Middlemarch

HAPTER LXII.

He was a squyer of lowe degre,
That loved the king’s daughter of Hungrie.
—Old Romance.

Will Ladislaw’s mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again, and
forthwith quitting Middlemarch. The morning after his agitating scene
with Bulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that various
causes had detained him in the neighborhood longer than he had
expected, and asking her permission to call again at Lowick at some
hour which she would mention on the earliest possible day, he being
anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so until she had granted him an
interview. He left the letter at the office, ordering the messenger to
carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for an answer.

Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words. His former
farewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam, and had
been announced as final even to the butler. It is certainly trying to a
man’s dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first
farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an
opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter
sneers afloat about Will’s motives for lingering. Still it was on the
whole more satisfactory to his feeling to take the directest means of
seeing Dorothea, than to use any device which might give an air of
chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that it was
what he earnestly sought. When he had parted from her before, he had
been in ignorance of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation
between them, and made a more absolute severance than he had then
believed in. He knew nothing of Dorothea’s private fortune, and being
little used to reflect on such matters, took it for granted that
according to Mr. Casaubon’s arrangement marriage to him, Will Ladislaw,
would mean that she consented to be penniless. That was not what he
could wish for even in his secret heart, or even if she had been ready
to meet such hard contrast for his sake. And then, too, there was the
fresh smart of that disclosure about his mother’s family, which if
known would be an added reason why Dorothea’s friends should look down
upon him as utterly below her. The secret hope that after some years he
might come back with the sense that he had at least a personal value
equal to her wealth, seemed now the dreamy continuation of a dream.
This change would surely justify him in asking Dorothea to receive him
once more.

But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will’s note. In
consequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to be
at home in a week, she had driven first to Freshitt to carry the news,
meaning to go on to the Grange to deliver some orders with which her
uncle had intrusted her—thinking, as he said, “a little mental
occupation of this sort good for a widow.”

If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt that
morning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed as to the
readiness of certain people to sneer at his lingering in the
neighborhood. Sir James, indeed, though much relieved concerning
Dorothea, had been on the watch to learn Ladislaw’s movements, and had
an instructed informant in Mr. Standish, who was necessarily in his
confidence on this matter. That Ladislaw had stayed in Middlemarch
nearly two months after he had declared that he was going immediately,
was a fact to embitter Sir James’s suspicions, or at least to justify
his aversion to a “young fellow” whom he represented to himself as
slight, volatile, and likely enough to show such recklessness as
naturally went along with a position unriveted by family ties or a
strict profession. But he had just heard something from Standish which,
while it justified these surmises about Will, offered a means of
nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea.

Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there
are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to
sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same
incongruous manner. Good Sir James was this morning so far unlike
himself that he was irritably anxious to say something to Dorothea on a
subject which he usually avoided as if it had been a matter of shame to
them both. He could not use Celia as a medium, because he did not
choose that she should know the kind of gossip he had in his mind; and
before Dorothea happened to arrive he had been trying to imagine how,
with his shyness and unready tongue, he could ever manage to introduce
his communication. Her unexpected presence brought him to utter
hopelessness in his own power of saying anything unpleasant; but
desperation suggested a resource; he sent the groom on an unsaddled
horse across the park with a pencilled note to Mrs. Cadwallader, who
already knew the gossip, and would think it no compromise of herself to
repeat it as often as required.

Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr. Garth, whom she
wanted to see, was expected at the hall within the hour, and she was
still talking to Caleb on the gravel when Sir James, on the watch for
the rector’s wife, saw her coming and met her with the needful hints.

“Enough! I understand,”—said Mrs. Cadwallader. “You shall be innocent.
I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself.”

“I don’t mean that it’s of any consequence,” said Sir James, disliking
that Mrs. Cadwallader should understand too much. “Only it is desirable
that Dorothea should know there are reasons why she should not receive
him again; and I really can’t say so to her. It will come lightly from
you.”

It came very lightly indeed. When Dorothea quitted Caleb and turned to
meet them, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped across the
park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat with Celia in a
matronly way about the baby. And so Mr. Brooke was coming back?
Delightful!—coming back, it was to be hoped, quite cured of
Parliamentary fever and pioneering. Apropos of the “Pioneer”—somebody
had prophesied that it would soon be like a dying dolphin, and turn all
colors for want of knowing how to help itself, because Mr. Brooke’s
protege, the brilliant young Ladislaw, was gone or going. Had Sir James
heard that?

The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James, turning
aside to whip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.

“All false!” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “He is not gone, or going,
apparently; the ‘Pioneer’ keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw is
making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr.
Lydgate’s wife, who they tell me is as pretty as pretty can be. It
seems nobody ever goes into the house without finding this young
gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano. But the people in
manufacturing towns are always disreputable.”

“You began by saying that one report was false, Mrs. Cadwallader, and I
believe this is false too,” said Dorothea, with indignant energy; “at
least, I feel sure it is a misrepresentation. I will not hear any evil
spoken of Mr. Ladislaw; he has already suffered too much injustice.”

Dorothea when thoroughly moved cared little what any one thought of her
feelings; and even if she had been able to reflect, she would have held
it petty to keep silence at injurious words about Will from fear of
being herself misunderstood. Her face was flushed and her lip trembled.

Sir James, glancing at her, repented of his stratagem; but Mrs.
Cadwallader, equal to all occasions, spread the palms of her hands
outward and said—“Heaven grant it, my dear!—I mean that all bad tales
about anybody may be false. But it is a pity that young Lydgate should
have married one of these Middlemarch girls. Considering he’s a son of
somebody, he might have got a woman with good blood in her veins, and
not too young, who would have put up with his profession. There’s Clara
Harfager, for instance, whose friends don’t know what to do with her;
and she has a portion. Then we might have had her among us.
However!—it’s no use being wise for other people. Where is Celia? Pray
let us go in.”

“I am going on immediately to Tipton,” said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
“Good-by.”

Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage. He
was altogether discontented with the result of a contrivance which had
cost him some secret humiliation beforehand.

Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn
corn-fields, not seeing or hearing anything around. The tears came and
rolled down her cheeks, but she did not know it. The world, it seemed,
was turning ugly and hateful, and there was no place for her
trustfulness. “It is not true—it is not true!” was the voice within her
that she listened to; but all the while a remembrance to which there
had always clung a vague uneasiness would thrust itself on her
attention—the remembrance of that day when she had found Will Ladislaw
with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard his voice accompanied by the piano.

“He said he would never do anything that I disapproved—I wish I could
have told him that I disapproved of that,” said poor Dorothea,
inwardly, feeling a strange alternation between anger with Will and the
passionate defence of him. “They all try to blacken him before me; but
I will care for no pain, if he is not to blame. I always believed he
was good.”—These were her last thoughts before she felt that the
carriage was passing under the archway of the lodge-gate at the Grange,
when she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief to her face and began to
think of her errands. The coachman begged leave to take out the horses
for half an hour as there was something wrong with a shoe; and
Dorothea, having the sense that she was going to rest, took off her
gloves and bonnet, while she was leaning against a statue in the
entrance-hall, and talking to the housekeeper. At last she said—

“I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell. I will go into the library and
write you some memoranda from my uncle’s letter, if you will open the
shutters for me.”

“The shutters are open, madam,” said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea, who
had walked along as she spoke. “Mr. Ladislaw is there, looking for
something.”

(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he had
missed in the act of packing his movables, and did not choose to leave
behind.)

Dorothea’s heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow, but she
was not perceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will was there
was for the moment all-satisfying to her, like the sight of something
precious that one has lost. When she reached the door she said to Mrs.
Kell—

“Go in first, and tell him that I am here.”

Will had found his portfolio, and had laid it on the table at the far
end of the room, to turn over the sketches and please himself by
looking at the memorable piece of art which had a relation to nature
too mysterious for Dorothea. He was smiling at it still, and shaking
the sketches into order with the thought that he might find a letter
from her awaiting him at Middlemarch, when Mrs. Kell close to his elbow
said—

“Mrs. Casaubon is coming in, sir.”

Will turned round quickly, and the next moment Dorothea was entering.
As Mrs. Kell closed the door behind her they met: each was looking at
the other, and consciousness was overflowed by something that
suppressed utterance. It was not confusion that kept them silent, for
they both felt that parting was near, and there is no shamefacedness in
a sad parting.

She moved automatically towards her uncle’s chair against the
writing-table, and Will, after drawing it out a little for her, went a
few paces off and stood opposite to her.

“Pray sit down,” said Dorothea, crossing her hands on her lap; “I am
very glad you were here.” Will thought that her face looked just as it
did when she first shook hands with him in Rome; for her widow’s cap,
fixed in her bonnet, had gone off with it, and he could see that she
had lately been shedding tears. But the mixture of anger in her
agitation had vanished at the sight of him; she had been used, when
they were face to face, always to feel confidence and the happy freedom
which comes with mutual understanding, and how could other people’s
words hinder that effect on a sudden? Let the music which can take
possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once
more—what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its
absence?

“I have sent a letter to Lowick Manor to-day, asking leave to see you,”
said Will, seating himself opposite to her. “I am going away
immediately, and I could not go without speaking to you again.”

“I thought we had parted when you came to Lowick many weeks ago—you
thought you were going then,” said Dorothea, her voice trembling a
little.

“Yes; but I was in ignorance then of things which I know now—things
which have altered my feelings about the future. When I saw you before,
I was dreaming that I might come back some day. I don’t think I ever
shall—now.” Will paused here.

“You wished me to know the reasons?” said Dorothea, timidly.

“Yes,” said Will, impetuously, shaking his head backward, and looking
away from her with irritation in his face. “Of course I must wish it. I
have been grossly insulted in your eyes and in the eyes of others.
There has been a mean implication against my character. I wish you to
know that under no circumstances would I have lowered myself by—under
no circumstances would I have given men the chance of saying that I
sought money under the pretext of seeking—something else. There was no
need of other safeguard against me—the safeguard of wealth was enough.”

Will rose from his chair with the last word and went—he hardly knew
where; but it was to the projecting window nearest him, which had been
open as now about the same season a year ago, when he and Dorothea had
stood within it and talked together. Her whole heart was going out at
this moment in sympathy with Will’s indignation: she only wanted to
convince him that she had never done him injustice, and he seemed to
have turned away from her as if she too had been part of the unfriendly
world.

“It would be very unkind of you to suppose that I ever attributed any
meanness to you,” she began. Then in her ardent way, wanting to plead
with him, she moved from her chair and went in front of him to her old
place in the window, saying, “Do you suppose that I ever disbelieved in
you?”

When Will saw her there, he gave a start and moved backward out of the
window, without meeting her glance. Dorothea was hurt by this movement
following up the previous anger of his tone. She was ready to say that
it was as hard on her as on him, and that she was helpless; but those
strange particulars of their relation which neither of them could
explicitly mention kept her always in dread of saying too much. At this
moment she had no belief that Will would in any case have wanted to
marry her, and she feared using words which might imply such a belief.
She only said earnestly, recurring to his last word—

“I am sure no safeguard was ever needed against you.”

Will did not answer. In the stormy fluctuation of his feelings these
words of hers seemed to him cruelly neutral, and he looked pale and
miserable after his angry outburst. He went to the table and fastened
up his portfolio, while Dorothea looked at him from the distance. They
were wasting these last moments together in wretched silence. What
could he say, since what had got obstinately uppermost in his mind was
the passionate love for her which he forbade himself to utter? What
could she say, since she might offer him no help—since she was forced
to keep the money that ought to have been his?—since to-day he seemed
not to respond as he used to do to her thorough trust and liking?

But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached the
window again.

“I must go,” he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which
sometimes accompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired and
burned with gazing too close at a light.

“What shall you do in life?” said Dorothea, timidly. “Have your
intentions remained just the same as when we said good-by before?”

“Yes,” said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as
uninteresting. “I shall work away at the first thing that offers. I
suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope.”

“Oh, what sad words!” said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob.
Then trying to smile, she added, “We used to agree that we were alike
in speaking too strongly.”

“I have not spoken too strongly now,” said Will, leaning back against
the angle of the wall. “There are certain things which a man can only
go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that
the best is over with him. This experience has happened to me while I
am very young—that is all. What I care more for than I can ever care
for anything else is absolutely forbidden to me—I don’t mean merely by
being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if it were within my
reach, by my own pride and honor—by everything I respect myself for. Of
course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in a
trance.”

Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea to
misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself
and offending against his self-approval in speaking to her so plainly;
but still—it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that
he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of
wooing.

But Dorothea’s mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another
vision than his. The thought that she herself might be what Will most
cared for did throb through her an instant, but then came doubt: the
memory of the little they had lived through together turned pale and
shrank before the memory which suggested how much fuller might have
been the intercourse between Will and some one else with whom he had
had constant companionship. Everything he had said might refer to that
other relation, and whatever had passed between him and herself was
thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as their simple
friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband’s
injurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down dreamily,
while images crowded upon her which left the sickening certainty that
Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate. But why sickening? He wanted her to
know that here too his conduct should be above suspicion.

Will was not surprised at her silence. His mind also was tumultuously
busy while he watched her, and he was feeling rather wildly that
something must happen to hinder their parting—some miracle, clearly
nothing in their own deliberate speech. Yet, after all, had she any
love for him?—he could not pretend to himself that he would rather
believe her to be without that pain. He could not deny that a secret
longing for the assurance that she loved him was at the root of all his
words.

Neither of them knew how long they stood in that way. Dorothea was
raising her eyes, and was about to speak, when the door opened and her
footman came to say—

“The horses are ready, madam, whenever you like to start.”

“Presently,” said Dorothea. Then turning to Will, she said, “I have
some memoranda to write for the housekeeper.”

“I must go,” said Will, when the door had closed again—advancing
towards her. “The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch.”

“You have acted in every way rightly,” said Dorothea, in a low tone,
feeling a pressure at her heart which made it difficult to speak.

She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant without speaking,
for her words had seemed to him cruelly cold and unlike herself. Their
eyes met, but there was discontent in his, and in hers there was only
sadness. He turned away and took his portfolio under his arm.

“I have never done you injustice. Please remember me,” said Dorothea,
repressing a rising sob.

“Why should you say that?” said Will, with irritation. “As if I were
not in danger of forgetting everything else.”

He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it
impelled him to go away without pause. It was all one flash to
Dorothea—his last words—his distant bow to her as he reached the
door—the sense that he was no longer there. She sank into the chair,
and for a few moments sat like a statue, while images and emotions were
hurrying upon her. Joy came first, in spite of the threatening train
behind it—joy in the impression that it was really herself whom Will
loved and was renouncing, that there was really no other love less
permissible, more blameworthy, which honor was hurrying him away from.
They were parted all the same, but—Dorothea drew a deep breath and felt
her strength return—she could think of him unrestrainedly. At that
moment the parting was easy to bear: the first sense of loving and
being loved excluded sorrow. It was as if some hard icy pressure had
melted, and her consciousness had room to expand: her past was come
back to her with larger interpretation. The joy was not the
less—perhaps it was the more complete just then—because of the
irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach, no contemptuous wonder
to imagine in any eye or from any lips. He had acted so as to defy
reproach, and make wonder respectful.

Any one watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying
thought within her. Just as when inventive power is working with glad
ease some small claim on the attention is fully met as if it were only
a cranny opened to the sunlight, it was easy now for Dorothea to write
her memoranda. She spoke her last words to the housekeeper in cheerful
tones, and when she seated herself in the carriage her eyes were bright
and her cheeks blooming under the dismal bonnet. She threw back the
heavy “weepers,” and looked before her, wondering which road Will had
taken. It was in her nature to be proud that he was blameless, and
through all her feelings there ran this vein—“I was right to defend
him.”

The coachman was used to drive his grays at a good pace, Mr. Casaubon
being unenjoying and impatient in everything away from his desk, and
wanting to get to the end of all journeys; and Dorothea was now bowled
along quickly. Driving was pleasant, for rain in the night had laid the
dust, and the blue sky looked far off, away from the region of the
great clouds that sailed in masses. The earth looked like a happy place
under the vast heavens, and Dorothea was wishing that she might
overtake Will and see him once more.

After a turn of the road, there he was with the portfolio under his
arm; but the next moment she was passing him while he raised his hat,
and she felt a pang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation,
leaving him behind. She could not look back at him. It was as if a
crowd of indifferent objects had thrust them asunder, and forced them
along different paths, taking them farther and farther away from each
other, and making it useless to look back. She could no more make any
sign that would seem to say, “Need we part?” than she could stop the
carriage to wait for him. Nay, what a world of reasons crowded upon her
against any movement of her thought towards a future that might reverse
the decision of this day!

“I only wish I had known before—I wish he knew—then we could be quite
happy in thinking of each other, though we are forever parted. And if I
could but have given him the money, and made things easier for
him!”—were the longings that came back the most persistently. And yet,
so heavily did the world weigh on her in spite of her independent
energy, that with this idea of Will as in need of such help and at a
disadvantage with the world, there came always the vision of that
unfittingness of any closer relation between them which lay in the
opinion of every one connected with her. She felt to the full all the
imperativeness of the motives which urged Will’s conduct. How could he
dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had placed between
them?—how could she ever say to herself that she would defy it?

Will’s certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance, had much
more bitterness in it. Very slight matters were enough to gall him in
his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he
felt himself plodding along as a poor devil seeking a position in a
world which in his present temper offered him little that he coveted,
made his conduct seem a mere matter of necessity, and took away the
sustainment of resolve. After all, he had no assurance that she loved
him: could any man pretend that he was simply glad in such a case to
have the suffering all on his own side?

That evening Will spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he was
gone.

BOOK VII.
TWO TEMPTATIONS.