MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 32

"They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk."

--SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.

The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone's

insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him,

was a feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts

of the old man's blood-relations, who naturally manifested more

their sense of the family tie and were more visibly numerous now

that he had become bedridden. Naturally: for when "poor Peter"

had occupied his arm-chair in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous

beetles for whom the cook prepares boiling water could have been

less welcome on a hearth which they had reasons for preferring,

than those persons whose Featherstone blood was ill-nourished, not

from penuriousness on their part, but from poverty. Brother Solomon

and Sister Jane were rich, and the family candor and total abstinence

from false politeness with which they were always received

seemed to them no argument that their brother in the solemn act

of making his will would overlook the superior claims of wealth.

Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to banish from

his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should have kept

away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no shadow

of such claims. They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good egg,

and should be laid in a warm nest.

But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and all the needy exiles, held a

different point of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces

to be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there,

from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination.

To the poorer and least favored it seemed likely that since Peter

had done nothing for them in his life, he would remember them

at the last. Jonah argued that men liked to make a surprise of

their wills, while Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he

left the best part of his money to those who least expected it.

Also it was not to be thought but that an own brother "lying there"

with dropsy in his legs must come to feel that blood was thicker

than water, and if he didn't alter his will, he might have money

by him. At any rate some blood-relations should be on the premises

and on the watch against those who were hardly relations at all.

Such things had been known as forged wills and disputed wills,

which seemed to have the golden-hazy advantage of somehow enabling