“Well, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke, good-humoredly, nursing his leg, “I can’t turn my back on Dorothea. I must be a father to her up to a certain point. I said, ‘My dear, I won’t refuse to give you away.’ I had spoken strongly before. But I can cut off the entail, you know. It will cost money and be troublesome; but I can do it, you know.”
Mr. Brooke nodded at Sir James, and felt that he was both showing his own force of resolution and propitiating what was just in the Baronet’s vexation. He had hit on a more ingenious mode of parrying than he was aware of. He had touched a motive of which Sir James was ashamed. The mass of his feeling about Dorothea’s marriage to Ladislaw was due partly to excusable prejudice, or even justifiable opinion, partly to a jealous repugnance hardly less in Ladislaw’s case than in Casaubon’s. He was convinced that the marriage was a fatal one for Dorothea. But amid that mass ran a vein of which he was too good and honorable a man to like the avowal even to himself: it was undeniable that the union of the two estates—Tipton and Freshitt—lying charmingly within a ring-fence, was a prospect that flattered him for his son and heir. Hence when Mr. Brooke noddingly appealed to that motive, Sir James felt a sudden embarrassment; there was a stoppage in his throat; he even blushed. He had found more words than usual in the first jet of his anger, but Mr. Brooke’s propitiation was more clogging to his tongue than Mr. Cadwallader’s caustic hint.
But Celia was glad to have room for speech after her uncle’s suggestion of the marriage ceremony, and she said, though with as little eagerness of manner as if the question had turned on an invitation to dinner, “Do you mean that Dodo is going to be married directly, uncle?”
“In three weeks, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, helplessly. “I can do nothing to hinder it, Cadwallader,” he added, turning for a little countenance toward the Rector, who said—