Middlemarch
well that I ought not to have left anything to be told her by others,
but—”
He broke off, and there was a moment’s silence. Dorothea refrained from
saying what was in her mind—how well she knew that there might be
invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife. This was a point
on which even sympathy might make a wound. She returned to the more
outward aspect of Lydgate’s position, saying cheerfully—
“And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in
you and support you, she might then be glad that you should stay in
your place and recover your hopes—and do what you meant to do. Perhaps
then you would see that it was right to agree with what I proposed
about your continuing at the Hospital. Surely you would, if you still
have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?”
Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.
“You need not decide immediately,” she said, gently. “A few days hence
it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode.”
Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most decisive
tones.
“No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering. I am
no longer sure enough of myself—I mean of what it would be possible for
me to do under the changed circumstances of my life. It would be
dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything serious in
dependence on me. I might be obliged to go away after all; I see little
chance of anything else. The whole thing is too problematic; I cannot
consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted. No—let the new
Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, and everything go on as it
might have done if I had never come. I have kept a valuable register
since I have been there; I shall send it to a man who will make use of
it,” he ended bitterly. “I can think of nothing for a long while but
getting an income.”
“It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly,” said Dorothea.
“It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from
that. Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen
from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this
fettering want of income. Why should not people do these things? It is
so difficult to make shares at all even. This is one way.”
“God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!” said Lydgate, rising as if with the
same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the
back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in. “It is good
that you should have such feelings. But I am not the man who ought to
allow himself to benefit by them. I have not given guarantees enough. I
must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for work
that I never achieved. It is very clear to me that I must not count on
anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I can
manage it. I should not be able for a long while, at the very best, to
get an income here, and—and it is easier to make necessary changes in a
new place. I must do as other men do, and think what will please the
world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the London
crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to some
southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get myself
puffed,—that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to keep my
soul alive in.”
“Now that is not brave,” said Dorothea,—“to give up the fight.”
“No, it is not brave,” said Lydgate, “but if a man is afraid of
creeping paralysis?” Then, in another tone, “Yet you have made a great
difference in my courage by believing in me. Everything seems more
bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few
other minds, especially in Farebrother’s, I shall be deeply grateful.
The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my
orders. That would soon get distorted. After all, there is no evidence
for me but people’s opinion of me beforehand. You can only repeat my
own report of myself.”
“Mr. Farebrother will believe—others will believe,” said Dorothea. “I
can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be
bribed to do a wickedness.”
“I don’t know,” said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice.
“I have not taken a bribe yet. But there is a pale shade of bribery
which is sometimes called prosperity. You will do me another great
kindness, then, and come to see my wife?”
“Yes, I will. I remember how pretty she is,” said Dorothea, into whose
mind every impression about Rosamond had cut deep. “I hope she will
like me.”
As Lydgate rode away, he thought, “This young creature has a heart
large enough for the Virgin Mary. She evidently thinks nothing of her
own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she
wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can
look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.
She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before—a fountain of
friendship towards men—a man can make a friend of her. Casaubon must
have raised some heroic hallucination in her. I wonder if she could
have any other sort of passion for a man? Ladislaw?—there was certainly
an unusual feeling between them. And Casaubon must have had a notion of
it. Well—her love might help a man more than her money.”
Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate
from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part,
though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear. She sat down at
once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note,
in which she pleaded that she had more claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to
the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to
Lydgate—that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant her the
position of being his helper in this small matter, the favor being
entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her
to do with her superfluous money. He might call her a creditor or by
any other name if it did but imply that he granted her request. She
enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the
letter with her the next day when she went to see Rosamond.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion.”
—_Henry V_.
The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
should be away until the evening. Of late she had never gone beyond her
own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa, to
whom she said, “If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
you not, papa? I suppose we shall have very little money. I am sure I
hope some one will help us.” And Mr. Vincy had said, “Yes, child, I
don’t mind a hundred or two. I can see the end of that.” With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw’s coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences is
too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond. And
it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest shock
when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is often
to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except the
desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness—or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui. Her melancholy had become so marked
that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual silent
reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.
But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs—where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out—equipped for a walk in
the town. She had a letter to post—a letter addressed to Mr. Ladislaw
and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten his
arrival by a hint of trouble. The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought “there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing.”
Meanwhile Dorothea’s mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit. Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
that of Will Ladislaw. Even in her most uneasy moments—even when she
had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader’s painfully graphic report of
gossip—her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music. But
there had followed his parting words—the few passionate words in which
he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love held
him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was resolved
not to declare but to carry away into banishment. From the time of that
parting, Dorothea, believing in Will’s love for her, believing with a
proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his determination that
no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart quite at rest as to
the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was sure that the regard
was blameless.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust. “If
you are not good, none is good”—those little words may give a terrific
meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.
Dorothea’s nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
great powers of her womanhood. And it had from the first acted strongly
on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted from her, that the brief
words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about herself
and the division which her fortune made between them, would only profit