Bab Bab 47 · Chapter XLVII

Was never true love loved in vain,

For truest love is highest gain.

No art can make it: it must spring

Where elements are fostering.

So in heaven’s spot and hour

Springs the little native flower,

Downward root and upward eye,

Shapen by the earth and sky.

It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that

little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own

rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under

a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled

in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke. Hesitations

before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to

every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came

his heat towards Lydgate—a heat which still kept him restless. Was he

not making a fool of himself?—and at a time when he was more than ever

conscious of being something better than a fool? And for what end?

Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of

possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and

thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions—does not find

images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting

it with dread. But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with

a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit “keeps the

roadway:” he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own

choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have

thought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness

for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It

may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision

of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him—namely, that Dorothea might become

a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might

turn into acceptance of him as a husband—had no tempting, arresting

power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and

follow it out, as we all do with that imagined “otherwise” which is our

practical heaven. It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain

thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in

the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of

ingratitude—the latent consciousness of many other barriers between

himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped

to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.

Casaubon. And there were yet other reasons. Will, we know, could not

bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once

exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea

looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in

thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change

which must somehow change her. Do we not shun the street version of a

fine melody?—or shrink from the news that the rarity—some bit of

chiselling or engraving perhaps—which we have dwelt on even with

exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is

really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day

possession? Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion;

and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called the solid

things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within

him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance

of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his

passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was

conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own

experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no

other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have

written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he

might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,—

“Queens hereafter might be glad to live

Upon the alms of her superfluous praise.”

But this result was questionable. And what else could he do for

Dorothea? What was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible to

tell. He would not go out of her reach. He saw no creature among her

friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple

confidence as to him. She had once said that she would like him to

stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss

around her.

This had always been the conclusion of Will’s hesitations. But he was

not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own

resolve. He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular

night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr.

Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be,

and this was always associated with the other ground of irritation—that

notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for Dorothea’s sake, he could

hardly ever see her. Whereupon, not being able to contradict these

unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, “I

am a fool.”

Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,

he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of

what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the

morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see

her. He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational

morning light, Objection said—

“That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon’s prohibition to visit

Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased.”

“Nonsense!” argued Inclination, “it would be too monstrous for him to

hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring

morning. And Dorothea will be glad.”

“It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy

him or to see Dorothea.”

“It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see

Dorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be always

comfortable? Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do.

I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation;

besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew.”

Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick

as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and

skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding

boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green

growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know that it was

Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church. Will easily felt

happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this time the thought of

vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face

break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine

on the water—though the occasion was not exemplary. But most of us are

apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is

odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his

personality excites in ourselves. Will went along with a small book

under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but

chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and

coming out. He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his

own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising. The

words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday

experience:—

“O me, O me, what frugal cheer

My love doth feed upon!

A touch, a ray, that is not here,

A shadow that is gone:

“A dream of breath that might be near,

An inly-echoed tone,

The thought that one may think me dear,

The place where one was known,

“The tremor of a banished fear,

An ill that was not done—

O me, O me, what frugal cheer

My love doth feed upon!”

Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and

showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation

of the spring whose spirit filled the air—a bright creature, abundant

in uncertain promises.

The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into

the curate’s pew before any one else arrived there. But he was still

left alone in it when the congregation had assembled. The curate’s pew

was opposite the rector’s at the entrance of the small chancel, and

Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked

round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year

to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with

more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and

there with age, but yet has young shoots. Mr. Rigg’s frog-face was

something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to

the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of

the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel’s cheek had

the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent

cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters

generally—the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the

black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all

betters, and the one most awful if offended. Even in 1831 Lowick was at

peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the

Sunday sermon. The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church

in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who

expected him to make a figure in the singing.

Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the

short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak—the same she had

worn in the Vatican. Her face being, from her entrance, towards the

chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was

no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow

as she passed him. To his own surprise Will felt suddenly

uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each

other. Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon came out of the vestry,

and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felt

his paralysis more complete. He could look nowhere except at the choir

in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps

pained, and he had made a wretched blunder. It was no longer amusing to

vex Mr. Casaubon, who had the advantage probably of watching him and

seeing that he dared not turn his head. Why had he not imagined this

beforehand?—but he could not expect that he should sit in that square

pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from

Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk. Still he called

himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be impossible for

him to look towards Dorothea—nay, that she might feel his coming an

impertinence. There was no delivering himself from his cage, however;

and Will found his places and looked at his book as if he had been a

school-mistress, feeling that the morning service had never been so

immeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous, out of

temper, and miserable. This was what a man got by worshipping the sight

of a woman! The clerk observed with surprise that Mr. Ladislaw did not

join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he might have a cold.

Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in

Will’s situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one

rose. It was the fashion at Lowick for “the betters” to go out first.

With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will

looked straight at Mr. Casaubon. But that gentleman’s eyes were on the

button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and

following her immediately without raising his eyelids. Will’s glance

had caught Dorothea’s as she turned out of the pew, and again she

bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were

repressing tears. Will walked out after them, but they went on towards

the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never

looking round.

It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back

sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in

the morning. The lights were all changed for him both without and

within.