“I understand,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “One who can write speeches.”

“I’ll fetch him in now, eh, Casaubon?” said Mr. Brooke. “He wouldn’t come in till I had announced him, you know. And we’ll go down and look at the picture. There you are to the life: a deep subtle sort of thinker with his fore-finger on the page, while Saint Bonaventure or somebody else, rather fat and florid, is looking up at the Trinity. Everything is symbolical, you know—the higher style of art: I like that up to a certain point, but not too far—it’s rather straining to keep up with, you know. But you are at home in that, Casaubon. And your painter’s flesh is good—solidity, transparency, everything of that sort. I went into that a great deal at one time. However, I’ll go and fetch Ladislaw.”

Chapter 35

“Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir   Que de voir d’héritiers une troupe affligée   Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongée,   Lire un long testament où pales, étonnés   On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez.   Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde   Je reviendrais, je crois, exprès de l’autre monde.”

—Regnard: Le Légataire Universel.

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.)

The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone’s funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. The long-recognized blood-relations and connections by marriage made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness. Jealousy of the Vincys had created a fellowship in hostility among all persons of the Featherstone blood, so that in the absence of any decided indication that one of themselves was to have more than the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy should have the land was necessarily dominant, though it left abundant feeling and leisure for vaguer jealousies, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth. Solomon found time to reflect that Jonah was undeserving, and Jonah to abuse Solomon as greedy; Jane, the elder sister, held that Martha’s children ought not to expect so much as the young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject of primogeniture, was sorry to think that Jane was so “having.” These nearest of kin were naturally impressed with the unreasonableness of expectations in cousins and second cousins, and used their arithmetic in reckoning the large sums that small legacies might mount to, if there were too many of them. Two cousins were present to hear the will, and a second cousin besides Mr. Trumbull. This second cousin was a Middlemarch mercer of polite manners and superfluous aspirates. The two cousins were elderly men from Brassing, one of them conscious of claims on the score of inconvenient expense sustained by him in presents of oysters and other eatables to his rich cousin Peter; the other entirely saturnine, leaning his hands and chin on a stick, and conscious of claims based on no narrow performance but on merit generally: both blameless citizens of Brassing, who wished that Jonah Featherstone did not live there. The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.

“Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred—that you may depend,—I shouldn’t wonder if my brother promised him,” said Solomon, musing aloud with his sisters, the evening before the funeral.

“Dear, dear!” said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds had been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.

But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among them as if from the moon. This was the stranger described by Mrs.