Speaker 1: Chapter seventy seven, Middle March. This is a LibriVox recording.
Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Middle
Speaker 1: March by George Eliot, chapter seventy seven. And thus thy
Speaker 1: fall hath left a kind of blot to mark the
Speaker 1: full fraught man and best endued with some suspicion Henry
Speaker 1: the fifth. The next day, Lydgate had to go to
Speaker 1: Brassing and told Rosamond that he should be away until
Speaker 1: the evening of late. She had never gone beyond her
Speaker 1: own house and garden except church, and wants to see
Speaker 1: her Papa, to whom she said, if Tashus goes away,
Speaker 1: you will help us to move, will you not, Papa?
Speaker 1: I suppose we shall have very little money. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I hope some one will help us. And mister Vincey
Speaker 1: had said, yes, child, I don't mind a hundred or two.
Speaker 1: I can see the end of that. With these exceptions,
Speaker 1: she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
Speaker 1: fixing her mind on will Ladislaw's coming as the one
Speaker 1: point of hope and interest, and associating this with some
Speaker 1: new urgency on Lydgate's to make immediate arrangements for leaving
Speaker 1: Middlemarch and going to London, till she felt assured that
Speaker 1: the coming would be a potent cause of the going,
Speaker 1: without at all seeing how this way of establishing sequence
Speaker 1: is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar
Speaker 1: folly in Rosamond. And it is precisely this sort of
Speaker 1: sequence which causes the greatest shock when it is sundered.
Speaker 1: For to see how an effect may be produced is
Speaker 1: often to see possible missings and checks. But to see
Speaker 1: nothing except the desirable cause, and close upon it the
Speaker 1: desirable effect rids us of doubt and makes our minds
Speaker 1: strongly intuitive. That was the process going on in poor Rosamond,
Speaker 1: while she arranged all objects around her with the same
Speaker 1: nicety as ever, only with more slowness, or sat down
Speaker 1: to the piano, meaning to play, and insisting, yet lingering
Speaker 1: on the music stool, with her white fingers suspended on
Speaker 1: the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy enery.
Speaker 1: Her melancholy had become so marked that Lydgate felt a
Speaker 1: strange timidity before it as a perpetual, silent reproach, and
Speaker 1: the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities towards this fair,
Speaker 1: fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have bruised,
Speaker 1: shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
Speaker 1: fear of her and fear for her, rushing in only
Speaker 1: the more forcibly after it had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.
Speaker 1: But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs, where
Speaker 1: she sometimes sat the whole day while Lydgate was out
Speaker 1: equipped for a walk in the town. She had a
Speaker 1: letter to post, a letter addressed to mister Ladislaw and
Speaker 1: written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten his arrival
Speaker 1: by hint of trouble. The servant maid, their sole house servant,
Speaker 1: now noticed her coming downstairs in her walking dress, and thought,
Speaker 1: there never did anybody look so pretty and bonnet poor thing. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to Rosamond,
Speaker 1: and with the many thoughts, both of the past and
Speaker 1: the probable future, which gathered around the idea of that
Speaker 1: visit until yesterday, when Lydgate had opened to her a
Speaker 1: glimpse of some trouble in his married life. The image
Speaker 1: of missus Lydgate had always been associated for her with
Speaker 1: that of Will Laddislaw, even in her most uneasy moments,
Speaker 1: even when she had been agitated by Missus Cadwalider's painfully
Speaker 1: graphic report of gossip, her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting,
Speaker 1: had been towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises.
Speaker 1: And when in her meeting with him afterwards, she had
Speaker 1: at first interpreted his words as a probable allusion to
Speaker 1: a feeling towards missus Lydgate which he was determined to
Speaker 1: cut himself off from indulging. She had a quick, sad,
Speaker 1: excusing vision of the charm there might be in his
Speaker 1: constant opportunities of companionship without fair creature, who most likely
Speaker 1: shared his other tastes, as she evidently did his delight
Speaker 1: in music. But there had followed his parting words, the
Speaker 1: few passionate words in which he had implied that she
Speaker 1: herself was the object of whom his love held him
Speaker 1: in dread, that it was his love for her only
Speaker 1: which he was resolved not to declare, but to carry
Speaker 1: away into banishment. From the time of that parting, Dorothea
Speaker 1: believing in Will's love for her, believing with a proud
Speaker 1: delight in his delicate sense of honor and his determination
Speaker 1: that no one should impeach him. Justly felt her heart
Speaker 1: quite at rest as to the regard he might have
Speaker 1: for missus Lydgate. She was sure that the regard was blameless.
Speaker 1: There are natures in which, if they love us, we
Speaker 1: are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.
Speaker 1: They bind us over to rectitude and purity by their
Speaker 1: pure belief about us, and our sins become that worst
Speaker 1: kind of sacrilege, which tears down the invisible altar of trust.
Speaker 1: If you are not good, none is good. Those little
Speaker 1: words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold
Speaker 1: a vitary intensity for remorse. Dorothea's nature was of that kind.
Speaker 1: Her own passionate fault lay along the easily counted open
Speaker 1: channels of her ardent character. And while she was full
Speaker 1: of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had
Speaker 1: not yet any material within her experience for subtle constructions
Speaker 1: and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers
Speaker 1: holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception
Speaker 1: of them was one of the great powers of her womanhood,
Speaker 1: and it had from the first acting strongly on Will Ladislaw.
Speaker 1: He felt when he parted from her that the brief
Speaker 1: words by which he had tried to convey to her
Speaker 1: his feeling about herself and the division which her fortune
Speaker 1: made between them, would only profit by their brevity. When
Speaker 1: Dorothea had to interpret them, he felt that in her
Speaker 1: mind he had found his highest estimate, and he was
Speaker 1: right there. In the months since their parting, Dorothea had
Speaker 1: felt a delicious, though sad repose in their relation to
Speaker 1: each other, as one which was inwardly whole and without blemish.
Speaker 1: She had an active force of antagonism within her. When
Speaker 1: the antagonism turned on the defense either of plans or
Speaker 1: persons that she were leaved in, and the wrongs which
Speaker 1: she felt that Will had received from her husband, and
Speaker 1: the external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
Speaker 1: only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
Speaker 1: And now, with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another
Speaker 1: fact affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
Speaker 1: resistance to what was said about him in that part
Speaker 1: of her world which lay within park Pallings. Young Ladislaw
Speaker 1: the grandson of a thieving jew pawnbroker, was a phrase
Speaker 1: which had entered emphatically into the dialogs about the bolsterode
Speaker 1: business at Lowick, Tipton and Freshett, and was a worse
Speaker 1: kind of placard on poor Will's back than the Italian
Speaker 1: with white mice upright, Sir James Chettam was convinced that
Speaker 1: his own satisfaction was righteous when he thought with some
Speaker 1: complacency that here was an added league to that mountainous
Speaker 1: distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea, which enabled him to dismiss
Speaker 1: any anxiety in that direction as too absurd. And perhaps
Speaker 1: there had been some pleasure in pointing mister Brooke's attention
Speaker 1: to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy as a fresh
Speaker 1: candle for him to see his own folly by. Dorothea
Speaker 1: had observed the animus with which Will's part in the
Speaker 1: painful story had been recalled more than once, but she
Speaker 1: had uttered no word, being checked now as she had
Speaker 1: not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness
Speaker 1: of the deeper relation between them which must always remain
Speaker 1: in consecrated secrecy. But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion
Speaker 1: into a more thorough glow. And this misfortune in Will's lot,
Speaker 1: which it seemed others were wishing to fling at his
Speaker 1: back as an opprobrium, only gave something more of enthusiasm
Speaker 1: to her clinging thought. She entertained no visions of their
Speaker 1: ever coming into nearer union, and yet she had taken
Speaker 1: no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her whole relation
Speaker 1: to Will very simple as part of her marriage sorrows,
Speaker 1: and would have thought it very sinful in her to
Speaker 1: keep up an inward wail, because she was not completely happy,
Speaker 1: being rather disposed to dwell on the superfluities of her lot.
Speaker 1: She could bear that the chief pleasures of her tenderness
Speaker 1: should lie in memory. And the idea of marriage came
Speaker 1: to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor
Speaker 1: of whom she at present knew nothing, but whose merits,
Speaker 1: as seen by her friends, would be a source of
Speaker 1: torment to her. Somebody who will manage your property for you,
Speaker 1: my dear, was mister Brook's attractive suggestion of suitable characteristics.
Speaker 1: I should like to manage it myself, if I knew
Speaker 1: what to do with it, said Dorothea. No, she had
Speaker 1: heard to her declaration that she would never be married again,
Speaker 1: and in the long valley of her life, which looked
Speaker 1: so flat and empty of Waymark's guidance would come as
Speaker 1: she walked along the road and saw her fellow passengers
Speaker 1: by the way. This habitual state of feeling about will
Speaker 1: Ladislaw had been strong in all her waking hours since
Speaker 1: she had proposed to pay a visit to missus Lydgate,
Speaker 1: making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
Speaker 1: figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and compassion.
Speaker 1: There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier to complete confidence,
Speaker 1: which had arisen between this wife and the husband who
Speaker 1: had yet made her happiness a law to him. That
Speaker 1: was a trouble which no third person must directly touch.
Speaker 1: But Dorothea thought with deep pity of the loneliness which
Speaker 1: must have come upon Rosamond from the suspicions cast on
Speaker 1: her husband, and there would surely be help in the
Speaker 1: manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy with her. I
Speaker 1: shall talk to her about her husband, thought Dorothea as
Speaker 1: she was being driven towards the town, the clear spring morning,
Speaker 1: the scent of the moist earth, the fresh leaves just
Speaker 1: showing their creased up wealth of greenery from out their
Speaker 1: half open sheaths. See which part of the cheerfulness she
Speaker 1: was feeling from a long conversation with mister Farebrother, who
Speaker 1: had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of Lydgate's conduct. I
Speaker 1: shall take missus Lydgate good news, and perhaps she will
Speaker 1: like to talk to me and make a friend of me.
Speaker 1: Dorothea had another errand in lowick Gate. It was about
Speaker 1: a new fine toned bell for the schoolhouse, and as
Speaker 1: she had to get out of her carriage very near
Speaker 1: to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street, having told
Speaker 1: the coachman to wait for some packages. The street door
Speaker 1: was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of
Speaker 1: looking out at the carriage, which was pausing within sight,
Speaker 1: when it became apparent to her that the lady who
Speaker 1: belonged to it was coming towards her. Is missus Lydgate
Speaker 1: at home? Said Dorothea. I'm not sure, my lady. I
Speaker 1: see if you'll please to walk in, said Martha, a
Speaker 1: little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
Speaker 1: collected enough to be sure that ma'am was not the
Speaker 1: right title for this queenly young widow with a carriage
Speaker 1: and pair. Will you please to walk in and I'll
Speaker 1: go and see. Say that I'm missus Casaubon, said Dorothea,
Speaker 1: as Martha moved forward, intending to show her into the
Speaker 1: drawing room and then to go upstairs to see if
Speaker 1: Rosamond had returned from her walk. They crossed the broader
Speaker 1: part of the entrance hall and turned up the passage
Speaker 1: which led to the garden. The drawing room door was unlatched,
Speaker 1: and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited
Speaker 1: for Missus Casaubon to enter, and then turned away, the
Speaker 1: door having swung open and swung back again without noise.
Speaker 1: Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning,
Speaker 1: being filled with images of things as they had been
Speaker 1: and were going to be. She found herself on the
Speaker 1: other side of the door without seeing anything remarkable, but
Speaker 1: immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones, which
Speaker 1: startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight
Speaker 1: and advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting
Speaker 1: slab of a bookcase, she saw in the terrible illumination
Speaker 1: of a certainty which filled up all outlines, something which
Speaker 1: made her pause, motionless, without self possession enough to speak.
Speaker 1: Seated with his back toward her on a sofa which
Speaker 1: stood against the wall, on a line with the door
Speaker 1: by which she had entered, she saw will Ladislaw close
Speaker 1: by him, and turned towards him with a flushed tearfulness
Speaker 1: which gave a new brilliancy to her face. Sat Rosamond,
Speaker 1: her bonnet hanging back, while Will, leaning towards her, clasped
Speaker 1: both her upraised hands in his, and spoke with low
Speaker 1: toned fervor. Rosamond, in her agitated absorption, had not noticed
Speaker 1: the silently advancing figure. But when Dorothea, after the first
Speaker 1: immeasurable instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found
Speaker 1: herself impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly
Speaker 1: aware of her presence, and with a spasmodic movement, snatched
Speaker 1: away her hands and rose, looking at Dorothea, who was
Speaker 1: unnecessarily arrested. Will Ladislaw, starting up, looked round also, and
Speaker 1: meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new lightning in them, seemed
Speaker 1: changing to marble, but she immediately turned them away from
Speaker 1: him to Rosamond and said, in a firm voice, excuse me, missus, Lydgate.
Speaker 1: The servant did not know that you were here. I
Speaker 1: called to deliver an important letter for mister Lydgate, which
Speaker 1: I wished to put into your own hands. She laid
Speaker 1: down the letter on the small table which had checked
Speaker 1: her retreat, and then, including Rosamond and will in one
Speaker 1: distant glance and bow, she went quickly out of the room,
Speaker 1: meeting in the passage the surprised Martha, who said she
Speaker 1: was sorry the mistress was not at home, and then
Speaker 1: showed the strange lady out, with an inward reflection that
Speaker 1: grand people were probably more impatient than others. Dorothea walked
Speaker 1: across the street with her most elastic step and was
Speaker 1: quickly in her carriage again. Drive on to fresh At Hall,
Speaker 1: she said to the coachman, and anyone looking at her
Speaker 1: might have thought that though she was paler than usual,
Speaker 1: she was never animated by a more self possessed energy,
Speaker 1: and that was really her experience. It was as if
Speaker 1: she had drunk a great draft of scorn that stimulated
Speaker 1: her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings. She had seen
Speaker 1: something so far below her belief that her emotions rushed
Speaker 1: back from it and made an excited throng without an object.
Speaker 1: She needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.
Speaker 1: She felt power to walk and work for a day
Speaker 1: without meat or drink, and she would carry out the
Speaker 1: purpose with which she had started in the morning of
Speaker 1: going to Freshet and Tipton to tell Sir James and
Speaker 1: her uncle all that she wished them to know about Lydgate,
Speaker 1: whose married loneliness under his trial now presented itself to
Speaker 1: her with new significance and made her more ardent in
Speaker 1: readiness to be his champion. She had never felt anything
Speaker 1: like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
Speaker 1: her married life, in which there had always been a
Speaker 1: quickly subduing pang, and she took it as a sign
Speaker 1: of new strength. Dodo, how very bright your eyes are,
Speaker 1: said Celia, when Sir James was gone out of the room.
Speaker 1: When you don't see anything you look at, are there anything?
Speaker 1: You are going to do? Something uncomfortable? I know is
Speaker 1: it all about mister Lydgate, or if something else happened?
Speaker 1: Celia had been used to watch her sister with expectation. Yes,
Speaker 1: dear great many things have happened, said Dodo in her
Speaker 1: full tones. I wonder what, said Celia, folding her arms
Speaker 1: cozily and leaning forward upon them. Oh, all the troubles
Speaker 1: of all the people on the face of the earth,
Speaker 1: said Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.
Speaker 1: Dear me, Dodo, you're going to have a scheme for
Speaker 1: said Celia, a little uneasily at this hamlet, like raving bussa.
Speaker 1: James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the grange,
Speaker 1: and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her
Speaker 1: resolution until she descended at her own door. End of
Speaker 1: chapter seventy seven. Read for LibriVox by Madame Tusk W
Speaker 1: W W dot R L O Walrus dot Sight, sled
Speaker 1: dot com.