Middlemarch

CHAPTER LV.

The chapter opens with a meditation on the way youth believes each parting final, each crisis the last of its kind—much as the oldest inhabitants of Peru may never quite cease to be agitated by earthquakes, even knowing more will follow. For Dorothea, still young enough that her long-lashed eyes looked out unsoiled after weeping as freshly as a passion-flower after rain, the morning’s parting from Will Ladislaw felt like the absolute close of any personal relation between them. He was going away into unknown years, and if he came back, he would be another man. She had not the least idea of his proud resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion that he might be playing the needy adventurer after a rich woman; she interpreted his behavior easily enough by her supposition that Casaubon’s codicil seemed to him, as it did to her, a gross interdict on their friendship. Their young delight in speaking truths no one else cared to hear was now a treasure of the past, and precisely for that reason she could dwell on it unchecked. In the shadowed chamber of her grief she could vent the passionate sorrow that astonished her. For the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and held it, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly judged with the grandson her own heart defended. She did not yet know that it was Love who had come to her briefly, with the hues of morning on his wings, and that she was sobbing farewell to his image as it was banished by the blameless rigor of irresistible day.

One day, when she went to Freshitt to keep her promise of staying all night and seeing baby washed, Mrs. Cadwallader came to dine while the Rector was off fishing. Even in the delightful drawing-room with its turf sloping toward a lilied pool, the heat was enough to make Celia, in white muslin, pity Dorothea in her black dress and close widow’s cap. She had taken up a fan some time before saying, 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,” Dorothea smiled. “I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off.”

Celia unfastened the cap and tossed it on a chair. Just as the coils of dark-brown hair fell free, Sir James entered. 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.” Lady Chettam, with due stateliness, replied that 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. Sir James was annoyed and leaned forward to play with Celia’s Maltese dog. Lady Chettam, in a tone meant to guard against such events, said that no friend of theirs had ever committed herself in that way except Mrs. Beevor, who had been severely punished for it.

“Oh, if she took the wrong man!” said Mrs. Cadwallader, who was in a decided 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.”

Sir James begged that they change the subject. But Dorothea, determined not to lose the chance of freeing herself from oblique references, said, “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.”

Privately, Celia said, “Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made you like yourself again in more ways than one. You spoke up just as you used to do.” Dorothea touched her sister’s chin. “Don’t be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life. I shall never marry again. I have delightful plans. I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work.”

Sir James was informed that night that Dorothea was set against marrying anybody and was going to take to “all sorts of plans.” To his secret feeling there was something repulsive in a woman’s second marriage; but if Dorothea chose to espouse her solitude, he felt the resolution would well become her.