prompt:
Chapter: Full souls are double mirrors, making still
    An endless vista of fair things before,
    Repeating things behind.

Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the
vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a
bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the
circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother's experience.

"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said.  "How can we begin to
inquire into it?  It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate
and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate.  As to the
first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would
have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess
I should shrink from it.  He would probably take it as a deadly insult.
I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on
personal matters.  And--one should know the truth about his conduct
beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result."

"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"
said Dorothea.  Some of her intensest experience in the last two years
had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction
of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr.
Farebrother.  She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences,
instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would
conquer by their emotional force.  Two days afterwards, he was dining
at the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, and when the dessert was
standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was
nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.

"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
him their first wish must be to justify him.  What do we live for, if
it is not to make life less difficult to each other?  I cannot be
indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in _my_ trouble,
and attended me in my illness."

Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been
when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly three years
before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a
decided opinion.  But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and
acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout
admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should
fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon.  He
smiled much less; when he said "Exactly" it was more often an
introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissive bachelor
days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve not to
be afraid of him--all the more because he was really her best friend.
He disagreed with her now.

"But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake to manage
a man's life for him in that way.  Lydgate must know--at least he will
soon come to know how he stands.  If he can clear himself, he will.  He
must act for himself."

"I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity," added
Mr. Farebrother.  "It is possible--I have often felt so much weakness
in myself that I can conceive even a man of honorable disposition, such
as I have always believed Lydgate to be, succumbing to such a
temptation as that of accepting money which was offered more or less
indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence about scandalous facts long
gone by.  I say, I can conceive this, if he were under the pressure of
hard circumstances--if he had been harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has
been.  I would not believe anything worse of him except under stringent
proof.  But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors,
that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into
a crime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own
consciousness and assertion."

"Oh, how cruel!" said Dorothea, clasping her hands.  "And would you not
like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence, if the
rest of the world belied him?  Besides, there is a man's character
beforehand to speak for him."

"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at
her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid
and unalterable.  It is something living and changing, and may become
diseased as our bodies do."

"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not be
afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help
him.  Why should I be afraid?  Now that I am not to have the land,
James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and take his place in
providing for the Hospital; and I have to consult Mr. Lydgate, to know
thoroughly what are the prospects of doing good by keeping up the
present plans.  There is the best opportunity in the world for me to
ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things which
might make all the circumstances clear.  Then we would all stand by him
and bring him out of his trouble.  People glorify all sorts of bravery
except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest
neighbors."  Dorothea's eyes had a moist brightness in them, and the
changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, who began to listen.

"It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which
would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother,
almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.

"Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know
the world better than she does."  said Sir James, with his little
frown.  "Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should really keep
back at present, and not volunteer any meddling with this Bulstrode
business.  We don't know yet what may turn up.  You must agree with
me?" he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.

"I do think it would be better to wait," said the latter.

"Yes, yes, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point
the discussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution
which was generally appropriate.  "It is easy to go too far, you know.
You must not let your ideas run away with you.  And as to being in a
hurry to put money into schemes--it won't do, you know.  Garth has
drawn me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that sort of thing: I'm
uncommonly out of pocket with one thing or another.  I must pull up.
As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune on those oak fences
round your demesne."

Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with Celia
into the library, which was her usual drawing-room.

"Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says," said Celia, "else you will
be getting into a scrape.  You always did, and you always will, when
you set about doing as you please.  And I think it is a mercy now after
all that you have got James to think for you.  He lets you have your
plans, only he hinders you from being taken in.  And that is the good
of having a brother instead of a husband.  A husband would not let you
have your plans."

"As if I wanted a husband!" said Dorothea.  "I only want not to have my
feelings checked at every turn."  Mrs. Casaubon was still undisciplined
enough to burst into angry tears.

"Now, really, Dodo," said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than
usual, "you _are_ contradictory: first one thing and then another.  You
used to submit to Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you would have
given up ever coming to see me if he had asked you."

"Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my
feeling for him," said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.

"Then why can't you think it your duty to submit a little to what James
wishes?" said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument.
"Because he only wishes what is for your own good.  And, of course, men
know best about everything, except what women know better." Dorothea
laughed and forgot her tears.

"Well, I mean about babies and those things," explained Celia.  "I
should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do
to Mr. Casaubon."

    Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
    May visit you and me.

When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her that
her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he
trusted soon to see him better and would call again the next day,
unless she sent for him earlier, he went directly home, got on his
horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out
of reach.

He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under
the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come
to Middlemarch.  Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a
mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight
on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only
vulgar standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged.  In such
moments a man can hardly escape being unloving.  Lydgate thought of
himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured
his lot.  He had meant everything to turn out differently; and others
had thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes.  His
marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to
Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the
mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave
unwarrantably.  There are episodes in most men's lives in which their
highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects
that fill their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present
just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an
emotion that swayed him to tenderness.  For he was very miserable.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life
which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can
understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into
the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who
suspected him of baseness?  How could he go silently away from
Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation?  And
yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?

For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it
had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation
thoroughly clear to him.  Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous
disclosures on the part of Raffles.  Lydgate could now construct all
the probabilities of the case.  "He was afraid of some betrayal in my
hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:
that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality.  And he
may have tampered with the patient--he may have disobeyed my orders.  I
fear he did.  But whether he did or not, the world believes that he
somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I
didn't help in it.  And yet--and yet he may not be guilty of the last
offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have
been a genuine relenting--the effect of second thoughts such as he
alleged.  What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the
thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.  In his last
dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite
of my suspicion to the contrary."

There was a benumbing cruelty in his position.  Even if he renounced
every other consideration than that of justifying himself--if he met
shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public
statement of all the facts as he knew them, who would be convinced?  It
would be playing the part of a fool to offer his own testimony on
behalf of himself, and say, "I did not take the money as a bribe."  The
circumstances would always be stronger than his assertion.  And
besides, to come forward and tell everything about himself must include
declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of
others against him.  He must tell that he had not known of Raffles's
existence when he first mentioned his pressing need of money to
Bulstrode, and that he took the money innocently as a result of that
communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have
arisen on his being called in to this man.  And after all, the
suspicion of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.

But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
the same way if he had not taken the money?  Certainly, if Raffles had
continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part of
Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
recent heavy obligation.  But if he had not received any money--if
Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy--would
he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the
man dead?--would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode--would the
dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own
treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his
profession--have had just the same force or significance with him?

That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he was
reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach.  If he had been
independent, this matter of a patient's treatment and the distinct rule
that he must do or see done that which he believed best for the life
committed to him, would have been the point on which he would have been
the sturdiest.  As it was, he had rested in the consideration that
disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen, could not be
considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to his
orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply
one of etiquette.  Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he
had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and
had said--"the purest experiment in treatment may still be
conscientious: my business is to take care of life, and to do the best
I can think of for it.  Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a
contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive." Alas! the
scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money
obligation and selfish respects.

"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot.  "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were
a leper!  My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--I can see
that.  Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make
little difference to the blessed world here.  I have been set down as
tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same."

Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at
him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients of his
had called in another practitioner.  The reasons were too plain now.
The general black-balling had begun.

No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a hopeless
misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance.  The scowl
which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a
meaningless accident.  Already when he was re-entering the town after
that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was setting his
mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be
done against him.  He would not retreat before calumny, as if he
submitted to it.  He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his
should show that he was afraid.  It belonged to the generosity as well
as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from
showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.  It was true
that the association with this man had been fatal to him--true that if
he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts
unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary
rather than the rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a
bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of
men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed
fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get
acquittal for himself by howling against another.  "I shall do as I
think right, and explain to nobody.  They will try to starve me out,
but--" he was going on with an obstinate resolve, but he was getting
near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged itself again into that
chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of
wounded honor and pride.

How would Rosamond take it all?  Here was another weight of chain to
drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common to
them both.  He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which
events must soon bring about.

    "Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together."
                             --BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.

In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held
a bad opinion of her husband.  No feminine intimate might carry her
friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the
unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman
with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on
something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral
impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.
Candor was one.  To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to
use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not
take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their
position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase, but meaning in
this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than
her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in
her lot--the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she
knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in
light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the
regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul,
which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered
with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner
implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from
regard to the feelings of her hearer.  On the whole, one might say that
an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a
neighbor unhappy for her good.

There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial
misfortunes would in different ways be likely to call forth more of
this moral activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode.  Mrs.
Bulstrode was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously
injured any human being.  Men had always thought her a handsome
comfortable woman, and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's
hypocrisy that he had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly
and melancholy person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure.
When the scandal about her husband was disclosed they remarked of
her--"Ah, poor woman!  She's as honest as the day--_she_ never
suspected anything wrong in him, you may depend on it."  Women, who
were intimate with her, talked together much of "poor Harriet,"
imagined what her feelings must be when she came to know everything,
and conjectured how much she had already come to know.  There was no
spiteful disposition towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence
anxious to ascertain what it would be well for her to feel and do under
the circumstances, which of course kept the imagination occupied with
her character and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy
till now.  With the review of Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was
inevitable to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same
blight with her aunt's. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less
pitied, though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had
always been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage
with an interloper.  The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they lay
on the surface: there was never anything bad to be "found out"
concerning them.  Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance to
her husband.  Harriet's faults were her own.

"She has always been showy," said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for a small
party, "though she has got into the way of putting her religion
forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold her head up
above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites clergymen and
heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places."

"We can hardly blame her for that," said Mrs. Sprague; "because few of
the best people in the town cared to associate with Bulstrode, and she
must have somebody to sit down at her table."

"Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "I
think he must be sorry now."

"But he was never fond of him in his heart--that every one knows," said
Mrs. Tom Toller.  "Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes.  He keeps to
the truth in what is evangelical.  It is only clergymen like Mr. Tyke,
who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind of religion,
who ever found Bulstrode to their taste."

"I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him," said Mrs.
Hackbutt.  "And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes have half kept
the Tyke family."

"And of course it is a discredit to his doctrines," said Mrs. Sprague,
who was elderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.

"People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch for
a good while to come."

"I think we must not set down people's bad actions to their religion,"
said falcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.

"Oh, my dear, we are forgetting," said Mrs. Sprague.  "We ought not to
be talking of this before you."

"I am sure I have no reason to be partial," said Mrs. Plymdale,
coloring.  "It's true Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms with
Mr. Bulstrode, and Harriet Vincy was my friend long before she married
him.  But I have always kept my own opinions and told her where she was
wrong, poor thing.  Still, in point of religion, I must say, Mr.
Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse, and yet have been a
man of no religion.  I don't say that there has not been a little too
much of that--I like moderation myself.  But truth is truth.  The men
tried at the assizes are not all over-religious, I suppose."

"Well," said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, "all I can say is, that
I think she ought to separate from him."

"I can't say that," said Mrs. Sprague.  "She took him for better or
worse, you know."

"But 'worse' can never mean finding out that your husband is fit for
Newgate," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "Fancy living with such a man!  I should
expect to be poisoned."

"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are to
be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.

"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.  "She
thinks her husband the first of men.  It's true he has never denied her
anything."

"Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "I suppose
she knows nothing yet, poor creature.  I do hope and trust I shall not
see her, for I should be frightened to death lest I should say anything
about her husband.  Do you think any hint has reached her?"

"I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller.  "We hear that he is
ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting on
Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday, and they had
new Tuscan bonnets.  Her own had a feather in it.  I have never seen
that her religion made any difference in her dress."

"She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale, a little
stung.  "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale lavender on
purpose to be consistent.  I must say it of Harriet that she wishes to
do right."

"As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the
meeting.  It will be a great blow to him.  There is his daughter as
well as his sister."

"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague.  "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate
can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black
about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.  It really
makes one shudder."

"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.

"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"
said Mrs. Plymdale.  "She needed a lesson."

"I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere," said Mrs.
Sprague.  "That is what is generally done when there is anything
disgraceful in a family."

"And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be.  I pity her from my heart.
And with all her faults, few women are better.  From a girl she had the
neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.  You
might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.  And so
she has brought up Kate and Ellen.  You may think how hard it will be
for her to go among foreigners."

"The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"
said Mrs. Sprague.  "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among the
French."

"That would suit _her_ well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;
"there is that kind of lightness about her.  But she got that from her
mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always gave her
good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had her marry
elsewhere."

Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication of
feeling.  There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode, but
also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house
with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined her to
desire that the mildest view of his character should be the true one,
but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming to palliate his
culpability.  Again, the late alliance of her family with the Tollers
had brought her in connection with the best circle, which gratified her
in every direction except in the inclination to those serious views
which she believed to be the best in another sense.  The sharp little
woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these
opposing "bests," and of her griefs and satisfactions under late
events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also
to fall heavily on her old friend whose faults she would have preferred
seeing on a background of prosperity.

Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the
oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret
uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last visit of
Raffles to The Shrubs.  That the hateful man had come ill to Stone
Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there and watch over
him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that Raffles had been
employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this made a tie of
benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness; and she had been
since then innocently cheered by her husband's more hopeful speech
about his own health and ability to continue his attention to business.
The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had brought him home ill from the
meeting, and in spite of comforting assurances during the next few
days, she cried in private from the conviction that her husband was not
suffering from bodily illness merely, but from something that afflicted
his mind.  He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit
with him, alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet
she suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted
to be busy with his papers.  Something, she felt sure, had happened.
Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth
day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to
church--

"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.  Has
anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"

"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively.  He felt that it
was not for him to make the painful revelation.

"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly at him
with her large dark eyes.

"There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms," said
Lydgate.  "Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people in
proportion to the delicacy of their systems.  It is often impossible to
account for the precise moment of an attack--or rather, to say why the
strength gives way at a particular moment."

Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer.  There remained in
her the belief that some calamity had befallen her husband, of which
she was to be kept in ignorance; and it was in her nature strongly to
object to such concealment.  She begged leave for her daughters to sit
with their father, and drove into the town to pay some visits,
conjecturing that if anything were known to have gone wrong in Mr.
Bulstrode's affairs, she should see or hear some sign of it.

She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then drove to
Mrs. Hackbutt's on the other side of the churchyard.  Mrs. Hackbutt saw
her coming from an up-stairs window, and remembering her former alarm
lest she should meet Mrs. Bulstrode, felt almost bound in consistency
to send word that she was not at home; but against that, there was a
sudden strong desire within her for the excitement of an interview in
which she was quite determined not to make the slightest allusion to
what was in her mind.

Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt
went to her, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than
was usually observable in her, these being precautions adopted against
freedom of speech.  She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.

"I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week," said
Mrs. Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks.  "But Mr. Bulstrode
was taken so ill at the meeting on Thursday that I have not liked to
leave the house."

Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other
held against her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern on the
rug.

"Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?" persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.

"Yes, he was," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude.  "The land
is to be bought by subscription, I believe."

"Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be buried
in it," said Mrs. Bulstrode.  "It is an awful visitation.  But I always
think Middlemarch a very healthy spot.  I suppose it is being used to
it from a child; but I never saw the town I should like to live at
better, and especially our end."

"I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch,
Mrs. Bulstrode," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh.  "Still, we
must learn to resign ourselves, wherever our lot may be cast.  Though I
am sure there will always be people in this town who will wish you
well."

Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, "if you take my advice you will part from
your husband," but it seemed clear to her that the poor woman knew
nothing of the thunder ready to bolt on her head, and she herself could
do no more than prepare her a little.  Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly
rather chill and trembling: there was evidently something unusual
behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt's; but though she had set out with
the desire to be fully informed, she found herself unable now to pursue
her brave purpose, and turning the conversation by an inquiry about the
young Hackbutts, she soon took her leave saying that she was going to
see Mrs. Plymdale.  On her way thither she tried to imagine that there
might have been some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr.
Bulstrode and some of his frequent opponents--perhaps Mr. Hackbutt
might have been one of them.  That would account for everything.

But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting
explanation seemed no longer tenable.  "Selina" received her with a
pathetic affectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on
the commonest topics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary
quarrel of which the most important consequence was a perturbation of
Mr. Bulstrode's health.  Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought that she
would sooner question Mrs. Plymdale than any one else; but she found to
her surprise that an old friend is not always the person whom it is
easiest to make a confidant of: there was the barrier of remembered
communication under other circumstances--there was the dislike of
being pitied and informed by one who had been long wont to allow her
the superiority.  For certain words of mysterious appropriateness that
Mrs. Plymdale let fall about her resolution never to turn her back on
her friends, convinced Mrs. Bulstrode that what had happened must be
some kind of misfortune, and instead of being able to say with her
native directness, "What is it that you have in your mind?" she found
herself anxious to get away before she had heard anything more
explicit.  She began to have an agitating certainty that the misfortune
was something more than the mere loss of money, being keenly sensitive
to the fact that Selina now, just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before,
avoided noticing what she said about her husband, as they would have
avoided noticing a personal blemish.

She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive to
Mr. Vincy's warehouse.  In that short drive her dread gathered so much
force from the sense of darkness, that when she entered the private
counting-house where her brother sat at his desk, her knees trembled
and her usually florid face was deathly pale.  Something of the same
effect was produced in him by the sight of her: he rose from his seat
to meet her, took her by the hand, and said, with his impulsive
rashness--

"God help you, Harriet! you know all."

That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after.  It contained
that concentrated experience which in great crises of emotion reveals
the bias of a nature, and is prophetic of the ultimate act which will
end an intermediate struggle.  Without that memory of Raffles she might
still have thought only of monetary ruin, but now along with her
brother's look and words there darted into her mind the idea of some
guilt in her husband--then, under the working of terror came the image
of her husband exposed to disgrace--and then, after an instant of
scorching shame in which she felt only the eyes of the world, with one
leap of her heart she was at his side in mournful but unreproaching
fellowship with shame and isolation.  All this went on within her in a
mere flash of time--while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes
to her brother, who stood over her.  "I know nothing, Walter.  What is
it?" she said, faintly.

He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments, making
her aware that the scandal went much beyond proof, especially as to the
end of Raffles.

"People will talk," he said.  "Even if a man has been acquitted by a
jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink--and as far as the world goes, a
man might often as well be guilty as not.  It's a breakdown blow, and
it damages Lydgate as much as Bulstrode.  I don't pretend to say what
is the truth.  I only wish we had never heard the name of either
Bulstrode or Lydgate.  You'd better have been a Vincy all your life,
and so had Rosamond."  Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.

"But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet.  People don't blame
_you_. And I'll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,"
said the brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.

"Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter," said Mrs. Bulstrode.  "I
feel very weak."

And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, "I am not
well, my dear; I must go and lie down.  Attend to your papa.  Leave me
in quiet.  I shall take no dinner."

She locked herself in her room.  She needed time to get used to her
maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk
steadily to the place allotted her.  A new searching light had fallen
on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the
twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by
virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them
seem an odious deceit.  He had married her with that bad past life
hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence
of the worst that was imputed to him.  Her honest ostentatious nature
made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any
mortal.

But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd
patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her.  The man whose prosperity she
had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly
cherished her--now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible
to her in any sense to forsake him.  There is a forsaking which still
sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken
soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity.  She knew, when she
locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her
unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will
mourn and not reproach.  But she needed time to gather up her strength;
she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her
life.  When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some
little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were
her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she
had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.  She took off
all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing
her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down
and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an
early Methodist.

Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying
that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to
hers.  He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and
had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any
confession.  But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come,
he awaited the result in anguish.  His daughters had been obliged to
consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought
to him, he had not touched it.  He felt himself perishing slowly in
unpitied misery.  Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with
affection in it again.  And if he turned to God there seemed to be no
answer but the pressure of retribution.

It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife
entered.  He dared not look up at her.  He sat with his eyes bent down,
and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller--he seemed
so withered and shrunken.  A movement of new compassion and old
tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on
his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his
shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly--

"Look up, Nicholas."

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed
for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling
about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested
gently on him.  He burst out crying and they cried together, she
sitting at his side.  They could not yet speak to each other of the
shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought
it down on them.  His confession was silent, and her promise of
faithfulness was silent.  Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless
shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual
consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire.  She could
not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not
say, "I am innocent."

    "Le sentiment de la faussete des plaisirs presents, et
    l'ignorance de la vanite des plaisirs absents causent
    l'inconstance."--PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed
from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors
were paid.  But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none
of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.  In this
brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been
stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond
had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had
lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to
an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course,
trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when
she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London.  When she
did not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she
had that was worth living for.  The hard and contemptuous words which
had fallen from her husband in his anger had deeply offended that
vanity which he had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she
regarded as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret
repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor
substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her.  They were at a
disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any outlook
towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except in an
occasional letter from Will Ladislaw.  She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of
what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she
secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily come to
have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one of those
women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have
preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.  Mrs. Casaubon
was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before he knew Mrs.
Lydgate.  Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a
mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the
disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that
agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which
Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.  She even
fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--that
Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique
herself.  In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been busy before Will's
departure.  He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable
husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.  No notion could have
been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent in her marriage was
due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for
self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband;
but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm
which diverted her ennui.  She constructed a little romance which was
to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a
bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an
understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be
sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes.
His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly
increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the
alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the
family at Quallingham.  Since then the troubles of her married life had
deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.  Men and
women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague
uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and
oftener still for a mighty love.  Will Ladislaw had written chatty
letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied: their
separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change she
now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work with
quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
delightful promise which inspirited her.

It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was
nothing less than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned
indeed chiefly on his new interest in plans of colonization, but
mentioned incidentally, that he might find it necessary to pay a visit
to Middlemarch within the next few weeks--a very pleasant necessity, he
said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolboy.  He hoped there was
his old place on the rug, and a great deal of music in store for him.
But he was quite uncertain as to the time.  While Lydgate was reading
the letter to Rosamond, her face looked like a reviving flower--it grew
prettier and more blooming.  There was nothing unendurable now: the
debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw was coming, and Lydgate would be
persuaded to leave Middlemarch and settle in London, which was "so
different from a provincial town."

That was a bright bit of morning.  But soon the sky became black over
poor Rosamond.  The presence of a new gloom in her husband, about which
he was entirely reserved towards her--for he dreaded to expose his
lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception--soon received a
painfully strange explanation, alien to all her previous notions of
what could affect her happiness.  In the new gayety of her spirits,
thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit of moodiness than usual,
causing him to leave her remarks unanswered, and evidently to keep out
of her way as much as possible, she chose, a few days after the
meeting, and without speaking to him on the subject, to send out notes
of invitation for a small evening party, feeling convinced that this
was a judicious step, since people seemed to have been keeping aloof
from them, and wanted restoring to the old habit of intercourse.  When
the invitations had been accepted, she would tell Lydgate, and give him
a wise admonition as to how a medical man should behave to his
neighbors; for Rosamond had the gravest little airs possible about
other people's duties.  But all the invitations were declined, and the
last answer came into Lydgate's hands.

"This is Chichely's scratch.  What is he writing to you about?" said
Lydgate, wonderingly, as he handed the note to her.  She was obliged to
let him see it, and, looking at her severely, he said--

"Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me,
Rosamond?  I beg, I insist that you will not invite any one to this
house.  I suppose you have been inviting others, and they have refused
too."  She said nothing.

"Do you hear me?" thundered Lydgate.

"Yes, certainly I hear you," said Rosamond, turning her head aside with
the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.

Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room,
feeling himself dangerous.  Rosamond's thought was, that he was getting
more and more unbearable--not that there was any new special reason for
this peremptoriness.  His indisposition to tell her anything in which
he was sure beforehand that she would not be interested was growing
into an unreflecting habit, and she was in ignorance of everything
connected with the thousand pounds except that the loan had come from
her uncle Bulstrode.  Lydgate's odious humors and their neighbors'
apparent avoidance of them had an unaccountable date for her in their
relief from money difficulties.  If the invitations had been accepted
she would have gone to invite her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen
nothing of for several days; and she now put on her bonnet to go and
inquire what had become of them all, suddenly feeling as if there were
a conspiracy to leave her in isolation with a husband disposed to
offend everybody.  It was after the dinner hour, and she found her
father and mother seated together alone in the drawing-room. They
greeted her with sad looks, saying "Well, my dear!" and no more.  She
had never seen her father look so downcast; and seating herself near
him she said--

"Is there anything the matter, papa?"

He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, "Oh, my dear, have you heard
nothing?  It won't be long before it reaches you."

"Is it anything about Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning pale.  The idea
of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been
unaccountable to her in him.

"Oh, my dear, yes.  To think of your marrying into this trouble.  Debt
was bad enough, but this will be worse."

"Stay, stay, Lucy," said Mr. Vincy.  "Have you heard nothing about your
uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?"

"No, papa," said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not
anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power with an
iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.

Her father told her everything, saying at the end, "It's better for you
to know, my dear.  I think Lydgate must leave the town.  Things have
gone against him.  I dare say he couldn't help it.  I don't accuse him
of any harm," said Mr. Vincy.  He had always before been disposed to
find the utmost fault with Lydgate.

The shock to Rosamond was terrible.  It seemed to her that no lot could
be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the
centre of infamous suspicions.  In many cases it is inevitable that the
shame is felt to be the worst part of crime; and it would have required
a great deal of disentangling reflection, such as had never entered
into Rosamond's life, for her in these moments to feel that her trouble
was less than if her husband had been certainly known to have done
something criminal.  All the shame seemed to be there.  And she had
innocently married this man with the belief that he and his family were
a glory to her!  She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and
only said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left
Middlemarch long ago.

"She bears it beyond anything," said her mother when she was gone.

"Ah, thank God!" said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.

But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards her
husband.  What had he really done--how had he really acted?  She did
not know.  Why had he not told her everything?  He did not speak to her
on the subject, and of course she could not speak to him.  It came into
her mind once that she would ask her father to let her go home again;
but dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter dreariness to her: a
married woman gone back to live with her parents--life seemed to have
no meaning for her in such a position: she could not contemplate
herself in it.

The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that
she had heard the bad news.  Would she speak to him about it, or would
she go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she
believed him guilty?  We must remember that he was in a morbid state of
mind, in which almost all contact was pain.  Certainly Rosamond in this
case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence on
his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;--was
he not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her, since now
she knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him?  But a
deeper-lying consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and
the silence between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they
were both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.

He thought, "I am a fool.  Haven't I given up expecting anything?  I
have married care, not help."  And that evening he said--

"Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?"

"Yes," she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying
on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.

"What have you heard?"

"Everything, I suppose.  Papa told me."

"That people think me disgraced?"

"Yes," said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.

There was silence.  Lydgate thought, "If she has any trust in me--any
notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not
believe I have deserved disgrace."

But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly.
Whatever was to be said on the subject she expected to come from
Tertius.  What did she know?  And if he were innocent of any wrong, why
did he not do something to clear himself?

This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in
which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in
him--even Farebrother had not come forward.  He had begun to question
her with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill
fog which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked
by despairing resentment.  Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed
to regard as if it were hers alone.  He was always to her a being
apart, doing what she objected to.  He started from his chair with an
angry impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and
down the room.  There was an underlying consciousness all the while
that he should have to master this anger, and tell her everything, and
convince her of the facts.  For he had almost learned the lesson that
he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in
her sympathy, he must give the more.  Soon he recurred to his intention
of opening himself: the occasion must not be lost.  If he could bring
her to feel with some solemnity that here was a slander which must be
met and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had come out of
his desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfully
on her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little
money as possible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep
themselves independent.  He would mention the definite measures which
he desired to take, and win her to a willing spirit.  He was bound to
try this--and what else was there for him to do?

He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and
forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would
sit down.  She too had begun to think this an opportunity for urging on
Tertius what he ought to do.  Whatever might be the truth about all
this misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.

Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one
nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her
gravely before he reopened the sad subject.  He had conquered himself
so far, and was about to speak with a sense of solemnity, as on an
occasion which was not to be repeated.  He had even opened his lips,
when Rosamond, letting her hands fall, looked at him and said--

"Surely, Tertius--"

"Well?"

"Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in
Middlemarch.  I cannot go on living here.  Let us go to London.  Papa,
and every one else, says you had better go.  Whatever misery I have to
put up with, it will be easier away from here."

Lydgate felt miserably jarred.  Instead of that critical outpouring for
which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be
gone through again.  He could not bear it.  With a quick change of
countenance he rose and went out of the room.

Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to
be the more because she was less, that evening might have had a better
issue.  If his energy could have borne down that check, he might still
have wrought on Rosamond's vision and will.  We cannot be sure that any
natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a
more massive being than their own.  They may be taken by storm and for
the moment converted, becoming part of the soul which enwraps them in
the ardor of its movement.  But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain
within him, and his energy had fallen short of its task.

The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as
ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.
They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate
going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond
feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly.  It was
of no use to say anything to Tertius; but when Will Ladislaw came, she
was determined to tell him everything.  In spite of her general
reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.

    "To mercy, pity, peace, and love
         All pray in their distress,
     And to these virtues of delight,
         Return their thankfulness.
           .   .   .   .   .   .
     For Mercy has a human heart,
         Pity a human face;
     And Love, the human form divine;
         And Peace, the human dress.
                       --WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.

Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence of
a summons from Dorothea.  The summons had not been unexpected, since it
had followed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated that he
had resumed his arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must remind
Lydgate of his previous communications about the Hospital, to the
purport of which he still adhered.  It had been his duty, before taking
further steps, to reopen the subject with Mrs. Casaubon, who now
wished, as before, to discuss the question with Lydgate.  "Your views
may possibly have undergone some change," wrote Mr. Bulstrode; "but, in
that case also, it is desirable that you should lay them before her."

Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest.  Though, in deference
to her masculine advisers, she had refrained from what Sir James had
called "interfering in this Bulstrode business," the hardship of
Lydgate's position was continually in her mind, and when Bulstrode
applied to her again about the hospital, she felt that the opportunity
was come to her which she had been hindered from hastening.  In her
luxurious home, wandering under the boughs of her own great trees, her
thought was going out over the lot of others, and her emotions were
imprisoned.  The idea of some active good within her reach, "haunted
her like a passion," and another's need having once come to her as a
distinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give
relief, and made her own ease tasteless.  She was full of confident
hope about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of
his personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman.
Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence
on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship.

As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live
through again all the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her
memories.  They all owed their significance to her marriage and its
troubles--but no; there were two occasions in which the image of
Lydgate had come painfully in connection with his wife and some one
else.  The pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it had left in her
an awakened conjecture as to what Lydgate's marriage might be to him, a
susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate.  These
thoughts were like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright, and gave
an attitude of suspense to her whole frame, though she was only looking
out from the brown library on to the turf and the bright green buds
which stood in relief against the dark evergreens.

When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face,
which was strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for two
months.  It was not the change of emaciation, but that effect which
even young faces will very soon show from the persistent presence of
resentment and despondency.  Her cordial look, when she put out her
hand to him, softened his expression, but only with melancholy.

"I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,"
said Dorothea when they were seated opposite each other; "but I put off
asking you to come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about the
Hospital.  I know that the advantage of keeping the management of it
separate from that of the Infirmary depends on you, or, at least, on
the good which you are encouraged to hope for from having it under your
control.  And I am sure you will not refuse to tell me exactly what you
think."

"You want to decide whether you should give a generous support to the
Hospital," said Lydgate.  "I cannot conscientiously advise you to do it
in dependence on any activity of mine.  I may be obliged to leave the
town."

He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able to
carry out any purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.

"Not because there is no one to believe in you?" said Dorothea, pouring
out her words in clearness from a full heart.  "I know the unhappy
mistakes about you.  I knew them from the first moment to be mistakes.
You have never done anything vile.  You would not do anything
dishonorable."

It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on
Lydgate's ears.  He drew a deep breath, and said, "Thank you." He could
say no more: it was something very new and strange in his life that
these few words of trust from a woman should be so much to him.

"I beseech you to tell me how everything was," said Dorothea,
fearlessly.  "I am sure that the truth would clear you."

Lydgate started up from his chair and went towards the window,
forgetting where he was.  He had so often gone over in his mind the
possibility of explaining everything without aggravating appearances
that would tell, perhaps unfairly, against Bulstrode, and had so often
decided against it--he had so often said to himself that his assertions
would not change people's impressions--that Dorothea's words sounded
like a temptation to do something which in his soberness he had
pronounced to be unreasonable.

"Tell me, pray," said Dorothea, with simple earnestness; "then we can
consult together.  It is wicked to let people think evil of any one
falsely, when it can be hindered."

Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea's face
looking up at him with a sweet trustful gravity.  The presence of a
noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes
the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger,
quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in
the wholeness of our character.  That influence was beginning to act on
Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one who is
dragged and struggling amid the throng.  He sat down again, and felt
that he was recovering his old self in the consciousness that he was
with one who believed in it.

"I don't want," he said, "to bear hard on Bulstrode, who has lent me
money of which I was in need--though I would rather have gone without
it now.  He is hunted down and miserable, and has only a poor thread of
life in him.  But I should like to tell you everything.  It will be a
comfort to me to speak where belief has gone beforehand, and where I
shall not seem to be offering assertions of my own honesty.  You will
feel what is fair to another, as you feel what is fair to me."

"Do trust me," said Dorothea; "I will not repeat anything without your
leave.  But at the very least, I could say that you have made all the
circumstances clear to me, and that I know you are not in any way
guilty.  Mr. Farebrother would believe me, and my uncle, and Sir James
Chettam.  Nay, there are persons in Middlemarch to whom I could go;
although they don't know much of me, they would believe me.  They would
know that I could have no other motive than truth and justice.  I would
take any pains to clear you.  I have very little to do.  There is
nothing better that I can do in the world."

Dorothea's voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would
do, might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it
effectively.  The searching tenderness of her woman's tones seemed made
for a defence against ready accusers.  Lydgate did not stay to think
that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up, for the first time in his
life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous
sympathy, without any check of proud reserve.  And he told her
everything, from the time when, under the pressure of his difficulties,
he unwillingly made his first application to Bulstrode; gradually, in
the relief of speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance of what
had gone on in his mind--entering fully into the fact that his
treatment of the patient was opposed to the dominant practice, into his
doubts at the last, his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy
consciousness that the acceptance of the money had made some difference
in his private inclination and professional behavior, though not in his
fulfilment of any publicly recognized obligation.

"It has come to my knowledge since," he added, "that Hawley sent some
one to examine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said that she
gave the patient all the opium in the phial I left, as well as a good
deal of brandy.  But that would not have been opposed to ordinary
prescriptions, even of first-rate men.  The suspicions against me had
no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledge that I took money,
that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man to die, and that
he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other
against the patient--that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my
tongue.  They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately,
because they lie in people's inclination and can never be disproved.
How my orders came to be disobeyed is a question to which I don't know
the answer.  It is still possible that Bulstrode was innocent of any
criminal intention--even possible that he had nothing to do with the
disobedience, and merely abstained from mentioning it.  But all that
has nothing to do with the public belief.  It is one of those cases on
which a man is condemned on the ground of his character--it is
believed that he has committed a crime in some undefined way, because
he had the motive for doing it; and Bulstrode's character has enveloped
me, because I took his money.  I am simply blighted--like a damaged
ear of corn--the business is done and can't be undone."

"Oh, it is hard!" said Dorothea.  "I understand the difficulty there is
in your vindicating yourself.  And that all this should have come to
you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find
out better ways--I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable.  I know
you meant that.  I remember what you said to me when you first spoke to
me about the hospital.  There is no sorrow I have thought more about
than that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."

"Yes," said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full
meaning of his grief.  "I had some ambition.  I meant everything to be
different with me.  I thought I had more strength and mastery.  But the
most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."

"Suppose," said Dorothea, meditatively,--"suppose we kept on the
Hospital according to the present plan, and you stayed here though only
with the friendship and support of a few, the evil feeling towards you
would gradually die out; there would come opportunities in which people
would be forced to acknowledge that they had been unjust to you,
because they would see that your purposes were pure.  You may still win
a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have heard you speak of, and
we shall all be proud of you," she ended, with a smile.

"That might do if I had my old trust in myself," said Lydgate,
mournfully.  "Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round
and running away before this slander, leaving it unchecked behind me.
Still, I can't ask any one to put a great deal of money into a plan
which depends on me."

"It would be quite worth my while," said Dorothea, simply.  "Only
think.  I am very uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I
have too little for any great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I
have too much.  I don't know what to do.  I have seven hundred a-year
of my own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left
me, and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank.  I
wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of my income which I
don't want, to buy land with and found a village which should be a
school of industry; but Sir James and my uncle have convinced me that
the risk would be too great.  So you see that what I should most
rejoice at would be to have something good to do with my money: I
should like it to make other people's lives better to them.  It makes
me very uneasy--coming all to me who don't want it."

A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate's face.  The childlike
grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said all this was
irresistible--blent into an adorable whole with her ready understanding
of high experience.  (Of lower experience such as plays a great part in
the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted
knowledge, little helped by her imagination.) But she took the smile as
encouragement of her plan.

"I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously," she said, in a
tone of persuasion.  "The hospital would be one good; and making your
life quite whole and well again would be another."

Lydgate's smile had died away.  "You have the goodness as well as the
money to do all that; if it could be done," he said.  "But--"

He hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window; and
she sat in silent expectation.  At last he turned towards her and said
impetuously--

"Why should I not tell you?--you know what sort of bond marriage is.
You will understand everything."

Dorothea felt her heart beginning to beat faster.  Had he that sorrow
too?  But she feared to say any word, and he went on immediately.

"It is impossible for me now to do anything--to take any step without
considering my wife's happiness.  The thing that I might like to do if
I were alone, is become impossible to me.  I can't see her miserable.
She married me without knowing what she was going into, and it might
have been better for her if she had not married me."

"I know, I know--you could not give her pain, if you were not obliged
to do it," said Dorothea, with keen memory of her own life.

"And she has set her mind against staying.  She wishes to go.  The
troubles she has had here have wearied her," said Lydgate, breaking off
again, lest he should say too much.

"But when she saw the good that might come of staying--" said Dorothea,
remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if he had forgotten the reasons
which had just been considered.  He did not speak immediately.

"She would not see it," he said at last, curtly, feeling at first that
this statement must do without explanation.  "And, indeed, I have lost
all spirit about carrying on my life here."  He paused a moment and
then, following the impulse to let Dorothea see deeper into the
difficulty of his life, he said, "The fact is, this trouble has come
upon her confusedly.  We have not been able to speak to each other
about it.  I am not sure what is in her mind about it: she may fear
that I have really done something base.  It is my fault; I ought to be
more open.  But I have been suffering cruelly."

"May I go and see her?" said Dorothea, eagerly.  "Would she accept my
sympathy?  I would tell her that you have not been blamable before any
one's judgment but your own.  I would tell her that you shall be
cleared in every fair mind.  I would cheer her heart.  Will you ask her
if I may go to see her?  I did see her once."

"I am sure you may," said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some
hope.  "She would feel honored--cheered, I think, by the proof that you
at least have some respect for me.  I will not speak to her about your
coming--that she may not connect it with my wishes at all.  I know very
well that I ought not to have left anything to be told her by others,
but--"

He broke off, and there was a moment's silence.  Dorothea refrained
from saying what was in her mind--how well she knew that there might be
invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife.  This was a
point on which even sympathy might make a wound.  She returned to the
more outward aspect of Lydgate's position, saying cheerfully--

"And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in
you and support you, she might then be glad that you should stay in
your place and recover your hopes--and do what you meant to do.
Perhaps then you would see that it was right to agree with what I
proposed about your continuing at the Hospital.  Surely you would, if
you still have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?"

Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.

"You need not decide immediately," she said, gently.  "A few days hence
it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode."

Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most decisive
tones.

"No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering.  I am
no longer sure enough of myself--I mean of what it would be possible
for me to do under the changed circumstances of my life.  It would be
dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything serious in
dependence on me.  I might be obliged to go away after all; I see
little chance of anything else.  The whole thing is too problematic; I
cannot consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted.  No--let
the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, and everything go on
as it might have done if I had never come.  I have kept a valuable
register since I have been there; I shall send it to a man who will
make use of it," he ended bitterly.  "I can think of nothing for a long
while but getting an income."

"It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly," said Dorothea.
"It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from
that.  Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen
from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this
fettering want of income.  Why should not people do these things?  It
is so difficult to make shares at all even.  This is one way."

"God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!" said Lydgate, rising as if with the
same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the
back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in.  "It is good
that you should have such feelings.  But I am not the man who ought to
allow himself to benefit by them.  I have not given guarantees enough.
I must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for
work that I never achieved.  It is very clear to me that I must not
count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I
can manage it.  I should not be able for a long while, at the very
best, to get an income here, and--and it is easier to make necessary
changes in a new place.  I must do as other men do, and think what will
please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the
London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to
some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get
myself puffed,--that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to
keep my soul alive in."

"Now that is not brave," said Dorothea,--"to give up the fight."

"No, it is not brave," said Lydgate, "but if a man is afraid of
creeping paralysis?"  Then, in another tone, "Yet you have made a great
difference in my courage by believing in me.  Everything seems more
bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few
other minds, especially in Farebrother's, I shall be deeply grateful.
The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my
orders.  That would soon get distorted.  After all, there is no
evidence for me but people's opinion of me beforehand.  You can only
repeat my own report of myself."

"Mr. Farebrother will believe--others will believe," said Dorothea.  "I
can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be
bribed to do a wickedness."

"I don't know," said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice.
"I have not taken a bribe yet.  But there is a pale shade of bribery
which is sometimes called prosperity.  You will do me another great
kindness, then, and come to see my wife?"

"Yes, I will.  I remember how pretty she is," said Dorothea, into whose
mind every impression about Rosamond had cut deep.  "I hope she will
like me."

As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature has a heart
large enough for the Virgin Mary.  She evidently thinks nothing of her
own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she
wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can
look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.
She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before--a fountain of
friendship towards men--a man can make a friend of her.  Casaubon must
have raised some heroic hallucination in her.  I wonder if she could
have any other sort of passion for a man?  Ladislaw?--there was
certainly an unusual feeling between them.  And Casaubon must have had
a notion of it.  Well--her love might help a man more than her money."

Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate
from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part,
though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear.  She sat down at
once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note,
in which she pleaded that she had more claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to
the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to
Lydgate--that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant her the
position of being his helper in this small matter, the favor being
entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her
to do with her superfluous money.  He might call her a creditor or by
any other name if it did but imply that he granted her request.  She
enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the
letter with her the next day when she went to see Rosamond.

    "And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
     To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
     With some suspicion."
                                         --Henry V.

The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
should be away until the evening.  Of late she had never gone beyond
her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa,
to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
you not, papa?  I suppose we shall have very little money.  I am sure I
hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
don't mind a hundred or two.  I can see the end of that."  With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how.  This way of establishing sequences
is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive.  That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui.  Her melancholy had become so
marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.

But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
in the town.  She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
his arrival by a hint of trouble.  The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing."

Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit.  Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
that of Will Ladislaw.  Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she
had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of
gossip--her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music.  But
there had followed his parting words--the few passionate words in
which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was
resolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment.  From the
time of that parting, Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her,
believing with a proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his
determination that no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart
quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate.  She was
sure that the regard was blameless.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust.  "If
you are not good, none is good"--those little words may give a
terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for
remorse.

Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
suspicions of hidden wrong.  But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
great powers of her womanhood.  And it had from the first acted
strongly on Will Ladislaw.  He felt, when he parted from her, that the
brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about
herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would
only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.

And he was right there.  In the months since their parting Dorothea had
felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
one which was inwardly whole and without blemish.  She had an active
force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
lay within park palings.

"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
absurd.  And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
candle for him to see his own folly by.  Dorothea had observed the
animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
secrecy.  But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.

She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
yet she had taken no posture of renunciation.  She had accepted her
whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and
would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail
because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on
the superfluities of her lot.  She could bear that the chief pleasures
of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came
to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she
at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,
would be a source of torment to her:--"somebody who will manage your
property for you, my dear," was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of
suitable characteristics.  "I should like to manage it myself, if I
knew what to do with it," said Dorothea.  No--she adhered to her
declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long
valley of her life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance
would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers
by the way.

This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in
all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.
Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and
compassion.  There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier
to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the
husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him.  That was a
trouble which no third person must directly touch.  But Dorothea
thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon
Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would
surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy
with her.

"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she was
being driven towards the town.  The clear spring morning, the scent of
the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth
of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the
cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.
Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of
Lydgate's conduct.  "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps
she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."

Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her
carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street,
having told the coachman to wait for some packages.  The street door
was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at
the carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to
her that the lady who "belonged to it" was coming towards her.

"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.

"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in," said
Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title for this
queenly young widow with a carriage and pair.  "Will you please to walk
in, and I'll go and see."

"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward
intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to
see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.

They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the
passage which led to the garden.  The drawing-room door was unlatched,
and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.
Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and
swung back again without noise.

Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being
filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be.
She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything
remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones
which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and
advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a
bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which
filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,
without self-possession enough to speak.

Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall
on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will
Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her
bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her
upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.

Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her
presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and
rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested.  Will Ladislaw,
starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new
lightning in them, seemed changing to marble: But she immediately
turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice--

"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished
to put into your own hands."

She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her
retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and
bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the
surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,
and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that
grand people were probably more impatient than others.

Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was
quickly in her carriage again.

"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one
looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual
she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy.  And that was
really her experience.  It was as if she had drunk a great draught of
scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object.  She
needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.  She felt
power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink.  And she would
carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of
going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that
she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under
his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made
her more ardent in readiness to be his champion.  She had never felt
anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing
pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.

"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James was
gone out of the room.  "And you don't see anything you look at, Arthur
or anything.  You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know.  Is
it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?" Celia had
been used to watch her sister with expectation.

"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo, in her full
tones.

"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
forward upon them.

"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said
Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.

"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a
little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.

But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
until she descended at her own door.

    "Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
     With her sweet faith above for monument"

Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--he
looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
towards him with doubt.  It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in
whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification
from what had just happened.  Shallow natures dream of an easy sway
over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty
magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures
and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were.  She
knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used
to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut
into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to
soothe or subdue.  Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always
subdued in the long-run: events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond
would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never
gave up what she had set her mind on.

She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
coat-sleeve.

"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if
his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.  He wheeled
round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the
tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking
fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.

She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as
only Lydgate was used to interpret.  She became suddenly quiet and
seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
shawl.  Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
with his anger.  It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.  And yet--how
could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?  He was fuming
under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive
vibration.  In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--

"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."

"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.  "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," said 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 began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it.  Presently he burst out again--

"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.  She'll think of me as an incarnate insult
to her, from the first moment we--"

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered.  He found another vent for his rage by
snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be
throttled and flung off.

"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 were being hurled at her, was
almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
some new terrible existence.  She had no sense of chill resolute
repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
lash never experienced before.  What another nature felt in opposition
to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness.  When
Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:
her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them.  If it
had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would
have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort
her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very
cheap.

Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.  He
had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.  He knew that he
was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.

After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still.  At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
he felt checked and stultified in his anger.  He walked towards the
mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for--he
hardly knew what.  The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there--he had had
suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
within it.  And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
slow pincers:--that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
heart.  But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before it can turn into compassion.

And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's
by a mute misery.  The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.

Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship.  But she said nothing,
and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, "Shall I
come in and see Lydgate this evening?"

"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.

And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
been in.

After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting.  When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to
make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms.  Rosamond said
that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
day of grief.

Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there.  The perception that she was ill threw every other
thought into the background.  When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested
on him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
she felt some content that he was there.  He perceived the difference
in a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her,
and bending over her said, "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated
you?"  Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and
for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her.  He imagined
that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her
nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards
himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that
visit had raised.

    "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.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Dorothea asks Farebrother if it would be possible to approach Lydgate about the scandal and offer help. Farebrother tells her that Lydgate may not respond positively to questioning. Sir James says that they cannot manage another man's life for him. Dorothea decides to wait until she approaches Lydgate about taking over Bulstrode's interest in the hospital before broaching the subject of the scandal. Lydgate deduces that Bulstrode loaned him the money to bind him through a strong obligation in the event that Raffles disclosed any damaging details about his past. The townspeople avoid him, and he begins losing clients. He resolves to stay in Middlemarch and face the worst, but the thought of Rosamond's reaction pains him deeply. Mrs. Bulstrode suspects something terrible when Lydgate accompanies her husband home from the meeting. Neither Lydgate nor her friends will give her a straight answer, so she goes to her brother, Mr. Vincy. He sorrowfully tells her the whole sad story, but he is careful to let her know that no one blames her. He tells her that he will stand by her no matter what she chooses to do. Bulstrode knows that his wife returned home, claiming that she wasn't well, so he perceives that she has heard everything. He prepares himself to hear her say that she is leaving him. She dresses herself in mourning clothing and goes to see him. He will not look at her. A wave of compassion hits her when she sees his shrunken frame. He bursts into tears with her sitting by his side. His confession and her resolve to stick with him are unspoken. Happy to be free of debt, Rosamond sends out invitations to a dinner party. She is bored in Middlemarch and misses Will Ladislaw's company. She feels jealous of his admiration for Dorothea. He writes to tell her that he will visit Middlemarch soon. She still hopes to convince Lydgate to leave Middlemarch. All the invitations to Rosamond's dinner party are declined. She visits her parents. They tell her everything and say that Lydgate will probably have to leave town. Lydgate perceives that she knows of the scandal, but to his disappointment, she does not express the belief that he is innocent. Dorothea summons Lydgate to discuss her involvement in the hospital. He tells her not to depend on him to manage the hospital, as he may have to leave town. Dorothea states her belief in his innocence and says that she wants to clear his name. Her support touches Lydgate deeply. He tells her that he must consider Rosamond's happiness, so he is disposed to leave Middlemarch. She offers to speak with Rosamond to show her that they are not completely abandoned. Dorothea decides to take over Lydgate's debt to Bulstrode. She sets out to visit Rosamond with a check for one thousand pounds. She encounters Will Ladislaw clasping Rosamond's hands. Rosamond has been crying. Dorothea recalls all the gossip concerning Will's relationship with Rosamond, so she departs abruptly. She considers Lydgate's marriage troubles under a new light, and she is ready more than ever to be his champion. Will knows exactly what Dorothea thinks. He is shattered at the loss of her good opinion. Rosamond tries to touch his coat sleeve, but he angrily shakes her off. She sarcastically tells him to go after Dorothea. They quarrel, and Will leaves her home in a huff. Later, Rosamond collapses sobbing into Lydgate's arms. He doesn't know the cause of her depression. Will returns to the Lydgate home later. Lydgate informs him that Rosamond is ill. He tells Ladislaw that his own name is included in the present scandal. Will says that he wouldn't be surprised if everyone thought he conspired with Raffles to kill Bulstrode. He doesn't tell Lydgate that he refused Bulstrode's money, because Lydgate is under suspicion for accepting it.