Middlemarch George Eliot (essential reading txt) 📖

her tea and toast untouched, but sat with her usual pretty primness, only showing her emotion by that flush in the cheeks and brightness in the eyes which give an old woman a touching momentary identity with her far-off youthful self, and saying decisively⁠—

“The greatest comfort, Camden, is that you have deserved it.”

“When a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must come after,” said the son, brimful of pleasure, and not trying to conceal it. The gladness in his face was of that active kind which seems to have energy enough not only to flash outwardly, but to light up busy vision within: one seemed to see thoughts, as well as delight, in his glances.

“Now, aunt,” he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Noble, who was making tender little beaver-like noises, “There shall be sugar-candy always on the table for you to steal and give to the children, and you shall have a great many new stockings to make presents of, and you shall darn your own more than ever!”

Miss Noble nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh, conscious of having already dropped an additional lump of sugar into her basket on the strength of the new preferment.

“As for you, Winny”⁠—the Vicar went on⁠—“I shall make no difficulty about your marrying any Lowick bachelor⁠—Mr. Solomon Featherstone, for example, as soon as I find you are in love with him.”

Miss Winifred, who had been looking at her brother all the while and crying heartily, which was her way of rejoicing, smiled through her tears and said, “You must set me the example, Cam: you must marry now.”

“With all my heart. But who is in love with me? I am a seedy old fellow,” said the Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away and looking down at himself. “What do you say, mother?”

“You are a handsome man, Camden: though not so fine a figure of a man as your father,” said the old lady.

“I wish you would marry Miss Garth, brother,” said Miss Winifred. “She would make us so lively at Lowick.”

“Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me,” said the Vicar, not caring to specify.

“We don’t want everybody,” said Miss Winifred. “But you would like Miss Garth, mother, shouldn’t you?”

“My son’s choice shall be mine,” said Mrs. Farebrother, with majestic discretion, “and a wife would be most welcome, Camden. You will want your whist at home when we go to Lowick, and Henrietta Noble never was a whist-player.” (Mrs. Farebrother always called her tiny old sister by that magnificent name.)

“I shall do without whist now, mother.”

“Why so, Camden? In my time whist was thought an undeniable amusement for a good churchman,” said Mrs. Farebrother, innocent of the meaning that whist had for her son, and speaking rather sharply, as at some dangerous countenancing of new doctrine.

“I shall be too busy for whist; I shall have two parishes,” said the Vicar, preferring not to discuss the virtues of that game.

He had already said to Dorothea, “I don’t feel bound to give up St. Botolph’s. It is protest enough against the pluralism they want to reform if I give somebody else most of the money. The stronger thing is not to give up power, but to use it well.”

“I have thought of that,” said Dorothea. “So far as self is concerned, I think it would be easier to give up power and money than to keep them. It seems very unfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I felt that I ought not to let it be used by someone else instead of me.”

“It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power,” said Mr. Farebrother.

His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active when the yoke of life ceases to gall them. He made no display of humility on the subject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed that his conduct had shown laches which others who did not get benefices were free from.

“I used often to wish I had been something else than a clergyman,” he said to Lydgate, “but perhaps it will be better to try and make as good a clergyman out of myself as I can. That is the well-beneficed point of view, you perceive, from which difficulties are much simplified,” he ended, smiling.

The Vicar did feel then as if his share of duties would be easy. But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly⁠—something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

Hardly a week later, Duty presented itself in his study under the disguise of Fred Vincy, now returned from Omnibus College with his bachelor’s degree.

“I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr. Farebrother,” said Fred, whose fair open face was propitiating, “but you are the only friend I can consult. I told you everything once before, and you were so good that I can’t help coming to you again.”

“Sit down, Fred, I’m ready to hear and do anything I can,” said the Vicar, who was busy packing some small objects for removal, and went on with his work.

“I wanted to tell you⁠—” Fred hesitated an instant and then went on plungingly, “I might go into the Church now; and really, look where I may, I can’t see anything else to do. I don’t like it, but I know it’s uncommonly hard on my father to say so, after he has spent a good deal of money in educating me for it.” Fred paused again an instant, and then repeated, “and I can’t see anything else to do.”

“I did talk to your father about it, Fred, but I made little way with him. He said it was too late. But you have got over one bridge now: what are your other difficulties?”

“Merely that I don’t like it. I don’t like divinity, and