CHAPTER LXXV.

    "Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et
    l'ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent
    l'inconstance."--PASCAL.


Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed
from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors
were paid.  But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none
of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.  In this
brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been
stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond
had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had
lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to
an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course,
trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when
she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London.  When she
did not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she
had that was worth living for.  The hard and contemptuous words which
had fallen from her husband in his anger had deeply offended that
vanity which he had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she
regarded as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret
repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor
substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her.  They were at a
disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any outlook
towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except in an
occasional letter from Will Ladislaw.  She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of
what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she
secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily come to
have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one of those
women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have
preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.  Mrs. Casaubon
was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before he knew Mrs.
Lydgate.  Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a
mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the
disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that
agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which
Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.  She even
fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--that
Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique
herself.  In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been busy before Will's
departure.  He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable
husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.  No notion could have
been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent in her marriage was
due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for
self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband;
but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm
which diverted her ennui.  She constructed a little romance which was
to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a
bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an
understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be
sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes.
His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly
increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the
alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the
family at Quallingham.  Since then the troubles of her married life had
deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.  Men and
women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague
uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and
oftener still for a mighty love.  Will Ladislaw had written chatty
letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied: their
separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change she
now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work with
quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
delightful promise which inspirited her.

It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was
nothing less than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned
indeed chiefly on his new interest in plans of colonization, but
mentioned incidentally, that he might find it necessary to pay a visit
to Middlemarch within the next few weeks--a very pleasant necessity, he
said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolboy.  He hoped there was
his old place on the rug, and a great deal of music in store for him.
But he was quite uncertain as to the time.  While Lydgate was reading
the letter to Rosamond, her face looked like a reviving flower--it grew
prettier and more blooming.  There was nothing unendurable now: the
debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw was coming, and Lydgate would be
persuaded to leave Middlemarch and settle in London, which was "so
different from a provincial town."

That was a bright bit of morning.  But soon the sky became black over
poor Rosamond.  The presence of a new gloom in her husband, about which
he was entirely reserved towards her--for he dreaded to expose his
lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception--soon received a
painfully strange explanation, alien to all her previous notions of
what could affect her happiness.  In the new gayety of her spirits,
thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit of moodiness than usual,
causing him to leave her remarks unanswered, and evidently to keep out
of her way as much as possible, she chose, a few days after the
meeting, and without speaking to him on the subject, to send out notes
of invitation for a small evening party, feeling convinced that this
was a judicious step, since people seemed to have been keeping aloof
from them, and wanted restoring to the old habit of intercourse.  When
the invitations had been accepted, she would tell Lydgate, and give him
a wise admonition as to how a medical man should behave to his
neighbors; for Rosamond had the gravest little airs possible about
other people's duties.  But all the invitations were declined, and the
last answer came into Lydgate's hands.

"This is Chichely's scratch.  What is he writing to you about?" said
Lydgate, wonderingly, as he handed the note to her.  She was obliged to
let him see it, and, looking at her severely, he said--

"Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me,
Rosamond?  I beg, I insist that you will not invite any one to this
house.  I suppose you have been inviting others, and they have refused
too."  She said nothing.

"Do you hear me?" thundered Lydgate.

"Yes, certainly I hear you," said Rosamond, turning her head aside with
the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.

Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room,
feeling himself dangerous.  Rosamond's thought was, that he was getting
more and more unbearable--not that there was any new special reason for
this peremptoriness.  His indisposition to tell her anything in which
he was sure beforehand that she would not be interested was growing
into an unreflecting habit, and she was in ignorance of everything
connected with the thousand pounds except that the loan had come from
her uncle Bulstrode.  Lydgate's odious humors and their neighbors'
apparent avoidance of them had an unaccountable date for her in their
relief from money difficulties.  If the invitations had been accepted
she would have gone to invite her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen
nothing of for several days; and she now put on her bonnet to go and
inquire what had become of them all, suddenly feeling as if there were
a conspiracy to leave her in isolation with a husband disposed to
offend everybody.  It was after the dinner hour, and she found her
father and mother seated together alone in the drawing-room. They
greeted her with sad looks, saying "Well, my dear!" and no more.  She
had never seen her father look so downcast; and seating herself near
him she said--

"Is there anything the matter, papa?"

He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, "Oh, my dear, have you heard
nothing?  It won't be long before it reaches you."

"Is it anything about Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning pale.  The idea
of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been
unaccountable to her in him.

"Oh, my dear, yes.  To think of your marrying into this trouble.  Debt
was bad enough, but this will be worse."

"Stay, stay, Lucy," said Mr. Vincy.  "Have you heard nothing about your
uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?"

"No, papa," said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not
anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power with an
iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.

Her father told her everything, saying at the end, "It's better for you
to know, my dear.  I think Lydgate must leave the town.  Things have
gone against him.  I dare say he couldn't help it.  I don't accuse him
of any harm," said Mr. Vincy.  He had always before been disposed to
find the utmost fault with Lydgate.

The shock to Rosamond was terrible.  It seemed to her that no lot could
be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the
centre of infamous suspicions.  In many cases it is inevitable that the
shame is felt to be the worst part of crime; and it would have required
a great deal of disentangling reflection, such as had never entered
into Rosamond's life, for her in these moments to feel that her trouble
was less than if her husband had been certainly known to have done
something criminal.  All the shame seemed to be there.  And she had
innocently married this man with the belief that he and his family were
a glory to her!  She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and
only said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left
Middlemarch long ago.

"She bears it beyond anything," said her mother when she was gone.

"Ah, thank God!" said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.

But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards her
husband.  What had he really done--how had he really acted?  She did
not know.  Why had he not told her everything?  He did not speak to her
on the subject, and of course she could not speak to him.  It came into
her mind once that she would ask her father to let her go home again;
but dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter dreariness to her: a
married woman gone back to live with her parents--life seemed to have
no meaning for her in such a position: she could not contemplate
herself in it.

The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that
she had heard the bad news.  Would she speak to him about it, or would
she go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she
believed him guilty?  We must remember that he was in a morbid state of
mind, in which almost all contact was pain.  Certainly Rosamond in this
case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence on
his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;--was
he not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her, since now
she knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him?  But a
deeper-lying consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and
the silence between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they
were both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.

He thought, "I am a fool.  Haven't I given up expecting anything?  I
have married care, not help."  And that evening he said--

"Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?"

"Yes," she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying
on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.

"What have you heard?"

"Everything, I suppose.  Papa told me."

"That people think me disgraced?"

"Yes," said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.

There was silence.  Lydgate thought, "If she has any trust in me--any
notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not
believe I have deserved disgrace."

But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly.
Whatever was to be said on the subject she expected to come from
Tertius.  What did she know?  And if he were innocent of any wrong, why
did he not do something to clear himself?

This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in
which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in
him--even Farebrother had not come forward.  He had begun to question
her with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill
fog which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked
by despairing resentment.  Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed
to regard as if it were hers alone.  He was always to her a being
apart, doing what she objected to.  He started from his chair with an
angry impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and
down the room.  There was an underlying consciousness all the while
that he should have to master this anger, and tell her everything, and
convince her of the facts.  For he had almost learned the lesson that
he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in
her sympathy, he must give the more.  Soon he recurred to his intention
of opening himself: the occasion must not be lost.  If he could bring
her to feel with some solemnity that here was a slander which must be
met and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had come out of
his desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfully
on her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little
money as possible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep
themselves independent.  He would mention the definite measures which
he desired to take, and win her to a willing spirit.  He was bound to
try this--and what else was there for him to do?

He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and
forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would
sit down.  She too had begun to think this an opportunity for urging on
Tertius what he ought to do.  Whatever might be the truth about all
this misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.

Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one
nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her
gravely before he reopened the sad subject.  He had conquered himself
so far, and was about to speak with a sense of solemnity, as on an
occasion which was not to be repeated.  He had even opened his lips,
when Rosamond, letting her hands fall, looked at him and said--

"Surely, Tertius--"

"Well?"

"Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in
Middlemarch.  I cannot go on living here.  Let us go to London.  Papa,
and every one else, says you had better go.  Whatever misery I have to
put up with, it will be easier away from here."

Lydgate felt miserably jarred.  Instead of that critical outpouring for
which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be
gone through again.  He could not bear it.  With a quick change of
countenance he rose and went out of the room.

Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to
be the more because she was less, that evening might have had a better
issue.  If his energy could have borne down that check, he might still
have wrought on Rosamond's vision and will.  We cannot be sure that any
natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a
more massive being than their own.  They may be taken by storm and for
the moment converted, becoming part of the soul which enwraps them in
the ardor of its movement.  But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain
within him, and his energy had fallen short of its task.

The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as
ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.
They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate
going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond
feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly.  It was
of no use to say anything to Tertius; but when Will Ladislaw came, she
was determined to tell him everything.  In spite of her general
reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.