Middlemarch
nothing? It won’t be long before it reaches you.”
“Is it anything about Tertius?” said Rosamond, turning pale. The idea
of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been
unaccountable to her in him.
“Oh, my dear, yes. To think of your marrying into this trouble. Debt
was bad enough, but this will be worse.”
“Stay, stay, Lucy,” said Mr. Vincy. “Have you heard nothing about your
uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?”
“No, papa,” said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not
anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power with an
iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.
Her father told her everything, saying at the end, “It’s better for you
to know, my dear. I think Lydgate must leave the town. Things have gone
against him. I dare say he couldn’t help it. I don’t accuse him of any
harm,” said Mr. Vincy. He had always before been disposed to find the
utmost fault with Lydgate.
The shock to Rosamond was terrible. It seemed to her that no lot could
be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the
centre of infamous suspicions. In many cases it is inevitable that the
shame is felt to be the worst part of crime; and it would have required
a great deal of disentangling reflection, such as had never entered
into Rosamond’s life, for her in these moments to feel that her trouble
was less than if her husband had been certainly known to have done
something criminal. All the shame seemed to be there. And she had
innocently married this man with the belief that he and his family were
a glory to her! She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and only
said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left
Middlemarch long ago.
“She bears it beyond anything,” said her mother when she was gone.
“Ah, thank God!” said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.
But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards her
husband. What had he really done—how had he really acted? She did not
know. Why had he not told her everything? He did not speak to her on
the subject, and of course she could not speak to him. It came into her
mind once that she would ask her father to let her go home again; but
dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter dreariness to her: a
married woman gone back to live with her parents—life seemed to have no
meaning for her in such a position: she could not contemplate herself
in it.
The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that
she had heard the bad news. Would she speak to him about it, or would
she go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she
believed him guilty? We must remember that he was in a morbid state of
mind, in which almost all contact was pain. Certainly Rosamond in this
case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence on
his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;—was he
not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her, since now she
knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him? But a deeper-lying
consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and the silence
between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they were both
adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.
He thought, “I am a fool. Haven’t I given up expecting anything? I have
married care, not help.” And that evening he said—
“Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?”
“Yes,” she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying
on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.
“What have you heard?”
“Everything, I suppose. Papa told me.”
“That people think me disgraced?”
“Yes,” said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.
There was silence. Lydgate thought, “If she has any trust in me—any
notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not
believe I have deserved disgrace.”
But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly. Whatever
was to be said on the subject she expected to come from Tertius. What
did she know? And if he were innocent of any wrong, why did he not do
something to clear himself?
This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in
which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in
him—even Farebrother had not come forward. He had begun to question her
with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill fog
which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked by
despairing resentment. Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed to
regard as if it were hers alone. He was always to her a being apart,
doing what she objected to. He started from his chair with an angry
impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and down the
room. There was an underlying consciousness all the while that he
should have to master this anger, and tell her everything, and convince
her of the facts. For he had almost learned the lesson that he must
bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in her
sympathy, he must give the more. Soon he recurred to his intention of
opening himself: the occasion must not be lost. If he could bring her
to feel with some solemnity that here was a slander which must be met
and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had come out of his
desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfully on
her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little money
as possible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep
themselves independent. He would mention the definite measures which he
desired to take, and win her to a willing spirit. He was bound to try
this—and what else was there for him to do?
He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and
forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would
sit down. She too had begun to think this an opportunity for urging on
Tertius what he ought to do. Whatever might be the truth about all this
misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.
Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one
nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her
gravely before he reopened the sad subject. He had conquered himself so
far, and was about to speak with a sense of solemnity, as on an
occasion which was not to be repeated. He had even opened his lips,
when Rosamond, letting her hands fall, looked at him and said—
“Surely, Tertius—”
“Well?”
“Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in
Middlemarch. I cannot go on living here. Let us go to London. Papa, and
every one else, says you had better go. Whatever misery I have to put
up with, it will be easier away from here.”
Lydgate felt miserably jarred. Instead of that critical outpouring for
which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be
gone through again. He could not bear it. With a quick change of
countenance he rose and went out of the room.
Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to
be the more because she was less, that evening might have had a better
issue. If his energy could have borne down that check, he might still
have wrought on Rosamond’s vision and will. We cannot be sure that any
natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a
more massive being than their own. They may be taken by storm and for
the moment converted, becoming part of the soul which enwraps them in
the ardor of its movement. But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain within
him, and his energy had fallen short of its task.
The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as
ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.
They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate
going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond
feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly. It was
of no use to say anything to Tertius; but when Will Ladislaw came, she
was determined to tell him everything. In spite of her general
reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
To mercy, pity, peace, and love
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight,
Return their thankfulness.
. . . . . .
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
—WILLIAM BLAKE: _Songs of Innocence_.
Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence of
a summons from Dorothea. The summons had not been unexpected, since it
had followed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated that he
had resumed his arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must remind
Lydgate of his previous communications about the Hospital, to the
purport of which he still adhered. It had been his duty, before taking
further steps, to reopen the subject with Mrs. Casaubon, who now
wished, as before, to discuss the question with Lydgate. “Your views
may possibly have undergone some change,” wrote Mr. Bulstrode; “but, in
that case also, it is desirable that you should lay them before her.”
Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest. Though, in deference
to her masculine advisers, she had refrained from what Sir James had
called “interfering in this Bulstrode business,” the hardship of
Lydgate’s position was continually in her mind, and when Bulstrode
applied to her again about the hospital, she felt that the opportunity
was come to her which she had been hindered from hastening. In her
luxurious home, wandering under the boughs of her own great trees, her
thought was going out over the lot of others, and her emotions were
imprisoned. The idea of some active good within her reach, “haunted her
like a passion,” and another’s need having once come to her as a
distinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give
relief, and made her own ease tasteless. She was full of confident hope
about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of his
personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman.
Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence
on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship.
As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live
through again all the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her
memories. They all owed their significance to her marriage and its
troubles—but no; there were two occasions in which the image of Lydgate
had come painfully in connection with his wife and some one else. The
pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it had left in her an awakened
conjecture as to what Lydgate’s marriage might be to him, a
susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate. These thoughts
were like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright, and gave an
attitude of suspense to her whole frame, though she was only looking
out from the brown library on to the turf and the bright green buds
which stood in relief against the dark evergreens.
When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face,
which was strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for two
months. It was not the change of emaciation, but that effect which even
young faces will very soon show from the persistent presence of
resentment and despondency. Her cordial look, when she put out her hand
to him, softened his expression, but only with melancholy.
“I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,”
said Dorothea when they were seated opposite each other; “but I put off
asking you to come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about the
Hospital. I know that the advantage of keeping the management of it