Kabanata Kabanata 75 · Chapter LXXV

“Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de

la vanité des plaisirs absents causent l’inconstance.”—PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed

from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors

were paid. But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none

of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination. In this

brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been

stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond

had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had

lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to

an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course,

trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when

she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London. When she

did not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she

had that was worth living for. The hard and contemptuous words which

had fallen from her husband in his anger had deeply offended that

vanity which he had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she

regarded as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret

repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor

substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her. They were at a

disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any outlook

towards Quallingham—there was no outlook anywhere except in an

occasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and

disappointed by Will’s resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of

what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she

secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily come to

have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one of those

women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have

preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless. Mrs. Casaubon

was all very well; but Will’s interest in her dated before he knew Mrs.

Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a

mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the

disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that

agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which

Lydgate’s presence had no longer the magic to create. She even

fancied—what will not men and women fancy in these matters?—that Will

exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique herself.

In this way poor Rosamond’s brain had been busy before Will’s

departure. He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable

husband for her than she had found in Lydgate. No notion could have

been falser than this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was

due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for

self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband;

but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm

which diverted her ennui. She constructed a little romance which was to

vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a

bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an

understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be

sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes.

His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly

increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the

alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the

family at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life had

deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful

rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on. Men and

women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague

uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and

oftener still for a mighty love. Will Ladislaw had written chatty

letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied: their

separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change she

now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;

everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work with

quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,

delightful promise which inspirited her.

It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was

nothing less than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned

indeed chiefly on his new interest in plans of colonization, but

mentioned incidentally, that he might find it necessary to pay a visit

to Middlemarch within the next few weeks—a very pleasant necessity, he

said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolboy. He hoped there was his

old place on the rug, and a great deal of music in store for him. But

he was quite uncertain as to the time. While Lydgate was reading the

letter to Rosamond, her face looked like a reviving flower—it grew

prettier and more blooming. There was nothing unendurable now: the

debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw was coming, and Lydgate would be

persuaded to leave Middlemarch and settle in London, which was “so

different from a provincial town.”

That was a bright bit of morning. But soon the sky became black over

poor Rosamond. The presence of a new gloom in her husband, about which

he was entirely reserved towards her—for he dreaded to expose his

lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception—soon received a

painfully strange explanation, alien to all her previous notions of

what could affect her happiness. In the new gayety of her spirits,

thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit of moodiness than usual,

causing him to leave her remarks unanswered, and evidently to keep out

of her way as much as possible, she chose, a few days after the

meeting, and without speaking to him on the subject, to send out notes

of invitation for a small evening party, feeling convinced that this

was a judicious step, since people seemed to have been keeping aloof

from them, and wanted restoring to the old habit of intercourse. When

the invitations had been accepted, she would tell Lydgate, and give him

a wise admonition as to how a medical man should behave to his

neighbors; for Rosamond had the gravest little airs possible about

other people’s duties. But all the invitations were declined, and the

last answer came into Lydgate’s hands.

“This is Chichely’s scratch. What is he writing to you about?” said

Lydgate, wonderingly, as he handed the note to her. She was obliged to

let him see it, and, looking at her severely, he said—

“Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me,

Rosamond? I beg, I insist that you will not invite any one to this

house. I suppose you have been inviting others, and they have refused

too.” She said nothing.

“Do you hear me?” thundered Lydgate.

“Yes, certainly I hear you,” said Rosamond, turning her head aside with

the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.

Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room,

feeling himself dangerous. Rosamond’s thought was, that he was getting

more and more unbearable—not that there was any new special reason for

this peremptoriness. His indisposition to tell her anything in which he

was sure beforehand that she would not be interested was growing into

an unreflecting habit, and she was in ignorance of everything connected

with the thousand pounds except that the loan had come from her uncle

Bulstrode. Lydgate’s odious humors and their neighbors’ apparent

avoidance of them had an unaccountable date for her in their relief

from money difficulties. If the invitations had been accepted she would

have gone to invite her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen nothing

of for several days; and she now put on her bonnet to go and inquire

what had become of them all, suddenly feeling as if there were a

conspiracy to leave her in isolation with a husband disposed to offend

everybody. It was after the dinner hour, and she found her father and

mother seated together alone in the drawing-room. They greeted her with

sad looks, saying “Well, my dear!” and no more. She had never seen her

father look so downcast; and seating herself near him she said—

“Is there anything the matter, papa?”

He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, “Oh, my dear, have you heard

nothing? It won’t be long before it reaches you.”

“Is it anything about Tertius?” said Rosamond, turning pale. The idea

of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been

unaccountable to her in him.

“Oh, my dear, yes. To think of your marrying into this trouble. Debt

was bad enough, but this will be worse.”

“Stay, stay, Lucy,” said Mr. Vincy. “Have you heard nothing about your

uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?”

“No, papa,” said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not

anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power with an

iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.

Her father told her everything, saying at the end, “It’s better for you

to know, my dear. I think Lydgate must leave the town. Things have gone

against him. I dare say he couldn’t help it. I don’t accuse him of any

harm,” said Mr. Vincy. He had always before been disposed to find the

utmost fault with Lydgate.

The shock to Rosamond was terrible. It seemed to her that no lot could

be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the

centre of infamous suspicions. In many cases it is inevitable that the

shame is felt to be the worst part of crime; and it would have required

a great deal of disentangling reflection, such as had never entered

into Rosamond’s life, for her in these moments to feel that her trouble

was less than if her husband had been certainly known to have done

something criminal. All the shame seemed to be there. And she had

innocently married this man with the belief that he and his family were

a glory to her! She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and only

said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left

Middlemarch long ago.

“She bears it beyond anything,” said her mother when she was gone.

“Ah, thank God!” said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.

But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards her

husband. What had he really done—how had he really acted? She did not

know. Why had he not told her everything? He did not speak to her on

the subject, and of course she could not speak to him. It came into her

mind once that she would ask her father to let her go home again; but

dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter dreariness to her: a

married woman gone back to live with her parents—life seemed to have no

meaning for her in such a position: she could not contemplate herself

in it.

The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that

she had heard the bad news. Would she speak to him about it, or would

she go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she

believed him guilty? We must remember that he was in a morbid state of

mind, in which almost all contact was pain. Certainly Rosamond in this

case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence on

his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;—was he

not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her, since now she

knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him? But a deeper-lying

consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and the silence

between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they were both

adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.

He thought, “I am a fool. Haven’t I given up expecting anything? I have

married care, not help.” And that evening he said—

“Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?”

“Yes,” she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying

on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.

“What have you heard?”

“Everything, I suppose. Papa told me.”

“That people think me disgraced?”

“Yes,” said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.

There was silence. Lydgate thought, “If she has any trust in me—any

notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not

believe I have deserved disgrace.”

But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly. Whatever

was to be said on the subject she expected to come from Tertius. What

did she know? And if he were innocent of any wrong, why did he not do

something to clear himself?

This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in

which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in

him—even Farebrother had not come forward. He had begun to question her

with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill fog

which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked by

despairing resentment. Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed to

regard as if it were hers alone. He was always to her a being apart,

doing what she objected to. He started from his chair with an angry

impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and down the

room. There was an underlying consciousness all the while that he

should have to master this anger, and tell her everything, and convince

her of the facts. For he had almost learned the lesson that he must

bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in her

sympathy, he must give the more. Soon he recurred to his intention of

opening himself: the occasion must not be lost. If he could bring her

to feel with some solemnity that here was a slander which must be met

and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had come out of his

desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfully on

her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little money

as possible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep

themselves independent. He would mention the definite measures which he

desired to take, and win her to a willing spirit. He was bound to try

this—and what else was there for him to do?

He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and

forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would

sit down. She too had begun to think this an opportunity for urging on

Tertius what he ought to do. Whatever might be the truth about all this

misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.

Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one

nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her

gravely before he reopened the sad subject. He had conquered himself so

far, and was about to speak with a sense of solemnity, as on an

occasion which was not to be repeated. He had even opened his lips,

when Rosamond, letting her hands fall, looked at him and said—

“Surely, Tertius—”

“Well?”

“Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in

Middlemarch. I cannot go on living here. Let us go to London. Papa, and

every one else, says you had better go. Whatever misery I have to put

up with, it will be easier away from here.”

Lydgate felt miserably jarred. Instead of that critical outpouring for

which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be

gone through again. He could not bear it. With a quick change of

countenance he rose and went out of the room.

Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to

be the more because she was less, that evening might have had a better

issue. If his energy could have borne down that check, he might still

have wrought on Rosamond’s vision and will. We cannot be sure that any

natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a

more massive being than their own. They may be taken by storm and for

the moment converted, becoming part of the soul which enwraps them in

the ardor of its movement. But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain within

him, and his energy had fallen short of its task.

The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as

ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.

They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate

going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond

feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly. It was

of no use to say anything to Tertius; but when Will Ladislaw came, she

was determined to tell him everything. In spite of her general

reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.