Middlemarch

CHAPTER XL.

The chapter opens with a prefatory verse celebrating diligent labor, then shifts to Caleb Garth’s breakfast-table, where father, mother, and five of the children are gathered amid morning correspondence. Mary Garth contemplates taking a position as a teacher at a school in York—thirty-five pounds a year, plus extras for teaching the smallest strummers at the piano. The children tease her, Alfred calling her “an old brick,” Ben setting it to a cantering song, and Mary, laughing and crying together, is persuaded by her father to give up the post and stay at home.

Caleb has been reading his letters with grave attention. One is from Sir James Chettam, offering him the management of the Freshitt and Tipton estates—an offer that includes the restoration of his former agency at Tipton, which Sir James hopes to see combined with Freshitt on terms agreeable to Mr. Garth.

“He writes handsomely, doesn’t he, Susan?” says Caleb, looking up over his spectacles. Mrs. Garth, who has come to stand behind him with her hand on his shoulder, presses him to mind he asks fair pay. He promises, calculating that it will come to between four and five hundred for the two together, and his eyes are bright with joy.

In the evening, Mr. Farebrother comes up the orchard walk to make a visit. He has come as an envoy for Fred Vincy, who has taken him into his confidence. Fred is going away to try again for his degree and wants Caleb to know he is sorry about the debt he cannot pay. Caleb waves his hand: “We have had the pinch and got over it. And now I’m going to be as rich as a Jew.”

When Mary slips out of the room, Caleb confides to the Vicar a long-held secret. Old Featherstone, on the night he died, had asked Mary to burn one of his wills in exchange for money, and she had refused. If she had done as he wished, Fred Vincy would now have ten thousand pounds. Mary, in the right as she was, cannot help feeling much as if she had knocked down somebody’s property and broken it against her will. Caleb, too, feels with her, and would gladly make amends.

“If I could make any amends to the poor lad, instead of bearing him a grudge for the harm he did us, I should be glad to do it. Now, what is your opinion, sir?”

The Vicar ruminates, then promises to keep the secret. As he takes his leave, he finds Mary in the orchard with Letty, gathering apples. They talk of Fred Vincy, and the Vicar, observing her, shrugs his shoulders twice as he walks to Lowick—an inward dialogue in which he confesses to himself that there is probably something more between Fred and Mary than the regard of old playfellows, and replies with the question whether that bit of womanhood be not a great deal too choice for that crude young gentleman.

When Caleb and Susan are alone, he proposes a path for Fred: he wants help by-and-by, and Fred might come in and learn the nature of things and act under him. Susan thinks the Vincys would object, but Caleb is firm. “I call it improper pride to let fools’ notions hinder you from doing a good action.”

They then discuss the curious coincidence that both Mr. Bulstrode and Joshua Rigg Featherstone have applied to him about valuing the same piece of land. Bulstrode has long wanted to get a handsome bit of land under his fingers, and here is the very land that everyone had expected for Fred Vincy, which old Featherstone had secretly left to Rigg, the side-slip son he had kept in the dark. Caleb shakes his head: “The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools.”

CHAPTER XLI.

The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward between Bulstrode and Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning Stone Court had occasioned the interchange of a letter or two. And now at Stone Court itself, Rigg stands at the window with his hands behind him, looking out on the grounds as their master, while a man of very different appearance confronts him from the middle of the room.

John Raffles is a florid, hairy man on the way to sixty, with thick curly whiskers gone gray, a stoutish body in clothes of shabby joinings, and the air of a swaggerer who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of fireworks. His name he sometimes writes as W.A.G. after his signature, observing that he was once taught by Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A., and that he, Raffles, originated the witticism of calling that celebrated principal Ba-Lamb.

“Come, now, Josh,” he says in his full rumbling tone, “here is your poor mother going into the vale of years, and you could afford something handsome now to make her comfortable.”

“Not while you live. Nothing would make her comfortable while you live,” Rigg replies in his cool high voice, never turning from the window. “What I give her, you’ll take.”

Raffles pleads eloquently for a little capital to settle into the tobacco trade, swearing he has done with his wild oats and wants only to sit by his chimney-corner. Rigg listens, then turns to face him.

“The more you say anything, the less I shall believe it. The more you want me to do a thing, the more reason I shall have for never doing it. Do you think I mean to forget your kicking me when I was a lad, and eating all the best victual away from me and my mother?”

He concludes with a threat that if Raffles ever shows himself inside the gates again, he shall be driven off with the dogs and the wagoner’s whip. Raffles makes a grimace, then subsides into a laugh and draws a brandy-flask from his pocket. He proposes a final bargain: brandy and a sovereign to pay his way back, and he will go like a bullet.

Mind, Rigg answers, if he ever sees him again, he will not speak to him.

Raffles catches up the flask and a folded paper that has fallen within the fender, and shoves the paper under the leather to make the glass firm—a letter signed Nicholas Bulstrode, casually pocketed by a man unlikely to disturb it from its present useful position.

Rigg, having locked his bureau again, walks back to the window and gazes out as impassibly as he had done at the beginning. Raffles, taking a small allowance from the flask and depositing it with provoking slowness, departs with his parting shot: “Farewell, Josh—and if forever!”