Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in

the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as

possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this

desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and

that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an

amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance

aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?

Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on

drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her

his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine. Before

he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke

along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the

disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship

with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils

of maturity. And he delivered this statement with as much careful

precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be

attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect

that he should have to repeat or revise his communications of a

practical or personal kind. The inclinations which he had deliberately

stated on the 2d of October he would think it enough to refer to by the

mention of that date; judging by the standard of his own memory, which

was a volume where a vide supra could serve instead of repetitions, and

not the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of forgotten

writing. But in this case Mr. Casaubon's confidence was not likely to

be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the

eager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in

experience is an epoch.

It was three o'clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.

Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from

Tipton; and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along

the shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the

bordering wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk,

the Great St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in

their walks. There had risen before her the girl's vision of a

possible future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling

hope, and she wanted to wander on in that visionary future without

interruption. She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in

her cheeks, and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look

at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a

little backward. She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if

it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled

behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a

time when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to be

dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never

surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean. This was a trait of

Miss Brooke's asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic's

expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not

consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the

solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between

the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024