Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a
glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box.
"I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?"
"No, no; I've no opinion of that system. Life wants padding," said Mr.
Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory. "However," he went on,
accenting the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, "what I came here
to talk about was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred's."
"That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as
different views as on diet, Vincy."
"I hope not this time." (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.)
"The fact is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. Somebody has
been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to
try to set him against Fred. He's very fond of Fred, and is likely to
do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that
he means to leave him his land, and that makes other people jealous."
"Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as
to the course you have pursued with your eldest son. It was entirely
from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family
of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting
money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in
giving him extravagant idle habits. You are now reaping the
consequences."
To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely
shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.
When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready, in
the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics
generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework
of things which seems to throw questions of private conduct into the
background. And this particular reproof irritated him more than any
other. It was eminently superfluous to him to be told that he was
reaping the consequences. But he felt his neck under Bulstrode's yoke;
and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was anxious to refrain from
that relief.
"As to that, Bulstrode, it's no use going back. I'm not one of your
pattern men, and I don't pretend to be. I couldn't foresee everything
in the trade; there wasn't a finer business in Middlemarch than ours,
and the lad was clever. My poor brother was in the Church, and would
have done well--had got preferment already, but that stomach fever took
him off: else he might have been a dean by this time. I think I was
justified in what I tried to do for Fred. If you come to religion, it
seems to me a man shouldn't want to carve out his meat to an ounce
beforehand:--one must trust a little to Providence and be generous.
It's a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little: in
my opinion, it's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance."