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.