Middlemarch · Book III · Chapter 24 (2/2)

While Fred was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them on the desk before Mr. Garth. He had burst forth at once with the plain fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources. Mrs. Garth was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for an explanation. Caleb blushed, and after a little pause said⁠—

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred; it was for a hundred and sixty pounds. He made sure he could meet it himself.”

There was an evident change in Mrs. Garth’s face, but it was like a change below the surface of water which remains smooth. She fixed her eyes on Fred, saying⁠—

“I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money and he has refused you.”

“No,” said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty; “but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use, I should not like to mention Mr. Garth’s name in the matter.”

“It has come at an unfortunate time,” said Caleb, in his hesitating way, looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper, “Christmas upon us⁠—I’m rather hard up just now. You see, I have to cut out everything like a tailor with short measure. What can we do, Susan? I shall want every farthing we have in the bank. It’s a hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it!”

“I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for Alfred’s premium,” said Mrs. Garth, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear might have discerned a slight tremor in some of the words. “And I have no doubt that Mary has twenty pounds saved from her salary by this time. She will advance it.”

Mrs. Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively. Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions. But she had made Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse. Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.

“I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs. Garth⁠—ultimately,” he stammered out.

“Yes, ultimately,” said Mrs. Garth, who having a special dislike to fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram. “But boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed at fifteen.” She had never been so little inclined to make excuses for Fred.

“I was the most in the wrong, Susan,” said Caleb. “Fred made sure of finding the money. But I’d no business to be fingering bills. I suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?” he added, fixing his merciful gray eyes on Fred. Caleb was too delicate to specify Mr. Featherstone.

“Yes, I have tried everything⁠—I really have. I should have had a hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which I was about to sell. My uncle had given me eighty pounds, and I paid away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I was going to sell for eighty or more⁠—I meant to go without a horse⁠—but now it has turned out vicious and lamed itself. I wish I and the horses too had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you. There’s no one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Garth have always been so kind to me. However, it’s no use saying that. You will always think me a rascal now.”

Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry was not of much use to the Garths. They could see him mount, and quickly pass through the gate.

“I am disappointed in Fred Vincy,” said Mrs. Garth. “I would not have believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts. I knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could the least afford to lose.”

“I was a fool, Susan.”

“That you were,” said the wife, nodding and smiling. “But I should not have gone to publish it in the marketplace. Why should you keep such things from me? It is just so with your buttons: you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging. If I had only known I might have been ready with some better plan.”

“You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan,” said Caleb, looking feelingly at her. “I can’t abide your losing the money you’ve scraped together for Alfred.”

“It is very well that I had scraped it together; and it is you who will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself. You must give up your bad habits. Some men take to drinking, and you have taken to working without pay. You must indulge yourself a little less in that. And you must ride over to Mary, and ask the child what money she has.”

Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his head slowly, and fitting his fingertips together with much nicety.

“Poor Mary!” he said. “Susan,” he went on in a lowered tone, “I’m afraid she may be fond of Fred.”

“Oh no! She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her in any other than a brotherly way.”

Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up his chair to the desk, and said, “Deuce take the bill⁠—I wish it was at Hanover! These things are a sad interruption to business!”

The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine. But it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the word “business,” the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in its gold-fringed linen.

Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating starlike in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out⁠—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “business;” and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of the special men in the county.

His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times. He divided them into “business, politics, preaching, learning, and amusement.” He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with “business” as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he determined to give up all forms of his beloved “business” which required that talent. He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his work well, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the Garths were poor, and “lived in a small way.” However, they did not mind it.