“It is wonderful, though,” he said to
himself as he shuffled out of the room—“it
is wonderful that she should have liked him.
However, the match is good. I should have been
travelling out of my brief to have hindered it, let
Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will. He is pretty
certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon. That was
a very seasonable pamphlet of his on the Catholic
Question:—a deanery at least. They
owe him a deanery.”
And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical
reflectiveness, by remarking that Mr. Brooke on this
occasion little thought of the Radical speech which,
at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes
of the bishops. What elegant historian would
neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that
his heroes did not foresee the history of the world,
or even their own actions?—For example,
that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little
thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred
the Great, when he measured his laborious nights with
burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring
their idle days with watches. Here is a mine
of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked,
is likely to outlast our coal.
But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps
less warranted by precedent—namely, that
if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have
made any great difference. To think with pleasure
of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical
income was one thing—to make a Liberal
speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind
which cannot look at a subject from various points
of view.
CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh, rescue her!
I am her brother now,
And you her father.
Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian
in each gentleman.”
It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he
continued to like going to the Grange after he had
once encountered the difficulty of seeing Dorothea
for the first time in the light of a woman who was
engaged to another man. Of course the forked
lightning seemed to pass through him when he first
approached her, and he remained conscious throughout
the interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he
was, it must be owned that his uneasiness was less
than it would have been if he had thought his rival
a brilliant and desirable match. He had no sense
of being eclipsed by Mr. Casaubon; he was only shocked
that Dorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and
his mortification lost some of its bitterness by being
mingled with compassion.
Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that
he had completely resigned her, since with the perversity
of a Desdemona she had not affected a proposed match
that was clearly suitable and according to nature;
he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of
her engagement to Mr. Casaubon. On the day when
he first saw them together in the light of his present
knowledge, it seemed to him that he had not taken
