Chapter LXXXI
Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig,
Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen,
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen
Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
Faust: 2r Theil.
When Dorothea was again at Lydgate's door speaking to
Martha, he was in the room close by with the door ajar,
preparing to go out. He heard her voice, and immediately
came to her.
"Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this
morning?" she said, having reflected that it would be better
to leave out all allusion to her previous visit.
"I have no doubt she will," said Lydgate, suppressing
his thought about Dorothea's looks, which were as much
changed as Rosamond's, "if you will be kind enough to come
in and let me tell her that you are here. She has not been
very well since you were here yesterday, but she is better
this morning, and I think it is very likely that she will be
cheered by seeing you again."
It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected,
knew nothing about the circumstances of her yesterday's
visit; nay, he appeared to imagine that she had carried it
out according to her intention. She had prepared a little
note asking Rosamond to see her, which she would have given
to the servant if he had not been in the way, but now she
was in much anxiety as to the result of his announcement.
After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to
take a letter from his pocket and put it into her hands,
saying, " I wrote this last night, and was going to carry it
to Lowick in my ride. When one is grateful for something
too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory
than speech one does not at least hear how inadequate
the words are."
Dorothea's face brightened. "It is I who have most to
thank for, since you have let me take that place. You
have consented?" she said, suddenly doubting.
"Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day."
He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had
but lately finished dressing herself, and sat languidly
wondering what she should do next, her habitual industry in
small things, even in the days of her sadness, prompting her
to begin some kind of occupation, which she dragged through
slowly or paused in from lack of interest. She looked ill,
but had recovered her usual quietude of manner, and Lydgate
had feared to disturb her by any questions. He had told her
of Dorothea's letter containing the check, and afterwards he
had said, "Ladislaw is come, Rosy; he sat with me last
night; I dare say he will be here again to-day. I thought
he looked
rather battered and depressed." And Rosamond
had made no reply.
Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, "Rosy,
dear, Mrs. Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like
to see her, would you not?" That she colored and gave rather
a startled movement did not surprise him after the agitation
produced by the interview yesterday — a beneficent agitation,
he thought, since it seemed to have made her turn to him
again.
Rosamond dared not say no. She dared not with a tone of
her voice touch the facts of yesterday. Why had Mrs.
Casaubon come again? The answer was a blank which Rosamond
could only fill up with dread, for Will Ladislaw's
lacerating words had made every thought of Dorothea a fresh
smart to her. Nevertheless, in her new humiliating
uncertainty she dared do nothing but comply. She did not
say yes, but she rose and let Lydgate put a light shawl over
her shoulders, while he said, "I am going out immediately."
Then something crossed her mind which prompted her to say, "
Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into the drawing-room." And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully
understood this wish. He led her down to the drawing-room
door, and then turned away, observing to himself that he was
rather a blundering husband to be dependent for his wife's
trust in him on the influence of another woman.
Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she
walked towards Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in
cold reserve. Had Mrs. Casaubon come to say anything to her
about Will? If so, it was a liberty that Rosamond resented;
and she prepared herself to meet every word with polite
impassibility. Will had bruised her pride too sorely for
her to feel any compunction towards him and Dorothea: her
own injury seemed much the greater. Dorothea was not only
the " preferred " woman, but had also a formidable advantage
in being Lydgate's benefactor; and to poor Rosamond's pained
confused vision it seemed that this Mrs. Casaubon — this
woman who predominated in all things concerning her — must
have come now with the sense of having the advantage,
and with animosity prompting her to use it. Indeed,
not Rosamond only, but any one else, knowing the outer facts
of the case, and not the simple inspiration on which
Dorothea acted, might well have wondered why she came.
Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful
slimness wrapped in her soft white shawl, the rounded
infantine mouth and cheek inevitably suggesting mildness and
innocence, Rosamond paused at three yards' distance from her
visitor and bowed. But Dorothea, who had taken off her
gloves, from an impulse which she could never resist when
she wanted a sense of freedom, came forward, and with her
face full of a sad yet sweet openness, put out her hand.
Rosamond could not avoid meeting her glance, could not avoid
putting her small hand into Dorothea's, which clasped it
with gentle motherliness; and immediately a doubt of her own
prepossessions began to stir within her. Rosamond's eye was
quick for faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon's face looked
pale and changed since yesterday, yet gentle, and like the
firm softness of her hand. But Dorothea had counted a
little too much on her own strength: the clearness and
intensity of her mental action this morning were the
continuance of a nervous exaltation which made her frame as
dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal;
and in looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart
swelling, and was unable to speak — all her effort was
required to keep back tears. She succeeded in that, and the
emotion only passed over her face like the spirit of a sob;
but it added to Rosamond's impression that Mrs. Casaubon's
state of mind must be something quite different from what
she had imagined.
So they sat down without a word of preface on the two
chairs that happened to be nearest, and happened also to be
close together; though Rosamond's notion when she first
bowed was that she should stay a long way off from Mrs.
Casaubon. But she ceased thinking how anything would turn
out — merely wondering what would come. And Dorothea began
to speak quite simply, gathering firmness as she went on.
"I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that
is
why I am here again so soon. You will not think me
too troublesome when I tell you that I came to talk to you
about the injustice that has been shown towards Mr. Lydgate.
It will cheer you — will it not? — to know a great deal about
him, that he may not like to speak about himself just
because it is in his own vindication and to his own honor.
You will like to know that your husband has warm friends,
who have not left off believing in his high character? You
will let me speak of this without thinking that I take a
liberty?"
The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with
generous heedlessness above all the facts which had filled
Rosamond's mind as grounds of obstruction and hatred between
her and this woman, came as soothingly as a warm stream over
her shrinking fears. Of course Mrs. Casaubon had the facts
in her mind, but she was not going to speak of anything
connected with them. That relief was too great for Rosamond
to feel much else at the moment. She answered prettily, in
the new ease of her soul —
"I know you have been very good. I shall like to hear
anything you will say to me about Tertius."
"The day before yesterday," said Dorothea, " when I had
asked him to come to Lowick to give me his opinion on the
affairs of the Hospital, he told me everything about his
conduct and feelings in this sad event which has made
ignorant people cast suspicions on him.-The reason he told
me was because I was very bold and asked him. I believed
that he had never acted dishonorably, and I begged him to
tell me the history. He confessed to me that he had never
told it before, not even to you, because he had a great
dislike to say, ' I was not wrong,' as if that were proof,
when there are guilty people who will say so. The truth is,
he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there were any
bad secrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode
offered him the money because he repented, out of kindness,
of having refused it before. All his anxiety about his
patient was to treat him rightly, and he was a little
uncomfortable that the case did not end as he had expected;
but he thought then and still thinks that there may have
been no wrong in it on any one's part. And I have told
Mr. Farebrother, and Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam:
they all believe in your husband. That will cheer you, will
it not? That will give you courage?"
Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on
Rosamond very close to her, she felt something like bashful
timidity before a superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor. She said, with blushing embarrassment,
"Thank you: you are very kind."
"And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out
everything about this to you. But you will forgive him. It
was because he feels so much more about your happiness than
anything else — he feels his life bound into one with yours,
and it hurts him more than anything, that his misfortunes
must hurt you. He could speak to me because I am an
indifferent person. And then I asked him if I might come to
see you; because I felt so much for his trouble and yours.
That is why I came yesterday, and why I am come to-day.
Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? — How can we live and
think that any one has trouble — piercing trouble — and we
could help them, and never try?"
Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was
uttering, forgot everything but that she was speaking from
out the heart of her own trial to Rosamond's. The emotion
had wrought itself more and more into her utterance, till
the tones might have gone to one's very marrow, like a low
cry from some suffering creature in the darkness. And she
had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand
that she had pressed before.
Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound
within her had been probed, burst into hysterical crying as
she had done the day before when she clung to her husband.
Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave of her own sorrow
returning over her — her thought being drawn to the possible
share that Will Ladislaw might have in Rosamond's mental
tumult. She was beginning to fear that she should not be
able to suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting,
and while her hand was still resting on Rosamond's lap,
though the hand underneath it was withdrawn, she was
struggling against her own
rising sobs. She tried to
master herself with the thought that this might be a
turning-point in three lives — not in her own; no, there the
irrevocable had happened, but — in those three lives which
were touching hers with the solemn neighborhood of danger
and distress. The fragile creature who was crying close to
her — there might still be time to rescue her from the misery
of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike any
other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with
the same thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them
both. She felt the relation between them to be peculiar
enough to give her a peculiar influence, though she had no
conception that the way in which her own feelings were
involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.
It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even
Dorothea could imagine: she was under the first great shock
that had shattered her dream-world in which she had been
easily confident of herself and critical of others; and this
strange unexpected manifestation of feeling in a woman whom
she had approached with a shrinking aversion and dread, as
one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards her,
made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had
been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in
upon her.
When Rosamond's convulsed throat was subsiding into
calm, and she withdrew the handkerchief with which she had
been hiding her face, her eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly
as if they had been blue flowers. What was the use of
thinking about behavior after this crying? And Dorothea
looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
silent tear. Pride was broken down between these two.
"We were talking about your husband," Dorothea said,
with some timidity. "I thought his looks were sadly changed
with suffering the other day. I had not seen him for many
weeks before. He said he had been feeling very lonely in
his trial; but I think he would have borne it all better if
he had been able to be quite open with you."
"Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything,"
said Rosamond, imagining that he had been complaining of her
to
Dorothea. "He ought not to wonder that I object to
speak to him on painful subjects."
"It was himself he blamed for not speaking," said
Dorothea. "What he said of you was, that he could not be
happy in doing anything which made you unhappy — that his
marriage was of course a bond which must affect his choice
about everything; and for that reason he refused my proposal
that he should keep his position at the Hospital, because
that would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not
undertake to do anything which would be painful to you. He
could say that to me, because he knows that I had much trial
in my marriage, from my husband's illness, which hindered
his plans and saddened him; and he knows that I have felt
how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who
is tied to us."
Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint
pleasure stealing over Rosamond's face. But there was no
answer, and she went on, with a gathering tremor, " Marriage
is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful
in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else
better than — than those we were married to, it would be no
use " — poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only
seize her language brokenly — "I mean, marriage drinks up all
our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort
of love. I know it may be very dear — but it murders our
marriage — and then the marriage stays with us like a
murder — and everything else is gone. And then our husband —
if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but
made a curse in his life — "
Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her
of presuming too far, and of speaking as if she herself were
perfection addressing error. She was too much preoccupied
with her own anxiety, to be aware that Rosamond was
trembling too; and filled with the need to express pitying
fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on
Rosamond's, and said 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, from out of which she was
struggling to save another, rushed over Dorothea with
conquering force. She stopped in speechless agitation. not
crying, but feeling as if she were being inwardly grappled.
Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her lips
trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands
that lay under them.
Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her
own — hurried along in a new movement which gave all things
some new, awful, undefined aspect — could find no words, but
involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea's forehead which
was very near her, and then for a minute the two women
clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck.
"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in
an eager half-whisper, while she was still feeling
Dorothea's arms round her — urged by a mysterious necessity
to free herself from something that oppressed her as if it
were blood guiltiness.
They moved apart, looking at each other.
"When you came in yesterday — it was not as you thought,"
said Rosamond in the same tone.
There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea
She expected a vindication of Rosamond herself.
"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I
might know he could never love me," said Rosamond, getting
more and more hurried as she went on. "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. But it shall not be through me.
He has never had any love for me — I know he has not — he has
always thought slightly of me. He said yesterday that no
other woman existed for him beside you. The blame of what
happened is entirely mine. He said he could never explain
to you — because of me. He said you could never think well
of him again. But now I have told you, and he cannot
reproach me any more."
Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she
had not known before. She had begun her confession under
the subduing influence of Dorothea's emotion; and as
she went on she had gathered the sense that she was
repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a knife-wound within her.
The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to
be called joy. It was a tumult in which the terrible strain
of the night and morning made a resistant pain: — she could
only perceive that this would be joy when she had recovered
her power of feeling it. Her immediate consciousness was
one of immense sympathy without cheek; she eared for
Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly to
her last words —
"No, he cannot reproach you any more."
With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in
others, she felt a great outgoing of her heart towards
Rosamond, for the generous effort which had redeemed her
from suffering, not counting that the effort was a reflex of
her own energy.
After they had been silent a little, she said —
"You are not sorry that I came this morning?"
"No, you have been very good to me," said Rosamond. "I
did not think that you would be so good. I was very
unhappy. I am not happy now. Everything is so sad."
"But better days will come. Your husband will be
rightly valued. And he depends on you for comfort. He
loves you best. The worst loss would be to lose that — and
you have not lost it," said Dorothea.
She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of
her own relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that
Rosamond's affection was yearning back towards her husband.
"Tertius did not find fault with me, then?" said
Rosamond, understanding now that Lydgate might have said
anything to Mrs. Casaubon, and that she certainly was
different from other women. Perhaps there was a faint taste
of jealousy in the question. A smile began to play over
Dorothea's face as she said —
"No, indeed! How could you imagine it?" But here the
door opened, and Lydgate entered.
"I am come back in my quality of doctor," he said.
"After
I went away, I was haunted by two pale faces:
Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need of care as you, Rosy.
And I thought that I had not done my duty in leaving you
together; so when I had been to Coleman's I came home again.
I noticed that you were walking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky
has changed — I think we may have rain. May I send some one
to order your carriage to come for you?"
"Oh, no! I am strong: I need the walk," said Dorothea,
rising with animation in her face. "Mrs. Lydgate and I have
chatted a great deal,.and it is time for me to go. I have
always been accused of being-immoderate and saying too
much."
She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an
earnest, quiet good-by without kiss or other show of
effusion: there had been between them too much serious
emotion for them to use the signs of it superficially.
As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of
Rosamond, but told him of Mr. Farebrother and the other
friends who had listened with belief to his story.
When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown
herself on the sofa, in resigned fatigue.
"Well, Rosy," he said, standing over her, and touching
her hair, " what do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have
seen so much of her?"
"I think she must be better than any one," said
Rosamond, "and she is very beautiful. If you go to talk to
her so often, you will be more discontented with me than
ever!"
Lydgate laughed at the "so often." "But has she made
you any less discontented with me?"
"I think she has," said Rosamond, looking up in his
face. "How heavy your eyes are, Tertius — and do push your
hair back." He lifted up his large white hand to obey her,
and felt thankful for this little mark of interest in him.
Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly
scourged — meek enough to nestle under the old despised
shelter. And the shelter was still there: Lydgate had
accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had
chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burthen of
her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying
that burthen pitifully.