Chapter LXXIX
Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended
their talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was
in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did
both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
Despond. — BUNYAN.
When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her,
hoping that she might soon sleep under the effect of an
anodyne, he went into the drawing-room to fetch a book which
he had left there, meaning to spend the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter addressed to
him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of
the fact, for Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried
by herself.
When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met
him with a surprise which made it clear that he had not been
told of the earlier visit, and Will could not say, " Did not
Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I came this morning?"
"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his
greeting.
"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.
"No — only a slight nervous shock — the effect of some
agitation. She has been overwrought lately. The truth is,
Ladislaw, I am an unlucky devil. We have gone through
several rounds of purgatory since you left, and I have
lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I suppose
you are only just come down — you look rather battered — you
have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"
"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at
eight o'clock this-morning. I have been shutting myself up
and resting," said Will, feeling himself a sneak, but seeing
no alternative to this evasion.
And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles
which Rosamond had already depicted to him in her way. She
had not mentioned the fact of Will's name being connected
with the public story — this detail not immediately affecting
her — and he now heard it for the first time.
"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed
up with the disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand
better than most men how Ladislaw might be stung by the
revelation. "You will be sure to hear it as soon as you
turn out into the town. I suppose it is true that Raffles
spoke to you."
"Yes," said Will, sardonically. "I shall be fortunate
if gossip does not make me the most disreputable person in
the whole affair. I should think the latest version must
be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder Bulstrode, and ran
away from Middlemarch for the purpose."
He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my
name to recommend it in her hearing; however — what does it
signify now?"
But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him. Will
was
very open and careless about his personal affairs,
but it was among the more exquisite touches in nature's
modelling of him that he had a delicate generosity which
warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying that
he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted
it.
Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence.
He made no allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their
trouble, and of Dorothea he only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has
been the one person to come forward and say that she had no
belief in any of the suspicions against me." Observing a
change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each
other not to fear that his words might have some hidden
painful bearing on it. And it occurred to him that Dorothea
was the real cause of the present visit to Middlemarch.
The two men were pitying each other, but it was only
Will who guessed the extent of his companion's trouble.
When Lydgate spoke with desperate resignation of going to
settle in London, and said with a faint smile, "We shall
have you again, old fellow," Will felt inexpressibly
mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to
him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future
where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding
to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a
commoner history of perdition than any single momentous
bargain.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look
passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led
with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby
achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly groaning on that
margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him this
evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had
made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation:
he dreaded Lydgate's unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his
own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in
motiveless levity.