Daniel Deronda - George Eliot (best romance books of all time txt) 📗

year. Of whatever nature might be the hidden change wrought in Rex by the disappointment of his first love, it was apparently quite secondary to that evidence of more serious ambition which dated from the family misfortune; indeed, Mr. Gascoigne was inclined to regard the little affair which had caused him so much anxiety the year before as an evaporation of superfluous moisture, a kind of finish to the baking process which the human dough demands. Rex had lately come down for a summer visit to the rectory, bringing Anna home, and while he showed nearly the old liveliness with his brothers and sisters, he continued in his holiday the habits of the eager student, rising early in the morning and shutting himself up early in the evenings to carry on a fixed course of study.

“You don’t repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?” said his father.

“There is no profession I would choose before it,” said Rex. “I should like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code. I reverse the famous dictum. I should say, ‘Give me something to do with making the laws, and let who will make the songs.’ ”

“You will have to stow in an immense amount of rubbish, I suppose⁠—that’s the worst of it,” said the rector.

“I don’t see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with. It doesn’t make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers. Any orderly way of looking at things as cases and evidence seems to me better than a perpetual wash of odds and ends bearing on nothing in particular. And then, from a higher point of view, the foundations and the growth of law make the most interesting aspects of philosophy and history. Of course there will be a good deal that is troublesome, drudging, perhaps exasperating. But the great prizes in life can’t be won easily⁠—I see that.”

“Well, my boy, the best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world. But I fancy it so with most work when a man goes into it with a will. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said to me the other day that his ’prentice had no mind to his trade; ‘and yet, sir,’ said Brewitt, ‘what would a young fellow have if he doesn’t like the blacksmithing?’ ”

The rector cherished a fatherly delight, which he allowed to escape him only in moderation. Warham, who had gone to India, he had easily borne parting with, but Rex was that romance of later life which a man sometimes finds in a son whom he recognizes as superior to himself, picturing a future eminence for him according to a variety of famous examples. It was only to his wife that he said with decision: “Rex will be a distinguished man, Nancy, I am sure of it⁠—as sure as Paley’s father was about his son.”

“Was Paley an old bachelor?” said Mrs. Gascoigne.

“That is hardly to the point, my dear,” said the rector, who did not remember that irrelevant detail. And Mrs. Gascoigne felt that she had spoken rather weakly.

This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by the group who had exchanged the faded dignity of Offendene for the low white house not a mile off, well enclosed with evergreens, and known to the villagers, as “Jodson’s.” Mrs. Davilow’s delicate face showed only a slight deepening of its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more silver lines, in consequence of the last year’s trials; the four girls had bloomed out a little from being less in the shade; and the good Jocosa preserved her serviceable neutrality toward the pleasures and glories of the world as things made for those who were not “in a situation.”

The low narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows, with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of monthly roses, the faint murmurs of the garden, and the occasional rare sound of hoofs and wheels seeming to clarify the succeeding silence, made rather a crowded, lively scene, Rex and Anna being added to the usual group of six. Anna, always a favorite with her younger cousins, had much to tell of her new experience, and the acquaintances she had made in London, and when on her first visit she came alone, many questions were asked her about Gwendolen’s house in Grosvenor Square, what Gwendolen herself had said, and what anyone else had said about Gwendolen. Had Anna been to see Gwendolen after she had known about the yacht? No:⁠—an answer which left speculation free concerning everything connected with that interesting unknown vessel beyond the fact that Gwendolen had written just before she set out to say that Mr. Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the Mediterranean, and again from Marseilles to say that she was sure to like the yachting, the cabins were very elegant, and she would probably not send another letter till she had written quite a long diary filled with dittos. Also, this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in “the newspaper;” so that altogether this new phase of Gwendolen’s exalted life made a striking part of the sisters’ romance, the book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or two to make an adventure that might end well.

But when Rex was present, the girls, according to instructions, never started this fascinating topic, and today there had only been animated descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends, which caused some astonished questioning from minds to which the idea of live Jews, out of a book, suggested a difference deep enough to be almost zoological, as of a strange race in Pliny’s Natural History that might sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha could not imagine what Jews believed now; and she had a dim idea that they rejected the Old Testament since it proved the New; Miss