Middlemarch

HAPTER LXXIX.

“Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their talk, they
drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain;
and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name
of the slough was Despond.”—BUNYAN.

When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea’s letter
addressed to him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.

When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
visit, and Will could not say, “Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
came this morning?”

“Poor Rosamond is ill,” Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.

“Not seriously, I hope,” said Will.

“No—only a slight nervous shock—the effect of some agitation. She has
been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky devil.
We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you left, and I
have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I suppose you are
only just come down—you look rather battered—you have not been long
enough in the town to hear anything?”

“I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o’clock this
morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting,” said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.

And then he heard Lydgate’s account of the troubles which Rosamond had
already depicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned the fact of
Will’s name being connected with the public story—this detail not
immediately affecting her—and he now heard it for the first time.

“I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
disclosures,” said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation. “You will be sure to
hear it as soon as you turn out into the town. I suppose it is true
that Raffles spoke to you.”

“Yes,” said Will, sardonically. “I shall be fortunate if gossip does
not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair. I should
think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose.”

He was thinking “Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however—what does it signify now?”

But he said nothing of Bulstrode’s offer to him. Will was very open and
careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature’s modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode’s money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate’s misfortune to have accepted it.

Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond’s feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, “Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me.”
Observing a change in Will’s face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.

The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion’s trouble. When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, “We shall have you again, old fellow,” Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
momentous bargain.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him
this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate’s
unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.