Middlemarch

HAPTER LXXX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Ladislaw’s shoes, I would,” said Henrietta Noble.

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I did love him!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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