Middlemarch
fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.
She was keenly offended, but the signs she made of this were such as
only Lydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet and
seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
shawl. Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.
It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting. And yet—how
could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her? He was fuming
under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
dangerously poised, and Rosamond’s voice now brought the decisive
vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said—
“You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference.”
“Go after her!” he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. “Do you
think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
her again at more than a dirty feather?—Explain! How can a man explain
at the expense of a woman?”
“You can tell her what you please,” said Rosamond with more tremor.
“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is
not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—to believe
that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you.”
He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again—
“I had no hope before—not much—of anything better to come. But I had
one certainty—that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or done
about me, she believed in me.—That’s gone! She’ll never again think me
anything but a paltry pretence—too nice to take heaven except upon
flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil’s change by
the sly. She’ll think of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the
first moment we—”
Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage by
snatching up Rosamond’s words again, as if they were reptiles to be
throttled and flung off.
“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my
preference! I never had a _preference_ for her, any more than I have a
preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I
would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
other woman’s living.”
Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was
almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
some new terrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute
repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
Lydgate’s most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
lash never experienced before. What another nature felt in opposition
to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness. When Will
had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery: her
lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them. If it had
been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would have
been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort her,
with that strong-armed comfort which she had often held very cheap.
Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity. He had
felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless. He knew that he
was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute. He
had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
he felt checked and stultified in his anger. He walked towards the
mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for—he
hardly knew what. The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there—he had had
suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
within it. And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
slow pincers:—that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
heart. But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
Rosamond’s blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before it can turn into compassion.
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
in silence; Will’s face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond’s
by a mute misery. The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship. But she said nothing,
and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, “Shall I
come in and see Lydgate this evening?”
“If you like,” Rosamond answered, just audibly.
And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
been in.
After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting. When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to make
the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms. Rosamond said
that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
day of grief.
Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there. The perception that she was ill threw every other
thought into the background. When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested on
him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
she felt some content that he was there. He perceived the difference in
a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her, and
bending over her said, “My poor Rosamond! has something agitated you?”
Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and for
the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her. He imagined that
Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her nervous
system, which evidently involved some new turning towards himself, was
due to the excitement of the new impressions which that visit had
raised.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
“Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their talk, they
drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain;
and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name
of the slough was Despond.”—BUNYAN.
When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea’s letter
addressed to him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.
When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
visit, and Will could not say, “Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
came this morning?”
“Poor Rosamond is ill,” Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.
“Not seriously, I hope,” said Will.
“No—only a slight nervous shock—the effect of some agitation. She has
been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky devil.
We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you left, and I
have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I suppose you are
only just come down—you look rather battered—you have not been long
enough in the town to hear anything?”
“I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o’clock this
morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting,” said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.
And then he heard Lydgate’s account of the troubles which Rosamond had
already depicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned the fact of
Will’s name being connected with the public story—this detail not
immediately affecting her—and he now heard it for the first time.
“I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
disclosures,” said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation. “You will be sure to
hear it as soon as you turn out into the town. I suppose it is true
that Raffles spoke to you.”
“Yes,” said Will, sardonically. “I shall be fortunate if gossip does
not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair. I should
think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose.”
He was thinking “Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however—what does it signify now?”
But he said nothing of Bulstrode’s offer to him. Will was very open and
careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature’s modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode’s money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate’s misfortune to have accepted it.
Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond’s feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, “Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me.”
Observing a change in Will’s face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.
The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion’s trouble. When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, “We shall have you again, old fellow,” Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of