Chapter: "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.



       "Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
        The Godhead's most benignant grace;
        Nor know we anything so fair
        As is the smile upon thy face;
        Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
        And fragrance in thy footing treads;
        Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
    And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
                                        --WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.


When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised
to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt.  There was
a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother
family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the
Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady
companion.  When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she
was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could
dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered
into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell,
giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and
getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy.  She paused on
her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some
garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the
crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the
result of sixty years' experience as to soils--namely, that if your
soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to
make it all of a mummy, why then--

Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than
was necessary.  That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like
another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of
his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not
to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets
of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals.  The
evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than
usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of
creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for
aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some
inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's
attention.

"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"

"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her
beaver-like notes.

"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his
glasses and looking at the carpet.

"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble.  "A German box--very
pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."

"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone
of comprehension, getting up and hunting.  The box was found at last
under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, "it
was under a fender the last time."

"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.

"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."

"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.

Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return.  She was surprised and
annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it
was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation.
Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked
in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised
anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."

Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true; you
must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate.  That sort
of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."

He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to
speak, even when he said good-night.

The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless
within the clutch of inescapable anguish.  Dismissing Tantripp with a
few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards
the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and
moaned out--

"Oh, I did love him!"

Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
thoroughly to leave any power of thought.  She could only cry in loud
whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted
and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome--after
her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who,
misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--after her lost woman's
pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet dim perspective of
hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged
recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.

In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--she besought
hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the
mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor
and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame
was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.

There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two, as
if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided
by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her
gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the
lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.

Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had
trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the
dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with
a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out
her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness
was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the
unshrinking utterance of despair.

And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved,
was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a
detected illusion--no, a living man towards whom there could not yet
struggle any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and
indignation and jealous offended pride.  The fire of Dorothea's anger
was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning
reproach.  Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that
might have been whole enough without him?  Why had he brought his cheap
regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in
exchange?  He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of
her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before.  Why had he not
stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that
they might be less contemptible?

But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and
moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she
sobbed herself to sleep.

In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around
her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had
happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into
the eyes of sorrow.  She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit
down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her
thoughts.  For now the thoughts came thickly.  It was not in Dorothea's
nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the
narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness
that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own.

She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately
again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible
meaning.  Was she alone in that scene?  Was it her event only?  She
forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a
woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some
clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth.  In her first outleap
of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she
had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever.  But
that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a
faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when
the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult
and had once shown her the truer measure of things.  All the active
thought with which she had before been representing to herself the
trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, like her
own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--all this
vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it
asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let
us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance.  She said to her own
irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of
driving her back from effort.

And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact
with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants
bearing the sacred branch?  The objects of her rescue were not to be
sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her.  She yearned towards
the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her
errant will.  "What should I do--how should I act now, this very day,
if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of
those three?"

It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light
piercing into the room.  She opened her curtains, and looked out
towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside
the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his
back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures
moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog.  Far off in the bending sky
was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the
manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.  She was a part of that
involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from
her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish
complaining.

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but
something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
murmur which would soon gather distinctness.  She took off the clothes
which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
and began to make her toilet.  Presently she rang for Tantripp, who
came in her dressing-gown.

"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night," burst out
Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face, which
in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater
dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you _will_.  Anybody might think now
you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."

"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling.  "I have slept; I
am not ill.  I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
my new bonnet to-day."

"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most
thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds' worth less of
crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire.  "There's a reason
in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds at the bottom of your
skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--and if ever anybody looked
like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--is what's consistent for a
second year.  At least, that's _my_ thinking," ended Tantripp, looking
anxiously at the fire; "and if anybody was to marry me flattering
himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be
deceived by his own vanity, that's all."

"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she used to
do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; "get me the
coffee."

She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it
in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this
strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the morning when
she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should have asked for her
lighter mourning which she had waived before.  Tantripp would never
have found the clew to this mystery.  Dorothea wished to acknowledge
that she had not the less an active life before her because she had
buried a private joy; and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to
all initiation, haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that
slight outward help towards calm resolve.  For the resolve was not easy.

Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.



    "Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig,
     Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen,
     Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
     Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen
     Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
                                   --Faust: 2r Theil.


When Dorothea was again at Lydgate's door speaking to Martha, he was in
the room close by with the door ajar, preparing to go out.  He heard
her voice, and immediately came to her.

"Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this morning?" she said,
having reflected that it would be better to leave out all allusion to
her previous visit.

"I have no doubt she will," said Lydgate, suppressing his thought about
Dorothea's looks, which were as much changed as Rosamond's, "if you
will be kind enough to come in and let me tell her that you are here.
She has not been very well since you were here yesterday, but she is
better this morning, and I think it is very likely that she will be
cheered by seeing you again."

It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected, knew nothing about
the circumstances of her yesterday's visit; nay, he appeared to imagine
that she had carried it out according to her intention.  She had
prepared a little note asking Rosamond to see her, which she would have
given to the servant if he had not been in the way, but now she was in
much anxiety as to the result of his announcement.

After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to take a letter
from his pocket and put it into her hands, saying, "I wrote this last
night, and was going to carry it to Lowick in my ride.  When one is
grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less
unsatisfactory than speech--one does not at least _hear_ how inadequate
the words are."

Dorothea's face brightened.  "It is I who have most to thank for, since
you have let me take that place.  You _have_ consented?" she said,
suddenly doubting.

"Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day."

He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had but lately
finished dressing herself, and sat languidly wondering what she should
do next, her habitual industry in small things, even in the days of her
sadness, prompting her to begin some kind of occupation, which she
dragged through slowly or paused in from lack of interest.  She looked
ill, but had recovered her usual quietude of manner, and Lydgate had
feared to disturb her by any questions.  He had told her of Dorothea's
letter containing the check, and afterwards he had said, "Ladislaw is
come, Rosy; he sat with me last night; I dare say he will be here again
to-day. I thought he looked rather battered and depressed."  And
Rosamond had made no reply.

Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, "Rosy, dear, Mrs.
Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like to see her, would you
not?"  That she colored and gave rather a startled movement did not
surprise him after the agitation produced by the interview yesterday--a
beneficent agitation, he thought, since it seemed to have made her turn
to him again.

Rosamond dared not say no.  She dared not with a tone of her voice
touch the facts of yesterday.  Why had Mrs. Casaubon come again?  The
answer was a blank which Rosamond could only fill up with dread, for
Will Ladislaw's lacerating words had made every thought of Dorothea a
fresh smart to her.  Nevertheless, in her new humiliating uncertainty
she dared do nothing but comply.  She did not say yes, but she rose and
let Lydgate put a light shawl over her shoulders, while he said, "I am
going out immediately." Then something crossed her mind which prompted
her to say, "Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into the
drawing-room." And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully understood
this wish.  He led her down to the drawing-room door, and then turned
away, observing to himself that he was rather a blundering husband to
be dependent for his wife's trust in him on the influence of another
woman.

Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards
Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve.  Had Mrs.
Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will?  If so, it was a
liberty that Rosamond resented; and she prepared herself to meet every
word with polite impassibility.  Will had bruised her pride too sorely
for her to feel any compunction towards him and Dorothea: her own
injury seemed much the greater.  Dorothea was not only the "preferred"
woman, but had also a formidable advantage in being Lydgate's
benefactor; and to poor Rosamond's pained confused vision it seemed
that this Mrs. Casaubon--this woman who predominated in all things
concerning her--must have come now with the sense of having the
advantage, and with animosity prompting her to use it.  Indeed, not
Rosamond only, but any one else, knowing the outer facts of the case,
and not the simple inspiration on which Dorothea acted, might well have
wondered why she came.

Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful slimness wrapped
in her soft white shawl, the rounded infantine mouth and cheek
inevitably suggesting mildness and innocence, Rosamond paused at three
yards' distance from her visitor and bowed.  But Dorothea, who had
taken off her gloves, from an impulse which she could never resist when
she wanted a sense of freedom, came forward, and with her face full of
a sad yet sweet openness, put out her hand.  Rosamond could not avoid
meeting her glance, could not avoid putting her small hand into
Dorothea's, which clasped it with gentle motherliness; and immediately
a doubt of her own prepossessions began to stir within her.  Rosamond's
eye was quick for faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon's face looked pale
and changed since yesterday, yet gentle, and like the firm softness of
her hand.  But Dorothea had counted a little too much on her own
strength: the clearness and intensity of her mental action this morning
were the continuance of a nervous exaltation which made her frame as
dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal; and in
looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling, and was
unable to speak--all her effort was required to keep back tears.  She
succeeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face like the
spirit of a sob; but it added to Rosamond's impression that Mrs.
Casaubon's state of mind must be something quite different from what
she had imagined.

So they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that
happened to be nearest, and happened also to be close together; though
Rosamond's notion when she first bowed was that she should stay a long
way off from Mrs. Casaubon.  But she ceased thinking how anything would
turn out--merely wondering what would come.  And Dorothea began to
speak quite simply, gathering firmness as she went on.

"I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that is why I am
here again so soon.  You will not think me too troublesome when I tell
you that I came to talk to you about the injustice that has been shown
towards Mr. Lydgate.  It will cheer you--will it not?--to know a great
deal about him, that he may not like to speak about himself just
because it is in his own vindication and to his own honor.  You will
like to know that your husband has warm friends, who have not left off
believing in his high character?  You will let me speak of this without
thinking that I take a liberty?"

The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with generous
heedlessness above all the facts which had filled Rosamond's mind as
grounds of obstruction and hatred between her and this woman, came as
soothingly as a warm stream over her shrinking fears.  Of course Mrs.
Casaubon had the facts in her mind, but she was not going to speak of
anything connected with them.  That relief was too great for Rosamond
to feel much else at the moment.  She answered prettily, in the new
ease of her soul--

"I know you have been very good.  I shall like to hear anything you
will say to me about Tertius."

"The day before yesterday," said Dorothea, "when I had asked him to
come to Lowick to give me his opinion on the affairs of the Hospital,
he told me everything about his conduct and feelings in this sad event
which has made ignorant people cast suspicions on him.  The reason he
told me was because I was very bold and asked him.  I believed that he
had never acted dishonorably, and I begged him to tell me the history.
He confessed to me that he had never told it before, not even to you,
because he had a great dislike to say, 'I was not wrong,' as if that
were proof, when there are guilty people who will say so.  The truth
is, he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there were any bad
secrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode offered him the
money because he repented, out of kindness, of having refused it
before.  All his anxiety about his patient was to treat him rightly,
and he was a little uncomfortable that the case did not end as he had
expected; but he thought then and still thinks that there may have been
no wrong in it on any one's part.  And I have told Mr. Farebrother, and
Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam: they all believe in your husband.
That will cheer you, will it not?  That will give you courage?"

Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very
close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before a
superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor.  She said, with
blushing embarrassment, "Thank you: you are very kind."

"And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything about
this to you.  But you will forgive him.  It was because he feels so
much more about your happiness than anything else--he feels his life
bound into one with yours, and it hurts him more than anything, that
his misfortunes must hurt you.  He could speak to me because I am an
indifferent person.  And then I asked him if I might come to see you;
because I felt so much for his trouble and yours.  That is why I came
yesterday, and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is it
not?--  How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing
trouble--and we could help them, and never try?"

Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering,
forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her
own trial to Rosamond's. The emotion had wrought itself more and more
into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one's very
marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness.
And she had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand that
she had pressed before.

Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been
probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before
when she clung to her husband.  Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave
of her own sorrow returning over her--her thought being drawn to the
possible share that Will Ladislaw might have in Rosamond's mental
tumult.  She was beginning to fear that she should not be able to
suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while her hand
was still resting on Rosamond's lap, though the hand underneath it was
withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs.  She tried
to master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point
in three lives--not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had
happened, but--in those three lives which were touching hers with the
solemn neighborhood of danger and distress.  The fragile creature who
was crying close to her--there might still be time to rescue her from
the misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike any
other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with the same
thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both.  She felt the
relation between them to be peculiar enough to give her a peculiar
influence, though she had no conception that the way in which her own
feelings were involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.

It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even Dorothea could
imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her
dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and
critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of
feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion
and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards
her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been
walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.

When Rosamond's convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she
withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her
eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers.
What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying?  And
Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
silent tear.  Pride was broken down between these two.

"We were talking about your husband," Dorothea said, with some
timidity.  "I thought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the
other day.  I had not seen him for many weeks before.  He said he had
been feeling very lonely in his trial; but I think he would have borne
it all better if he had been able to be quite open with you."

"Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything," said Rosamond,
imagining that he had been complaining of her to Dorothea.  "He ought
not to wonder that I object to speak to him on painful subjects."

"It was himself he blamed for not speaking," said Dorothea.  "What he
said of you was, that he could not be happy in doing anything which
made you unhappy--that his marriage was of course a bond which must
affect his choice about everything; and for that reason he refused my
proposal that he should keep his position at the Hospital, because that
would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not undertake to do
anything which would be painful to you.  He could say that to me,
because he knows that I had much trial in my marriage, from my
husband's illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him; and he
knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting
another who is tied to us."

Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing
over Rosamond's face.  But there was no answer, and she went on, with a
gathering tremor, "Marriage is so unlike everything else.  There is
something even awful in the nearness it brings.  Even if we loved some
one else better than--than those we were married to, it would be no
use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her
language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving
or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.  I know it may be very
dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us
like a murder--and everything else is gone.  And then our husband--if
he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse
in his life--"

Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming
too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing
error.  She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware
that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express
pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond's,
and said with more agitated rapidity,--"I know, I know that the feeling
may be very dear--it has taken hold of us unawares--it is so hard, it
may seem like death to part with it--and we are weak--I am weak--"

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to
save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force.  She stopped
in speechless agitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being
inwardly grappled.  Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her
lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that
lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own--hurried
along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful,
undefined aspect--could find no words, but involuntarily she put her
lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a
minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a
shipwreck.

"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager
half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round
her--urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something
that oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.

They moved apart, looking at each other.

"When you came in yesterday--it was not as you thought," said Rosamond
in the same tone.

There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea.  She expected
a vindication of Rosamond herself.

"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he
could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as
she went on.  "And now I think he hates me because--because you
mistook him yesterday.  He says it is through me that you will think
ill of him--think that he is a false person.  But it shall not be
through me.  He has never had any love for me--I know he has not--he
has always thought slightly of me.  He said yesterday that no other
woman existed for him beside you.  The blame of what happened is
entirely mine.  He said he could never explain to you--because of me.
He said you could never think well of him again.  But now I have told
you, and he cannot reproach me any more."

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known
before.  She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of
Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that
she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a
knife-wound within her.

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning
made a resistant pain:--she could only perceive that this would be joy
when she had recovered her power of feeling it.  Her immediate
consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check; she cared for
Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly to her last
words--

"No, he cannot reproach you any more."

With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a
great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond, for the generous effort
which had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was
a reflex of her own energy.  After they had been silent a little, she
said--

"You are not sorry that I came this morning?"

"No, you have been very good to me," said Rosamond.  "I did not think
that you would be so good.  I was very unhappy.  I am not happy now.
Everything is so sad."

"But better days will come.  Your husband will be rightly valued.  And
he depends on you for comfort.  He loves you best.  The worst loss
would be to lose that--and you have not lost it," said Dorothea.

She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her own
relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that Rosamond's affection
was yearning back towards her husband.

"Tertius did not find fault with me, then?" said Rosamond,
understanding now that Lydgate might have said anything to Mrs.
Casaubon, and that she certainly was different from other women.
Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy in the question.  A smile
began to play over Dorothea's face as she said--

"No, indeed!  How could you imagine it?"  But here the door opened, and
Lydgate entered.

"I am come back in my quality of doctor," he said.  "After I went away,
I was haunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need
of care as you, Rosy.  And I thought that I had not done my duty in
leaving you together; so when I had been to Coleman's I came home
again.  I noticed that you were walking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has
changed--I think we may have rain.  May I send some one to order your
carriage to come for you?"

"Oh, no!  I am strong: I need the walk," said Dorothea, rising with
animation in her face.  "Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal,
and it is time for me to go.  I have always been accused of being
immoderate and saying too much."

She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet
good-by without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between
them too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it
superficially.

As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond, but told
him of Mr. Farebrother and the other friends who had listened with
belief to his story.

When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself on the
sofa, in resigned fatigue.

"Well, Rosy," he said, standing over her, and touching her hair, "what
do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much of her?"

"I think she must be better than any one," said Rosamond, "and she is
very beautiful.  If you go to talk to her so often, you will be more
discontented with me than ever!"

Lydgate laughed at the "so often."  "But has she made you any less
discontented with me?"

"I think she has," said Rosamond, looking up in his face.  "How heavy
your eyes are, Tertius--and do push your hair back." He lifted up his
large white hand to obey her, and felt thankful for this little mark of
interest in him.  Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly
scourged--meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter.  And
the shelter was still there: Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with
sad resignation.  He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken
the burthen of her life upon his arms.  He must walk as he could,
carrying that burthen pitifully.



    "My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
                                  --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.


Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay in
banishment unless they are obliged.  When Will Ladislaw exiled himself
from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his return than
his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier, but simply a
state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind,
and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite
facility.  As the months went on, it had seemed more and more difficult
to him to say why he should not run down to Middlemarch--merely for the
sake of hearing something about Dorothea; and if on such a flying visit
he should chance by some strange coincidence to meet with her, there
was no reason for him to be ashamed of having taken an innocent journey
which he had beforehand supposed that he should not take.  Since he was
hopelessly divided from her, he might surely venture into her
neighborhood; and as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch
over her--their opinions seemed less and less important with time and
change of air.

And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which
seemed to make a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty.
Will had given a disinterested attention to an intended settlement on a
new plan in the Far West, and the need for funds in order to carry out
a good design had set him on debating with himself whether it would not
be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode, to urge the
application of that money which had been offered to himself as a means
of carrying out a scheme likely to be largely beneficial.  The question
seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnance to again entering
into any relation with the banker might have made him dismiss it
quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination the probability
that his judgment might be more safely determined by a visit to
Middlemarch.

That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason for coming
down.  He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss the money
question with him, and he had meant to amuse himself for the few
evenings of his stay by having a great deal of music and badinage with
fair Rosamond, without neglecting his friends at Lowick Parsonage:--if
the Parsonage was close to the Manor, that was no fault of his.  He had
neglected the Farebrothers before his departure, from a proud
resistance to the possible accusation of indirectly seeking interviews
with Dorothea; but hunger tames us, and Will had become very hungry for
the vision of a certain form and the sound of a certain voice.
Nothing, had done instead--not the opera, or the converse of zealous
politicians, or the flattering reception (in dim corners) of his new
hand in leading articles.

Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything
would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there
would be no surprises in his visit.  But he had found that humdrum
world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and
lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become
the most fatal epoch of his life.  The next morning he felt so harassed
with the nightmare of consequences--he dreaded so much the immediate
issues before him--that seeing while he breakfasted the arrival of the
Riverston coach, he went out hurriedly and took his place on it, that
he might be relieved, at least for a day, from the necessity of doing
or saying anything in Middlemarch.  Will Ladislaw was in one of those
tangled crises which are commoner in experience than one might imagine,
from the shallow absoluteness of men's judgments.  He had found
Lydgate, for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances
which claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the
reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will
to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible.  To
a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was a
difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
increased for him.  He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded to
show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again; the
friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness was a
power which he dreaded.  And all the while there was no more foretaste
of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped
off and he was making his fresh start on crutches.  In the night he had
debated whether he should not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but
for London, leaving a note to Lydgate which would give a makeshift
reason for his retreat.  But there were strong cords pulling him back
from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of
Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite
of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery
for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance
which was also despair.

Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach.  He
came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made up his
mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening.  The Rubicon, we know,
was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay
entirely in certain invisible conditions.  Will felt as if he were
forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was
not empire, but discontented subjection.

But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness
the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue
that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship.  If Dorothea, after
her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she
perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for
discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those
three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past seven that
evening.

Rosamond had been prepared for Will's visit, and she received him with
a languid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous
exhaustion, of which he could not suppose that it had any relation to
Will.  And when she sat in silence bending over a bit of work, he
innocently apologized for her in an indirect way by begging her to lean
backward and rest.  Will was miserable in the necessity for playing the
part of a friend who was making his first appearance and greeting to
Rosamond, while his thoughts were busy about her feeling since that
scene of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclose them both,
like the painful vision of a double madness.  It happened that nothing
called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,
and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded paper
in his saucer.  He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he went back
to his inn he had no eagerness to unfold the paper.  What Rosamond had
written to him would probably deepen the painful impressions of the
evening.  Still, he opened and read it by his bed-candle. There were
only these few words in her neatly flowing hand:--

"I have told Mrs. Casaubon.  She is not under any mistake about you.  I
told her because she came to see me and was very kind.  You will have
nothing to reproach me with now.  I shall not have made any difference
to you."

The effect of these words was not quite all gladness.  As Will dwelt on
them with excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning at
the thought of what had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond--at the
uncertainty how far Dorothea might still feel her dignity wounded in
having an explanation of his conduct offered to her.  There might still
remain in her mind a changed association with him which made an
irremediable difference--a lasting flaw.  With active fancy he wrought
himself into a state of doubt little more easy than that of the man who
has escaped from wreck by night and stands on unknown ground in the
darkness.  Until that wretched yesterday--except the moment of
vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same
presence--all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been
as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies,
where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered.  But now--would
Dorothea meet him in that world again?



    "And now good-morrow to our waking souls
     Which watch not one another out of fear;
     For love all love of other sights controls,
     And makes one little room, an everywhere."
                                       --DR. DONNE.


On the second morning after Dorothea's visit to Rosamond, she had had
two nights of sound sleep, and had not only lost all traces of fatigue,
but felt as if she had a great deal of superfluous strength--that is
to say, more strength than she could manage to concentrate on any
occupation.  The day before, she had taken long walks outside the
grounds, and had paid two visits to the Parsonage; but she never in her
life told any one the reason why she spent her time in that fruitless
manner, and this morning she was rather angry with herself for her
childish restlessness.  To-day was to be spent quite differently.  What
was there to be done in the village?  Oh dear! nothing.  Everybody was
well and had flannel; nobody's pig had died; and it was Saturday
morning, when there was a general scrubbing of doors and door-stones,
and when it was useless to go into the school.  But there were various
subjects that Dorothea was trying to get clear upon, and she resolved
to throw herself energetically into the gravest of all.  She sat down
in the library before her particular little heap of books on political
economy and kindred matters, out of which she was trying to get light
as to the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's
neighbors, or--what comes to the same thing--so as to do them the most
good.  Here was a weighty subject which, if she could but lay hold of
it, would certainly keep her mind steady.  Unhappily her mind slipped
off it for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading
sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but
not of any one thing contained in the text.  This was hopeless.  Should
she order the carriage and drive to Tipton?  No; for some reason or
other she preferred staying at Lowick.  But her vagrant mind must be
reduced to order: there was an art in self-discipline; and she walked
round and round the brown library considering by what sort of manoeuvre
she could arrest her wandering thoughts.  Perhaps a mere task was the
best means--something to which she must go doggedly.  Was there not the
geography of Asia Minor, in which her slackness had often been rebuked
by Mr. Casaubon?  She went to the cabinet of maps and unrolled one:
this morning she might make herself finally sure that Paphlagonia was
not on the Levantine coast, and fix her total darkness about the
Chalybes firmly on the shores of the Euxine.  A map was a fine thing to
study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up
of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.
Dorothea set earnestly to work, bending close to her map, and uttering
the names in an audible, subdued tone, which often got into a chime.
She looked amusingly girlish after all her deep experience--nodding
her head and marking the names off on her fingers, with a little
pursing of her lip, and now and then breaking off to put her hands on
each side of her face and say, "Oh dear!  oh dear!"

There was no reason why this should end any more than a merry-go-round;
but it was at last interrupted by the opening of the door and the
announcement of Miss Noble.

The little old lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea's shoulder,
was warmly welcomed, but while her hand was being pressed she made many
of her beaver-like noises, as if she had something difficult to say.

"Do sit down," said Dorothea, rolling a chair forward.  "Am I wanted
for anything?  I shall be so glad if I can do anything."

"I will not stay," said Miss Noble, putting her hand into her small
basket, and holding some article inside it nervously; "I have left a
friend in the churchyard."  She lapsed into her inarticulate sounds,
and unconsciously drew forth the article which she was fingering.  It
was the tortoise-shell lozenge-box, and Dorothea felt the color
mounting to her cheeks.

"Mr. Ladislaw," continued the timid little woman.  "He fears he has
offended you, and has begged me to ask if you will see him for a few
minutes."

Dorothea did not answer on the instant: it was crossing her mind that
she could not receive him in this library, where her husband's
prohibition seemed to dwell.  She looked towards the window.  Could she
go out and meet him in the grounds?  The sky was heavy, and the trees
had begun to shiver as at a coming storm.  Besides, she shrank from
going out to him.

"Do see him, Mrs. Casaubon," said Miss Noble, pathetically; "else I
must go back and say No, and that will hurt him."

"Yes, I will see him," said Dorothea.  "Pray tell him to come."

What else was there to be done?  There was nothing that she longed for
at that moment except to see Will: the possibility of seeing him had
thrust itself insistently between her and every other object; and yet
she had a throbbing excitement like an alarm upon her--a sense that
she was doing something daringly defiant for his sake.

When the little lady had trotted away on her mission, Dorothea stood in
the middle of the library with her hands falling clasped before her,
making no attempt to compose herself in an attitude of dignified
unconsciousness.  What she was least conscious of just then was her own
body: she was thinking of what was likely to be in Will's mind, and of
the hard feelings that others had had about him.  How could any duty
bind her to hardness?  Resistance to unjust dispraise had mingled with
her feeling for him from the very first, and now in the rebound of her
heart after her anguish the resistance was stronger than ever.  "If I
love him too much it is because he has been used so ill:"--there was a
voice within her saying this to some imagined audience in the library,
when the door was opened, and she saw Will before her.

She did not move, and he came towards her with more doubt and timidity
in his face than she had ever seen before.  He was in a state of
uncertainty which made him afraid lest some look or word of his should
condemn him to a new distance from her; and Dorothea was afraid of her
_own_ emotion.  She looked as if there were a spell upon her, keeping
her motionless and hindering her from unclasping her hands, while some
intense, grave yearning was imprisoned within her eyes.  Seeing that
she did not put out her hand as usual, Will paused a yard from her and
said with embarrassment, "I am so grateful to you for seeing me."

"I wanted to see you," said Dorothea, having no other words at command.
It did not occur to her to sit down, and Will did not give a cheerful
interpretation to this queenly way of receiving him; but he went on to
say what he had made up his mind to say.

"I fear you think me foolish and perhaps wrong for coming back so soon.
I have been punished for my impatience.  You know--every one knows
now--a painful story about my parentage.  I knew of it before I went
away, and I always meant to tell you of it if--if we ever met again."

There was a slight movement in Dorothea, and she unclasped her hands,
but immediately folded them over each other.

"But the affair is matter of gossip now," Will continued.  "I wished
you to know that something connected with it--something which happened
before I went away, helped to bring me down here again.  At least I
thought it excused my coming.  It was the idea of getting Bulstrode to
apply some money to a public purpose--some money which he had thought
of giving me.  Perhaps it is rather to Bulstrode's credit that he
privately offered me compensation for an old injury: he offered to give
me a good income to make amends; but I suppose you know the
disagreeable story?"

Will looked doubtfully at Dorothea, but his manner was gathering some
of the defiant courage with which he always thought of this fact in his
destiny.  He added, "You know that it must be altogether painful to me."

"Yes--yes--I know," said Dorothea, hastily.

"I did not choose to accept an income from such a source.  I was sure
that you would not think well of me if I did so," said Will.  Why
should he mind saying anything of that sort to her now?  She knew that
he had avowed his love for her.  "I felt that"--he broke off,
nevertheless.

"You acted as I should have expected you to act," said Dorothea, her
face brightening and her head becoming a little more erect on its
beautiful stem.

"I did not believe that you would let any circumstance of my birth
create a prejudice in you against me, though it was sure to do so in
others," said Will, shaking his head backward in his old way, and
looking with a grave appeal into her eyes.

"If it were a new hardship it would be a new reason for me to cling to
you," said Dorothea, fervidly.  "Nothing could have changed me but--"
her heart was swelling, and it was difficult to go on; she made a great
effort over herself to say in a low tremulous voice, "but thinking that
you were different--not so good as I had believed you to be."

"You are sure to believe me better than I am in everything but one,"
said Will, giving way to his own feeling in the evidence of hers.  "I
mean, in my truth to you.  When I thought you doubted of that, I didn't
care about anything that was left.  I thought it was all over with me,
and there was nothing to try for--only things to endure."

"I don't doubt you any longer," said Dorothea, putting out her hand; a
vague fear for him impelling her unutterable affection.

He took her hand and raised it to his lips with something like a sob.
But he stood with his hat and gloves in the other hand, and might have
done for the portrait of a Royalist.  Still it was difficult to loose
the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed
her, looked and moved away.

"See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed,"
she said, walking towards the window, yet speaking and moving with only
a dim sense of what she was doing.

Will followed her at a little distance, and leaned against the tall
back of a leather chair, on which he ventured now to lay his hat and
gloves, and free himself from the intolerable durance of formality to
which he had been for the first time condemned in Dorothea's presence.
It must be confessed that he felt very happy at that moment leaning on
the chair.  He was not much afraid of anything that she might feel now.

They stood silent, not looking at each other, but looking at the
evergreens which were being tossed, and were showing the pale underside
of their leaves against the blackening sky.  Will never enjoyed the
prospect of a storm so much: it delivered him from the necessity of
going away.  Leaves and little branches were hurled about, and the
thunder was getting nearer.  The light was more and more sombre, but
there came a flash of lightning which made them start and look at each
other, and then smile.  Dorothea began to say what she had been
thinking of.

"That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing
to try for.  If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good
would remain, and that is worth trying for.  Some can be happy.  I
seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most
wretched.  I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if
that feeling had not come to me to make strength."

"You have never felt the sort of misery I felt," said Will; "the misery
of knowing that you must despise me."

"But I have felt worse--it was worse to think ill--" Dorothea had begun
impetuously, but broke off.

Will colored.  He had the sense that whatever she said was uttered in
the vision of a fatality that kept them apart.  He was silent a moment,
and then said passionately--

"We may at least have the comfort of speaking to each other without
disguise.  Since I must go away--since we must always be divided--you
may think of me as one on the brink of the grave."

While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit
each of them up for the other--and the light seemed to be the terror of
a hopeless love.  Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window; Will
followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement; and so they
stood, with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the
storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack and roll above them,
and the rain began to pour down.  Then they turned their faces towards
each other, with the memory of his last words in them, and they did not
loose each other's hands.

"There is no hope for me," said Will.  "Even if you loved me as well as
I love you--even if I were everything to you--I shall most likely
always be very poor: on a sober calculation, one can count on nothing
but a creeping lot.  It is impossible for us ever to belong to each
other.  It is perhaps base of me to have asked for a word from you.  I
meant to go away into silence, but I have not been able to do what I
meant."

"Don't be sorry," said Dorothea, in her clear tender tones.  "I would
rather share all the trouble of our parting."

Her lips trembled, and so did his.  It was never known which lips were
the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly,
and then they moved apart.

The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit
were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was
one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a
certain awe.

Dorothea sat down on the seat nearest to her, a long low ottoman in the
middle of the room, and with her hands folded over each other on her
lap, looked at the drear outer world.  Will stood still an instant
looking at her, then seated himself beside her, and laid his hand on
hers, which turned itself upward to be clasped.  They sat in that way
without looking at each other, until the rain abated and began to fall
in stillness.  Each had been full of thoughts which neither of them
could begin to utter.

But when the rain was quiet, Dorothea turned to look at Will.  With
passionate exclamation, as if some torture screw were threatening him,
he started up and said, "It is impossible!"

He went and leaned on the back of the chair again, and seemed to be
battling with his own anger, while she looked towards him sadly.

"It is as fatal as a murder or any other horror that divides people,"
he burst out again; "it is more intolerable--to have our life maimed by
petty accidents."

"No--don't say that--your life need not be maimed," said Dorothea,
gently.

"Yes, it must," said Will, angrily.  "It is cruel of you to speak in
that way--as if there were any comfort.  You may see beyond the misery
of it, but I don't. It is unkind--it is throwing back my love for you
as if it were a trifle, to speak in that way in the face of the fact.
We can never be married."

"Some time--we might," said Dorothea, in a trembling voice.

"When?" said Will, bitterly.  "What is the use of counting on any
success of mine?  It is a mere toss up whether I shall ever do more
than keep myself decently, unless I choose to sell myself as a mere pen
and a mouthpiece.  I can see that clearly enough.  I could not offer
myself to any woman, even if she had no luxuries to renounce."

There was silence.  Dorothea's heart was full of something that she
wanted to say, and yet the words were too difficult.  She was wholly
possessed by them: at that moment debate was mute within her.  And it
was very hard that she could not say what she wanted to say.  Will was
looking out of the window angrily.  If he would have looked at her and
not gone away from her side, she thought everything would have been
easier.  At last he turned, still resting against the chair, and
stretching his hand automatically towards his hat, said with a sort of
exasperation, "Good-by."

"Oh, I cannot bear it--my heart will break," said Dorothea, starting
from her seat, the flood of her young passion bearing down all the
obstructions which had kept her silent--the great tears rising and
falling in an instant: "I don't mind about poverty--I hate my wealth."

In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she
drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go on
speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while
she said in a sobbing childlike way, "We could live quite well on my
own fortune--it is too much--seven hundred a-year--I want so little--no
new clothes--and I will learn what everything costs."

 The Lydgates are able to keep their house with the money from Bulstrode, but no one calls there but Will Ladislaw. Rosamond thinks his flirtation hides a deeper feeling, and daydreams about Will keep her going at this time. When she finds out about her husband's scandal, she is in deep shock and sends for Will. Dorothea sends for Lydgate and offers her support at the hospital: he must stay in Middlemarch and prove his innocence. She believes in him. This is the first support he has had, for even Rosamond has lost faith in him. The presence of Dorothea's noble nature makes him believe he can weather the storm. She offers to talk to his wife. When Dorothea calls on Mrs. Lydgate, Rosamond is in a compromising position with Will holding her hands. Dorothea runs out, and Will shouts at Rosamond for ruining his reputation with Dorothea. He shatters Rosamond's egoism by saying: "no other woman exists by the side of her." Rosamond falls ill with this shock and goes to bed. Lydgate is tender with her. Dorothea and Will had been connected by a tender love and understanding though separated. Now it has been destroyed, and Dorothea stays up all night weeping. But in the morning she has an epiphany while looking at a laboring family out the window. She yearns for the perfect right and sees the largeness of the world and her part in it. She resolves to go again to Mrs. Lydgate to see what she can do to get her to love her husband. Dorothea puts her personal feelings aside and defends Lydgate to his wife. Thinking Rosamond is contemplating running away with Will, she urges her to stand by her husband. For once, Rosamond is unselfish and confesses to Dorothea that Will loves her and no one else. This clears the road for Will. While watching a storm from Lowick's windows together, Dorothea and Will decide it is unbearable to part, no matter what the circumstances, and they declare their love for one another.

