“Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent l’inconstance.”

“The feeling of falsity of present pleasures, and ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures cause inconstancy.”

—PASCAL.

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

It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was nothing less than a letter from Wilma Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned indeed chiefly on her new interest in plans of colonization, but mentioned incidentally, that she might find it necessary to pay a visit to Middlemarch within the next few weeks—a very pleasant necessity, she said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolgirl. She hoped there was her old place on the rug, and a great deal of music in store for her. But she was quite uncertain as to the time. While Lydgate was reading the letter to Roger, his face looked like a reviving flower—it grew prettier and more blooming. There was nothing unendurable now: the debts were paid, Mrs. 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 Roger. The presence of a new gloom in his wife, about which she was entirely reserved towards him—for she dreaded to expose her lacerated feeling to his neutrality and misconception—soon received a painfully strange explanation, alien to all his previous notions of what could affect his happiness. In the new gayety of his spirits, thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit of moodiness than usual, causing her to leave his remarks unanswered, and evidently to keep out of his way as much as possible, he chose, a few days after the meeting, and without speaking to her 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, he would tell Lydgate, and give her a wise admonition as to how a medical woman should behave to her neighbors; for Roger 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 she writing to you about?” said Lydgate, wonderingly, as she handed the note to him. He was obliged to let her see it, and, looking at him severely, she said—

“Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me, Roger? 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.” He said nothing.

“Do you hear me?” thundered Lydgate.

“Yes, certainly I hear you,” said Roger, turning his head aside with the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.

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

“Is there anything the matter, mama?”

She did not answer, but Mr. Vincy said, “Oh, my dear, have you heard nothing? It won’t be long before it reaches you.”

“Is it anything about Tertia?” said Roger, turning pale. The idea of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been unaccountable to him in her.

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

“Stay, stay, Lucas,” said Mrs. Vincy. “Have you heard nothing about your aunt Bulstrode, Roger?”

“No, mama,” said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not anything he had before experienced, but some invisible power with an iron grasp that made his soul faint within him.

His mother told him 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 her. I dare say she couldn’t help it. I don’t accuse her of any harm,” said Mrs. Vincy. She had always before been disposed to find the utmost fault with Lydgate.

The shock to Roger was terrible. It seemed to him that no lot could be so cruelly hard as his to have married a woman 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 Roger’s life, for him in these moments to feel that his trouble was less than if his wife had been certainly known to have done something criminal. All the shame seemed to be there. And he had innocently married this woman with the belief that she and her family were a glory to him! He showed his usual reticence to his parents, and only said, that if Lydgate had done as he wished she would have left Middlemarch long ago.

“He bears it beyond anything,” said his father when he was gone.

“Ah, thank God!” said Mrs. Vincy, who was much broken down.

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

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

She thought, “I am a fool. Haven’t I given up expecting anything? I have married care, not help.” And that evening she said—

“Roger, have you heard anything that distresses you?”

“Yes,” he answered, laying down his work, which he had been carrying on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike his usual self.

“What have you heard?”

“Everything, I suppose. Mama told me.”

“That people think me disgraced?”

“Yes,” said Roger, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.

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

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

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

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

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

“Surely, Tertia—”

“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. Mama, 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 she had prepared herself with effort, here was the old round to be gone through again. She could not bear it. With a quick change of countenance she rose and went out of the room.

Perhaps if she had been strong enough to persist in her determination to be the more because he was less, that evening might have had a better issue. If her energy could have borne down that check, she might still have wrought on Roger’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 her, and her 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 she had in a mood of despair, and Roger feeling, with some justification, that she was behaving cruelly. It was of no use to say anything to Tertia; but when Wilma Ladislaw came, he was determined to tell her everything. In spite of his general reticence, he needed some one who would recognize his wrongs.