Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXXXI.

When Dorothea is again at Lydgate’s door, Lydgate is in the room close by and comes to her immediately. He says Mrs. Lydgate can receive her, though she has not been very well since yesterday. Dorothea, who has reflected it would be better to leave out all allusion to her previous visit, is now in much anxiety as to the result. He leads her into the drawing-room and pauses to take a letter from his pocket—the check letter, which he says he wrote last night. “When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech.” Dorothea’s face brightens. “It is I who have most to thank for, since you have let me take that place. You have consented?”

“Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day.”

He goes upstairs to Rosamond, who is languidly wondering what to do next, and says gently, “Rosy, dear, Mrs. Casaubon is come to see you again.” Rosamond colors and gives a startled movement. She dares not say no, dares not touch the facts of yesterday with a tone of her voice. She rises and lets Lydgate put a shawl over her shoulders.

Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, Rosamond pauses at three yards’ distance and bows. Dorothea puts out her hand with a face full of sad yet sweet openness, and Rosamond cannot avoid putting her small hand into Dorothea’s, which clasps it with gentle motherliness. Dorothea’s clearness and intensity of mental action are the continuance of a nervous exaltation which makes her frame as dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal. Looking at Rosamond, she suddenly finds her heart swelling and is unable to speak; the emotion only passes over her face like the spirit of a sob.

They sit down on two chairs near each other. Dorothea speaks simply, gathering firmness as she goes on, telling Rosamond of Lydgate’s vindication by Mr. Farebrother, Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam. Rosamond answers prettily, in the new ease of her soul. Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she is uttering from the heart of her own trial, forgets everything but that she is speaking from out her own suffering to Rosamond’s. The tones might have gone to one’s very marrow. Rosamond, with an overmastering pang as if a wound within her had been probed, bursts into hysterical crying.

Dorothea is feeling a great wave of her own sorrow returning, fearing that she will not be able to suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting. She tries to master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point in three lives. The fragile creature crying close to her—there might still be time to rescue her from the misery of false incompatible bonds.

When Rosamond’s convulsed throat subsides into calm, the two women look at each other helplessly, almost as if they had been blue flowers. Pride is broken down between them. Dorothea says timidly, “We were talking about your husband.” She speaks of how hard marriage is, how it drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. Her voice sinks very low. She puts her hands on Rosamond’s and says with more agitated rapidity, “I know, I know that the feeling may be very dear—it has taken hold of us unawares—it is so hard, it may seem like death to part with it—and we are weak—I am weak—”

The waves of her own sorrow rush over Dorothea with conquering force. She stops in speechless agitation, her face of a deathlier paleness, her lips trembling. Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own, finds no words but involuntarily puts her lips to Dorothea’s forehead; for a minute the two women clasp each other as if they had been in a shipwreck.

“You are thinking what is not true,” says Rosamond in an eager half-whisper. “When you came in yesterday—it was not as you thought.” Dorothea expects a vindication of Rosamond. “He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he could never love me,” Rosamond says, getting more and more hurried. “And now I think he hates me because—because you mistook him yesterday. He says it is through me that you will think ill of him—think that he is a false person. The blame of what happened is entirely mine. He said you could never think well of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot reproach me any more.”

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea is too strong to be called joy—a tumult in which the terrible strain makes a resistant pain. Her immediate consciousness is one of immense sympathy without check. “No, he cannot reproach you any more.” She feels a great outgoing of her heart toward Rosamond for the generous effort. Rosamond says she did not think Mrs. Casaubon would be so good; she is very unhappy, everything is so sad. Dorothea urges that better days will come, that her husband will be rightly valued, that the worst loss would be to lose his love.

When Lydgate enters as doctor, Dorothea rises with animation. They say an earnest quiet good-by. As Lydgate takes her to the door she tells him of the friends who have listened with belief to his story. When he comes back to Rosamond she has thrown herself on the sofa in resigned fatigue. “I think she must be better than any one,” Rosamond says, “and she is very beautiful.” Poor Rosamond’s vagrant fancy has come back terribly scourged—meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter. And the shelter is still there.