CHAPTER 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 with.
out 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 pane, 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.
