Chapter: This figure hath high price: 't was wrought with love
    Ages ago in finest ivory;
    Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines
    Of generous womanhood that fits all time
    That too is costly ware; majolica
    Of deft design, to please a lordly eye:
    The smile, you see, is perfect--wonderful
    As mere Faience! a table ornament
    To suit the richest mounting."


Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally
drive into Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity
such as occur to every lady of any wealth when she lives within three
miles of a town.  Two days after that scene in the Yew-tree Walk, she
determined to use such an opportunity in order if possible to see
Lydgate, and learn from him whether her husband had really felt any
depressing change of symptoms which he was concealing from her, and
whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost about himself.  She felt
almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another, but the
dread of being without it--the dread of that ignorance which would make
her unjust or hard--overcame every scruple.  That there had been some
crisis in her husband's mind she was certain: he had the very next day
begun a new method of arranging his notes, and had associated her quite
newly in carrying out his plan.  Poor Dorothea needed to lay up stores
of patience.

It was about four o'clock when she drove to Lydgate's house in Lowick
Gate, wishing, in her immediate doubt of finding him at home, that she
had written beforehand.  And he was not at home.

"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea, who had never, that she knew
of, seen Rosamond, but now remembered the fact of the marriage.  Yes,
Mrs. Lydgate was at home.

"I will go in and speak to her, if she will allow me.  Will you ask her
if she can see me--see Mrs. Casaubon, for a few minutes?"

When the servant had gone to deliver that message, Dorothea could hear
sounds of music through an open window--a few notes from a man's voice
and then a piano bursting into roulades.  But the roulades broke off
suddenly, and then the servant came back saying that Mrs. Lydgate would
be happy to see Mrs. Casaubon.

When the drawing-room door opened and Dorothea entered, there was a
sort of contrast not infrequent in country life when the habits of the
different ranks were less blent than now.  Let those who know, tell us
exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days of mild
autumn--that thin white woollen stuff soft to the touch and soft to the
eye.  It always seemed to have been lately washed, and to smell of the
sweet hedges--was always in the shape of a pelisse with sleeves hanging
all out of the fashion.  Yet if she had entered before a still audience
as Imogene or Cato's daughter, the dress might have seemed right
enough: the grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her
simply parted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then
in the fate of women, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold
trencher we call a halo.  By the present audience of two persons, no
dramatic heroine could have been expected with more interest than Mrs.
Casaubon.  To Rosamond she was one of those county divinities not
mixing with Middlemarch mortality, whose slightest marks of manner or
appearance were worthy of her study; moreover, Rosamond was not without
satisfaction that Mrs. Casaubon should have an opportunity of studying
_her_. What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen by the
best judges? and since Rosamond had received the highest compliments at
Sir Godwin Lydgate's, she felt quite confident of the impression she
must make on people of good birth.  Dorothea put out her hand with her
usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate's lovely
bride--aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance, but
seeing him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle.  The gentleman
was too much occupied with the presence of the one woman to reflect on
the contrast between the two--a contrast that would certainly have been
striking to a calm observer.  They were both tall, and their eyes were
on a level; but imagine Rosamond's infantine blondness and wondrous
crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so
perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large
embroidered collar which it was to be hoped all beholders would know
the price of, her small hands duly set off with rings, and that
controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive
substitute for simplicity.

"Thank you very much for allowing me to interrupt you," said Dorothea,
immediately.  "I am anxious to see Mr. Lydgate, if possible, before I
go home, and I hoped that you might possibly tell me where I could find
him, or even allow me to wait for him, if you expect him soon."

"He is at the New Hospital," said Rosamond; "I am not sure how soon he
will come home.  But I can send for him."

"Will you let me go and fetch him?" said Will Ladislaw, coming forward.
He had already taken up his hat before Dorothea entered.  She colored
with surprise, but put out her hand with a smile of unmistakable
pleasure, saying--

"I did not know it was you: I had no thought of seeing you here."

"May I go to the Hospital and tell Mr. Lydgate that you wish to see
him?" said Will.

"It would be quicker to send the carriage for him," said Dorothea, "if
you will be kind enough to give the message to the coachman."

Will was moving to the door when Dorothea, whose mind had flashed in an
instant over many connected memories, turned quickly and said, "I will
go myself, thank you.  I wish to lose no time before getting home
again.  I will drive to the Hospital and see Mr. Lydgate there.  Pray
excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate.  I am very much obliged to you."

Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she left
the room hardly conscious of what was immediately around her--hardly
conscious that Will opened the door for her and offered her his arm to
lead her to the carriage.  She took the arm but said nothing.  Will was
feeling rather vexed and miserable, and found nothing to say on his
side.  He handed her into the carriage in silence, they said good-by,
and Dorothea drove away.

In the five minutes' drive to the Hospital she had time for some
reflections that were quite new to her.  Her decision to go, and her
preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that
there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any
further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to
mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate was a
matter of concealment.  That was all that had been explicitly in her
mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort.  Now that she
was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man's voice and the
accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning
on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder
that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her
husband's absence.  And then she could not help remembering that he had
passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there
be any unfitness in the fact?  But Will was Mr. Casaubon's relative,
and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness.  Still there had
been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that
Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin's visits during his own absence.
"Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things," said poor Dorothea to
herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.
She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so
clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled.  But the carriage stopped
at the gate of the Hospital.  She was soon walking round the grass
plots with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong bent which
had made her seek for this interview.

Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it
clearly enough.  His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here
for the first time there had come a chance which had set him at a
disadvantage.  It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was
not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen him under
circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely occupied
with her.  He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the
circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life.  But that was
not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town,
he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position
requiring that he should know everybody and everything.  Lydgate was
really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and
he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling
upon.  Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had
descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper.  It was mortifying.  Will
was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for
Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from
her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to
the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome
and Britain.  Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy
in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,
like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--solid
as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as
the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.  And Will was
of a temperament to feel keenly the presence of subtleties: a man of
clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, that for the first
time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him had sprung up
in Dorothea's mind, and that their silence, as he conducted her to the
carriage, had had a chill in it.  Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and
jealousy, had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her
socially.  Confound Casaubon!

Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking
irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated herself
at her work-table, said--

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.  May I come
another day and just finish about the rendering of 'Lungi dal caro
bene'?"

"I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond.  "But I am sure you
admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one.  I quite envy
your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon.  Is she very clever?  She looks
as if she were."

"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.

"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she
were handsome.  What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you
are with Mrs. Casaubon?"

"Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs.
Lydgate.  "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her
attributes--one is conscious of her presence."

"I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond,
dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness.  "He will come back and
think nothing of me."

"That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto.  Mrs.
Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with her."

"You are a devout worshipper, I perceive.  You often see her, I
suppose."

"No," said Will, almost pettishly.  "Worship is usually a matter of
theory rather than of practice.  But I am practising it to excess just
at this moment--I must really tear myself away."

"Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear the music,
and I cannot enjoy it so well without him."

When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of
him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands, "Mr. Ladislaw was
here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in.  He seemed vexed.  Do
you think he disliked her seeing him at our house?  Surely your
position is more than equal to his--whatever may be his relation to the
Casaubons."

"No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed, Ladislaw is
a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella."

"Music apart, he is not always very agreeable.  Do you like him?"

"Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
bric-a-brac, but likable."

"Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon."

"Poor devil!" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears.

Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world,
especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood
had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone
costumes--that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and
enslave men.  At that time young ladies in the country, even when
educated at Mrs. Lemon's, read little French literature later than
Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent
illumination over the scandals of life.  Still, vanity, with a woman's
whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight
hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite
conquests.  How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage
with a husband as crown-prince by your side--himself in fact a
subject--while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their
rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!  But
Rosamond's romance turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and
it was enough to enjoy his assured subjection.  When he said, "Poor
devil!" she asked, with playful curiosity--

"Why so?"

"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
He only neglects his work and runs up bills."

"I am sure you do not neglect your work.  You are always at the
Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's
quarrel; and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope
and phials.  Confess you like those things better than me."

"Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be
something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate, letting his
hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking at her with
affectionate gravity.  "I shall make you learn my favorite bit from an
old poet--

        'Why should our pride make such a stir to be
         And be forgot?  What good is like to this,
         To do worthy the writing, and to write
         Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?'

What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,--and to write out
myself what I have done.  A man must work, to do that, my pet."

"Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you
to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch.  You
cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working.  But we
cannot live like hermits.  You are not discontented with me, Tertius?"

"No, dear, no.  I am too entirely contented."

"But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?"

"Merely to ask about her husband's health.  But I think she is going to
be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred
a-year."



    I would not creep along the coast but steer
    Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.


When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New
Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs of
change in Mr. Casaubon's bodily condition beyond the mental sign of
anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was silent for a few
moments, wondering whether she had said or done anything to rouse this
new anxiety.  Lydgate, not willing to let slip an opportunity of
furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say--

"I don't know whether your or Mr.--Casaubon's attention has been drawn
to the needs of our New Hospital.  Circumstances have made it seem
rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault:
it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other
medical men.  I think you are generally interested in such things, for
I remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you at Tipton
Grange before your marriage, you were asking me some questions about
the way in which the health of the poor was affected by their miserable
housing."

"Yes, indeed," said Dorothea, brightening.  "I shall be quite grateful
to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things a little
better.  Everything of that sort has slipped away from me since I have
been married.  I mean," she said, after a moment's hesitation, "that
the people in our village are tolerably comfortable, and my mind has
been too much taken up for me to inquire further.  But here--in such a
place as Middlemarch--there must be a great deal to be done."

"There is everything to be done," said Lydgate, with abrupt energy.
"And this Hospital is a capital piece of work, due entirely to Mr.
Bulstrode's exertions, and in a great degree to his money.  But one man
can't do everything in a scheme of this sort.  Of course he looked
forward to help.  And now there's a mean, petty feud set up against the
thing in the town, by certain persons who want to make it a failure."

"What can be their reasons?" said Dorothea, with naive surprise.

"Chiefly Mr. Bulstrode's unpopularity, to begin with.  Half the town
would almost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him.  In this
stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done
unless it is done by their own set.  I had no connection with Bulstrode
before I came here.  I look at him quite impartially, and I see that he
has some notions--that he has set things on foot--which I can turn to
good public purpose.  If a fair number of the better educated men went
to work with the belief that their observations might contribute to the
reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see a change
for the better.  That's my point of view.  I hold that by refusing to
work with Mr. Bulstrode I should be turning my back on an opportunity
of making my profession more generally serviceable."

"I quite agree with you," said Dorothea, at once fascinated by the
situation sketched in Lydgate's words.  "But what is there against Mr.
Bulstrode?  I know that my uncle is friendly with him."

"People don't like his religious tone," said Lydgate, breaking off
there.

"That is all the stronger reason for despising such an opposition,"
said Dorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of
the great persecutions.

"To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:--he
is masterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade,
which has complaints of its own that I know nothing about.  But what
has that to do with the question whether it would not be a fine thing
to establish here a more valuable hospital than any they have in the
county?  The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact
that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands.  Of course
I am glad of that.  It gives me an opportunity of doing some good
work,--and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me.  But the
consequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set
themselves tooth and nail against the Hospital, and not only refuse to
cooperate themselves, but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder
subscriptions."

"How very petty!" exclaimed Dorothea, indignantly.

"I suppose one must expect to fight one's way: there is hardly anything
to be done without it.  And the ignorance of people about here is
stupendous.  I don't lay claim to anything else than having used some
opportunities which have not come within everybody's reach; but there
is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer, and
happening to know something more than the old inhabitants.  Still, if I
believe that I can set going a better method of treatment--if I
believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries which may
be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base truckler
if I allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me.  And
the course is all the clearer from there being no salary in question to
put my persistence in an equivocal light."

"I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate," said Dorothea,
cordially.  "I feel sure I can help a little.  I have some money, and
don't know what to do with it--that is often an uncomfortable thought
to me.  I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose
like this.  How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure
will do great good!  I wish I could awake with that knowledge every
morning.  There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly
see the good of!"

There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea's voice as she spoke these
last words.  But she presently added, more cheerfully, "Pray come to
Lowick and tell us more of this.  I will mention the subject to Mr.
Casaubon.  I must hasten home now."

She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to
subscribe two hundred a-year--she had seven hundred a-year as the
equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage.  Mr.
Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the sum might
be disproportionate in relation to other good objects, but when
Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced.  He
did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctant to
give it.  If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through
the medium of another passion than the love of material property.

Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of
her conversation with him about the Hospital.  Mr. Casaubon did not
question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what
had passed between Lydgate and himself "She knows that I know," said
the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit knowledge
only thrust further off any confidence between them.  He distrusted her
affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?



    It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their
    forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times
    present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do,
    without the borrowed help and satire of times past;
    condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions
    of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue
    the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal,
    and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem
    to indigitate and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE:
    Pseudodoxia Epidemica.


That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to
Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different
lights.  He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded
prejudice.  Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a
determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that
vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay
representative--a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from
religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of
human action.  These might be called the ministerial views.  But
oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which
need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw
forever on the vasts of ignorance.  What the opposition in Middlemarch
said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a
great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody
shall not be an originator; but there were differences which
represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.
Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the
Tankard in Slaughter Lane.

Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to
poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your
leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted
to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,
who had money in trust before her marriage--a poor tale for a doctor,
who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with
you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
were gone.  If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what
was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion
was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits
to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare
with their pitch-plaisters--such a hanging business as that was not
wanted in Middlemarch!

And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter
Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic
public-house--the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop's--was
the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to
the vote whether its long-standing medical man, "Doctor Gambit," should
not be cashiered in favor of "this Doctor Lydgate," who was capable of
performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether
given up by other practitioners.  But the balance had been turned
against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that
this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal
recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors.  In the
course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public
sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop's was an index.

A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of
Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,
depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the
stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not
the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence.
Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn
threadbare, like old Featherstone's, had been at once inclined to try
him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor's bills, thought
agreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him
without stint if the children's temper wanted a dose, occasions when
the old practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined
to employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever.  Some considered
that he might do more than others "where there was liver;"--at least
there would be no harm in getting a few bottles of "stuff" from him,
since if these proved useless it would still be possible to return to
the Purifying Pills, which kept you alive if they did not remove the
yellowness.  But these were people of minor importance.  Good
Middlemarch families were of course not going to change their doctor
without reason shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did
not feel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his
successor, objecting that he was "not likely to be equal to Peacock."

But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars
enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to
intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being
of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden,
like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a
note of exclamation at the end.  The cubic feet of oxygen yearly
swallowed by a full-grown man--what a shudder they might have created
in some Middlemarch circles!  "Oxygen! nobody knows what that may
be--is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?  And yet there are
people who say quarantine is no good!"

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense
drugs.  This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive
distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with
whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have
counted on having the law on their side against a man who without
calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a
charge on drugs.  But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to
foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity;
and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though
not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the
subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation
of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the
character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if
their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out
long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.

"It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost
as mischievous as quacks," said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly.  "To get
their own bread they must overdose the king's lieges; and that's a bad
sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey--undermines the constitution in a fatal
way."

Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of
outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also
asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical point of
view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an
exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid,
and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging
kind--jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence
from letting out the full force of his mind.  It was Mr. Mawmsey's
friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of
Lydgate's reply.  But let the wise be warned against too great
readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake,
lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the
stirrup, and Mr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had
known who the king's lieges were, giving his "Good morning, sir,
good-morning, sir," with the air of one who saw everything clearly
enough.  But in truth his views were perturbed.  For years he had been
paying bills with strictly made items, so that for every half-crown and
eighteen-pence he was certain something measurable had been delivered.
He had done this with satisfaction, including it among his
responsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill
than usual as a dignity worth mentioning.  Moreover, in addition to the
massive benefit of the drugs to "self and family," he had enjoyed the
pleasure of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so
as to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit--a
practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and
especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey had
the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring, he was wont
to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them.

Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which
appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop, when they
were recited to Mrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as
a fertile mother,--generally under attendance more or less frequent
from Mr. Gambit, and occasionally having attacks which required Dr.
Minchin.

"Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?"
said Mrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling.  "I should like
him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn't take
strengthening medicine for a month beforehand.  Think of what I have to
provide for calling customers, my dear!"--here Mrs. Mawmsey turned to
an intimate female friend who sat by--"a large veal pie--a stuffed
fillet--a round of beef--ham, tongue, et cetera, et cetera!  But what
keeps me up best is the pink mixture, not the brown.  I wonder, Mr.
Mawmsey, with _your_ experience, you could have patience to listen.  I
should have told him at once that I knew a little better than that."

"No, no, no," said Mr. Mawmsey; "I was not going to tell him my
opinion.  Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto.  But he
didn't know who he was talking to.  I was not to be turned on _his_
finger.  People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as
well say, 'Mawmsey, you're a fool.'  But I smile at it: I humor
everybody's weak place.  If physic had done harm to self and family, I
should have found it out by this time."

The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic
was of no use.

"Indeed!" said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise.  (He
was a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) "How
will he cure his patients, then?"

"That is what I say," returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight
to her speech by loading her pronouns.  "Does _he_ suppose that people
will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?"

Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit, including
very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of
course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare
time and personal narrative had never been charged for.  So he replied,
humorously--

"Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know."

"Not one that I would employ," said Mrs. Mawmsey.  "_Others_ may do as
they please."

Hence Mr. Gambit could go away from the chief grocer's without fear of
rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those
hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own
honesty, and that it might be worth some people's while to show him up.
Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the
smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments
to a balance.  And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate
up until he knew how.  He had not indeed great resources of education,
and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional
contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the
breathing apparatus "longs."

Other medical men felt themselves more capable.  Mr. Toller shared the
highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family:
there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line of
retail trade.  Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest
way in the world of taking things which might be supposed to annoy him,
being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept a good house, was
very fond of a little sporting when he could get it, very friendly with
Mr. Hawley, and hostile to Mr. Bulstrode.  It may seem odd that with
such pleasant habits he should have been given to the heroic treatment,
bleeding and blistering and starving his patients, with a dispassionate
disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favored the
opinion of his ability among his patients, who commonly observed that
Mr. Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you
could desire: no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his
profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came, he _did_
something.  He was a great favorite in his own circle, and whatever he
implied to any one's disadvantage told doubly from his careless
ironical tone.

He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, "Ah!" when he was told
that Mr. Peacock's successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and
Mr. Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr.
Toller said, laughingly, "Dibbitts will get rid of his stale drugs,
then.  I'm fond of little Dibbitts--I'm glad he's in luck."

"I see your meaning, Toller," said Mr. Hackbutt, "and I am entirely of
your opinion.  I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that
effect.  A medical man should be responsible for the quality of the
drugs consumed by his patients.  That is the rationale of the system of
charging which has hitherto obtained; and nothing is more offensive
than this ostentation of reform, where there is no real amelioration."

"Ostentation, Hackbutt?" said Mr. Toller, ironically.  "I don't see
that.  A man can't very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes
in.  There's no reform in the matter: the question is, whether the
profit on the drugs is paid to the medical man by the druggist or by
the patient, and whether there shall be extra pay under the name of
attendance."

"Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug," said
Mr. Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.

Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a
party, getting the more irritable in consequence.

"As to humbug, Hawley," he said, "that's a word easy to fling about.
But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own
nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general
practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn't be a gentleman.  I throw back
the imputation with scorn.  I say, the most ungentlemanly trick a man
can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with
innovations which are a libel on their time-honored procedure.  That is
my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who
contradicts me."  Mr. Wrench's voice had become exceedingly sharp.

"I can't oblige you there, Wrench," said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his
hands into his trouser-pockets.

"My dear fellow," said Mr. Toller, striking in pacifically, and looking
at Mr. Wrench, "the physicians have their toes trodden on more than we
have.  If you come to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague."

"Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these
infringements?" said Mr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer
his lights.  "How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?"

"Nothing to be done there," said Mr. Hawley.  "I looked into it for
Sprague.  You'd only break your nose against a damned judge's decision."

"Pooh! no need of law," said Mr. Toller.  "So far as practice is
concerned the attempt is an absurdity.  No patient will like
it--certainly not Peacock's, who have been used to depletion.  Pass the
wine."

Mr. Toller's prediction was partly verified.  If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey,
who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed
declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him
in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did "use all the
means he might use" in the case.  Even good Mr. Powderell, who in his
constant charity of interpretation was inclined to esteem Lydgate the
more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit of a better plan, had his
mind disturbed with doubts during his wife's attack of erysipelas, and
could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr. Peacock on a
similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which were not
otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs.
Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in a
remarkably hot August.  At last, indeed, in the conflict between his
desire not to hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no "means" should be
lacking, he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon's Purifying
Pills, an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease
at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood.  This
co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate, and Mr.
Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hoping that it
might be attended with a blessing.

But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped by
what we mortals rashly call good fortune.  I suppose no doctor ever
came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody--cures
which may be called fortune's testimonials, and deserve as much
credit as the written or printed kind.  Various patients got well while
Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it
was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the
merit of bringing people back from the brink of death.  The trash
talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it
gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and
unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the
simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his
own part of ignorant puffing.  But even his proud outspokenness was
checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the
interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and "good fortune"
insisted on using those interpretations.

Mrs. Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming
symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr. Minchin called, asked him to see
her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary;
whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of
tumor, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy,
calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the stay maker and
his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr. Minchin's paper, and
by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the
neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumor at
first declared to be as large and hard as a duck's egg, but later in
the day to be about the size of "your fist." Most hearers agreed that
it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of
"squitchineal" as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body
when taken enough of into the inside--the oil by gradually "soopling,"
the squitchineal by eating away.

Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened to
be one of Lydgate's days there.  After questioning and examining her,
Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, "It's not tumor:
it's cramp."  He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told
her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs.
Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was
in need of good food.

But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the
supposed tumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only
wandered to another region with angrier pain.  The staymaker's wife
went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy
in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went
to work again.  But the case continued to be described as one of tumor
in Churchyard Lane and other streets--nay, by Mrs. Larcher also; for
when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin, he
naturally did not like to say, "The case was not one of tumor, and I
was mistaken in describing it as such," but answered, "Indeed! ah!  I
saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind." He had been inwardly
annoyed, however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he
had recommended two days before, to hear from the house-surgeon, a
youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what
had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general
practitioner to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner,
and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably
inattentive to etiquette.  Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for
valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such
rectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equal
qualifications.  But report took up this amazing case of tumor, not
clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for
being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate's
method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in
the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and
rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumor both hard and
obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.

How could Lydgate help himself?  It is offensive to tell a lady when
she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether
mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement.  And to have entered into
the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical
propriety.  Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by
that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.

In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an
every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he
won.  The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having
been a patient of Mr. Peacock's, sent for Lydgate, whom he had
expressed his intention to patronize.  Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a
good subject for trying the expectant theory upon--watching the course
of an interesting disease when left as much as possible to itself, so
that the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air
with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would
like to be taken into his medical man's confidence, and be represented
as a partner in his own cure.  The auctioneer heard, without much
surprise, that his was a constitution which (always with due watching)
might be left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a
disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he
probably had the rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test
of a rational procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary
functions a general benefit to society.

Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view
that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.

"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether
ignorant of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority of
expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing.  And he
went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much
sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the
importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects
for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited
to the dignity of his secretions.  For Lydgate was acute enough to
indulge him with a little technical talk.

It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a
disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the
strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward
in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of
patient he had to deal with.  The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,
and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it.
He had caught the words "expectant method," and rang chimes on this and
other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew a
thing or two more than the rest of the doctors--was far better versed
in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers."

This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy's illness had given
to Mr. Wrench's enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground.
The new-comer already threatened to be a nuisance in the shape of
rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical
criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had
something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions.  His
practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the first the
report of his high family had led to his being pretty generally
invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the
best houses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed
always to end in a mutual attachment.  There was hardly ever so much
unanimity among them as in the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant
young fellow, and yet ready for the sake of ultimately predominating to
show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode.  That Mr. Farebrother, whose
name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended
Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother's
unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.

Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust
at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the
direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because
there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and
pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote having refused help towards
the building, on the ground that they preferred giving to the Old
Infirmary.  Mr. Bulstrode met all the expenses, and had ceased to be
sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out his notions of
improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had
had to spend large sums, and the building had lingered.  Caleb Garth
had undertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the
interior fittings were begun had retired from the management of the
business; and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however
Bulstrode might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry
and masonry, and had a notion both of drains and chimneys.  In fact,
the Hospital had become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode, and
he would willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sum that he
might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another
favorite object which also required money for its accomplishment: he
wished to buy some land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, and
therefore he wished to get considerable contributions towards
maintaining the Hospital.  Meanwhile he framed his plan of management.
The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in all its forms; Lydgate was
to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free authority
to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies,
particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other
medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to
contravene Lydgate's ultimate decisions; and the general management was
to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors associated with
Mr. Bulstrode, who were to have votes in the ratio of their
contributions, the Board itself filling up any vacancy in its numbers,
and no mob of small contributors being admitted to a share of
government.

There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the
town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital.

"Very well," said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, "we have a capital
house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we'll
get Webbe from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them,
to come over twice a-week, and in case of any exceptional operation,
Protheroe will come from Brassing.  I must work the harder, that's all,
and I have given up my post at the Infirmary.  The plan will flourish
in spite of them, and then they'll be glad to come in.  Things can't
last as they are: there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then
young fellows may be glad to come and study here."  Lydgate was in high
spirits.

"I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr.
Bulstrode.  "While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigor,
you shall have my unfailing support.  And I have humble confidence that
the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts against the spirit
of evil in this town will not be withdrawn.  Suitable directors to
assist me I have no doubt of securing.  Mr. Brooke of Tipton has
already given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he
has not specified the sum--probably not a great one.  But he will be a
useful member of the board."

A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate
nothing, and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.

The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now.  Neither Dr.
Sprague nor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate's knowledge, or
his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was his
arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable.  They implied
that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless
innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the
charlatan.

The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop.  In
those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr. St.
John Long, "noblemen and gentlemen" attesting his extraction of a fluid
like mercury from the temples of a patient.

Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that "Bulstrode
had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure
to like other sorts of charlatans."

"Yes, indeed, I can imagine," said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number of
thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; "there are so many
of that sort.  I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make
people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked."

"No, no," said Mr. Toller, "Cheshire was all right--all fair and above
board.  But there's St. John Long--that's the kind of fellow we call a
charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a
fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other
people.  The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get
quicksilver out of it."

"Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions!"
said Mrs. Taft.

After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played
even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much
more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and
sevens of hospital patients.  Especially it was to be expected, as the
landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their
dead bodies.  For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died
apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the
symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body,
and thus gave an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where
that lady had long resided on an income such as made this association
of her body with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her
memory.

Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
Hospital to Dorothea.  We see that he was bearing enmity and silly
misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by
his good share of success.

"They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially in Mr.
Farebrother's study.  "I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends
I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our
wants.  By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no
seductions now away from home and work.  And I am more and more
convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous
origin of all the tissues.  Raspail and others are on the same track,
and I have been losing time."

"I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr. Farebrother, who had been
puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; "but as to the
hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you are prudent."

"How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes before me
to do.  I can't help people's ignorance and spite, any more than
Vesalius could.  It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly
conclusions which nobody can foresee."

"Quite true; I didn't mean that.  I meant only two things.  One is,
keep yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you
can go on doing good work of your own by his help; but don't get tied.
Perhaps it seems like personal feeling in me to say so--and there's a
good deal of that, I own--but personal feeling is not always in the
wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an
opinion."

"Bulstrode is nothing to me," said Lydgate, carelessly, "except on
public grounds.  As to getting very closely united to him, I am not
fond enough of him for that.  But what was the other thing you meant?"
said Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and
feeling in no great need of advice.

"Why, this.  Take care--experto crede--take care not to get hampered
about money matters.  I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you
don't like my playing at cards so much for money.  You are right enough
there.  But try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven't
got.  I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to
assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and
sermonizing on it."

Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother's hints very cordially, though he would
hardly have borne them from another man.  He could not help remembering
that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable,
and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.
The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the
stock of wine for a long while.

Many thoughts cheered him at that time--and justly.  A man conscious of
enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the
memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds,
and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.  At
home, that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother,
he had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and
his hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating
attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after
another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he
was!) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious
sea-breezes.

There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one
might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.  In his dark eyes
and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the
fulness of contemplative thought--the mind not searching, but
beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close
to the sofa and opposite her husband's face.

"Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands
before her and putting on a little air of meekness.

"Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes
and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving.  Rosamond's presence
at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,
and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull.


"What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing her
face nearer to his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

"I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three
hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy."

"I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head.  "We used to play at
guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon's, but not anatomists."

"I'll tell you.  His name was Vesalius.  And the only way he could get
to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from
graveyards and places of execution."

"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, "I am
very glad you are not Vesalius.  I should have thought he might find
some less horrible way than that."

"No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much
notice of her answer.  "He could only get a complete skeleton by
snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and
burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of
night."

"I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond, half
playfully, half anxiously, "else I shall have you getting up in the
night to go to St. Peter's churchyard.  You know how angry you told me
the people were about Mrs. Goby.  You have enemies enough already."

"So had Vesalius, Rosy.  No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch
are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon
Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen
was wrong.  They called him a liar and a poisonous monster.  But the
facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of
them."

"And what happened to him afterwards?" said Rosamond, with some
interest.

"Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last.  And they did
exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his
work.  Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to
take a great chair at Padua.  He died rather miserably."

There was a moment's pause before Rosamond said, "Do you know, Tertius,
I often wish you had not been a medical man."

"Nay, Rosy, don't say that," said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.
"That is like saying you wish you had married another man."

"Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have
been something else.  And your cousins at Quallingham all think that
you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession."

"The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!" said Lydgate, with
scorn.  "It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort
to you."

"Still," said Rosamond, "I do _not_ think it is a nice profession,
dear."  We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

"It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond," said Lydgate,
gravely.  "And to say that you love me without loving the medical man
in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach
but don't like its flavor.  Don't say that again, dear, it pains me."

"Very well, Doctor Grave-face," said Rosy, dimpling, "I will declare in
future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things
in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying
miserably."

"No, no, not so bad as that," said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and
petting her resignedly.



    Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos
    aquello que podremos.

    Since we cannot get what we like, let us like
    what we can get.
                                     --Spanish Proverb.


While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command,
felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch,
Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national
struggle for another kind of Reform.

By the time that Lord John Russell's measure was being debated in the
House of Commons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch,
and a new definition of parties which might show a decided change of
balance if a new election came.  And there were some who already
predicted this event, declaring that a Reform Bill would never be
carried by the actual Parliament.  This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on
to Mr. Brooke as a reason for congratulation that he had not yet tried
his strength at the hustings.

"Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year," said Will.
"The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question
of Reform has set in.  There is likely to be another election before
long, and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its
head.  What we have to work at now is the 'Pioneer' and political
meetings."

"Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here,"
said Mr. Brooke.  "Only I want to keep myself independent about Reform,
you know; I don't want to go too far.  I want to take up
Wilberforce's and Romilly's line, you know, and work at Negro
Emancipation, Criminal Law--that kind of thing.  But of course I should
support Grey."

"If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take
what the situation offers," said Will.  "If everybody pulled for his
own bit against everybody else, the whole question would go to tatters."

"Yes, yes, I agree with you--I quite take that point of view.  I should
put it in that light.  I should support Grey, you know.  But I don't
want to change the balance of the constitution, and I don't think Grey
would."

"But that is what the country wants," said Will.  "Else there would be
no meaning in political unions or any other movement that knows what
it's about.  It wants to have a House of Commons which is not weighted
with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives of the
other interests.  And as to contending for a reform short of that, it
is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already begun to
thunder."

"That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it.  Write that down,
now.  We must begin to get documents about the feeling of the country,
as well as the machine-breaking and general distress."

"As to documents," said Will, "a two-inch card will hold plenty.  A few
rows of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will
show the rate at which the political determination of the people is
growing."

"Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw.  That is an
idea, now: write it out in the 'Pioneer.' Put the figures and deduce
the misery, you know; and put the other figures and deduce--and so on.
You have a way of putting things.  Burke, now:--when I think of Burke,
I can't help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough to give you,
Ladislaw.  You'd never get elected, you know.  And we shall always want
talent in the House: reform as we will, we shall always want talent.
That avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a little like Burke.  I
want that sort of thing--not ideas, you know, but a way of putting
them."

"Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing," said Ladislaw, "if they were
always in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke at hand."

Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison, even from
Mr. Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh to be
conscious of expressing one's self better than others and never to have
it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right
thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather
fortifying.  Will felt that his literary refinements were usually
beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception; nevertheless, he was
beginning thoroughly to like the work of which when he began he had
said to himself rather languidly, "Why not?"--and he studied the
political situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to
poetic metres or mediaevalism.  It is undeniable that but for the
desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what
else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the
needs of the English people or criticising English statesmanship: he
would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several
dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and
finding it too artificial, beginning to copy "bits" from old pictures,
leaving off because they were "no good," and observing that, after all,
self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have
been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general.  Our
sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place
of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not
a matter of indifference.

Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone
worthy of continuous effort.  His nature warmed easily in the presence
of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the
easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit.  In
spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather
happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for
practical purposes, and making the "Pioneer" celebrated as far as
Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not
worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).

Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was
relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and
retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.

"Shift the pegs a little," he said to himself, "and Mr. Brooke might be
in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order
of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same
pattern.  I am better here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would
have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a
precedent too rigid for me to react upon.  I don't care for prestige or
high pay."

As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the
sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his
position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise
wherever he went.  That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he
had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their
accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his irritation had gone out
towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose
caste.  "I never had any caste," he would have said, if that prophecy
had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone
like breath in his transparent skin.  But it is one thing to like
defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the "Pioneer" was
tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon's view.  Will's relationship in that
distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate's high connections, serve
as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumored that young Ladislaw
was Mr. Casaubon's nephew or cousin, it was also rumored that "Mr.
Casaubon would have nothing to do with him."

"Brooke has taken him up," said Mr. Hawley, "because that is what no
man in his senses could have expected.  Casaubon has devilish good
reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young
fellow whose bringing-up he paid for.  Just like Brooke--one of those
fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse."

And some oddities of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support
Mr. Keck, the editor of the "Trumpet," in asserting that Ladislaw, if
the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained,
which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his
speech when he got on to a platform--as he did whenever he had an
opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid
Englishmen generally.  It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip of a
fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the
hour against institutions "which had existed when he was in his
cradle."  And in a leading article of the "Trumpet," Keck characterized
Ladislaw's speech at a Reform meeting as "the violence of an
energumen--a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks
the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge
which was of the cheapest and most recent description."

"That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck," said Dr. Sprague, with
sarcastic intentions.  "But what is an energumen?"

"Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution," said Keck.

This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other
habits which became matter of remark.  He had a fondness, half
artistic, half affectionate, for little children--the smaller they were
on tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better
Will liked to surprise and please them.  We know that in Rome he was
given to ramble about among the poor people, and the taste did not quit
him in Middlemarch.

He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys
with their galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out,
little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him,
and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven.  This troop he had
led out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time, and since
the cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear day to gather
sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside, where he drew out a
small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised a Punch-and-Judy
drama with some private home-made puppets.  Here was one oddity.
Another was, that in houses where he got friendly, he was given to
stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt
to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such
an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously
mixed blood and general laxity.

But Will's articles and speeches naturally recommended him in families
which the new strictness of party division had marked off on the side
of Reform.  He was invited to Mr. Bulstrode's; but here he could not
lie down on the rug, and Mrs. Bulstrode felt that his mode of talking
about Catholic countries, as if there were any truce with Antichrist,
illustrated the usual tendency to unsoundness in intellectual men.

At Mr. Farebrother's, however, whom the irony of events had brought on
the same side with Bulstrode in the national movement, Will became a
favorite with the ladies; especially with little Miss Noble, whom it
was one of his oddities to escort when he met her in the street with
her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of the town, and
insisting on going with her to pay some call where she distributed her
small filchings from her own share of sweet things.

But the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was
Lydgate's. The two men were not at all alike, but they agreed none the
worse.  Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of
megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his
susceptibilities on those who took no notice of them.  With Rosamond,
on the other hand, he pouted and was wayward--nay, often
uncomplimentary, much to her inward surprise; nevertheless he was
gradually becoming necessary to her entertainment by his companionship
in her music, his varied talk, and his freedom from the grave
preoccupation which, with all her husband's tenderness and indulgence,
often made his manners unsatisfactory to her, and confirmed her dislike
of the medical profession.

Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the
people in the efficacy of "the bill," while nobody cared about the low
state of pathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions.
One evening in March, Rosamond in her cherry-colored dress with
swansdown trimming about the throat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate,
lately come in tired from his outdoor work, was seated sideways on an
easy-chair by the fire with one leg over the elbow, his brow looking a
little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columns of the "Pioneer,"
while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed, avoided looking
at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself had not a moody
disposition.  Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug contemplating the
curtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low the notes of "When
first I saw thy face;" while the house spaniel, also stretched out with
small choice of room, looked from between his paws at the usurper of
the rug with silent but strong objection.

Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper, and
said to Will, who had started up and gone to the table--

"It's no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw:
they only pick the more holes in his coat in the 'Trumpet.'"

"No matter; those who read the 'Pioneer' don't read the 'Trumpet,'"
said Will, swallowing his tea and walking about.  "Do you suppose the
public reads with a view to its own conversion?  We should have a
witches' brewing with a vengeance then--'Mingle, mingle, mingle,
mingle, You that mingle may'--and nobody would know which side he was
going to take."

"Farebrother says, he doesn't believe Brooke would get elected if the
opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring
another member out of the bag at the right moment."

"There's no harm in trying.  It's good to have resident members."

"Why?" said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient word
in a curt tone.

"They represent the local stupidity better," said Will, laughing, and
shaking his curls; "and they are kept on their best behavior in the
neighborhood.  Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good
things on his estate that he never would have done but for this
Parliamentary bite."

"He's not fitted to be a public man," said Lydgate, with contemptuous
decision.  "He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see
that at the Hospital.  Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives
him."

"That depends on how you fix your standard of public men," said Will.
"He's good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their
mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man--they only
want a vote."

"That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw--crying up a
measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a
part of the very disease that wants curing."

"Why not?  Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land
without knowing it," said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when
he had not thought of a question beforehand.

"That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of
hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it
whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to
carry it.  You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more
thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured
by a political hocus-pocus."

"That's very fine, my dear fellow.  But your cure must begin somewhere,
and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never
be reformed without this particular reform to begin with.  Look what
Stanley said the other day--that the House had been tinkering long
enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that
voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been
sold wholesale.  Wait for wisdom and conscience in public
agents--fiddlestick!  The only conscience we can trust to is the
massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work
is the wisdom of balancing claims.  That's my text--which side is
injured?  I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous
upholder of the wrong."

"That general talk about a particular case is mere question begging,
Ladislaw.  When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn't
follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout."

"I am not begging the question we are upon--whether we are to try for
nothing till we find immaculate men to work with.  Should you go on
that plan?  If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform
and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the
better motives or even the better brains?"

"Oh, of course," said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move
which he had often used himself, "if one did not work with such men as
are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion
in the town about Bulstrode were a true one, that would not make it
less true that he has the sense and the resolution to do what I think
ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about; but that is
the only ground on which I go with him," Lydgate added rather proudly,
bearing in mind Mr. Farebrother's remarks.  "He is nothing to me
otherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground--I would keep
clear of that."

"Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?" said Will
Ladislaw, nettled, and turning sharp round.  For the first time he felt
offended with Lydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have
declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr.
Brooke.

"Not at all," said Lydgate, "I was simply explaining my own action.  I
meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives
and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal
independence, and that he is not working for his private
interest--either place or money."

"Then, why don't you extend your liberality to others?" said Will,
still nettled.  "My personal independence is as important to me as
yours is to you.  You have no more reason to imagine that I have
personal expectations from Brooke, than I have to imagine that you have
personal expectations from Bulstrode.  Motives are points of honor, I
suppose--nobody can prove them.  But as to money and place in the
world." Will ended, tossing back his head, "I think it is pretty clear
that I am not determined by considerations of that sort."

"You quite mistake me, Ladislaw," said Lydgate, surprised.  He had been
preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what
Ladislaw might infer on his own account.  "I beg your pardon for
unintentionally annoying you.  In fact, I should rather attribute to
you a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests.  On the
political question, I referred simply to intellectual bias."

"How very unpleasant you both are this evening!" said Rosamond.  "I
cannot conceive why money should have been referred to.  Polities and
Medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon.  You can both
of you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each other on
those two topics."

Rosamond looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring the
bell, and then crossing to her work-table.

"Poor Rosy!" said Lydgate, putting out his hand to her as she was
passing him.  "Disputation is not amusing to cherubs.  Have some music.
Ask Ladislaw to sing with you."

When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, "What put you out of
temper this evening, Tertius?"

"Me?  It was Ladislaw who was out of temper.  He is like a bit of
tinder."

"But I mean, before that.  Something had vexed you before you came in,
you looked cross.  And that made you begin to dispute with Mr.
Ladislaw.  You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius."

"Do I?  Then I am a brute," said Lydgate, caressing her penitently.

"What vexed you?"

"Oh, outdoor things--business."  It was really a letter insisting on
the payment of a bill for furniture.  But Rosamond was expecting to
have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.



    Was never true love loved in vain,
    For truest love is highest gain.
    No art can make it: it must spring
    Where elements are fostering.
        So in heaven's spot and hour
        Springs the little native flower,
        Downward root and upward eye,
        Shapen by the earth and sky.


It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
little discussion with Lydgate.  Its effect when he went to his own
rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under
a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled
in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke.  Hesitations
before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to
every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came
his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which still kept him restless.  Was he
not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than
ever conscious of being something better than a fool?  And for what end?

Well, for no definite end.  True, he had dreamy visions of
possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and
thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find
images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting
it with dread.  But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with
a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the
roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own
choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have
thought rather idiotic.  The way in which he made a sort of happiness
for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this.  It
may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision
of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea might become
a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might
turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting
power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and
follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our
practical heaven.  It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain
thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in
the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of
ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between
himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.
Casaubon.  And there were yet other reasons.  Will, we know, could not
bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once
exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea
looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in
thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change
which must somehow change her.  Do we not shun the street version of a
fine melody?--or shrink from the news that the rarity--some bit of
chiselling or engraving perhaps--which we have dwelt on even with
exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is
really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day
possession?  Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our
emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called
the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to
have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the
inheritance of a fortune.  What others might have called the futility
of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was
conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own
experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.
Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no
other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have
written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he
might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,--

        "Queens hereafter might be glad to live
         Upon the alms of her superfluous praise."

But this result was questionable.  And what else could he do for
Dorothea?  What was his devotion worth to her?  It was impossible to
tell.  He would not go out of her reach.  He saw no creature among her
friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple
confidence as to him.  She had once said that she would like him to
stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss
around her.

This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations.  But he was
not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own
resolve.  He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular
night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr.
Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be,
and this was always associated with the other ground of
irritation--that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for
Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her.  Whereupon, not being
able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own
strongest bias and said, "I am a fool."

Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,
he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of
what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the
morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see
her.  He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational
morning light, Objection said--

"That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon's prohibition to visit
Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased."

"Nonsense!" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous for him to
hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring
morning.  And Dorothea will be glad."

"It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy
him or to see Dorothea."

"It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see
Dorothea?  Is he to have everything to himself and be always
comfortable?  Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to
do.  I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation;
besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew."

Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick
as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and
skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding
boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green
growths piercing the brown.  Everything seemed to know that it was
Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church.  Will easily felt
happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this time the thought of
vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face
break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine
on the water--though the occasion was not exemplary.  But most of us
are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is
odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his
personality excites in ourselves.  Will went along with a small book
under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but
chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and
coming out.  He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his
own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising.  The
words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday
experience:--

        "O me, O me, what frugal cheer
           My love doth feed upon!
         A touch, a ray, that is not here,
           A shadow that is gone:

        "A dream of breath that might be near,
           An inly-echoed tone,
         The thought that one may think me dear,
           The place where one was known,

        "The tremor of a banished fear,
           An ill that was not done--
         O me, O me, what frugal cheer
           My love doth feed upon!"

Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and
showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation
of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant
in uncertain promises.

The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into
the curate's pew before any one else arrived there.  But he was still
left alone in it when the congregation had assembled.  The curate's pew
was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel, and
Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked
round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year
to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with
more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and
there with age, but yet has young shoots.  Mr. Rigg's frog-face was
something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to
the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of
the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had
the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent
cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters
generally--the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the
black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all
betters, and the one most awful if offended.  Even in 1831 Lowick was
at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the
Sunday sermon.  The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church
in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who
expected him to make a figure in the singing.

Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the
short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same she had
worn in the Vatican.  Her face being, from her entrance, towards the
chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was
no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow
as she passed him.  To his own surprise Will felt suddenly
uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each
other.  Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon came out of the vestry,
and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felt
his paralysis more complete.  He could look nowhere except at the choir
in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps
pained, and he had made a wretched blunder.  It was no longer amusing
to vex Mr. Casaubon, who had the advantage probably of watching him and
seeing that he dared not turn his head.  Why had he not imagined this
beforehand?--but he could not expect that he should sit in that square
pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from
Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk.  Still he
called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be
impossible for him to look towards Dorothea--nay, that she might feel
his coming an impertinence.  There was no delivering himself from his
cage, however; and Will found his places and looked at his book as if
he had been a school-mistress, feeling that the morning service had
never been so immeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous,
out of temper, and miserable.  This was what a man got by worshipping
the sight of a woman!  The clerk observed with surprise that Mr.
Ladislaw did not join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he
might have a cold.

Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in
Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one
rose.  It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters" to go out first.
With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will
looked straight at Mr. Casaubon.  But that gentleman's eyes were on the
button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and
following her immediately without raising his eyelids.  Will's glance
had caught Dorothea's as she turned out of the pew, and again she
bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were
repressing tears.  Will walked out after them, but they went on towards
the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never
looking round.

It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back
sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in
the morning.  The lights were all changed for him both without and
within.



    Surely the golden hours are turning gray
    And dance no more, and vainly strive to run:
    I see their white locks streaming in the wind--
    Each face is haggard as it looks at me,
    Slow turning in the constant clasping round
    Storm-driven.


Dorothea's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly from
the perception that Mr. Casaubon was determined not to speak to his
cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served to mark more
strongly the alienation between them.  Will's coming seemed to her
quite excusable, nay, she thought it an amiable movement in him towards
a reconciliation which she herself had been constantly wishing for.  He
had probably imagined, as she had, that if Mr. Casaubon and he could
meet easily, they would shake hands and friendly intercourse might
return.  But now Dorothea felt quite robbed of that hope.  Will was
banished further than ever, for Mr. Casaubon must have been newly
embittered by this thrusting upon him of a presence which he refused to
recognize.

He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some difficulty
in breathing, and had not preached in consequence; she was not
surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent at luncheon, still less
that he made no allusion to Will Ladislaw.  For her own part she felt
that she could never again introduce that subject.  They usually spent
apart the hours between luncheon and dinner on a Sunday; Mr. Casaubon
in the library dozing chiefly, and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she
was wont to occupy herself with some of her favorite books.  There was
a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window--of various sorts,
from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon, to
her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year." But to-day
opened one after another, and could read none of them.  Everything
seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus--Jewish
antiquities--oh dear!--devout epigrams--the sacred chime of favorite
hymns--all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood: even the spring
flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon
clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the sustaining thoughts which
had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future
days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions.
It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that poor
Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual
effort demanded by her married life.  She was always trying to be what
her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she
was.  The thing that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have,
seemed to be always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted
and not shared by her husband it might as well have been denied.  About
Will Ladislaw there had been a difference between them from the first,
and it had ended, since Mr. Casaubon had so severely repulsed
Dorothea's strong feeling about his claims on the family property, by
her being convinced that she was in the right and her husband in the
wrong, but that she was helpless.  This afternoon the helplessness was
more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could
be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear.  She longed for work
which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and
now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb,
where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would
never see the light.  Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and
seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and
fellowship--turning his face towards her as he went.

Books were of no use.  Thinking was of no use.  It was Sunday, and she
could not have the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby.
There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and
Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.

After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud, Mr.
Casaubon proposed that they should go into the library, where, he said,
he had ordered a fire and lights.  He seemed to have revived, and to be
thinking intently.

In the library Dorothea observed that he had newly arranged a row of
his note-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand a
well-known volume, which was a table of contents to all the others.

"You will oblige me, my dear," he said, seating himself, "if instead of
other reading this evening, you will go through this aloud, pencil in
hand, and at each point where I say 'mark,' will make a cross with your
pencil.  This is the first step in a sifting process which I have long
had in view, and as we go on I shall be able to indicate to you certain
principles of selection whereby you will, I trust, have an intelligent
participation in my purpose."

This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his memorable
interview with Lydgate, that Mr. Casaubon's original reluctance to let
Dorothea work with him had given place to the contrary disposition,
namely, to demand much interest and labor from her.

After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, "We will take the
volume up-stairs--and the pencil, if you please--and in case of
reading in the night, we can pursue this task.  It is not wearisome to
you, I trust, Dorothea?"

"I prefer always reading what you like best to hear," said Dorothea,
who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in
reading or anything else which left him as joyless as ever.

It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics in
Dorothea impressed those around her, that her husband, with all his
jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of
her promises, and her power of devoting herself to her idea of the
right and best.  Of late he had begun to feel that these qualities were
a peculiar possession for himself, and he wanted to engross them.

The reading in the night did come.  Dorothea in her young weariness had
slept soon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light, which seemed
to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a
steep hill: she opened her eyes and saw her husband wrapped in his warm
gown seating himself in the arm-chair near the fire-place where the
embers were still glowing.  He had lit two candles, expecting that
Dorothea would awake, but not liking to rouse her by more direct means.

"Are you ill, Edward?" she said, rising immediately.

"I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture.  I will sit here for a
time."  She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up, and said, "You
would like me to read to you?"

"You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon,
with a shade more meekness than usual in his polite manner.  "I am
wakeful: my mind is remarkably lucid."

"I fear that the excitement may be too great for you," said Dorothea,
remembering Lydgate's cautions.

"No, I am not conscious of undue excitement.  Thought is easy."
Dorothea dared not insist, and she read for an hour or more on the same
plan as she had done in the evening, but getting over the pages with
more quickness.  Mr. Casaubon's mind was more alert, and he seemed to
anticipate what was coming after a very slight verbal indication,
saying, "That will do--mark that"--or "Pass on to the next head--I omit
the second excursus on Crete." Dorothea was amazed to think of the
bird-like speed with which his mind was surveying the ground where it
had been creeping for years.  At last he said--

"Close the book now, my dear.  We will resume our work to-morrow.  I
have deferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed.  But you
observe that the principle on which my selection is made, is to give
adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each of the theses
enumerated in my introduction, as at present sketched.  You have
perceived that distinctly, Dorothea?"

"Yes," said Dorothea, rather tremulously.  She felt sick at heart.

"And now I think that I can take some repose," said Mr. Casaubon.  He
laid down again and begged her to put out the lights.  When she had
lain down too, and there was a darkness only broken by a dull glow on
the hearth, he said--

"Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea."

"What is it?" said Dorothea, with dread in her mind.

"It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my
death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what
I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire."

Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her
to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part which might
make a new yoke for her.  She did not answer immediately.

"You refuse?" said Mr. Casaubon, with more edge in his tone.

"No, I do not yet refuse," said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need of
freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn--I think it
is not right--to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me
to.  Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising."

"But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you
refuse."

"No, dear, no!" said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears.
"But may I wait and reflect a little while?  I desire with my whole
soul to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge
suddenly--still less a pledge to do I know not what."

"You cannot then confide in the nature of my wishes?"

"Grant me till to-morrow," said Dorothea, beseechingly.

"Till to-morrow then," said Mr. Casaubon.

Soon she could hear that he was sleeping, but there was no more sleep
for her.  While she constrained herself to lie still lest she should
disturb him, her mind was carrying on a conflict in which imagination
ranged its forces first on one side and then on the other.  She had no
presentiment that the power which her husband wished to establish over
her future action had relation to anything else than his work.  But it
was clear enough to her that he would expect her to devote herself to
sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful
illustration of principles still more doubtful.  The poor child had
become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key
which had made the ambition and the labor of her husband's life.  It
was not wonderful that, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment
in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiassed
comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked
all his egoism.  And now she pictured to herself the days, and months,
and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called
shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a
mosaic wrought from crushed ruins--sorting them as food for a theory
which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.  Doubtless
a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth
a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of
substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and
Lavoisier is born.  But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which
made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares
against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more
solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in
sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible:
it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity
of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate
notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for
threading the stars together.  And Dorothea had so often had to check
her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as
it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge
which was to make life worthier!  She could understand well enough now
why her husband had come to cling to her, as possibly the only hope
left that his labors would ever take a shape in which they could be
given to the world.  At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even
her aloof from any close knowledge of what he was doing; but gradually
the terrible stringency of human need--the prospect of a too speedy
death--

And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her husband's
past--nay, to his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out
of that past: the lonely labor, the ambition breathing hardly under the
pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs;
and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him!  And had she not
wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labor?--But
she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could
serve in devoutly for its own sake.  Was it right, even to soothe his
grief--would it be possible, even if she promised--to work as in a
treadmill fruitlessly?

And yet, could she deny him?  Could she say, "I refuse to content this
pining hunger?"  It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was
almost sure to do for him living.  If he lived as Lydgate had said he
might, for fifteen years or more, her life would certainly be spent in
helping him and obeying him.

Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living
and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead.  While he lived,
he could claim nothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate
against, and even to refuse.  But--the thought passed through her mind
more than once, though she could not believe in it--might he not mean
to demand something more from her than she had been able to imagine,
since he wanted her pledge to carry out his wishes without telling her
exactly what they were?  No; his heart was bound up in his work only:
that was the end for which his failing life was to be eked out by hers.

And now, if she were to say, "No! if you die, I will put no finger to
your work"--it seemed as if she would be crushing that bruised heart.

For four hours Dorothea lay in this conflict, till she felt ill and
bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely.  Helpless as a child
which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late morning
sleep, and when she waked Mr. Casaubon was already up.  Tantripp told
her that he had read prayers, breakfasted, and was in the library.

"I never saw you look so pale, madam," said Tantripp, a solid-figured
woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne.

"Was I ever high-colored, Tantripp?" said Dorothea, smiling faintly.

"Well, not to say high-colored, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose.
But always smelling those leather books, what can be expected?  Do rest
a little this morning, madam.  Let me say you are ill and not able to
go into that close library."

"Oh no, no! let me make haste," said Dorothea.  "Mr. Casaubon wants me
particularly."

When she went down she felt sure that she should promise to fulfil his
wishes; but that would be later in the day--not yet.

As Dorothea entered the library, Mr. Casaubon turned round from the
table where he had been placing some books, and said--

"I was waiting for your appearance, my dear.  I had hoped to set to
work at once this morning, but I find myself under some indisposition,
probably from too much excitement yesterday.  I am going now to take a
turn in the shrubbery, since the air is milder."

"I am glad to hear that," said Dorothea.  "Your mind, I feared, was too
active last night."

"I would fain have it set at rest on the point I last spoke of,
Dorothea.  You can now, I hope, give me an answer."

"May I come out to you in the garden presently?" said Dorothea, winning
a little breathing space in that way.

"I shall be in the Yew-tree Walk for the next half-hour," said Mr.
Casaubon, and then he left her.

Dorothea, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring her some
wraps.  She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any
renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to
say "Yes" to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the
thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything
but submit completely.  She sat still and let Tantripp put on her
bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was unusual with her, for she liked
to wait on herself.

"God bless you, madam!" said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement
of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable
to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.

This was too much for Dorothea's highly-strung feeling, and she burst
into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm.  But soon she checked
herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the
shrubbery.

"I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for your
master," said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the
breakfast-room. She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as
we know; and she always declined to call Mr. Casaubon anything but
"your master," when speaking to the other servants.

Pratt laughed.  He liked his master very well, but he liked Tantripp
better.

When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the
nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though
from a different cause.  Then she had feared lest her effort at
fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where
she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she
shrank.  Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to
this--only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal
and not the real yoke of marriage.  She saw clearly enough the whole
situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul
that entreated hers.  If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak.  But
the half-hour was passing, and she must not delay longer.  When she
entered the Yew-tree Walk she could not see her husband; but the walk
had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped
in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment
on chill days for the garden.  It occurred to her that he might be
resting in the summer-house, towards which the path diverged a little.
Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to a
stone table.  His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was
bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening
his face on each side.

"He exhausted himself last night," Dorothea said to herself, thinking
at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a
place to rest in.  But then she remembered that of late she had seen
him take that attitude when she was reading to him, as if he found it
easier than any other; and that he would sometimes speak, as well as
listen, with his face down in that way.  She went into the summerhouse
and said, "I am come, Edward; I am ready."

He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep.  She
laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready!" Still he was
motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned down to him,
took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to his head, crying
in a distressed tone--

"Wake, dear, wake!  Listen to me.  I am come to answer." But Dorothea
never gave her answer.

Later in the day, Lydgate was seated by her bedside, and she was
talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone
through her mind the night before.  She knew him, and called him by his
name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain everything
to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain everything to her
husband.

"Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise.  Only,
thinking about it was so dreadful--it has made me ill.  Not very ill.
I shall soon be better.  Go and tell him."

But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.

 Dorothea visits Lydgate's home to ask if Casaubon consulted him because of new health problems. Lydgate is not home, but she discovers that Will is there visiting with Rosamond. Will offers to go to the New Hospital to fetch Lydgate, but Dorothea chooses to go to the hospital herself. She does not want to speak with Will, because she knows she could not tell Casaubon about it without upsetting him. She also doesn't want to hide things from her husband. She wonders why Will visits Rosamond in Lydgate's absence. Dorothea's abrupt departure mortifies Will, and he suspects he has fallen in her opinion. Rosamond teases Will by saying he worships Dorothea. Rosamond wonders at the possibilities of having male admirers even as a married woman. Lydgate sets Dorothea's mind to rest about Casaubon's health. He converses with her about the petty politics hindering his fund-raising efforts for the hospital. He names Bulstrode's unpopularity as the chief reason. He regrets wasting time on political differences when he'd rather be working on medical issues. Dorothea donates some money to the hospital. Public opinion of Lydgate's support of reform of the medical profession is divided. Lydgate's sparing use of drugs arouses distrust in potential patients, professional jealousy in other doctors, and anger in the local apothecaries. His habit of sometimes contradicting other doctors' methods angers and embarrasses his colleagues. However, Lydgate's successful treatment of some serious illnesses balances the public distrust somewhat. Bulstrode would be happy to pay for everything at the hospital in return for the exclusive right to manage it, except for the fact that he wishes to purchase Stone Court from Joshua Rigg Featherstone. Therefore, he must secure large donations for the hospital. He gives Lydgate full authority over the treatment of the patients. Other doctors can consult, but they cannot contravene Lydgate's decisions. Every medical man in town refuses to visit the Fever Hospital. Rosamond tells Lydgate that she wishes he weren't a medical man. She says that his titled relatives feel that he has sunk below them in his choice of a profession. Lydgate tells her that she cannot love him if she can't love the medical man in him. Public opinion of Ladislaw generally conforms to Casaubon's. The rumor has gotten out that they are relatives, but that Casaubon will have nothing to do with him. Many find him brash, ridiculous, and perhaps a little dangerous. However, he is friendly with some households, including Farebrother's, where he is a favorite of the ladies, especially Miss Noble. He visits the Lydgates frequently and alleviates Rosamond's boredom. Lydgate is out of temper because he has been unable to pay the debt he owes on his furniture, and Rosamond is pregnant. Casaubon suspects that Will plans to fool Dorothea into marrying him when she becomes a widow in order to get possession of his wealth. However, Will worships Dorothea for other reasons. He wonders what his devotion means to her. He plans to go to Lowick Church during services in order to catch a glimpse of her, even though it would be an outright defiance of Casaubon's prohibition. He goes nevertheless, but he regrets his impetuous action immediately because Dorothea pales when she sees him. Dorothea is upset that her husband continues in refusing to speak to Will. His presence in the Church only more strongly marks their alienation. Casaubon's health continues to decline. Later that night, Casaubon asks Dorothea to make a promise. She asks what the promise is. Casaubon thinks her question is a refusal. She asks him to defer the matter until the next morning. In the morning Casaubon takes a walk. Dorothea resolves to promise whatever Casaubon wants and searches for him on the grounds. She finds him seated on a bench and discovers that he has died.

