Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone
worthy of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence
of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the
easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit. In
spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather
happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for
practical purposes, and making the "Pioneer" celebrated as far as
Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not
worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was
relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and
retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.
"Shift the pegs a little," he said to himself, "and Mr. Brooke might be
in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order
of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same
pattern. I am better here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would
have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a
precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I don't care for prestige or
high pay."
As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the
sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his
position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise
wherever he went. That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he
had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their
accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his irritation had gone out
towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose
caste. "I never had any caste," he would have said, if that prophecy
had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone
like breath in his transparent skin. But it is one thing to like
defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the "Pioneer" was
tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon's view. Will's relationship in that
distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate's high connections, serve
as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumored that young Ladislaw
was Mr. Casaubon's nephew or cousin, it was also rumored that "Mr.
Casaubon would have nothing to do with him."
"Brooke has taken him up," said Mr. Hawley, "because that is what no
man in his senses could have expected. Casaubon has devilish good
reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young
fellow whose bringing-up he paid for. Just like Brooke--one of those
fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse."