Middlemarch
was a current of thought in her about his probable want of money, and
the impossibility of her helping him. If her uncle had been at home,
something might have been done through him! It was this preoccupation
with the hardship of Will’s wanting money, while she had what ought to
have been his share, which led her to say, seeing that he remained
silent and looked away from her—
“I wonder whether you would like to have that miniature which hangs
up-stairs—I mean that beautiful miniature of your grandmother. I think
it is not right for me to keep it, if you would wish to have it. It is
wonderfully like you.”
“You are very good,” said Will, irritably. “No; I don’t mind about it.
It is not very consoling to have one’s own likeness. It would be more
consoling if others wanted to have it.”
“I thought you would like to cherish her memory—I thought—” Dorothea
broke off an instant, her imagination suddenly warning her away from
Aunt Julia’s history—“you would surely like to have the miniature as a
family memorial.”
“Why should I have that, when I have nothing else! A man with only a
portmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head.”
Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance; it was a
little too exasperating to have his grandmother’s portrait offered him
at that moment. But to Dorothea’s feeling his words had a peculiar
sting. She rose and said with a touch of indignation as well as
hauteur—
“You are much the happier of us two, Mr. Ladislaw, to have nothing.”
Will was startled. Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed like a
dismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked a little way
towards her. Their eyes met, but with a strange questioning gravity.
Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to
conjecture what was in the other. Will had really never thought of
himself as having a claim of inheritance on the property which was held
by Dorothea, and would have required a narrative to make him understand
her present feeling.
“I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now,” he said. “But
poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most
care for.”
The words cut Dorothea to the heart, and made her relent. She answered
in a tone of sad fellowship.
“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that—I
mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands,
and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a
little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was
very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,” she
ended, smiling playfully.
“I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it,”
said Will. He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of
contradictory desires and resolves—desiring some unmistakable proof
that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which such a
proof might bring him. “The thing one most longs for may be surrounded
with conditions that would be intolerable.”
At this moment Pratt entered and said, “Sir James Chettam is in the
library, madam.”
“Ask Sir James to come in here,” said Dorothea, immediately. It was as
if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will. Each of
them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other, while
they awaited Sir James’s entrance.
After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible to
Ladislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards
Dorothea, said—
“I must say good-by, Mrs. Casaubon; and probably for a long while.”
Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-by cordially. The sense
that Sir James was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him,
roused her resolution and dignity: there was no touch of confusion in
her manner. And when Will had left the room, she looked with such calm
self-possession at Sir James, saying, “How is Celia?” that he was
obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him. And what would be the
use of behaving otherwise? Indeed, Sir James shrank with so much
dislike from the association even in thought of Dorothea with Ladislaw
as her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an
outward show of displeasure which would have recognized the
disagreeable possibility. If any one had asked him why he shrank in
that way, I am not sure that he would at first have said anything
fuller or more precise than “_That_ Ladislaw!”—though on reflection he
might have urged that Mr. Casaubon’s codicil, barring Dorothea’s
marriage with Will, except under a penalty, was enough to cast
unfitness over any relation at all between them. His aversion was all
the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere.
But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at
that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through
which Will’s pride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from
Dorothea.
CHAPTER LV.
Hath she her faults? I would you had them too.
They are the fruity must of soundest wine;
Or say, they are regenerating fire
Such as hath turned the dense black element
Into a crystal pathway for the sun.
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that
our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think
its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each
crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the
oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the
earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that
there are plenty more to come.
To Dorothea, still in that time of youth when the eyes with their long
full lashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied
as a freshly opened passion-flower, that morning’s parting with Will
Ladislaw seemed to be the close of their personal relations. He was
going away into the distance of unknown years, and if ever he came back
he would be another man. The actual state of his mind—his proud resolve
to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion that he would play the
needy adventurer seeking a rich woman—lay quite out of her imagination,
and she had interpreted all his behavior easily enough by her
supposition that Mr. Casaubon’s codicil seemed to him, as it did to
her, a gross and cruel interdict on any active friendship between them.
Their young delight in speaking to each other, and saying what no one
else would care to hear, was forever ended, and become a treasure of
the past. For this very reason she dwelt on it without inward check.
That unique happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent chamber
she might vent the passionate grief which she herself wondered at. For
the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and kept it
before her, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly judged
with the grandson whom her own heart and judgment defended. Can any one
who has rejoiced in woman’s tenderness think it a reproach to her that
she took the little oval picture in her palm and made a bed for it
there, and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would soothe the
creatures who had suffered unjust condemnation? She did not know then
that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before
awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings—that it was Love to whom
she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless
rigor of irresistible day. She only felt that there was something
irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the
future were the more readily shapen into resolve. Ardent souls, ready
to construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the
fulfilment of their own visions.
One day that she went to Freshitt to fulfil her promise of staying all
night and seeing baby washed, Mrs. Cadwallader came to dine, the Rector
being gone on a fishing excursion. It was a warm evening, and even in
the delightful drawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped from the
open window towards a lilied pool and well-planted mounds, the heat was
enough to make Celia in her white muslin and light curls reflect with
pity on what Dodo must feel in her black dress and close cap. But this
was not until some episodes with baby were over, and had left her mind
at leisure. She had seated herself and taken up a fan for some time
before she said, in her quiet guttural—
“Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap. I am sure your dress must make you
feel ill.”
“I am so used to the cap—it has become a sort of shell,” said Dorothea,
smiling. “I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off.”
“I must see you without it; it makes us all warm,” said Celia, throwing
down her fan, and going to Dorothea. It was a pretty picture to see
this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow’s cap from her
more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair. Just as the coils
and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free, Sir James entered the
room. He looked at the released head, and said, “Ah!” in a tone of
satisfaction.
“It was I who did it, James,” said Celia. “Dodo need not make such a
slavery of her mourning; she need not wear that cap any more among her
friends.”
“My dear Celia,” said Lady Chettam, “a widow must wear her mourning at
least a year.”
“Not if she marries again before the end of it,” said Mrs. Cadwallader,
who had some pleasure in startling her good friend the Dowager. Sir
James was annoyed, and leaned forward to play with Celia’s Maltese dog.
“That is very rare, I hope,” said Lady Chettam, in a tone intended to
guard against such events. “No friend of ours ever committed herself in
that way except Mrs. Beevor, and it was very painful to Lord Grinsell
when she did so. Her first husband was objectionable, which made it the
greater wonder. And severely she was punished for it. They said Captain
Beevor dragged her about by the hair, and held up loaded pistols at
her.”
“Oh, if she took the wrong man!” said Mrs. Cadwallader, who was in a
decidedly wicked mood. “Marriage is always bad then, first or second.
Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he has got no other.
I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first.”
“My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you,” said Lady Chettam. “I
am sure you would be the last woman to marry again prematurely, if our
dear Rector were taken away.”
“Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy. It is lawful to
marry again, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos instead of
Christians. Of course if a woman accepts the wrong man, she must take
the consequences, and one who does it twice over deserves her fate. But
if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery—the sooner the better.”
“I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen,” said Sir
James, with a look of disgust. “Suppose we change it.”
“Not on my account, Sir James,” said Dorothea, determined not to lose
the opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to
excellent matches. “If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you
that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal to me than
second marriage. It is no more to me than if you talked of women going
fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not, I shall not follow
them. Pray let Mrs. Cadwallader amuse herself on that subject as much
as on any other.”
“My dear Mrs. Casaubon,” said Lady Chettam, in her stateliest way, “you
do not, I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my mentioning
Mrs. Beevor. It was only an instance that occurred to me. She was
step-daughter to Lord Grinsell: he married Mrs. Teveroy for his second
wife. There could be no possible allusion to you.”
“Oh no,” said Celia. “Nobody chose the subject; it all came out of