CHAPTER 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.
