Middlemarch
Dorothea’s face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very
close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before a
superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor. She said, with
blushing embarrassment, “Thank you: you are very kind.”
“And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything about
this to you. But you will forgive him. It was because he feels so much
more about your happiness than anything else—he feels his life bound
into one with yours, and it hurts him more than anything, that his
misfortunes must hurt you. He could speak to me because I am an
indifferent person. And then I asked him if I might come to see you;
because I felt so much for his trouble and yours. That is why I came
yesterday, and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is it
not?— How can we live and think that any one has trouble—piercing
trouble—and we could help them, and never try?”
Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering,
forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her
own trial to Rosamond’s. The emotion had wrought itself more and more
into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one’s very
marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness.
And she had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand that
she had pressed before.
Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been
probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before
when she clung to her husband. Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave
of her own sorrow returning over her—her thought being drawn to the
possible share that Will Ladislaw might have in Rosamond’s mental
tumult. She was beginning to fear that she should not be able to
suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while her hand
was still resting on Rosamond’s lap, though the hand underneath it was
withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs. She tried to
master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point in
three lives—not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had happened,
but—in those three lives which were touching hers with the solemn
neighborhood of danger and distress. The fragile creature who was
crying close to her—there might still be time to rescue her from the
misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike any
other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with the same
thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both. She felt the
relation between them to be peculiar enough to give her a peculiar
influence, though she had no conception that the way in which her own
feelings were involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.
It was a newer crisis in Rosamond’s experience than even Dorothea could
imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her
dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and
critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of
feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion
and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards
her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been
walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.
When Rosamond’s convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she
withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her
eyes met Dorothea’s as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers.
What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying? And
Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
silent tear. Pride was broken down between these two.
“We were talking about your husband,” Dorothea said, with some
timidity. “I thought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the
other day. I had not seen him for many weeks before. He said he had
been feeling very lonely in his trial; but I think he would have borne
it all better if he had been able to be quite open with you.”
“Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything,” said Rosamond,
imagining that he had been complaining of her to Dorothea. “He ought
not to wonder that I object to speak to him on painful subjects.”
“It was himself he blamed for not speaking,” said Dorothea. “What he
said of you was, that he could not be happy in doing anything which
made you unhappy—that his marriage was of course a bond which must
affect his choice about everything; and for that reason he refused my
proposal that he should keep his position at the Hospital, because that
would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not undertake to do
anything which would be painful to you. He could say that to me,
because he knows that I had much trial in my marriage, from my
husband’s illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him; and he
knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting
another who is tied to us.”
Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing
over Rosamond’s face. But there was no answer, and she went on, with a
gathering tremor, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is
something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some
one else better than—than those we were married to, it would be no
use”—poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her
language brokenly—“I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving
or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very
dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us
like a murder—and everything else is gone. And then our husband—if he
loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in
his life—”
Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming
too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing
error. She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware
that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express
pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond’s,
and said with more agitated rapidity,—“I know, I know that the feeling
may be very dear—it has taken hold of us unawares—it is so hard, it may
seem like death to part with it—and we are weak—I am weak—”
The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to
save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force. She stopped
in speechless agitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being
inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her
lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that
lay under them.
Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own—hurried
along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful,
undefined aspect—could find no words, but involuntarily she put her
lips to Dorothea’s forehead which was very near her, and then for a
minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a
shipwreck.
“You are thinking what is not true,” said Rosamond, in an eager
half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea’s arms round
her—urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something that
oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.
They moved apart, looking at each other.
“When you came in yesterday—it was not as you thought,” said Rosamond
in the same tone.
There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea. She expected a
vindication of Rosamond herself.
“He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he
could never love me,” said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as
she went on. “And now I think he hates me because—because you mistook
him yesterday. He says it is through me that you will think ill of
him—think that he is a false person. But it shall not be through me. He
has never had any love for me—I know he has not—he has always thought
slightly of me. He said yesterday that no other woman existed for him
beside you. The blame of what happened is entirely mine. He said he
could never explain to you—because of me. He said you could never think
well of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot reproach me
any more.”
Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known
before. She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of
Dorothea’s emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that
she was repelling Will’s reproaches, which were still like a
knife-wound within her.
The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning
made a resistant pain:—she could only perceive that this would be joy
when she had recovered her power of feeling it. Her immediate
consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check; she cared for
Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly to her last
words—
“No, he cannot reproach you any more.”
With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a
great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond, for the generous effort
which had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was
a reflex of her own energy. After they had been silent a little, she
said—
“You are not sorry that I came this morning?”
“No, you have been very good to me,” said Rosamond. “I did not think
that you would be so good. I was very unhappy. I am not happy now.
Everything is so sad.”
“But better days will come. Your husband will be rightly valued. And he
depends on you for comfort. He loves you best. The worst loss would be
to lose that—and you have not lost it,” said Dorothea.
She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her own
relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that Rosamond’s affection
was yearning back towards her husband.
“Tertius did not find fault with me, then?” said Rosamond,
understanding now that Lydgate might have said anything to Mrs.
Casaubon, and that she certainly was different from other women.
Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy in the question. A smile
began to play over Dorothea’s face as she said—
“No, indeed! How could you imagine it?” But here the door opened, and
Lydgate entered.
“I am come back in my quality of doctor,” he said. “After I went away,
I was haunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need
of care as you, Rosy. And I thought that I had not done my duty in
leaving you together; so when I had been to Coleman’s I came home
again. I noticed that you were walking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has
changed—I think we may have rain. May I send some one to order your
carriage to come for you?”
“Oh, no! I am strong: I need the walk,” said Dorothea, rising with
animation in her face. “Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal,
and it is time for me to go. I have always been accused of being
immoderate and saying too much.”
She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet
good-by without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between
them too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it
superficially.
As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond, but told
him of Mr. Farebrother and the other friends who had listened with
belief to his story.
When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself on the
sofa, in resigned fatigue.
“Well, Rosy,” he said, standing over her, and touching her hair, “what
do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much of her?”
“I think she must be better than any one,” said Rosamond, “and she is
very beautiful. If you go to talk to her so often, you will be more
discontented with me than ever!”
Lydgate laughed at the “so often.” “But has she made you any less
discontented with me?”