MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 39

"If, as I have, you also doe,

Vertue attired in woman see,

And dare love that, and say so too,

And forget the He and She;

And if this love, though placed so,

From prophane men you hide,

Which will no faith on this bestow,

Or, if they doe, deride:

Then you have done a braver thing

Than all the Worthies did,

And a braver thence will spring,

Which is, to keep that hid."

--DR. DONNE.

Sir James Chettam's mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing

anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant

belief in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative,

and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition

as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to

leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making

her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of the estate.

In this way it happened that one day near four o'clock, when

Mr. Brooke and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door

opened and Mrs. Casaubon was announced.

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and,

obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging "documents" about hanging

sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding

several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting

a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant

residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier

images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with

Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started

up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends.

Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion,

in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance,

which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his

body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had.

For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure

the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul

as well as body, and make a man's passion for one woman differ from

his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and

river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns

and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff.