Middlemarch George Eliot (essential reading txt) 📖

of the group that watched old Featherstone’s funeral from an upper window of the manor. She was not fond of visiting that house, but she liked, as she said, to see collections of strange animals such as there would be at this funeral; and she had persuaded Sir James and the young Lady Chettam to drive the Rector and herself to Lowick in order that the visit might be altogether pleasant.

“I will go anywhere with you, Mrs. Cadwallader,” Celia had said; “but I don’t like funerals.”

“Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.”

“No, to be sure not,” said the Dowager Lady Chettam, with stately emphasis.

The upper window from which the funeral could be well seen was in the room occupied by Mr. Casaubon when he had been forbidden to work; but he had resumed nearly his habitual style of life now in spite of warnings and prescriptions, and after politely welcoming Mrs. Cadwallader had slipped again into the library to chew a cud of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim.

But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the library, and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone’s funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life, always afterwards came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive points in memory, just as the vision of St. Peter’s at Rome was inwoven with moods of despondency. Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors’ lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.

The dreamlike association of something alien and ill-understood with the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness which was due to the very ardor of Dorothea’s nature. The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below. And Dorothea was not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of that height.

“I shall not look any more,” said Celia, after the train had entered the church, placing herself a little behind her husband’s elbow so that she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek. “I dare say Dodo likes it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people.”

“I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among,” said Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the interest of a monk on his holiday tour. “It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbors, unless they are cottagers. One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs. Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library.”

“Quite right to feel obliged to me,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Your rich Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I dare say you don’t half see them at church. They are quite different from your uncle’s tenants or Sir James’s⁠—monsters⁠—farmers without landlords⁠—one can’t tell how to class them.”

“Most of these followers are not Lowick people,” said Sir James; “I suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch. Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well as land.”

“Think of that now! when so many younger sons can’t dine at their own expense,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Ah,” turning round at the sound of the opening door, “here is Mr. Brooke. I felt that we were incomplete before, and here is the explanation. You are come to see this odd funeral, of course?”

“No, I came to look after Casaubon⁠—to see how he goes on, you know. And to bring a little news⁠—a little news, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding at Dorothea as she came towards him. “I looked into the library, and I saw Casaubon over his books. I told him it wouldn’t do: I said, ‘This will never do, you know: think of your wife, Casaubon.’ And he promised me to come up. I didn’t tell him my news: I said, he must come up.”

“Ah, now they are coming out of church,” Mrs. Cadwallader exclaimed. “Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set! Mr. Lydgate as doctor, I suppose. But that is really a good looking woman, and the fair young man must be her son. Who are they, Sir James, do you know?”

“I see Vincy, the Mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife and son,” said Sir James, looking interrogatively at Mr. Brooke, who nodded and said⁠—

“Yes, a very decent family⁠—a very good fellow is Vincy; a credit to the manufacturing interest. You have seen him at my house, you know.”

“Ah, yes: one of your secret committee,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, provokingly.

“A coursing fellow, though,” said Sir James, with a fox-hunter’s disgust.

“And one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Those dark, purple-faced people are an excellent foil. Dear me, they are like a set of jugs! Do look at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering above them in his white surplice.”

“It’s a solemn thing, though, a funeral,” said Mr. Brooke, “if you take it in that light, you know.”

“But I am not taking it in that light. I can’t wear my solemnity too often, else it will go to rags. It was time the old man died, and none of these people are sorry.”

“How piteous!” said Dorothea. “This funeral seems to me the most dismal