This distinction conferred on the Rector of Tipton and Freshitt was the
reason why Mrs. Cadwallader made one of the group that watched old
Featherstone's funeral from an upper window of the manor. She was not
fond of visiting that house, but she liked, as she said, to see
collections of strange animals such as there would be at this funeral;
and she had persuaded Sir James and the young Lady Chettam to drive the
Rector and herself to Lowick in order that the visit might be
altogether pleasant.
"I will go anywhere with you, Mrs. Cadwallader," Celia had said; "but I
don't like funerals."
"Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must
accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married
Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the
end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning,
because I couldn't have the end without them."
"No, to be sure not," said the Dowager Lady Chettam, with stately
emphasis.
The upper window from which the funeral could be well seen was in the
room occupied by Mr. Casaubon when he had been forbidden to work; but
he had resumed nearly his habitual style of life now in spite of
warnings and prescriptions, and after politely welcoming Mrs.
Cadwallader had slipped again into the library to chew a cud of erudite
mistake about Cush and Mizraim.
But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the
library, and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone's
funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life,
always afterwards came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive
points in memory, just as the vision of St. Peter's at Rome was inwoven
with moods of despondency. Scenes which make vital changes in our
neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a
particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for
us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity
which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with
the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of
loneliness which was due to the very ardor of Dorothea's nature. The
country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart
on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect
discrimination on the belts of thicker life below. And Dorothea was
not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of that height.