At this last action Monk began to bark loudly, and it was a moment for
Mr. Brooke to escape. He walked out of the yard as quickly as he
could, in some amazement at the novelty of his situation. He had never
been insulted on his own land before, and had been inclined to regard
himself as a general favorite (we are all apt to do so, when we think
of our own amiability more than of what other people are likely to want
of us). When he had quarrelled with Caleb Garth twelve years before he
had thought that the tenants would be pleased at the landlord's taking
everything into his own hands.
Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the
midnight darkness of Mr. Dagley; but nothing was easier in those times
than for an hereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant, in spite
somehow of having a rector in the twin parish who was a gentleman to
the backbone, a curate nearer at hand who preached more learnedly than
the rector, a landlord who had gone into everything, especially fine
art and social improvement, and all the lights of Middlemarch only
three miles off. As to the facility with which mortals escape
knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze of
London, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would
have been if he had learned scant skill in "summing" from the
parish-clerk of Tipton, and read a chapter in the Bible with immense
difficulty, because such names as Isaiah or Apollos remained
unmanageable after twice spelling. Poor Dagley read a few verses
sometimes on a Sunday evening, and the world was at least not darker to
him than it had been before. Some things he knew thoroughly, namely,
the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness of weather, stock
and crops, at Freeman's End--so called apparently by way of sarcasm,
to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was
no earthly "beyond" open to him.