Middlemarch

BOOK VII.

TWO TEMPTATIONS.

CHAPTER LXIII.

At a Christmas dinner-party, Mr. Toller asked Mr. Farebrother if he had seen much of his scientific phoenix, Lydgate, lately. Farebrother said he was out of the way, and Lydgate too busy. Toller suggested that Lydgate was preparing theories of treatment to try on his patients, and Farebrother replied that one ought to be candid about a bold fresh mind in medicine, and that if a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else. “Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner,” said Mr. Harry Toller, the brewer, and Mr. Chichely remarked with an emphatic reticence that he hoped Lydgate’s relations in the North backed him up, else he ought not to have married that nice girl.

Farebrother had heard hints of Lydgate’s expenses before, and thought it not unlikely that there were resources or expectations. One evening, when he took the pains to go to Middlemarch to have a chat with Lydgate, he noticed an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy way. Lydgate talked persistently, putting arguments for and against certain biological views, but had none of those definite things to say which give the waymarks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit. When they went into the drawing-room, Lydgate, having asked Rosamond to give them music, sank back in his chair in silence, but with a strange light in his eyes. “He may have been taking an opiate,” thought the Vicar.

On New Year’s Day, at Mr. Vincy’s party, the ladies of the Farebrother family were all present. Mary Garth had been invited on Fred’s persuasion, and was now in a corner telling the Vincy children stories, with Mr. Farebrother watching her from behind little Louisa on his knee. “A delightful young person is Miss Garth,” said Mrs. Farebrother to Mrs. Vincy, who, obliged to reply, remarked that it was a pity she was not better-looking. “I cannot say that,” said the old lady, decisively; “I like her countenance.”

When Lydgate came in from dessert, Farebrother took him aside against the fireplace. “You are the man I was going to look for,” he said. He spoke of his living, and how Mrs. Casaubon had been told that Lydgate had praised him up. “You should let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have done him a good turn.” Lydgate answered coldly, “I can’t tell what you mean.” Farebrother thought he could account for the speech as the perversity of a man ill at ease in his affairs, and answered in a tone of good-humored admission: “I have no need to hang on the smiles of chance now.” “I don’t see that there’s any money-getting without chance,” said Lydgate; “if a man gets it in a profession, it’s pretty sure to come by chance.” Farebrother, perceiving that he had been rebuffed, asked what time it was, and they went into the drawing-room.

CHAPTER LXIV.

Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs, he knew that it would hardly have been in Mr. Farebrother’s power to give him the help he immediately wanted. With the year’s bills coming in, with Dover’s threatening hold on his furniture, and with nothing to depend on but slow dribbling payments from patients who must not be offended, nothing less than a thousand pounds would have freed him from actual embarrassment.

His mind was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes. “This is what I am thinking of, and that is what I might have been thinking of,” was the bitter incessant murmur within him, making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.

He tried to draw Rosamond into sympathy with possible measures for narrowing their expenses. “We two can do with only one servant, and live on very little,” he said. “I ought to have known better, and I deserve a thrashing for bringing you into the necessity of living in a poorer way than you have been used to. But we married because we loved each other, and that may help us to pull along till things get better.” He took her on his knee, and tried to speak persuasively about the necessity of dismissing servants and retrenching. Rosamond obeyed him, but in her secret soul she was utterly aloof from him. The poor thing saw only that the world was not ordered to her liking, and Lydgate was part of that world.

“My uncle Bulstrode ought to allow you a salary for the time you give to the Hospital,” Rosamond suggested, and Lydgate answered impatiently that this need not enter into their discussion. He told her he saw one resource which would free them from a good deal of difficulty: young Ned Plymdale, who was about to be married to Miss Sophy Toller, would be glad to take this house from them with most of the furniture, and pay handsomely for the lease. Rosamond left her husband’s knee and walked slowly to the other end of the room, the tears coming as she pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks. “I never could have believed that you would like to act in that way,” she said. Lydgate burst out, “It’s not a question of liking. It’s the only thing I can do.” She walked out of the room in silence, but with an intense determination to hinder what Lydgate liked to do.

That evening Lydgate was a little comforted by observing that Rosamond was more lively than she had usually been of late. He thought, “If she will be happy and I can rub through, what does it all signify?” He began to search for an account of experiments he had long ago meant to look up, and was feeling something of the old delightful absorption when Rosamond, who had left the piano, said, “Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house already.”

Lydgate, startled, looked up in silence. Then he asked, “How do you know?” She had called at Mrs. Plymdale’s that morning. “Perhaps some one else may turn up,” he said coolly. “I told Trumbull to be on the look-out if he failed with Plymdale.” Rosamond said no more. But the next day she carried out her plan of writing to Sir Godwin Lydgate, a letter in which she pointed out how desirable it was that Tertius should quit such a place as Middlemarch for one more fitted to his talents, how the unpleasant character of the inhabitants had hindered his professional success, and how in consequence he was in money difficulties, from which it would require a thousand pounds thoroughly to extricate him. She did not say that Tertius was unaware of her intention to write.