Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

Rosamond and Will stand motionless—he looking toward the spot where Dorothea stood, she looking toward him with doubt. To Rosamond, in whose inmost soul there is hardly so much annoyance as gratification from what has just happened, it seems an endless time. She believes in her own power to soothe or subdue, and she trusts implicitly in her petty magic to turn the deepest streams.

She puts out her arm and lays the tips of her fingers on Will’s coat-sleeve. “Don’t touch me!” he says, with an utterance like the cut of a lash, darting from her, his face changing from pink to white and back again as if his whole frame tingled with the sting of the pain. He wheels round to the other side of the room and stands opposite to her, his fingers in his pockets, his head thrown back, looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.

She is keenly offended but makes signs only Lydgate is used to interpret. She becomes quiet, seats herself, unties her hanging bonnet. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she says, “You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference.”

“Go after her!” he bursts out. “Do you think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather?—Explain! How can a man explain at the expense of a woman?”

“You can tell her what you please,” says Rosamond with more tremor.

“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—to believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you.”

He begins to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it. “I had no hope before—not much—of anything better to come. But I had one certainty—that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or done about me, she believed in me.—That’s gone! She’ll never again think me anything but a paltry pretence—too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil’s change by the sly.”

Will stops as if he has grasped something that must not be thrown and shattered. He takes up Rosamond’s words again as if they were reptiles to be throttled.

“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.”

Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons are hurled at her, is almost losing the sense of her identity, waking into some new terrible existence. She has no sense of chill resolute repulsion; all her sensibility is turned into a bewildering novelty of pain. When Will has ceased to speak she has become an image of sickened misery: her lips pale, her eyes with a tearless dismay. If it had been Tertius who stood opposite, that look of misery would have been a pang to him.

Will has no such movement of pity. He has felt no bond beforehand to this woman who has spoiled the ideal treasure of his life, and he holds himself blameless. He knows he is cruel, but he has no relenting yet. They remain for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart, in silence—Will’s face possessed by a mute rage, Rosamond’s by a mute misery.

At last Will asks, “Shall I come in and see Lydgate this evening?” “If you like,” Rosamond answers just audibly. He goes out, Martha never knowing he has been in. After he is gone, Rosamond tries to get up from her seat but falls back fainting. When she comes to herself she feels too ill to ring the bell and remains helpless until Martha finds her. Rosamond says she felt suddenly sick and faint, and is helped upstairs. Lydgate comes home earlier than expected and finds her there. The perception that she is ill throws every other thought into the background. He seats himself by her and bends over her, saying, “My poor Rosamond! has something agitated you?” Clinging to him she falls into hysterical sobbings, and for the next hour he does nothing but soothe and tend her.