Middlemarch
Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she left
the room hardly conscious of what was immediately around her—hardly
conscious that Will opened the door for her and offered her his arm to
lead her to the carriage. She took the arm but said nothing. Will was
feeling rather vexed and miserable, and found nothing to say on his
side. He handed her into the carriage in silence, they said good-by,
and Dorothea drove away.
In the five minutes’ drive to the Hospital she had time for some
reflections that were quite new to her. Her decision to go, and her
preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that
there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any
further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to
mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate was a
matter of concealment. That was all that had been explicitly in her
mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort. Now that she
was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the
accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning
on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder
that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her
husband’s absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had
passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there
be any unfitness in the fact? But Will was Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and
one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still there had been
signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr.
Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence.
“Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea to
herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.
She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so
clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled. But the carriage stopped
at the gate of the Hospital. She was soon walking round the grass plots
with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong bent which had made
her seek for this interview.
Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it
clearly enough. His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here for
the first time there had come a chance which had set him at a
disadvantage. It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was
not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen him under
circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely occupied
with her. He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the
circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life. But that was
not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town,
he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position
requiring that he should know everybody and everything. Lydgate was
really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and
he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling
upon. Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had
descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper. It was mortifying. Will
was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for
Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from
her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to
the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome
and Britain. Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy
in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,
like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and
subtle—solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo,
or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness. And Will
was of a temperament to feel keenly the presence of subtleties: a man
of clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, that for the
first time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him had
sprung up in Dorothea’s mind, and that their silence, as he conducted
her to the carriage, had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his
hatred and jealousy, had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid
below her socially. Confound Casaubon!
Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking
irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated herself
at her work-table, said—
“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May I come
another day and just finish about the rendering of ‘Lungi dal caro
bene’?”
“I shall be happy to be taught,” said Rosamond. “But I am sure you
admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite envy your
acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever? She looks as if
she were.”
“Really, I never thought about it,” said Will, sulkily.
“That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she
were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you
are with Mrs. Casaubon?”
“Herself,” said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs.
Lydgate. “When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her
attributes—one is conscious of her presence.”
“I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick,” said Rosamond,
dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness. “He will come back and
think nothing of me.”
“That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto. Mrs.
Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with her.”
“You are a devout worshipper, I perceive. You often see her, I
suppose.”
“No,” said Will, almost pettishly. “Worship is usually a matter of
theory rather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess just
at this moment—I must really tear myself away.”
“Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear the music,
and I cannot enjoy it so well without him.”
When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of
him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands, “Mr. Ladislaw was
here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in. He seemed vexed. Do
you think he disliked her seeing him at our house? Surely your position
is more than equal to his—whatever may be his relation to the
Casaubons.”
“No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed. Ladislaw is
a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella.”
“Music apart, he is not always very agreeable. Do you like him?”
“Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
bric-a-brac, but likable.”
“Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon.”
“Poor devil!” said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife’s ears.
Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world,
especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood
had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone
costumes—that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and
enslave men. At that time young ladies in the country, even when
educated at Mrs. Lemon’s, read little French literature later than
Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent
illumination over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with a woman’s
whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight
hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite
conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage
with a husband as crown-prince by your side—himself in fact a
subject—while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest
probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better! But Rosamond’s
romance turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and it was
enough to enjoy his assured subjection. When he said, “Poor devil!” she
asked, with playful curiosity—
“Why so?”
“Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
He only neglects his work and runs up bills.”
“I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the
Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor’s
quarrel; and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope
and phials. Confess you like those things better than me.”
“Haven’t you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be
something better than a Middlemarch doctor?” said Lydgate, letting his
hands fall on to his wife’s shoulders, and looking at her with
affectionate gravity. “I shall make you learn my favorite bit from an
old poet—
‘Why should our pride make such a stir to be
And be forgot? What good is like to this,
To do worthy the writing, and to write
Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?’
What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,—and to write out myself
what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet.”
“Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you
to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch. You
cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working. But we
cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented with me, Tertius?”
“No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented.”
“But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?”
“Merely to ask about her husband’s health. But I think she is going to
be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred
a-year.”
CHAPTER XLIV.
I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New
Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs of
change in Mr. Casaubon’s bodily condition beyond the mental sign of
anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was silent for a few
moments, wondering whether she had said or done anything to rouse this
new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to let slip an opportunity of
furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say—
“I don’t know whether your or Mr. Casaubon’s attention has been drawn
to the needs of our New Hospital. Circumstances have made it seem
rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault:
it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other
medical men. I think you are generally interested in such things, for I
remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you at Tipton
Grange before your marriage, you were asking me some questions about
the way in which the health of the poor was affected by their miserable
housing.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, brightening. “I shall be quite grateful
to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things a little
better. Everything of that sort has slipped away from me since I have
been married. I mean,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation, “that the
people in our village are tolerably comfortable, and my mind has been
too much taken up for me to inquire further. But here—in such a place
as Middlemarch—there must be a great deal to be done.”
“There is everything to be done,” said Lydgate, with abrupt energy.
“And this Hospital is a capital piece of work, due entirely to Mr.
Bulstrode’s exertions, and in a great degree to his money. But one man
can’t do everything in a scheme of this sort. Of course he looked
forward to help. And now there’s a mean, petty feud set up against the
thing in the town, by certain persons who want to make it a failure.”
“What can be their reasons?” said Dorothea, with naive surprise.
“Chiefly Mr. Bulstrode’s unpopularity, to begin with. Half the town
would almost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him. In this stupid
world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless
it is done by their own set. I had no connection with Bulstrode before
I came here. I look at him quite impartially, and I see that he has
some notions—that he has set things on foot—which I can turn to good