Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXXIX.

When Rosamond is quiet and Lydgate has left her, hoping she may soon sleep, he goes into the drawing-room and sees Dorothea’s letter on the table. When Will Ladislaw comes in a little later, Lydgate meets him with surprise and says, “Poor Rosamond is ill.” Will responds with concern. Lydgate, who can understand how Ladislaw might be stung by revelations, tells him that his name is mixed up with the disclosures and that he will be sure to hear about it. He says Raffles spoke to him, yes.

“Yes,” says Will, sardonically. “I shall be fortunate if gossip does not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair.” But he says nothing of Bulstrode’s offer to him; he shrinks from saying he had rejected Bulstrode’s money at the moment when Lydgate’s misfortune is to have accepted it. Lydgate, too, is reticent. He tells Will only that Mrs. Casaubon was the one person to come forward and say she had no belief in the suspicions against him, and avoids any further mention of her.

The two men are pitying each other, but only Will guesses the extent of his companion’s trouble. When Lydgate speaks with desperate resignation of going to settle in London, Will feels inexpressibly mournful and says nothing. Rosamond had that morning entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate, and it seems to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself is sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. Both men are on a perilous margin when they begin to look passively at their future selves. Lydgate is inwardly groaning on that margin, and Will is arriving at it. He dreads the obligation he feels toward Rosamond after his cruel outburst, and he dreads his own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

CHAPTER LXXX.

When Dorothea saw Mr. Farebrother that morning, she had promised to dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt. After tending to the new bell for the schoolhouse and discoursing wisely with old Master Bunney about crops, she dresses hastily and goes over to the parsonage. The evening goes by cheerfully until after tea, when some inarticulate little sounds are heard. Henrietta Noble, the tiny old lady, has lost her tortoise-shell lozenge-box, a present from Mr. Ladislaw. Mr. Farebrother hunts and finds it.

“That is an affair of the heart with my aunt,” he says, smiling at Dorothea. Dorothea attempts to smile in return but is alarmed to find her heart palpitating violently. She rises and says she has overtired herself. Mr. Farebrother gives her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea does not speak.

The limit of resistance is reached, and she has sunk back helpless within the clutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a few faint words, she locks her door and presses her hands hard on the top of her head and moans out, “Oh, I did love him!”

Then comes the hour in which the waves of suffering shake her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought. She can only cry in loud whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief, her lost joy of clinging to one who was misprized by others but worthy in her thought, after her lost woman’s pride, after her sweet dim perspective of hope.

In that hour there are two images that tear her heart in two. Here is the bright creature she had trusted, who had come to her like the spirit of morning; with full consciousness she stretches out her arms toward him and cries that their nearness was a parting vision. And there, aloof, was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a detected illusion—no, a living man toward whom there could not yet struggle any wail of regretful pity. The fire of Dorothea’s anger is not easily spent, and it flames out in fitful returns of spurning reproach. Why had he come obtruding his life into hers? Why had he brought his cheap regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in exchange? He knew that he was deluding her.

She loses energy at last and subsides into helpless sobs on the cold floor, where she sobs herself to sleep.

In the chill hours of the morning twilight she awakes, not with wondering where she is, but with the clearest consciousness that she is looking into the eyes of sorrow. She feels as if her soul has been liberated from its terrible conflict; she is no longer wrestling with her grief but can sit down with it as a lasting companion. She begins to live through that yesterday morning deliberately, forcing herself to dwell on every detail. She forces herself to think of it as bound up with another woman’s life—a woman toward whom she had set out with longing to carry some clearness and comfort. All her active thought with which she had been representing the trials of Lydgate’s lot returns to her as a power. She says to her own irremediable grief that it shall make her more helpful instead of driving her back from effort. By morning light, she has resolved that she will make as quietly and unnoticeably as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.