Middlemarch by George Eliot
CHAPTER LXXII.
460 words | Chapter 84
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.
Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the
vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a
bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the
circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.
“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to
inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate
and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the
first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would
have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess
I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult.
I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on
personal matters. And—one should know the truth about his conduct
beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”
“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,”
said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years
had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction
of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr.
Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences,
instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would
conquer by their emotional force. Two days afterwards, he was dining at
the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, and when the dessert was
standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was
nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.
“Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
him their first wish must be to justify him. What do we live for, if it
is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be
indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in _my_ trouble,
and attended me in my illness.”
Dorothea’s tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been
when she was at the head of her uncle’s table nearly three years
before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a
decided opinion. But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and
acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout
admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should
fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon. He
smiled much less; when he said “Exactly” it was more often an
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