd Gent. ‘Why, where they lay of old—in human souls’

      Mr Casaubon’s behaviour about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

      On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company with her uncle and Celia. Mr Casaubon’s home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the south-west front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small windowed and melancholy-looking; the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief СКАЧАТЬ