Chapter Chapter 77 · 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

by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that in

her mind he had found his highest estimate.

And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had

felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as

one which was inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active

force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the

defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs

which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the

external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,

only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment. And

now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact

affecting Will’s social position, which roused afresh Dorothea’s inward

resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which

lay within park palings.

“Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker” was a phrase

which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode

business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of

placard on poor Will’s back than the “Italian with white mice.” Upright

Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was righteous

when he thought with some complacency that here was an added league to

that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea, which enabled

him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too absurd. And perhaps

there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr. Brooke’s attention to this

ugly bit of Ladislaw’s genealogy, as a fresh candle for him to see his

own folly by. Dorothea had observed the animus with which Will’s part

in the painful story had been recalled more than once; but she had

uttered no word, being checked now, as she had not been formerly in

speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a deeper relation between

them which must always remain in consecrated secrecy. But her silence

shrouded her resistant emotion into a more thorough glow; and this

misfortune in Will’s lot which, it seemed, others were wishing to fling

at his back as an opprobrium, only gave something more of enthusiasm to

her clinging thought.

She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and

yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her

whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and

would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail

because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on

the superfluities of her lot. She could bear that the chief pleasures

of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came

to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she

at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,

would be a source of torment to her:—“somebody who will manage your

property for you, my dear,” was Mr. Brooke’s attractive suggestion of

suitable characteristics. “I should like to manage it myself, if I knew

what to do with it,” said Dorothea. No—she adhered to her declaration

that she would never be married again, and in the long valley of her

life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as

she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way.

This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in

all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.

Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond’s

figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and

compassion. There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier to

complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the husband

who had yet made her happiness a law to him. That was a trouble which

no third person must directly touch. But Dorothea thought with deep

pity of the loneliness which must have come upon Rosamond from the

suspicions cast on her husband; and there would surely be help in the

manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy with her.

“I shall talk to her about her husband,” thought Dorothea, as she was

being driven towards the town. The clear spring morning, the scent of

the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth

of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the

cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.

Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of

Lydgate’s conduct. “I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps

she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me.”

Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new

fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her

carriage very near to Lydgate’s, she walked thither across the street,

having told the coachman to wait for some packages. The street door was

open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at the

carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to her

that the lady who “belonged to it” was coming towards her.

“Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?” said Dorothea.

“I’m not sure, my lady; I’ll see, if you’ll please to walk in,” said

Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but

collected enough to be sure that “mum” was not the right title for this

queenly young widow with a carriage and pair. “Will you please to walk

in, and I’ll go and see.”

“Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon,” said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward

intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to

see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.

They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the

passage which led to the garden. The drawing-room door was unlatched,

and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.

Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and

swung back again without noise.

Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being

filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be. She

found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything

remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones

which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and

advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a

bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which

filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,

without self-possession enough to speak.

Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall

on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will

Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed

tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her

bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her

upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.

Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently

advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable

instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself

impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her

presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and

rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested. Will Ladislaw,

starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea’s eyes with a new

lightning in them, seemed changing to marble. But she immediately

turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice—

“Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.

I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished

to put into your own hands.”

She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her

retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and

bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the

surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,

and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that

grand people were probably more impatient than others.

Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was

quickly in her carriage again.

“Drive on to Freshitt Hall,” she said to the coachman, and any one

looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual

she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy. And that was

really her experience. It was as if she had drunk a great draught of

scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.

She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions

rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object. She

needed something active to turn her excitement out upon. She felt power

to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink. And she would carry

out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of going to

Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that she wished

them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under his trial

now presented itself to her with new significance, and made her more

ardent in readiness to be his champion. She had never felt anything

like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of her

married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing pang;

and she took it as a sign of new strength.

“Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!” said Celia, when Sir James was

gone out of the room. “And you don’t see anything you look at, Arthur

or anything. You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know. Is it

all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?” Celia had been

used to watch her sister with expectation.

“Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,” said Dodo, in her full

tones.

“I wonder what,” said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning

forward upon them.

“Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth,” said

Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.

“Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?” said Celia, a

little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.

But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,

and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution

until she descended at her own door.