Chapter: "The offender's sorrow brings but small relief
     To him who wears the strong offence's cross."
                                        --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.


I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events
at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known
in his life before.  Not that he had been disappointed as to the
possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be
concluded with Lord Medlicote's man, this Diamond, in which hope to the
amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest
warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had
just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely
by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was
no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after
marriage--which of course old companions were aware of before the
ceremony.  For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual
elasticity under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that
he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any
more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be
presented in five days.  Even if he had applied to his father on the
plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss, Fred felt smartingly
that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Garth from the
consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit.
He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to
go straight to Mr. Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him
the fifty pounds, and getting that sum at least safely out of his own
hands.  His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the
accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being
brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred
wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater.  He took
his father's nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr.
Garth, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary.  In fact,
it is probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her,
his conscience would have been much less active both in previously
urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself
after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as
directly and simply as he could.  Even much stronger mortals than Fred
Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love
best.  "The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique
personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who
get a theatre where the audience demands their best.  Certainly it
would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary
Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.

Mr. Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house, which
was a little way outside the town--a homely place with an orchard in
front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which
before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now
surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen.  We get the fonder
of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends
have.  The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had
four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from
which all the best furniture had long been sold.  Fred liked it too,
knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples
and quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant
expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he
should probably have to make his confession before Mrs. Garth, of whom
he was rather more in awe than of her husband.  Not that she was
inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Mary was.  In her
present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth never committed herself by
over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth,
and learned self-control. She had that rare sense which discerns what
is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring.  Adoring her
husband's virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his
incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences
cheerfully.  She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in
teapots or children's frilling, and had never poured any pathetic
confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr.
Garth's want of prudence and the sums he might have had if he had been
like other men.  Hence these fair neighbors thought her either proud or
eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as "your fine
Mrs. Garth." She was not without her criticism of them in return, being
more accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch, and--where
is the blameless woman?--apt to be a little severe towards her own sex,
which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate.  On the
other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings
of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.  Also, it
must be admitted that Mrs. Garth was a trifle too emphatic in her
resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess
into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her
consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent
were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family
dinner, and darned all the stockings.  She had sometimes taken pupils
in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen
with their book or slate.  She thought it good for them to see that she
could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders
"without looking,"--that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her
elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid
Zone--that, in short, she might possess "education" and other good
things ending in "tion," and worthy to be pronounced emphatically,
without being a useless doll.  When she made remarks to this edifying
effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not
hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth
like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto.
Certainly, the exemplary Mrs. Garth had her droll aspects, but her
character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavor
of skin.

Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been
disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have
excused Mary for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included
in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex.  But
this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it the
harder to Fred that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion.  And
the circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more unpleasant
than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early to look at
some repairs not far off.  Mrs. Garth at certain hours was always in
the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations
at once there--making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one
side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and
dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy
and girl, who were standing opposite to her at the table with their
books and slates before them.  A tub and a clothes-horse at the other
end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also
going on.

Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling
her pastry--applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches,
while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views
about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or
signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing.  She was of the same
curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more
delicacy of feature, a pale skin, a solid matronly figure, and a
remarkable firmness of glance.  In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded
one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing,
basket on arm.  Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter
would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a
dowry--the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a
malignant prophecy--"Such as I am, she will shortly be."

"Now let us go through that once more," said Mrs. Garth, pinching an
apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a
heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson.  "'Not without regard to
the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea'--tell
me again what that means, Ben."

(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient
paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her
"Lindley Murray" above the waves.)

"Oh--it means--you must think what you mean," said Ben, rather
peevishly.  "I hate grammar.  What's the use of it?"

"To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be
understood," said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.  "Should you like
to speak as old Job does?"

"Yes," said Ben, stoutly; "it's funnier.  He says, 'Yo goo'--that's
just as good as 'You go.'"

"But he says, 'A ship's in the garden,' instead of 'a sheep,'" said
Letty, with an air of superiority.  "You might think he meant a ship
off the sea."

"No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly," said Ben.  "How could a ship
off the sea come there?"

"These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of
grammar," said Mrs. Garth.  "That apple-peel is to be eaten by the
pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty.  Job
has only to speak about very plain things.  How do you think you would
write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of
grammar than he does?  You would use wrong words, and put words in the
wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would
turn away from you as a tiresome person.  What would you do then?"

"I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense that
this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.

"I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth,
accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring.
Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and
said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about
Cincinnatus."

"I know! he was a farmer," said Ben.

"Now, Ben, he was a Roman--let _me_ tell," said Letty, using her elbow
contentiously.

"You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing."

"Yes, but before that--that didn't come first--people wanted him," said
Letty.

"Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first," insisted Ben.
"He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his
advice.  And he was a brave man, and could fight.  And so could my
father--couldn't he, mother?"

"Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,"
said Letty, frowning.  "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak."

"Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the caps
from the tub.  "When your brother began, you ought to have waited to
see if he could not tell the story.  How rude you look, pushing and
frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows!  Cincinnatus, I
am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so."  (Mrs.
Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation,
and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem,
that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) "Now,
Ben."

"Well--oh--well--why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were
all blockheads, and--I can't tell it just how you told it--but they
wanted a man to be captain and king and everything--"

"Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish
to make her mother repent.

"Very well, dictator!" said Ben, contemptuously.  "But that isn't a
good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates."

"Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs. Garth,
carefully serious.  "Hark, there is a knock at the door!  Run, Letty,
and open it."

The knock was Fred's; and when Letty said that her father was not in
yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative.
He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs. Garth
in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there.  He put his arm
round Letty's neck silently, and led her into the kitchen without his
usual jokes and caresses.

Mrs. Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise was not
a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly
continuing her work--

"You, Fred, so early in the day?  You look quite pale.  Has anything
happened?"

"I want to speak to Mr. Garth," said Fred, not yet ready to say
more--"and to you also," he added, after a little pause, for he had no
doubt that Mrs. Garth knew everything about the bill, and he must in the
end speak of it before her, if not to her solely.

"Caleb will be in again in a few minutes," said Mrs. Garth, who
imagined some trouble between Fred and his father.  "He is sure not to
be long, because he has some work at his desk that must be done this
morning.  Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?"

"But we needn't go on about Cincinnatus, need we?" said Ben, who had
taken Fred's whip out of his hand, and was trying its efficiency on the
cat.

"No, go out now.  But put that whip down.  How very mean of you to whip
poor old Tortoise!  Pray take the whip from him, Fred."

"Come, old boy, give it me," said Fred, putting out his hand.

"Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up the
whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.

"Not to-day--another time.  I am not riding my own horse."

"Shall you see Mary to-day?"

"Yes, I think so," said Fred, with an unpleasant twinge.

"Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun."

"Enough, enough, Ben! run away," said Mrs. Garth, seeing that Fred was
teased. . .

"Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs. Garth?" said Fred, when
the children were gone and it was needful to say something that would
pass the time.  He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr.
Garth, or use any good opportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs.
Garth herself, give her the money and ride away.

"One--only one.  Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven.  I am not
getting a great income now," said Mrs. Garth, smiling.  "I am at a low
ebb with pupils.  But I have saved my little purse for Alfred's
premium: I have ninety-two pounds.  He can go to Mr. Hanmer's now; he
is just at the right age."

This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Garth was on the brink
of losing ninety-two pounds and more.  Fred was silent.  "Young
gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that," Mrs.
Garth innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border.
"And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer:
he wants to give the boy a good chance.  There he is!  I hear him
coming in.  We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?"

When they entered the parlor Caleb had thrown down his hat and was
seated at his desk.

"What!  Fred, my boy!" he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his
pen still undipped; "you are here betimes."  But missing the usual
expression of cheerful greeting in Fred's face, he immediately added,
"Is there anything up at home?--anything the matter?"

"Yes, Mr. Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give
you a bad opinion of me.  I am come to tell you and Mrs. Garth that I
can't keep my word.  I can't find the money to meet the bill after all.
I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty pounds towards the
hundred and sixty."

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 market-place. 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 finger-tips 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
star-like 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.

 Fred finally feels very sorry about his debt, and the fact that he has only fifty pounds and five days to pay up. Fred is most sorry because Mary's father is going to have to pay, and he feels this will jeopardize his chances with Mary. Fred goes to the Garth household to tell Caleb Garth, whose wife is very fond of Fred, but probably will not be after he tells her. Mrs. Garth is teaching her children their lessons in the kitchen, and Fred sits down and tells her and Mr. Garth the news. Mrs. Garth will have to give up the money she was saving to send her son to school; Fred feels terrible, as he should, knowing that his irresponsibility is costing them so much. Mr. Garth knows then that he was a fool to trust Fred, and they believe that there is little chance Mary will regard him so highly when she finds out.

