Middlemarch

HAPTER LXXVIII.

“Would it were yesterday and I i’ the grave,
With her sweet faith above for monument.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go after her!” he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. “Do you
think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
her again at more than a dirty feather?—Explain! How can a man explain
at the expense of a woman?”

“You can tell her what you please,” said Rosamond with more tremor.

“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is
not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—to believe
that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you.”

He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again—

“I had no hope before—not much—of anything better to come. But I had
one certainty—that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or done
about me, she believed in me.—That’s gone! She’ll never again think me
anything but a paltry pretence—too nice to take heaven except upon
flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil’s change by
the sly. She’ll think of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the
first moment we—”

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

“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my
preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a
preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I
would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
other woman’s living.”

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

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

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

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

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

“If you like,” Rosamond answered, just audibly.

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

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

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