‘My lady’s tongue is like the meadow blades,
That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
Nice cutting is her function: she divides
With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
And makes intangible savings.’
As Mr Casaubon’s carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated behind. It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for Mr Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a ‘how do you do?’ in the nick of time. In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain that the lodge-keeper regarded her as an important personage, from the low curtsey which was dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton.
‘Well, Mrs Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?’ said the high-coloured, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.
‘Pretty well for laying, madam, but they’ve ta’en to eating their eggs; I’ve no peace o’ mind with ’em at all.’
‘O the cannibals! Better sell them cheap at once. What will you sell them a couple? One can’t eat fowls of a bad character at a high price.’
‘Well, madam, half a crown, I couldn’t let ’em go, not under.’
‘Half a crown, these times! Come now—for the Rector’s chicken-broth on a Sunday. He has consumed all ours that I can spare. You are half paid with the sermon, Mrs Fitchett, remember that. Take a pair of tumbler-pigeons for them—little beauties. You must come and see them. You have no tumblers among your pigeons.’
‘Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see ’em after work. He’s very hot on new sorts: to oblige you.’
‘Oblige me! It will be the best bargain he ever made. A pair of church pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own eggs! Don’t you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!’
The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional ‘Surely, surely!’—from which it might be inferred that she would have found the countryside somewhat duller if the Rector’s lady had been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint. Indeed, both the farmers and labourers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton would have felt a sad lack of conversation but for the stories about what Mrs Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended, as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the crowd of heroic shades—who pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut jokes in the most companionable manner, though with a turn of tongue that let you know who she was. Such a lady gave a neighbourliness to both rank and religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe. A much more exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity would not have furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and would have been less socially uniting.
Mr Brooke, seeing Mrs Cadwallader’s merits from a different point of view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where he was sitting alone.
‘I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here,’ she said, seating herself comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built figure. ‘I suspect you and he are brewing some bad politics, else you would not be seeing so much of the lively man. I shall inform against you; remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel’s side about the Catholic Bill. I shall tell everybody that you are going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner; going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to distribute them. Come, confess!’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Mr Brooke, smiling and rubbing his eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment. ‘Casaubon and I don’t talk politics much. He doesn’t care much about the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing. He only cares about Church questions. That is not my line of action, you know.’
‘Ra-a-ther too much, my friend. I have heard of your doings. Who was it that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch? I believe you bought it on purpose. You are a perfect Guy Fawkes. See if you are not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming. Humphrey would not come to quarrel with you about it, so I am come.’
‘Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting—not persecuting, you know.’
‘There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the hustings. Now, do not let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr Brooke. A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying; there’s no excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing. You will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You will make a Saturday pie of all parties’ opinions, and be pelted by everybody.’
‘That is what I expect, you know,’ said Mr Brooke, not wishing to betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch—‘what I expect as an independent man. As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is not likely to be hooked on by any party. He may go with them up to a certain point—up to a certain point, you know. But that is what you ladies never understand.’
‘Where your certain point is? No. I should like to be told how a man can have any certain point when he belongs to no party—leading a roving life, and never letting his friends know his address. “Nobody knows where Brooke will be—there’s no counting on Brooke”—that is what people say of you, to be quite frank. Now, do turn respectable. How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?’
‘I don’t pretend to argue with a lady on politics,’ said Mr Brooke, with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly conscious that this attack of Mrs Cadwallader’s had opened the defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him.
‘Your sex are not thinkers, you know—varium et mutabile semper—that kind of thing. You don’t know Virgil. I knew’—Mr Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet—‘I was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know. That was what he said. You ladies are always against an independent attitude—a man’s caring for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing. And there is no part of the county where opinion is narrower than it is here—I don’t mean to throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent line; and if I don’t take it, who will?’
‘Who? Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position. People of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk it about. And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your daughter, to one of our best men. Sir James would be cruelly annoyed; it will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a Whig sign-board.’
Mr Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea’s engagement had no sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs Cadwallader’s prospective taunts. It might have been easy for ignorant observers to say, ‘Quarrel with Mrs Cadwallader;’ but where is a country gentleman to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbours? Who could taste the fine flavour in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like wine without a seal? Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a certain point.
‘I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece,’ said Mr Brooke, much relieved to